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My Week with the Cartel

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4/18/18- Finally finished development on my debut board game, "My Week with the Cartel".

A veritable admixture of a card game and a tile placing board game, this game will surely test even the most hardcore players of board games. The game includes 6 different types of cards: Threat Cards, Modifier Cards, Tweak Cards, Weapon Cards, Item Cards, and Food Cards. All pieces are printed one at a time from a 3D printer, and includes a Combo Sheet and a thorough Ruleset in each boxed game.

Players play as drug mules forced to travel with an unnamed cartel back to their home country, but must escape the cartel's grasp before the end of the trip.

Game is playable by 1 or 2 players, (yes even by oneself) and games are won by defeating all enemies on the board before the end of Day 7, and racking up the most points. Game days are measured by 24 placeable tiles (6 different types of tiles as well) out of 30, game days are customizable so you almost never get the same type of game day, and players must monitor Food, Hydration, Sanity, and Inventory in order to survive the game. It is very easy to lose at this game, and so winning is something best done by planning out many moves ahead.

Game tiles include: Meadow Tiles, Desert Tiles, Asphalt Tiles, Briar Tiles, Corn Field Tiles, and Night Tiles.

Combat is played out like darts or Blackjack, in that each player has what is called a 'Sweet Spot', and must lower it to '0' in order to win the combat encounter. Each combat encounter is a life-or-death situation in-game that can end the game early, or carry all the way until the end of Day 7 with numerous encounters.

The Threat Cards, Modifier Cards, and Tweak Cards are drawn at the beginning of each game day and must be played against as well as the enemies on board. Players will be able to ambush enemies, hijack trucks, and set traps that may or may not maim their teammate. Collateral damage is the name of the game in that it is one of the main ways to dispatch foes, but also accidentally cause friendly fire.

This game is the first of many that I plan to release, and I hope to share it with interested gamers out there.

Comments

Sounds interesting! How are

Sounds interesting!

How are you releasing it?

Since I'm a very small

Since I'm a very small operation with only a 2 person team, I have already released it on Etsy, but I am trying to advertise and spread information by word-of-mouth to hype it up a bit. Thanks for asking! It takes about 2 days for me to print off an entire game, but it is easier than making a 500 run of games only for them to sit in a storage space. Much easier.

Have you ever tried POD?

Print-On-Demand services like "The Game Crafter" (TGC):

http://www.thegamecrafter.com

They manufacture the game and ship it... All you need to do is upload all your components and then let TGC take care of all the trouble of making and sending your games all around the world!

Obviously there are restrictions: you need to use the components that TGC sells and in the formats that are available. But they've got SO MUCH, in most cases it's a case of compromising on a box size or making your own punch-outs...

Take a look! Best of luck(?!) with your game.

Thanks for the advice, and

Thanks for the advice, and yes I have looked into it. The only problem I have with The Game Crafter is their constantly changing shipping times (which hinder an order for me dramatically), and the fact that the total amount of pieces I've found is actually cheaper for me to print off myself when I can customize them, than it is to order. I ordered pieces for another game I am developing, just to see how much it would cost to do a POD run on that game, and it came out to be almost $40 just because I'm rather finicky on the pieces that go into the final product. Great stuff on there to be sure, but in retrospect it costs me about $20 to print off the pieces for an entire game by myself. I'm always open to new ideas though, so thanks again!

You can always go "half-way"

Manufacturing the game itself even if it only takes 48 hours seems... tedious to me. The alternative to waiting for 1 month is to ORDER like 5 games and wait for people to buy them from you. So you pre-order like 5 copies from a POD and then you just wait for those 5 sales...

Not 500... Understand what I mean??? So you stock only 5 copies and this way you only need to invest small amounts of money.

That's another way of looking at it... BTW no worries if you'd rather make the games yourself... It's just not something that I would ever do myself.

Cheers!

You should at least buy

You should at least buy yourself a supply of cheap plastic pawns :)

Much obliged

Much obliged

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