

This year I was able to pitch games to the following publishers:
- Asmodee
- Repos
- Filosofia / Z-Man Games Abacuspiele
- R & R Games
- ThinkFun
- Hasbro
- Mercury Games
On top of this I interacted with Rio Grande,Toy Vault, Ystari, Hans Im Gluck, Iello, Czech Games and North Star.
The bottom line is that this event was a successful one for a few reasons.
- From all our pitches we ended up leaving one of our prototypes with four different publishers! This doesn’t mean that they’ve agreed to publish it, but it does mean that they liked it and would like to play it with the rest of their team and figure out if it is something that they’d like to do. More on this in the next few posts.
- We started a relationship with ThinkFun which seems like a really good fit for many games that Sen and I make. I am positive that this relationship will be very beneficial for all of us, even if they don’t pick up any of our games!
- We pitched to Hasbro! This was wild and I’ll go into more details in another post – but this is huge!
- Relationships with all publishers continue to improve and I feel like I could call some of them friends – not just business acquaintances.
- I got to really hang out with other designers – and just play games with them all week! Get ready for some name-dropping:
William Attia, designer of Caylus: he taught us his new game, Spyrium (which is fantastic) and then we ended up playing a few other games together throughout the week like Enigma.
Stephen Glenn, designer of Balloon Cup: had an interesting conversation with him about the differences between Balloon Cup and the new re-do of that game called Pinata
Greg Daigle, designer of Hawaii: had a conversation with him and learned that he is officially Canadian so we invited him to become a member of the Game Artisans of Canada.
Vlaada Chvatil, designer of Galaxy Trucker and Dungeon Lords: I played many games with Vlaada – like Coup (when he says he’s the Captain – believe him!) and Hanabi (super interesting game).
Chris Handy, designer of the new Rio Grande game, Cinque Terre. I sat in on some of Chris’s pitches to publishers and he sat in on some of mine. He’s a good wing man!
Other designers at the Gathering that I met: Kevin Wilson, Matt Tolman, Gavan Brown,Tom Lehman,Al Leduc, Roberta Taylor, Rob…uh, and Alan Moon!!!
In the next few posts I’ll review the details of how the pitch sessions went with each publisher (though we did sign a couple NDAs, so we’ll have to be a bit less transparent than normal).
-Jay Cormier
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Use star decorations and even one of those cheesy hanging balls that spins on
the dance floor. A good set of golf clubs can dramatically increase your play.
In fact the golf club is quite an ingenious design of physics.
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