Finds at Protospiel MN
One of the great things about owning a game company is the business trips our whole family can enjoy, like our weekend "staycation" at Protospiel MN, in the Twin Cities. We got to playtest unpublished games with their designers for two days of fun.
Our friend Seppy Yoon from Fight in a Box was showing off the new-and-improved prototype of Conquest Princess. His high-end acrylic character pieces and 2-ply cutout gameboards gave me all kinds of good ideas for our own upcoming CatStronauts board game.
Other games we enjoyed were :
- Fantasy card game Penkawr
- The 3D-printed Junkernauts minis game, which outfits household appliances for postapocalyptic battles
- Good Day Bouquet, which makes a game of an actual faux-floral arrangement
- A pocket game about hatching chickens that cleverly uses circular cards for nests
- Eat Your Veggies, which uses origami "mashed potato mounds" to hide your broccoli
- A Face in the Crowd, which uses Guess Who boards as an I Spy variant
- 3D-printed pipe game Bad Plumbing
- Symptom-stacking card game Symptomati
My pick of the con was Roll the Trollz. Not only is it an actually-fun-for-adults dexterity game using dice as troll-thrown boulders, it's also a good example of the big trend I noticed this year of using AI-created artwork for prototypes. It makes a huge impact to really be able to see the designer's vision for the graphics, even at early stages of development … much like high-quality prototyping from thegamecrafter.com did for the physical components of prototypes a decade ago.
