Every few years, I partner up with a friend or two and try to strike it rich by starting a business. While each of them has been fun and rewarding, we’ve never managed to stay afloat for more than a handful of years or make a decent profit. Sure, the potential to have our business blow up and serve as our primary source of income is a fun idea, but the goal is always to make something that we can be proud of and look back on fondly. Since college I’ve run a memoir service, completed dozens of commercials and short films through my own film company, and most recently I opened a board game design business: Nic James Games, named after my business partner and oldest friend.

Nic and I have played board games together since high school. One thing we enjoyed as much as, if not more than the games themselves, was coming up with custom rulesets or expansions for our favorite games. I think a lot of young people do this, but we continued customizing our tabletop gaming experiences whenever we could over nearly two decades. Eventually we both started concocting our own little games, things that were easy to play with pieces from around the game room. As our ideas got more ambitions we felt like it might be time to try and make one that looked like a ‘real’ game, and I asked if he’d be interested in partnering up to give board game design a legitimate shot. We settled into roles pretty quickly. I have a creative writing degree and enjoy building stories around the weird game ideas we come up with, and Nic is an engineer whose interests and skillset lend themselves well to balancing games. Both of us have a keen eye for game mechanics in general, so we pitch each other ideas for how things could click together. Kind man that he is, Nic deferred to me on what our first game should be.

Understanding where the concept for The Power Generation came from will take a little telling. I was visiting Nic for our annual board game weekend, and he was driving me back to a mutual friend’s place from the airport and telling me about which games we was most interested in playing. He was describing a game called Fantastic Factories, a game that tasks the player with building a factory that can create resources. He said something along the lines of, “in order to make the most resources you have to have sufficient power generation” and my unmedicated ADHD brain went for a cheap joke. “Yeah, the Power Generation, like the Greatest Generation but if they listened to metal music.” He continued explaining Fantastic Factories but I was already lost in an ever-expanding web of creative ideas. The Power Generation isn’t just about listening to heavy metal music, they also got actual powers from watching too much MTV! And when they play their instruments they can turn regular people into cult-like fans that engage in turf wars because they want their bands to play at the biggest and best venues in town (this may or may not be related to the fact that in Age of Empires, the monk can convert your opponent’s units to your side, and when he does he says ‘wololo‘ which in my twisted head is also how a metal singer’s guttural noises sound).

The world of The Power Generation had taken shape in my head, and I wanted to make it real. So I pitched the idea to Nic as a skirmish war game where WarBands playing different genres of music engaged in a game of either gaining the most fans, or killing the opposing WarBand. It was exactly the right intersection of goofy, hardcore, and unique for us both to be interested. Not long after that trip was over, I started looking for an artist to help us with characters and materials design. We found a great fit in an artist from Romania named Seb. Together, the three of us would spend almost 6 months making this game a reality, and I’m excited to say that as of today, we are finally finished. The game will go up on Kickstarter at some point this summer or fall, but for now I wanted to show you what we made.

There are four playable bands in The Power Generation, each with six members that play a different instrument. Each of these bands also has a designated ‘star’ musician that has an enhanced ability to generate fans.

For each musician on the board for your band, there’s a corresponding character card that looks like this:

You place your musicians on a customizable map built from coaster-sized hex tiles, so the setup looks like this:

Players take turns moving around the board, choosing to fight or perform, and victory is declared when one team controls at least half the venues or all musicians in one band have been killed. My favorite part of the artwork has to be the box, which we designed to look like an electric guitar amp:

And for marketing purposes we mocked up some tour posters:

My plan is to cut together a short commercial with the posters and some music that a friend of mine wrote for each band. Here’s his track for Fellblade, and you can find the other three tracks on his youtube channel there.

It’s exciting to be at the end of this long project, and although I’m not expecting to make any money from it, it does blow my mind that we’ll have a legitimate game to pull off the shelf with our logo on the back of the box. Speaking of which, this is our logo:

We’re on to our next game now – Amino Station. It takes place on a space station full of shipping containers. There was a company called Amino Partners LTD that sent a bunch of people and equipment out to mine some asteroids, but while everything was in transit, they went under. Now there’s a shuttle coming to bring some people back to Earth, but only people who can afford a ‘competitively priced’ ticket. In order to raise the funds to get home, each player builds a mining rig from the parts in the storage containers and mines as much valuable stuff as they can from the asteroids nearby. I’ll make another post when that one’s ready, probably some time in late fall.