Welcome to my game design newsletter! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Matt Denton. I’m currently a junior at Haverford College, where I study English. I like history, sports, running, and (obviously) board games.
This newsletter is intended to provide updates on the games I design - how prototypes are progressing, when games get picked up by publishers, when they are going up for sale, etc. If this interests you, you’re in the right place.
I’ve got some exciting news to share in this inaugural issue! My first game design, Insurgent: Algeria, was picked up by Catastrophe Games, a small historical board game publisher, this week. It is slated for release at the end of this year or the beginning of next year. They found Insurgent on BoardGameGeek after it won third place in the 2022 Wargame Print and Play Design contest on that site. I had been planning to self-publish the game, but was pleasantly surprised when Catastrophe approached me with a contract.
Insurgent is a short, asymmetrical card game for two players based on the actors and events of the Algerian War (1954-62) between the National Liberation Front of Algeria and the French government. The war freed Algeria after 130 years of colonization. Players take on one of these two sides and play cards into three fronts - military, political and diplomatic - to win public support in each. Whichever player has more support in two of the three fronts wins the game.
I had some interest in publishing the game myself, mainly to get a taste of what running a small business feels like, but once the duties of coordinating art and marketing became more pressing, I was starting to dread it. I have a feeling that if game design remains an interest of mine in the long term, finding external publishers will be my method of getting games to market.
That’s all for now. I will post here only when I have significant news to share, which I expect to be relatively infrequently. If you know anyone who might be interested in this game specifically, or historical games in general, I’d appreciate if you could share this newsletter with them.
Well done sir! Looking forward to this!