Brainstorming with Paul

I had a great brainstorming session with Paul "Mad Dog" Mauer tonight. We spent about an hour on the phone talking about some ideas for two new convention games that we could playtest this spring and roll out in short order.

I have to give Paul his props when it comes to helping me sort out my thoughts. Even in the early days of our game development, he was right there to serve as a sounding board to tell me when we were on the right track, or when we were shooting into the weeds. For example, it was a long and heated argument outside of Midnight Comics -- after one of our early playtest games in the summer of 2004 -- that Paul's nitpicking with me forced us to hash out the concept for our retaliation shot and to solve the serious problems we were having with rifles and shotguns.

In those early drafts, "the rifle was god." There was no reason to ever carry a different weapon. Paul and I stood out there (more than one evening) outside the store hashing things over and over and over until we figured out what was wrong and made it right.

By the way, I'm not diminishing Murphy's involvement at this time -- he had a work schedule at that time that made him have to leave the very second the games were over. Paul and I, on the other hand, had more flexible hours and we could actually stay up until 2 am on a work night... and least once a week and come in late that day.

But Back To Tonight

I love running convention games, but I've got to admit that after running the same game -- Last Man Standing -- over and over again, I'm interested in trying something new. So Paul and I worked on some new material to shake things up. And potentially change some of our existing melee rules. I don't want to go into too much detail, but suffice to say that things are definitely heating up this spring!

Stay tuned for more updates, saddle pals.

Mike Mitchell