news
James Hewitt
New Game Announcement! Myth & Goal Coming ...

We’re teaming up with Blacklist Games to design Myth & Goal, a brand new fantasy sports game!

Details are sparse for now, but Adam and Brady from Blacklist spoke about it their SPIEL Digital video over the weekend (starting at 35:02):

news
James Hewitt
Results of the Feline and Wildlife Rescue Game ...

Over the past week and a half, Sophie and I have been spending our evenings playing through the fourteen print-and-play games that were submitted for the Game Jam we recently ran. For anyone who’s out of the loop, game jams are a concept that (as far as I’m aware) started out in the world of video games, where people rush to create a playable game in a challengingly short space of time. They’ve since become a staple of the tabletop gaming community, and we decided to set one up to raise some money for Feline and Wildlife Rescue Nottingham.

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James Hewitt
Join us for a Game Jam - and help some Needy ...

We’ve been tinkering with the idea for a little while, but we’ve finally had the chance to actually get it set up. So we’re proud to announce our very first Game Jam!

RFC News
James Hewitt
An Important Update about Robot Fight Club

So here's the big announcement: we're going to be cancelling this campaign today. Once again, thank you to everyone who's supported us. This has been a huge learning curve, and the lessons have been plentiful. This is not the end for Robot Fight Club - in fact, we've already started making some exciting progress towards a revamped version that we're sure you'll love! It'll be back before you know it.

mantic

League of Infamy Incoming

League of Infamy Incoming

You might have noticed all the hubbub over at Mantic Games about League of Infamy. This game marks the second big collaboration between Needy Cat and Mantic, and is a cooperatish dungeon crawler turned on its head, where instead of the usual trope of playing a band of adventuring heroes, you take on the role of a bunch of no-good bad guys assaulting a series of Elven keeps! You need to work together for victory, but the League’s a competitive place, and if you find a few opportunities to benefit yourself at the cost of the others… well, they were mugs for not doing it first, right?

Hellboy: The Board Game Wave One Breakdown

Hellboy: The Board Game Wave One Breakdown

It’s an exciting time here in Needy Catville. We’re working on some incredibly exciting things behind the scenes. We’ve got a couple of new games coming out soon that should be announced over the next couple of months. We’ve recently launched our three-part series, An Introduction to Game Design, where we’re inviting people to join us here in Nottingham and learn all about how to design their own board games. We’ve hit $50 a month on our Patreon, so it looks like we’re going to be launching a podcast! Oh, and here’s a big one - Hellboy: the Board Game has started shipping!

Design Diary: A Sense Of Closure

It’s safe to say that Hellboy took a bit longer than expected, once you factor in all the bells and whistles that got added in during the campaign! And our schedule wasn’t exactly sparse to begin with, so Sophie and I have basically transformed into stunted work-goblins over the past few months, only leaving our dank cave to eat food, go to meetings and gather raw materials to feed the ever-hungry prototyping table.

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Design Diary: Finishing Touches

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Design Diary: Finishing Touches

Hellboy: The Board Game has been in solid development for around seven months now, and it feels like even longer than that. It's lasted over half of Needy Cat Games' lifespan! (Oh, we had our first birthday last week - I meant to do a blog post about it, but we've been too busy...) There's still loads more Hellboy in the pipeline, but I'm proud to say that the rulebook for the main game is about to go into layout…

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Design Diary: Feedback Fun Times!

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Design Diary: Feedback Fun Times!

I saw a post on the Hellboy Fanatics Facebook group earlier today, asking about development of the game, and I realised that I've been completely schtum for way too long. People are rather understandably starting to wonder if I've dropped off the face of the earth, or burrowed under my desk to hide from the deadlines or something. 

Design Diary: More Than Punching

Design Diary: More Than Punching

One of the things that's been most hotly discussed is narrative - some people are concerned that the game just doesn't have enough story poking through the mechanics. I absolutely understand why they're concerned - after all, it's Hellboy! If the narrative isn't front and centre, we're wasting our opportunity. The stories are about as far from generic dungeon-crawling as you can get… 

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Hellboy Week: Fun with Budgets (Honest)

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Hellboy Week: Fun with Budgets (Honest)

One of the benefits of the B.P.R.D. being a well-funded shadowy government organisation is that the gang are rarely short on resources – the flipside, of course, is that you have to stay within parameters. This is represented by the Mission Budget, which the players can spend before the Case. This budget scales depending on the number of agents, and is one of the ways in which the game scales for different player counts.

Design Diary: Echoes of the Past

Design Diary: Echoes of the Past

With Hellboy: The Board Game hitting Kickstarter on Wednesday, I've really been enjoying the response to the snippets of information we've been releasing. People seem to be getting pretty excited about the game, and I couldn't be happier - after all, this is the first project I've done for Needy Cat to see the light of day! I've had a few questions, and I felt that this one in particular deserved a more in-depth answer: