I attended Game Market West in Fremont, California, this morning, and the event was tremendous fun. For the gamer in me, this was an exciting shopping adventure, a chance to buy something off the beaten path. For the game designer in me, this was a delightful way to release a game.

Reflecting on the event, Game Market West feels like the start of a trend, one long overdue here in the United States. Japan has had Tokyo Game Market for about a decade, a place where game designers can take a design — often with just a few copies, and sometimes handmade — and sell it to the gaming public. Many of the wildly popular titles these past couple of years got their start at TGM. While sales never felt like the point, they came naturally for many of the titles. That’s what happens when such an astounding outlet for creativity exists like it does in the Japanese game markets.

I’ve been publicly hoping for something similar here in the United States for quite a while. Game Market West this morning felt like a massive step forward towards that happening. Put together by Johnny Chin (who is himself an accomplished trick-taking designer, and who also writes the newsletter over at BGG’s Trick-Taking Guild), this Bay Area event allowed producers of small-batch games a chance to sell them. The event was attended by about 200 people, and as somebody who released a game there, I can attest that it was a fantastic meeting point between game creators and game buyers.

There will be another Game Market West this spring. And Daniel Newman of New Mill will be hosting an Indie Games Night Market this December at Pax Unplugged. So it does feel like the start of a broader movement towards encouraging indie games in the United States.

The rest of this post will be some insights from this morning, some hopes for the future, and some thoughts on the release of the game I designed for today.

About Game Market West

Game Market West was an indie game market held in the Bay Area today. It was free for “vendors” (i.e. indie game designers). It was also free for attendees. My best guess is that about 200 people attended, which is an exceptional turnout for a first-time event. The event has a website and a social media presence if you want future updates.

Each designer (and I was one of them) had a table to sell their games. Designers had to promise to bring at least 20 copies of their game. Many brought more, but I was on the low end since I literally brought mine in a carry-on suitcase! Just like with Tokyo Game Market, some designers asked for pre-orders, and others just waited for others to arrive. A fair number of the games sold out today, but to my knowledge, none sold out immediately, so everybody had a chance to get the games.

That is because, much to my surprise, there was not a rush at the start (at 10:00) and then a lull, like there often is a sales-focused events. Rather, it was a steady stream, with the peak being around noon, and things tapering off at 2:30 (it ended at 3:00). It was a relaxed event, with lots of time for chatting about games.

Many attendees (in terms of designers and buyers) were from the Bay Area, but quite a few drove in from a fair distance. I met a few people from Los Angeles, and a few from the more northern part of the west coast. I was probably the person from the furthest away, or at least a candidate for that (I live in Missouri), so Game Market West was still regional, but it attracted people from all over that region.  

Many, if not all, of the games were decently small batch. Some were hand assembled. A few were from print-on-demand sites. A few designers had ordered batches from more traditional game printers.

The game was in conjunction with Games of Freemont, a game store. My bet is that Game Market West drew a lot of traffic to the game store nearby, and vice versa. Based on today, larger game stores should really take advantage of something like this as a way to drive sales. Game Market West certainly pulled in foot traffic to the advantage of its host store.

There was a strange sense of excitement — and even bewilderment — around the entire experience. Matt Leacock was here as a guest of honor, and when I talked to him, he seemed impressed by the turnout (and he had autographed quite a few games). I was impressed too, and many of the other designers kept talking about how the event had far exceeded expectations.

Based on today, this seems like a trend that is about to take off, and based on the energy today, I could see it taking off rapidly. 

The Trick-Taking Games

Trick-taking fans appeared to drive a fair bit of the attendance, which I guess in retrospect is to be expected, since the event was widely publicized in those communities, and since that is one of the things TGM is known for. There were a few trick-taking releases here, so I thought I’d cover some I’m excited for. All either sold their allotment for the day or sold a lot of copies sold.

Game Market West’s host, Johnny Chin, released Golpher. I’ve played it, and it was as fun as it it is innovative. It has a spatial aspect, where players are making the golf course out of cards, and they’re trying to hit the ball in the hole while capturing the fewest tricks, a nice thematic tie to golf. It was hand assembled, and it even comes with a 3D-printed ruler, so this met many of the indie game checkboxes!

Brendon Fong released We Need to Talk, which had my favorite artwork of all of the games at the event. Brendon did the art himself, and when he autographed my copy of the game, he doodled a very cool illustration in the box top. I haven’t played it yet, but it looks like a fascinating mashup of trick-taking and climbing, where players try to collect memories before a breakup, only to shed them out afterwards. What a theme!

Jon Simantov, who had previously released Vamp on the Batwalk, had a drafting game called Draught Trick. Players will have a pre-set bid, and they draft their hand (in the style of 7 Wonders) to try to achieve their bid. I haven’t played it yet, but it looks awesome. I think drafting works exceptionally well with trick-taking — in fact, I have a post about that coming tomorrow — and having players draft into pre-set bids is a brilliant idea.

Draught Trick came with a promo card for my game February, which felt like a surreal experience for me.

A Detour About Small Batch Trick-Taking Design

I’ve written for this blog for a near decade. One of the highlights of today was meeting so many readers of the Opinionated Gamers! But long-time readers will notice that I dramatically slowed down my writing about three years ago. I used to write a post every few days, but these days, I average just a handful of posts a year. That is because I set out on a journey to make a series of small-batch trick-taking games, so I turned my focus to that endeavor, rather than writing.

Part of the dream was to try my hand at game design. I designed my first trick-taking game in 2017, and I enjoyed that experience back then. But part of it too was to experiment with small batch trick-taking design, in the hopes of offering advice to others and jumpstarting an indie game scene here in the United States.

I haven’t written much about that project here, because this is still one of the more widely-read blogs in the hobby, and it always felt cheap for me to use my pen for self promotion. So I’ve limited writing about my project mostly to my personal blog. But today, at the end of the project, I’m making an exception, in the hopes of pointing out just how special Game Market West was for me, and the promise it holds for the future.

Years in, I’m wrapping my personal project up, and Kansas City is the last game I’m going to sell. But this small batch experiment feels, to me, like a tremendous success. There are six games in the series, namely LetterTricks, February, Magic Trick, Change of Heart, Rewind, and Kansas City. Magic Trick was the hit of of the lot, and it became Xylotar from Bezier Games. Magic Trick itself garnered a finalist nomination for the Meeple’s Choice Award, that annual contest run by OG-er Larry Levy, and appears to be the first-ever self-published game to do so. Xylotar was briefly on the FairPlay List at Essen Spiel earlier this month. All of the games have pretty good reviews. Two of the games have digital implementations on the Trickster’s Table App. And along the way, there have been some fun moments, like serving on a trick-taking panel at Dice Tower West with Taylor Reiner and Thinker Themer, hosting a series of trick-taking events at the same convention, attending many trick-taking conventions around the country, etc.

But today tops all of those highs. This was the first time I’ve ever sold my small-batch games in person, and it was fun, both to get the chance to make the pitch in person, but also to meet so many fans of the series. Like a lot of the other designers at the event, I autographed a lot of games today!

But part of the joy is that this felt so long in coming. There isn’t much of an outlet for indie games in the United States, and as I’ve written about before, that is a major flaw in the scene. But that changed with Game Market West, and it was thrilling to be a small part of it.

When I first started on this project, I got a lot of weird reactions, and the traction was pretty slow. One friend called it “vanity publishing” and refused to encourage it. The first couple of games did not sell quickly: it took me about eight months to sell 75 copies of the first game, LetterTricks. Ironically, the places where my games seemed to catch on quickly were in Japan and Brazil, two countries with active indie game scenes. But here in the United States, things seemed to move at a snail’s pace.

That is, until the last few months. What seemed like a foreign concept to many in 2023 seems like a really cool concept to many of those same people in 2024. That is because of a dedicated, small group of people who opened the doors to creativity, and showed what could happen. We owe a debt of gratitude to the international scene for opening the door. But people hosting these game markets have allowed us to walk through that door here.

Much has been written in the past month about how there was nothing terribly exciting at Essen this year. But that was imminently predictable: most of the big publishers stopped taking risks years ago. Many of the releases these days are just minor variations and mashups of well-trodden mechanics, without much of an attempt at trying something out of the box. For those of us that have played thousands of games, that’s just not that interesting, even if they obviously would be exciting to new gamers.

And for us, there always needed to be an indie game scene. Now there is!

Kansas City

I released Kansas City today, and it is my favorite of the six games in the small-batch series. It is also the final game. As I’ve previously written about in the designer diary on my blog, the game is my group’s favorite of my games, which is why we themed it after our hometown. In many ways, we saved the best for last.

In many trick-taking games, players get dealt a hand of cards, assess the strength of their hand, and then make their bid. This game is the reverse: players are aiming for a fixed number of tricks, and they can adjust the strength of their hand by upgrading their cards to a trump suit, which is on the back of the cards. (This might be the first trick-taking game with numbers visible on the card backs.)

The game has an art deco style, a callback to LetterTricks, the first game in the series. And the artist, Megan Russell, really hit it out of the park. Here are the card backs:

And here are a couple of card fronts, themed after some of the symbols of Kansas City, namely BBQ, trains, and jazz:

I handed out copies to the Kansas City Trick-Taking Society earlier this week, then sold them at Game Market West this morning. And as of today, with the exception of a small number for Indie Games Night Market at PaxU, my entire first print of the game sold out. Other designers had GMW had even more success. As I said, indie games have caught on!

I hope you’ll check it out in the future. But I more hope that you’ll check out some indie games. They’re the farm team of creativity! And I hope I’ll see you at Indie Games Night Market at PaxU!