Welcome to the last of our Micro Chat interviews for the 2017 1st Quarter line-up of Kickstarter games. This time we talk with designer Mitchell Shipman on this game Find Your Seats. In Find Your Seats, players take the roles of party planners having a terrible day. They have completely misplaced their seating plan! Each player will start with a hand of cards representing dinner guests and, over three rounds, draft what they believe to be the best group of guests to sit next to each other. Players score points based on the seating arrangement of their guests. The player...

Happy 2017 and welcome to another Micro Chat! With the start of the new year, it comes with a new change at Button Shy, we now have switched over to quarterly Kickstarters - with each Kickstarter made up of 3 different wallet games - which means 3 different micro chats this month! Our first Micro Chat of January is with Rob Cramer on Turbo Drift. Button Shy's first racing game, Turbo Drift, where your table becomes a 1980's era Japanese Mountain Pass race course. Draft cards, avoid obstacles, pass the finish line! Turbo Drift is a real-space racing game for 2-4...

Find Your Seats Designer Diary by Mitchell Shipman   The Invitations Are Sent (Introduction and backstory) Hello! My name is Mitchell Shipman and I love designing games. Well, I love designing parts of games. Usually, I come up with a cool mechanic and can never think of a way to wrap an actual, complete game around it. My first attempt was trying to model an aggro mechanic from an MMO into a pseudo-grid based card game. The sky was my limit in terms of components, but I stuck with cards because I was deep in the black hole of MtG at...

Going Back For Seconds: Designing the Expansion for a “Small Portion” Game  by John du Bois As my first published design, my aspirations for Avignon’s commercial success were not high. I was fairly certain it would fund. I thought we’d hit a stretch goal or two. But how popular could a two-player only game about the Catholic Church really be? It seems that I underestimated our chances. It was never my intention to design a full expansion for Avignon. I’m not a big buyer of game expansions, and tend to think that if something was good enough to put into...

My First Published Game by Rob Cramer I never thought that I would design a game. When I first got into the hobby a few years ago, I was just happy that designers had broken through the monotony of Monopoly to create fun and different games. It was a brand new world that I was a part of, but I was only on one side of it. Playing new games opened my eyes to new ways games could work, like learning new colors after seeing in black and white, but that didn’t make me want to paint. But as dramatic...