Cornerstone, New Game from a New Publisher

Good Company Games, located in Marana, Arizona, is a new publisher with a simultaneously creepy, yet cheery logo. Matt Mette and Mike Thompson, the forces behind GCG, have released their first title – Cornerstone, designed by Mette – with the game currently being available only through the GCG website.

Says Mette, “I’d made a few games that were really fun, but I felt Cornerstone had enough potential that I thought I should take my hobby to the next level. I showed it to Mike, a long-time friend and ex-coworker, and we immediately formed a partnership.” Mette and Thompson are both mechanical engineers, so they drew on their design and production experience in order to bring the game into being.

In Cornerstone, each player receives her own set of 24 pieces, with each piece being comprised of 1-6 blocks. A 2x2 checkered cornerstone serves as the building block for the game, and on a turn a player rolls two six-sided dice, chooses one of those numbers, and adds one of her pieces with that many blocks to the structure, preserving the checkerboard look. She can then move her dude on the structure, jumping up no more than one level at a time and moving only over neutral spaces or spaces of her own color. Roll doubles and you can place the piece that you want. Get trapped by another player and you can mulligan to start from table level once again.

If someone knocks the tower over, the game ends with the player having the figure highest up in the tower winning – unless that player was the klutz who killed the game. In that case, the player with the second highest figure wins. (Presumably the game can also end after all the pieces are placed, but the rules don’t mention this possibility. I guess growth always leads to destruction.)

Mette notes that he’s played a wide range of games such as Carcassonne, RoboRally, HeroClix and D&D, while Thompson is more of a casual gamer. “Our partnership is a good one because our vision is to make high quality games that appeal to both the casual and serious gamer, and we balance each other out that way,” he says. “We feel Cornerstone is one of those games that bridges the gap between ages and types of gamers.”

The website-only sales structure results from GCG’s limited production capacity, says Mette. “Once we are happy with our supply capacity, we plan on introducing other games we have in our queue (in multiple genres, too, not just abstract),” he says. “We’re pretty excited about the other games we have, but we are being patient and not overextending ourselves.”

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