Indie Boards & Cards – A Small Publisher That Isn’t

Indie Boards & Cards is a new take on the concept of being a small self-publisher with the oddest part of the venture being that the company doesn’t actually publish anything! Instead Indie Boards & Cards can be thought of as a marketing collective for designers who publish their own games.

As owner Travis Worthington explains on the Indie website, the idea behind Indie Boards & Cards is that designers will develop their own creations from ruleset to graphic design. They will then present those games to members of BoardGameGeek.com who will play the game blindly (that is, without supervision from the designer) and provide written feedback. Feedback from at least five BGG members can be submitted to Indie, along with the game rules and photos. If Indie likes the submission, it will request a production ready copy of the game for playtesting, that copy being roughly equivalent to what purchasers would receive. If that checks out, Indie will request that copies of the game be sent to five peer reviewers chosen by Indie, after which Indie will decide whether to add the game to its stable of titles.

The expectation is that a designer’s print run will be in the neighborhood of 50-100 copies, with at least ten copies reserved for giveaways and five for reviewers. Indie Boards & Cards will publish a regular newsletter for gamers that will include information on new titles and hold contests for games. As Worthington writes on the site, “Once that launch has been very successful we can work with you to expand your customer base to into the high hundreds or possibly into the thousands.”

Worthington is launching Indie Boards & Cards with a game that he’s designed: Triumvirate, which will have 70 copies available in September 2009. Here’s his description of the game:

Triumvirate is a fast-paced game for two that requires subtle hand management and card play to win. It is an indirect game where the players represent the leaders of Roman noble houses. These noble leaders will be maneuvering the mostly political and sometimes military struggles that will determine which of the Triumvirate (Caesar, Pompey and Crassus) will be crowned as Emperor while also building influence with the individual Triumvirate members. The game ends when an Emperor is crowned; the winner is the player with the most influence over the Emperor at the end of the game.

The mechanisms in the core rules make for a very satisfying, imperfect information trick-taking game. In addition to the core game there is a drafting variant that removes randomness from play beyond the initial card deal. I have included both variants in the rule set as I found players to have a preference for either one or the other sytle of play.

The game comes with rules in English and Latin, with German rules being added soon. Triumvirate will retail for €20 to European customers and $20 to U.S. customers, with shipping included and $1 from each game being donated to Heifer International, and subscribers to the Indie Boards & Cards newsletter will have the first chance to purchase the game.

Worthington has approached existing self-publishers about working together with Indie to pool their marketing efforts and is interested in hearing from others who fall into that category.

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