Kingless: Festival Of Explosions
Games like Cards Against Humanity, Exploding Kittens, Secret Hitler & Master Dater have reinvigorated the tabletop card game space in recent years. Locally, Australian game creators Two19 have entered into the fray with their game Kingless & its new expansion Festival Of Explosions to rousing success, earning a PAX Australia Indie Showcase Award.
Recently one of the creators behind Kingless, Alex Kenworthy-Neale, sat down with Pario to discuss the journey of Two19 as they created their passion project.
Before the journey towards the release of Kingless even began Alex & his business partners, Sebastian J Roberts & Nathan Brown, had a passion for games. Whether those be video games, tabletop role-playing games or tabletop card games according to Alex they were "a huge part" of his life & entertainment choices. So like many people with similar passions, the idea began to percolate in his mind that perhaps one day he & his friends could create a game of their own. Then one night a light bulb went off in Alex's mind.
"This whole thing came out of a late night text message between myself & one of my partners saying, 'Do you want to make a card game about dwarves?',' recalled Alex excitedly. "Instead of saying no right away & going back to sleep, he replied & said, 'yeah, I'd love to.'"
From there the work began to make Kingless a reality.
"It was all well & good that we thought we do it," said Alex before explaining further. "After a little bit of work we promptly realised, yes, we absolutely could because we had a good core idea."
In the tabletop card game realm Kingless was entering into a pretty crowded marketplace thanks to what Alex described as "the golden age of crowdfunded tabletop games". This brought with it a range of challenges & opportunities.
Challenges along the way
Beyond the initial creative challenge of designing the game, there were 2 big obstacles that Kingless had to overcome; logistics & simply being noticed.
According to Alex although logistics appeared very daunting at first he soon came to realise it wouldn't be so bad after all.
"Logistics presented a pretty huge challenge but we were very fortunate to immediately partner with Panda Game Manufacturing. They're a fantastic company to work with. They really held our hand & helped us through a lot of the nitty-gritty of it all."
Once the manufacturing & shipping hurdles were overcome the next big challenge facing Kingless was cutting through in a crowded marketplace.
"Even if your idea is amazing you still need to actually bring it across people's screens, get their attention & get the word of mouth out there," explained Alex.
Opportunities to foster success
Although Kingless was entering into a crowded marketplace Alex & the Two19 found that this presented some unique opportunities as well.
"The good news about entering a crowded marketplace is that a lot of people have done this all before. No matter how you're expressing your creativity there's going to be other people who have done it before & are willing to share their experiences."
To ensure they could capitalise on the community knowledge Alex & his partners engaged in extensive research during their creative process. In doing this Alex found that "people are always very happy to help or there are people who have been out there on the internet writing about their experiences, what they did &what they found worked." So they were able to utilise this for the launch of Kingless to great success.
PAX Australia Indie Showcase
With the release of the first Kingless expansion pack, Festival Of Explosions, Two19 also earned themselves some very special recognition. This year they have been awarded a prize at the PAX Australia Indie Showcase, which features a select list of the top independent game creators in Australia.
When asked about that award Alex glowed in response by saying, "It's absolutely fantastic. It's phenomenal that PAX is out there supporting smaller projects like ours all across Australia. Getting to be a part of that amongst some great titles is humbling in many ways."
Follow Two19’s Creative Journey at: www.Two19.co
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