In the beginning…

Hey! My name is Caleb Compton, and I am currently working on starting my own board game company, which means that I am in the middle of designing my first board game. I have decided to use this space to explain a little bit about my company, my game, and how the process is going.

I’ll start at the beginning, as I have been told that is a very good place to start things. Why do I want to start a game company? The answer to that question goes back to when I was a small child (this is gonna go off the rails a little bit, but trust me it all connects). You see, I used to be a big Harry Potter fan. I still love the series, but I used to be one of those fans that would go to the book midnight launch parties dressed up in full wizard robes (I always had to be a Weasley, on account of my natural ginger-ness). My dad of course knew of my obsession, so he decided that it we be fun if our whole family got together and played the Harry Potter trading card game.

This was my first introduction to Trading Card Games (TCGs for short), and before long I was hooked. I didn’t stick with Harry Potter for long, and Yu-Gi-Oh quickly became my drug of choice. I loved all of the different crazy effects that the cards had, and soon my friends and I started making up our own cards and decks to play with. One day, when I was in middle school, I decided to take that idea a step further. Instead of just making up cards for another trading card game, I wanted to make my own trading card game!

I actually came up with a number of different types of trading card games, each one with it’s own “hook” or gimmick. One of my favorite gimmicks was a game I designed where the resource that you used to pay for cards was also your life total, so the more you spent the closer you got to death! I also designed a trading card game where you played on a board and tried to attack eachother’s castles. However, for almost a decade these games where nothing more than amusements that I played once or twice with friends or family. Eventually I graduated, moved away to college, and forgot all about those old games.

It wasn’t until years later, in December of 2015, that I thought about these games again. Around this time I had started trying to play Yu-Gi-Oh again after a long hiatus, and I was shocked at how different the game had become. I spent months trying to catch up, but the more I played the more I realized that it just wasn’t the game that I loved anymore. Now, I don’t want to talk bad about anybody or any company, but I will say that it really felt like Konami had made some serious missteps with managing this game. They kept making more and more overpowered cards, and making the game more and more complicated, to the point that the only people who can really afford to play are those that have been playing for a long time and are willing to shell out some serious cash for a good deck.

Let me be clear – I am not saying that Yu-Gi-Oh is a badly designed game. I simply think that it had been badly managed, and I started to think about how they could possibly be so short sighted. That’s when the thought struck me, the thought that has led to countless companies throughout history – I could do it better! I had made games before, and I could learn from the mistakes of those who went before me. I decided to do it: I was going to start a game company.

Of course, deciding to start a game company and actually starting one are very different things, but I will leave that for another day! Seeing as this is my first blog post I know that I have a lot to learn, but hopefully this was a somewhat interesting read, and tune in next week for the rest of the story! Also, because I am so new to this any and all criticism or suggestions are very welcome, so feel free to leave those in the comments down below! Thanks for reading!