Unpub Mini Sacramento (tabletop game protoype event)

Welcome to the very first Unpub Mini Sacramento!

What is an Unpub Mini? It's a day event where local tabletop game designers gather and bring prototypes that need people to play-test. The event is free and open to the public so that anyone interested can come play-test games and provide valuable feedback to the designers.

Where: Great Escape Games, 1250 Howe Avenue #3a, Sacramento, CA

When: 1 pm to 8 pm

Who: The designers and games are as follows.

Sarah and Will Reed: A husband and wife team who design games together as a hobby. They've been designing games since August 2012. They're bringing four cards games: BOLT, Dark Disciples, Manifestations and Stolen.

• BOLT: The Battlebot Operators League Tournament (BOLT) has brought together the greatest robot operators in all of the multiverse. Use your wits to maneuver your metal goliath into the most advantageous situations by delivering devastating attacks. Will you and your mechanical champion claim victory, or will you be turned into a heap of scrap?

• Dark Disciples: The master necromancer has perished and left you, his disciples, behind. Quickly ransack his lair to collect powerful reagents before the others do while avoiding the glyph traps your master left behind. When the lair is empty, the winner is the disciple with the strongest collection of reagents and will be the one to avenge your fallen master.

• Manifestations: You are a ghost who desires to reach for the world beyond the spiritual hot spots. The veils between you and the rest of the world are the thinnest they've ever been. Use the ghosts under your power to resolve your past issues in life. When the ghosts run out, only the strongest spirit will truly manifest and move to the next stage of their after life.

• Stolen: Masquerade, the greatest thief of the current century, has blackmailed you and your fellow thieves into stealing the illustrious doctorbove’s artwork totaling a certain amount of money within one week’s time. If you fail, he will tell the world who you really are for he knows your secret identities. Yet, if you succeed, you will gain your hearts’ desire – he will name you his heirs and pass on the title of world’s greatest thieves!

Ben Haskett: Designer of Baldrick's Tomb, a successful Kickstarter game, he's bringing his newest game Tower.

• Tower: In Tower, players race to beat their opponents to stores and buy the resources they need before they are out of stock. The players then use their purchased resources to construct segments of the tower. The first player to construct all three of his/her tower segments is the winner!

Danny Devine: He is an Artist by day who moonlights as a Board Game Designer by night! He has been designing games seriously for about a year now. His first game “Mob Town” is slated for Kickstarter in February.

• Mob Town: Mob Town is a 2-4 player Area Control the features an innovative modular board. Players play as rival Mob Families all trying to make a name for themselves and come out on top. Select secret agendas and take over the town with your rag tag crew of Dirty Rats, Sleazy Snakes, Conniving Weasels, Shady Sharks and Foxy Foxes. The family with the most points at the end of 3 rounds wins!

• Ghosts Love Candy: Ghosts LOVE candy—everyone knows that! The cruel twist is that they no longer have the physical bodies to enjoy the scrumptious candy they crave. But, on Halloween, the rules are off. Use your team of ghosts to possess Trick-or-Treaters and gobble up the candy you crave. The player whose ghosts earn them the most candy points after 8 rounds wins. But be careful! When a Trick-or-Treater eats too much candy they get sick and become your burden if you were the one to push them passed their candy limit.

Grant Rodiek: He is the designer of Farmageddon, published in 2012. He lives in San Francisco and spends his free time designing games or taking his corgi to the park (again and again).

• Flipped: A light euro for 2-5 players that plays in an hour or less. It features a worker placement mechanic and a dynamic demand mechanic to drive the efforts of the players as they rebuild and refurbish a city down on its luck.

• Mars Rising: A game of light tactical science fiction fleet combat for 2 players, or two teams of 4 players. The game plays in about 45 minutes. Players will cleverly maneuver, leverage powerful technology, and attack each other with squadrons of fighters and a range of powerful capital ships. The game presents a persistent campaign that plays out over the course of a number of highly varied scenarios.

Cody Parcell: A Sacramento native, Cody has always been an avid board game fan. When not playing games, he often plays baritone sax and trains in various martial arts.

• Cypher: A strategic dice game. Players roll their set of six dice, and then try to arrange a certain pattern before their opponent. This turn based game has a great combination of luck and skill, and the recently added “Agent Cards” add more choices and depth to the strategy.

Spenser Coke: He's a graphic designer new to the Sacramento area and passionate about making and playing games of all kinds.

• Village Defenders: A game where players will take the role of heroes who cooperatively attempt to defend their village against waves of vile creatures. Players must strategically use their unique abilities to defeat creatures and defend key buildings around the randomly-generated village.

Peter Ingebretson: He's been designing games for most of his life, and in the last year he's gotten serious about getting one published! He's bringing a 4x strategy game of magic and industry.

• The Will to Power: A fantasy strategy game of exploration, expansion, and economic development for 2-5 players. The great towers of the old wizards have fallen, and the land has been overrun by monsters. Starting from a single stronghold, each player will battle monsters, gather resources, construct buildings and collect powerful spells and artifacts. The first player to build two more towers is declared the wizard king!

Dan Hull: He's a long time game player, but a fairly recent game designer. He's on his second game design, and this one is is much more ambitious than the first (also unpublished so far).

• Warp Effect: A space-based 4x board game for 3-6 players. It's intended to be playable with less time commitment than most of the genre while still packing in all 4 X's.

Kell Brigan: She's a grumpy, migrainy, sometimes gimpy, 53-year-old spinster blowing the dust off her creativity as part of getting ready to retire. Especially fond of abstracts, but has no objection to an occasional encounter with zombies. Watch her saga unfold at: http://kellbrigan.weebly.com/index.html .

• Snail Invasion!: A game for Looney Pyramids, also known as Icehouse Pieces. A gaming system like playing cards, Looney Pyramids can be used to play hundreds of different games. "Snail Invasion!" will be entered in the annual Ice Awards, a competition for games using pyramids. More info is available at icehousegames.org and at looneylabs.com. "Snail Invasion" will eventually be combined with two other garden-themed games for Looney Pyramids to create the "Garden Party Trilogy." All games will be for one or two players, and last fewer than 20 minutes each. In "Snail Invasion!" a long-suffering gardener once again takes on the local snails, with the goal of having one, just one plant, for once live long enough to reach full growth. The gardener has many ways to evade or block the snails, but the snails can take out a plant with a single bite. Who will win this epic battle!? (This game is dedicated to the troup of local gastropods who took out 16 bucks worth of swiss chard starts overnight in April 2012.)

If you have any questions, please post below.

We hope to see you there!

Play-Tester Feedback:

To leave feedback on games you play at the event, please go to Unpub.net (http://unpub.net/unpub-mini-great-escape-games). Click on the game you played and there will be a big red button in the upper right of the screen to Record Feedback.