Eric Hanuise, founder of Flatlined Games, is pleased to announce the immediate release of his book “Board Game Publisher”.
The book explains the whole workflow of board game publishing, from reviewing designer prototypes to the finished games on the retailer’s shelves. Anyone interested in starting a game publishing business or in finding a job in the boardgame industry should find answers to their questions.
Argo can now be played on Yucata!
http://yucata.de/ is a german website allowing you to, play boardgames online. No need to install anything : just go to the site, create a free account and you can play!
Argo is our second game to become available on Yucata, you can also play Twin Tin Bots for free on the site.
Of course, should you prefer the cardboard-and-miniatures version, feel free to request it at your friendly local game store!
Mark Gerrits, who are you?
I'm a civil servant software engineer who sometimes designs games in his free time.
What kind of gamer are you?
Benjamin Benéteau, who are you?
I'm a French comic book artist, living in Brussels, mainly working on the backgrounds and cars of the new Michel Vaillant series since 2012, and currently working on a new one-shot, which will be published by Le Lombard in 2018.
Press release - Brussels 18 mar 2014 - for immediate release
Flatlined Games, with the kind help from Boite à Jeux and Board Game Arena is proud to announce the immediate availability of Twin Tin Bots as a free to play online web game on both platforms!
Twin Tin Bots is a robot programming game, by Philippe Keyaerts, who is well known amongst gamers for his previous successes : Vinci, Evo, Olympos, and of course the SmallWorld series.
In Twin Tin Bots, each player programs two robots to harvest crystals. The available orders are simple (forward, turn, harvest, unload, ...) but there are two robots to control with three program slots each, and only one order can be changed each turn! Furthermore, the other player's robots are after the same crystals, and will push your robots, or might even rob crystals from them.
The availability of the game on both platforms offers you choice between the turn-based play on Boite à Jeux or the real time play on Board Game Arena. Come forth and discover the joys of robot programming and crystal harvesting!
Philippe Keyaerts
A finished game is something solid, clear and detailed. The rules are precise, victory conditions are well defined, as are the means to reach them. In the beginning however, things are much more murky. There is nothing, or almost nothing. A spark, a blurry aspiration to something.
One morning I was toying around with the idea of a low complexity space combat. One ship per player, simple actions : move forward, turn, shoot, … and we merrily duke it out. I already created such a game, with simultaneous programming followed by a common resolution of the moves. Here I rather thought about turn-based, where you would end your turn by secretly choosing your next turn's move.
This kind of daydreaming is what a game designer's days are made of. Most of the time the dream fades. But every now and then it catches on, develops and grows into something worth working on. I was just finished with my big game Olympos and I guess the idea of working on a game with few rules made for a nice pace change.
Dragon Rage Designer Diary
By Lewis Pulsipher
Publisher's note : This Designer Diary was written in Oct 2012, and was pending publication in for a long while. I eventually decided to publish it here, as it is still quite relevant. At the time of this writing, Dragon Rage is almost sold out of the 1.500 initial copies. I only have a few units left in belgium, and I am toying around with the idea of a reprint, maybe at the same time as the standalone expansion which Lewis is designing. It would be a shame to let such a nice game remain unavailable for too long!
While Dragon Rage was originally published in 1982, it was reissued in a much higher-quality format with an additional map and many additional scenarios in Belgium in 2011. The game was very expensive to obtain from the US, as I’ll explain below, so I haven’t written this until the advent of good distribution in the USA.
This will be a quite different designer diary because it has been over 30 years since the original design. Perhaps it will be instructive to game designers more for the publishing history of the game than for the development history.
Dragon Rage has had a pretty checkered history. It was published in 1982 and sold very well I was told, but I was never paid for it. The publisher went bankrupt for reasons having nothing to do with its boardgames, and their games went into a kind of limbo. At the same time I took what amounted to a hiatus of 20 years from the game industry, and when I “came back” it took me many years to find a new publisher for the game. Here’s the story.
Here is a variant by Cedric Lapouge, allowing team play in Rumble in the House and Rumble in the Dungeon.
By combining 2- and 3- players teams, all configurations from 4 to 12 players are supported.
Teams of 2 : Players of the same team sit in front of each other. Once each player of the team has looked at his two secret character tokens, he gives one to his team mate.
I am delighted to echo the announcement of CoolMiniOrNot (CMON), our new US partner: 
Cthulhu in the House will debut at gencon on the CMON booth.
CoolMiniOrNot has partnered with Spaghetti Western Games and Flatlined Games to release the board game Cthulhu in the House. The game will premiere at Gen Con with a trade release to follow in Q3.
Make sure to check out the first part of this series : Twin tin bots design notes by Philippe Keyaerts.
Eric Hanuise
I was lucky to be involved with Twin Tin bots from the very first playtesting session. The prototype was already nice looking, with cute foam-core robots.
The first play was too long, lasting over two hours, but most of the elements worked quite well and I immediately liked that new game we just tried. Over the next few weeks we met for some more playtesting sessions, as the game was refined and developed. The more I played it, the more I liked it, and when Philippe told me the game was now far enough in the development process that he was starting to pitch it to publishers, I told him 'hey, I've loved that game since we started playing it, would you consider letting me publish it ?'
To celebrate Halloween here is a small Halloween special for Dragon Rage.
Defend Esirien and Nurkott from the Evil Pumpkins and the Giant Gingerbread Men!
Click here to download the Dragon Rage Halloween special (3Mb)
To celebrate this holiday weekend, we've placed an exclusive Dragon Rage Easter Special on our website for you to download.
Defend Esirien and Nurkott against the onslaught of the ferocious giant bunnies, and chase the Dragon Eggs!
Click here to download the Dragon rage Easter Special (10Mb)
Press release - For immediate distribution
Flatlined Games is a new boardgames publisher, based in Brussels, Belgium.
Founded by Eric Hanuise, Flatlined Games publishes and develops complex board games, with strong themes and multiple game mechanics, for demanding players.
Flatlined Games editorial line focuses on highly thematic games, and will include mostly either very complex games with multiple mechanisms or very simple and fun fillers.
Flatlined Games will target niche markets in the boardgames market, and address these niches globally with multilingual editions.
Flatlined Games primarily sells direct on its web site given our small print runs, but we are also open to distribution deals in Europe and US markets. Retailer enquiries are welcome too.
Flatlined Games reckon that your friendly local gaming shop is a key player in the spread of hobby games. Given our niche target market and low print run volumes we must mostly sell direct from our website, however we wish to support the local retailers. To this end we introduce our 'ship to your retailer' program : customers that are willing to have their order delivered at their local retailer instead of home will get a small discount. The goal is to have customers visit the retailers, giving them an extra sales opportunity.
