A Little Help From My Friends

Two By Two is expected to make landfall somewhere along the Pacific coast this Sunday. From there it will go to the warehouse of central wholesaler Publisher Services and then out to various distributors such as Lion Rampant here in Canada, ACD in the US, and Alliance for the US and worldwide. Online and brick & mortar retailers will include Two by Two in their regular orders from these distributors and the game should ultimately start appearing on store shelves sometime around the end of the month. The publisher had a few advance copies flown over from the actual print run (rather than preliminary proofs). Many of those will be going out to different reviewers and industry press but one should be arriving on my doorstep sometime tomorrow.

So, with the game almost in the hands of the general public, I thought now would be a great time to offer my thanks to all of the people who've helped along the way.
To my wife Reagan, thanks for your patience, support, and love as I've thrown myself headfirst into the topsy turvy world of boardgame design. To my extended family in all its myriad forms, thanks for giving me the opportunity to grow up in an environment were fun and play were treasured all the way into adulthood. To my nieces and nephews, thanks for keeping an old man young. To my employer, BioWare, for providing me with the creative freedom to design games for myself, not only for them. To the good people at FallCon, thanks for everything you've done to build such a friendly and vibrant gaming culture here in Alberta. To Torben and Rik of Valley Games, thanks for taking a big chance on some local talent - I hope it pays off big for you. To the artists involved in the game, thanks for your patience with all my crazy ideas and for the wonderfully colorful and playful illustrations that you've brought to final product. To the many translators, thanks for your help in bringing my game to the world (the final game ships with rulebooks in 9 different languages in the box - English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese!). To the many retailers who I've had the pleasure of visiting over the past couple of months and the many more who will ultimately carry my game on their shelves, thanks for working so hard to bring joy to so many families over the years. And, of course, to the players who ultimately buy the game and share it with their friends, thank you for your support - I hope you enjoy playing the game as much as I enjoyed designing it.

One very special group that I'd like to call out in greater detail is the Game Artisans of Canada, a wonderfully talented and ambitious group of fellow game designers who have worked so diligently and given so much to help each other and to raise the caliber of Canadian game design. In particular, I'd like to give a shout out to three other exciting games coming out this fall from first-time designers, every one of them a member of this fabulous group. Keep your eyes peeled for these games as they make the journey onto store shelves later this year:

Haggis by Sean Ross (Indie Boards & Cards)

JAB: Realtime Boxing by Gavan Brown (Tasty Minstrel)

Train of Thought by Jay Cormier & Sen-Foong Lim (Tasty Minstrel Games)