Essen is coming very fast, and we're very busy with all the preparations.
This year at Essen we will release Argo, the new game from Bruno Faidutti and Serge Laget. This is a limited Essen release, and the game will only arrive in distribution later in November.
I am delighted to echo the announcement of CoolMiniOrNot (CMON), our new US partner: 
Our new website is online. Most of the contents have been migrated to the new site, and the URLs remain the same where possible.
The Flatlined Games website was set up in 2010, and an upgrade was long overdue.
Argo is the latest game co-designed by Bruno Faidutti and Serge laget. They already teamed up to give ue Mystery at the Abbey, Khéops, Ad Astra, Mission red planet and Castel.
In Argo you lead a team of Astronauts to the escape pods: you awoke from cryostasis on an unknown mining station, and the computer woke you up because of a bug. Plenty of large bugs, that is, as the station is swarming with Aliens!
1. The spark : Spaceships, combat and inertia.
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.
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 ?'
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.
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!
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.
To celebrate Halloween here is a small Halloween special for Dragon Rage.
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!
