Protospiel Community Newsletter
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Hey Reader! Heather Newton here. Yet another game from the playtesting halls of Protospiel Online is enjoying a holiday season run on Kickstarter, this one from the August 2024 session. Prepare for a ghostly adventure this holiday season with Spirits of Christmas, a cooperative strategy card game for 1-6 players! Take Scrooge on the ride of his life playing as the spirits of Christmases Past, Present, and Future, moving Scrooge through shadow scenes and helping him see the error of his ways before his time is up! John Bailey of Humble Bard Games designed Spirits of Christmas to fulfill his own wish for a thematic game with crunchy strategy he could play with family and friends over the holidays. Since A Christmas Carol is his favorite holiday story (and also conveniently available in the international public domain), he started with this Dickens classic and built the mechanisms out from there. To fit in well with the spirit of generosity and togetherness the story promotes, he wanted the game to be cooperative. Playing as the Spirits of Christmases Past, Present, and Future with a cooperative goal to help Scrooge see the error of his ways made for a natural fit. As his daughter, Emmie, is an accomplished artist and also loves the story, he commissioned her to create all the illustrations for the game while he handled the graphic and product design. It's great to see families team up to create cool stuff together. I'm sure this game is on its way to being an extra special part of their holiday festivities in 2025 and beyond. Here's what playtesters are saying about Spirits of Christmas: It is VERY thematic. If you're looking for a Christmas themed game and like A Christmas Carol, this game is for you. The rules are easy enough to be the perfect family game during the holidays. The difficulty is easily adjusted, so you can bring it to any game table. Incredible implementation of theme, as you work to guide Scrooge through his past, present, and future revelations, working to trigger them by playing cards and hoping to get Scrooge all the way to his final redemption. Besides the theme, the gameplay is always very tight, and it makes you really work [together] to accomplish what you need to. So many nail-biting moments -- usually multiple times a game -- where if you succeed you do so against all odds! Spirits of Christmas glitters with a theme that's been overlooked in boardgames. The tight gameplay, the evocative art, and the ubiquitous Dickens quotes tie up this family holiday gift with a nice bow befitting the source material...it offers enough variety between different player counts and modes of play (via scalable difficulty and alternate table-talk rules) to keep players revisiting Scrooge's redemption throughout the season and perhaps as an annual holiday tradition. I got to playtest this one myself during its recent visit to Protospiel Online. My favorite parts were the Christmas Carol theme and the cooperative strategy talk it brought out among players. The campaign is already fully funded and is working towards stretch goals through December 19. It's expected to fulfill in summer 2025, so backers should have it in time for next year's holiday season. 🎄❄️🎄
📣Announcements Announcements Annooouuuncements! Badges for Protospiel Online Jan 17-19 2025 Now AvailableReady to kick off 2025 with some PO playtesting? Badges are on sale now with early bird pricing available through Jan 6, 2025 @ 11:59pm EST. This session, we added a Refer a Friend program that give you and your referral $5 off on any badge or sponsorship when they start a new account with protospiel.online through your personal link. Visit the Referral Coupons section of your account page while logged in to the PO website to find your personal sharable link. See you there?
Now Sharing Protospiel Community Newsletter Updates on Ko-fiDid you know you can read and share all the issues of our newsletter from the public feed at hello.protospiel.online/posts? We've added our Ko-fi feed as a new place for web browsers to discover these public posts and get easy access to all the featured game releases, celebrations, and opportunities they share. Ko-fi visitors can also contribute a one-time tip to help us push toward our Ko-fi funding goal for Upgraded Web Hosting & Account Limits by the end of 2024.
SpielMas 2024 Fast Approaching!Protospiel community member Greg Pool started SpielMas in 2020 as a holiday to celebrate the joy of playing games with loved ones. It runs from Dec 26-31 each year. The basic goal is to play at least one game per day each of those days. Personally I like to celebrate by sharing photos of my daily SpielMas display, which I 3D printed using this file from Thingiverse. What would you like to do to celebrate SpielMas this year? If you want to talk about it on social, you can follow the SpielMas Bluesky feed and add your own posts to the feed using the #SpielMas hashtag or interact with @spielmas on Instagram. If you don't already have an account on Bluesky, you can join through our starter pack to automatically follow some Protospiel Online Alumni + the 🎲✂️ feed (🎲=game ✂️=design), where there's been lots of active tabletop design conversation lately. Happy gaming! P.S. If you have something you'd like to see featured in our Community Newsletter, you have 3 options -- either submit an official feature request, reply to this message, or, if you're a current attendee or alumni, post in the #🙌share-your-wins channel in the Protospiel Online Discord server to let us know the details. We'd love to celebrate you! |
Protospiel Community Newsletter
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