This year is drawing to a close, and we thought we’d have a look back at what projects we’ve completed in terms of game design and writing.
A Book: We kicked off this year with the release of our historical novel for middle-grade readers, The Day the Pirates Went Mad (#TDTPiratesWentMad). Many years in the making, the first few months of 2021 were dedicated to finally getting this book out the door. One of the main successes in this effort was working with @JonMerchant21 on the cover art and interior illustrations – they turned out great!
A Card Game: After the official book launch on May 1st, our creative attentions turned back to game design. We had always planned to follow-up Pirate Pursuit – The Spanish Treasure Fleet with a second game that would re-use its many Pirate Lore cards. When we saw the #SmallBoxChallenge by @TheGameCrafter, we decided we would go for it! Not only did we manage to submit Pirate Pursuit – The King’s Pardon in time for the contest, but we got a lot of great comments from the community too. Now at the end of the year, we’ve tied up a last loose end by making available a boxless expansion edition so you can add just the new cards from “The King’s Pardon” to the larger “The Spanish Treasure Fleet”.
Plus a Few More Projects
Those were the two main projects for the year, but we had a few other accomplishments as well:
- The EmmaSharpesAdventures.com website now has a Teacher’s Guide to accompany #TDTPiratesWentMad, along with a number of behind-the-scenes and research-related posts. Here we also collaborated with an illustrator from the tabletop game design community – @WitchwayGames provided us a number of fantastic character portraits for the crew of the New Adventure!
- We also added three new custom tilesets for Chess Attack, our chess strategy teaching game. In addition to the traditional pieces, we now have the Animal Army, Spooky Creatures, and best of all, the Dinosaur Clan beautifully illustrated by @TunaCetiV!
- Most recently, we finished a new print-and-play, Elemental Minions, where 2–4 players battle to master their elemental minions while exploiting the strengths and weaknesses of the four primary elemental forces (Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water). Not only did we complete the three game modes we already had planned, but we were inspired at the last minute to add one more, making Elemental Minions a 4-in-1 game!
In Support Of…
To wrap up – throughout the year, we’ve been collecting all royalties from our books and commercial games to donate to our local children’s hospital, BCChildrens.ca! Thanks for your support!
We look forward to 2022 and continuing to #MakeLearningFun! 🙂