In May 2014 I was in the shower in my college apartment a week or two before graduation, thinking about card games and the books I’d been reading lately. While I was cleaning off I had an idea for the basic mechanics of a card game about fantasy heists with similar themes to the book I’d just finished, The Lies of Locke Lamora. I wrote some quick brainstorming notes on my computer when I was out of the shower, not really sure if it would amount to anything or not. The next day I got back to it and wrote more, and then the next, and the next, until I was designing cards and trying to balance systems against each other and I got to thinking hey, I might have something here. It was the first time I’d seriously tried to design a board game, not counting the ones I’d made with friends on long summer days in middle school. Over the next two years I would move back to Vermont, meet up with a great game design group in Burlington (shout out to Let’s Make Games Vermont), and work steadily to refine and develop that idea I’d had in the shower that day before graduating. At some point the game, which I’d been calling “the heist game” in my notes, gained the name No Honor Among Thieves.
In May 2016 I registered an LLC for Carpe Omnis Games, naming my publishing company after the website and blog that I’d had for years, so that I wouldn’t have to buy a new domain name and set up a new website. I had a game now, and it was good; all I needed was money to publish it. I worked for months to prepare for a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, sending review copies of No Honor Among Thieves to critics, assembling lists of news sites to send press releases, setting up interviews and podcasts, and asking for feedback on the campaign from everyone I could think of.
In August I launched the Kickstarter campaign, fingers crossed. In September the campaign ended, having earned $48,325, which was approximately 165% more than I’d asked for. This game was actually going to get published! And so it did, though it took a lot longer and cost a bit more than I thought it would.
No Honor Among Thieves is currently in the process of shipping out to backers worldwide. Some people in Australia already have it, UK backers have it en route, and everyone else is eagerly awaiting the email with tracking numbers from the fulfillment centers. The game is done, it’s being delivered, I actually made this work! And now, finally, four years after I had an idea in the shower and for some reason decided to actually stick with it instead of writing down some concepts and forgetting about it, here it is. No Honor Among Thieves, a game of daring heists and sudden betrayal.
This is all a bit of a long-winded and self-congratulatory way of saying that there’s now a store available on the website, where you can buy the results of my work for the past four years. You can find it here, or in the main navigation bar at the top of the page. Go there to preorder No Honor Among Thieves or the Kickstarter promo pack that contains all the little goodies unlocked by stretch goals during the campaign, buy NoHAT hats, or check out a bunch of Carpe Omnis Games branded apparel that I designed mostly because I wanted something cool to wear to conventions. I’ve also given the homepage of the website a bit of a face lift, to de-emphasize the blog that I don’t post in on anything remotely resembling a reasonable schedule and emphasize the products that Carpe Omnis Games is selling. It’s been a pretty major overhaul of the website, and I’m quite proud of how it looks, and the products that are now on sale here.
This is the culmination of four years of work. And I’m nowhere near done yet.
Welcome to the new Carpe Omnis.
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