Hey !
Oh my gosh, has it been a while! About a year actually. Looks like the previous letter I sent out was last November, which makes me sad. I like writing these, but I guess I just got very, very bogged down with getting Frosthaven out the door. And only now, a year later, am I finally able to breathe again.
So, look, there's a lot to cover here, but I want to start with the thing that has meant the most to me personally, and I'm not even talking about finishing the files on Frosthaven.
I grew up in California. And while the residents of Indiana have been able to claim me as a Hoosier for the past 16 years, I have always had a yearning to go back to my roots. Well, not exactly my roots. I spent the first 18 years of my life in Bakersfield, which is the part of California you pass through to get somewhere better. But while it is in a desert, it is within
reasonable driving distance of a lot of things, and I spent a lot of my youth exploring the beautiful nature around me.
I was supposed to just be in Indiana for grad school, but then I got married, and my wife wanted to stay, and then she started grad school, and, well, Indiana's gravity just became very real.
And all this is to say that, finally, at long last, I have escaped it. We moved back to beautiful California, have been in our new house for a week, and are absolutely loving every minute of it (except at night sleeping on an air mattress while we wait for the rest of our stuff to be delivered).
It truly feels like a new chapter of my life has begun (which did also nicely coincide with getting Frosthaven out the door), and I'm excited to see where it leads. Not only are we in a completely new place, but this is also our first time as homeowners, which is an interesting adventure in itself. It is all so new, and I really feel like anything
is possible (in a good way). I'm also really happy to be close to my family again!
So, yeah, I'll stop going on about that now and move on to other topics, except to say that I am looking for a new gaming group in the Monterey area. If you like heavy Euros and live around here, hit me up and maybe we can hang!
It's me! In California! With some birds!
So what other exciting things are there to talk about? Well, yeah, there's Frosthaven, but I talk about that enough in the Kickstarter updates. No, instead, something else that has been really cool for me has been the full release of Gloomhaven Digital!
It is now out of early access with the whole campaign implemented. This also coincided nicely with everything else going on. So I spent the last week of October frantically packing up everything in Indiana for the move across the country, then arrived and found myself with little to do, save a couple of Twitch streams I had planned on doing with my friends TJ and Richmond over at
Brambeard Gaming. (We'll also be playing on stream again tonight!)
Since the digital game had just came out, and I regularly appear on their stream to play random co-op video games with them, I thought, "Hey, let's play some Gloomhaven together." And it turned out to be a lot of fun! Gloomhaven is great! Since then, I've started my own campaign and have just been chilling out, killing demons
every day, and it is super-nice.
I don't think I've played Gloomhaven for fun since the game first came out and I started a short-lived campaign with my wife. And now I am very much into it. I just retired my Tinkerer and Cragheart, and now my veteran Scoundrel has to show the new recruits the ropes until they get their bearings. It's at this weird place in my memory where I vaguely
remember the layouts of the dungeons and the outcomes to events, but not fully, so I still get to surprise myself.
And it is just cool playing a video game that I designed! I know, I've published plenty of board games, but video games live in a different place in my heart. My relationship with them started much earlier, and designing one has always been a distant dream of mine. And now that dream is a reality, and the game is magnificent!
And now I've gone on for quite a while telling you about things that are important to me, but so much more has gone on in the last year! Well, mostly just Frosthaven, but also we saw the return of conventions with Gen Con and Origins (I didn't go out to Essen, as that seemed too big of a stretch in a pandemic). I had a great time at both of them. Origins was a bit
sparse, but there was great food and great company, so I can't really complain.
I should let you know that we'll be at PAXU next month as well, and we'll doing a big Frosthaven and Beyond event there, MCed by none other than Mik and Starla of Our Family Plays Games! We'll have an interesting announcement, and I'll also be fielding question, both live and pre-submitted.
So if you'd like to submit a question, go on over and subscribe to Our Family Plays Games, and they'll be asking for them later this month. Also congratulate them on their upcoming 100th episode! The event will be going down Saturday at 10:30 am, and we'll otherwise be hanging at booth 2531, so maybe I'll see you there!
Oh, and hey, did you know there's a Gloomhaven jigsaw puzzle in the webstore now? Plus all sorts of Jaws of the Lion merch, including removable stickers and pint glasses. You know, in case you're looking for Christmas presents or something. And despite all this time, we still haven't quite gotten the international orders for the webstore up
and running yet, but we are very close. Admittedly, we've been prioritizing other things, but I think we're ready to get that finalized, so stay tuned for that.
And, well, I think I'll just call it there. Don't worry! You won't have to wait another year to hear from me. I will be sure to have the next one go out closer to a month from now than a year.
Stay safe and be well!
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