Kitchen Table Gaming returns with a new episode around BDM’s new game, Emergents: Genesis! Anthony Conta and Matt Ferrando join for good eats and GGs

Emergents: Genesis is a brand new deckbuilding game that combines my two things that have occupied huge swaths of my professional life — comics and gaming. The game is an interactive deckbuilder in which you use a superhero avatar to fight with up to three other players. The game was designed by Anthony Conta around a world of superheroes — called Emergents — created by me. The artists who worked on the images for this game are all professional comics artists who have created mainstream titles in the superhero genre.

You have probably seen our Kickstarter (and might even have supported us). If you missed our Kickstarter but still want to support the game, you can do so at Urban Island Games. If you want to see the game in your local game shop you should tell your retailer to order it from ACD Distribution while supplies last.

This episode of Kitchen Table Gaming is all about Emergents: Genesis. This game features 13 different characters but for today’s episode I have honed in on four of them and made food (or drink) that ties into each of the four classes of powers that those Emergents possess.

I’m joined in this episode by two of the game designers who helped make Emergents: Genesis possible, Matt Ferrando and Anthony Conta. Punches are thrown; punch is drunk!

Check it out:

Check back all week long as I will be posting text versions of each of these recipes here on Fetchland. Enjoy!

It’s ironic how a game that was created to fill the void between sessions of other games has become so big, so large that it now suffers from the same problem. Maybe your MTGO draft is slow to fire, or your friend is late to your house, or you’re travelling to an event and want something to do in the afterhours when the hall is closed, but we’ve all had downtime while waiting to play Magic. Small, short games can offer a lot of interesting decisions while remaining tiny enough to only take up a little bit of your time. Sometimes, we need a game that lasts 5-15 minutes so we can fill some time before we get back to Magic.

So whether you’re at a GP, waiting for the eighth man to show up at your house to draft, or just looking for something a little different, here are eight games you can turn to when not playing Magic:

Love Letter

It’s hard to describe what type of game Love Letter is. It’s a party game. It’s a strategy game. Perhaps the best way to describe it is “fun.” While the theme is threadbare, you’re basically trying to eliminate the other players while being the last man standing or to have the highest card in your hand by the end of the round (which generally lasts as long as three minutes).

Hive

Hive is a two player chess variant that evolves as you play it. You get around 10-12 pieces to use to build a board, playing or moving hexes one at a time until you can surround the opponent’s queen. It’s similar to chess, but with a bit more unpredictability to it, since the play space changes as the game progresses.

The Duke

Like Hive, The Duke is a two player chess variant where planning ahead and spacial thinking are key. Unlike Hive, the Duke has a lot more randomness in it – if you want to add a piece to the board, you pull a random one out of a bag, which means each game evolves differently than the last, and you have to learn to adapt on the fly instead of rely on a dominant type of piece.

Star Realms

Similar to Ascension or Dominion, Star Realms is a deck building game (designed by Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour Hall of Famer Darwin Kastle) where you all start with the same resources and compete to gain new ones, with the eventual goal of reducing your opponent to zero life before they do the same to you. Imagine if while you were drafting, you could play the spells you pick several turns later – it feels similar. Best of all, they have a digital version, so you don’t even need to carry much to a friend’s house or a GP!

Iota

If Scrabble didn’t have words and relied on pictures instead, you’d have Iota – a game about connecting shapes, colors and numbers on an evolving board in an attempt to get the most points possible. Depending on how you play your cards, you can get as little as two points or as many as hundreds. A game for people who like planning ahead, managing board space and matching symbols, Iota demands you to think harder than any other game on this list.

Eight Minute Empire

As the name implies, in Eight Minute Empire you have to conquer as much of the world as you can in eight minutes. For a game with few, if any words, it’s surprisingly complex and deep. You draft resources and points while deploying troops around the world, all in eight minutes. It’s like micro-Risk, but without spending eight minutes rolling dice each turn.

Sheriff of Nottingham

A bluffing game where you’re incentivized to lie to your friends constantly, Sheriff of Nottingham is a surprisingly simple game about trying to get away with as much as possible. Each turn, the Sheriff tries to question people about the goods in their bags, preventing people from smuggling more into the town than they say they have. Note that you may walk away from this game looking at your friends in a new light as they lie to your face over and over again.

Funemployed

Last but not least, Funemployed is a party game [designed by me 🙂] where people try to apply to jobs saying things they’d never say on an interview – how your Daddy Issues make you a great Superhero, or why your Jet Packs make you the best Secret Agent. It’s a game that can be played for three minutes or three hours, depending on who you’re with. Note that like Sheriff, it’s also possible that you walk away from this game looking at your friends in a new light too, but because they say crazy, unpredictable things.

So what about you guys? What are your favorite games to fill the time while waiting to play a game of Magic or when you need a change of pace?

–Anthony Conta

Hi there! My name’s Anthony, and I’m a game designer.

Well, actually, that’s not the whole story. I’m a lot of things: a husband, a tutor, a gamer, a business owner, a dog lover, a Sagittarius, a human being, a mammal, and many more–including a new writer for this lovely site! But for the purposes of my articles, let’s just stick with game designer.

Brian (bdm) asked me to write about a topic near and dear to my heart: games. I love games. I’ve been playing games since I was old enough to walk. One of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received from my parents was an abandoned Game Gear left in my mother’s office at school when I was five years old. My bookshelves are bending under the weight of all my board games. I have such a large backlog of digital games that if I retired now and spent forty hours a week playing them to completion, I’d probably die before I finished.

This love of games caused me to be a bit – ahem – impulsive as I dove head-first into making them without any sort of plan or structure. To be honest, I’m still winging it. But I love it.

It all started with my friend, Josh, a writer. Four years ago, he casually mentioned he was making a game because of his love of science fiction. “You can DO that?!?!?” I proclaimed, astonished at the idea that anyone could just make a game, without any sort of plan, experience or company behind them. But it made sense. To design something, all you have to do is create it, and if it’s good enough, the rest will fall into place, right?

I wanted in, so I joined him. We had our fun, but it didn’t work out, so we went our separate ways. Josh kept writing, and I decided to pursue games further. That pursuit led me into a deep, secret underground of game designers, reporters, and enthusiasts that lived right under my nose in New York City. There are meetups every month, week, day even, where people who love games, for whatever reason, congregate and play. I’ve been to mini playtesting sessions with well-established professors and designers, bars where gamers meet consistently every week, and even obscure, loud, and crowded warehouses where I played games that were still in their early stages of existence. Being a part of this community felt like the Kickstarter mentality of helping creators bring their projects to life, except there was more interaction, less expectation, and a more personal connection. It was addicting–a network of individuals who shared my same passions, all manifesting in different ways. I went to every event I could, soaking it all in, trying to retain anything and everything that I came in contact with. I went to classes. I heard designers speak about their experiences. I went to expos where hundreds of people came to play games created by people who just wanted to make games. These people weren’t a part of any company or program, yet they had fully functional, enjoyable games right in front of my face.

But here I was, this kid, this child, this pretender. I didn’t have a degree. I didn’t have work experience. I hadn’t even designed, let alone produced or released a game before! Yet I was a part of this social circle, this community, propelled forward by one, singular drive: the desire to make games. That’s all I wanted; to express myself through my love of games by creating the games I wanted to play. The games I needed to exist. That desire kept pushing me further, pushing me to be better, transforming me into what I had always wanted to be: a game designer.

Influenced by my experiences and interactions with this community, I came up with a game with my girlfriend. It was a simple, little game I didn’t expect to go very far. It had a sardonic feel to it, a theme that was self-deprecating, and it caused its players to act out in silly voices, claim outrageous things, and overall act like a bunch of goofballs. Yet it was fun. It was really fun. And as I kept showing it to people, more and more of them wanted to play. And keep playing. In fact, it became increasingly rare that I would find someone who didn’t like the game.

People started to support me in surprising ways. My girlfriend became my greatest business partner. My best friends started to help playtest and design with me. We developed relationships with other companies. We travelled together, to faraway places, just to play the game. I never would have succeeded in any capacity without their help.

I gave the game a catchy name: ‘Funemployed’. I did a small print run to legitimize it further. I found a publisher. I started a company. I ran a Kickstarter. I went to a convention, and we sold out of stock three times during that weekend. I did a cooking show. I asked my girlfriend to marry me, using the game as my proposal. I found a new publisher. I did a second Kickstarter. I got the game to Amazon. I made an expansion. On and on, each experience built on the next, like a stack of legos forming a giant skyscraper (at least, I hope they’re legos–someone save me if they’re Jenga pieces instead).

While Funemployed went through its transformation, I made more games. Brian and I, with the help of a lot of other people, made a card game. I worked on prototypes for new experiences. I consulted with companies about design. I went to more conventions. On and on, the wheel turned, with nothing driving me forward except that one, singular desire–to create. I didn’t have an MBA that told me how to run a business. I didn’t have a design degree grounded in ‘the meaning of play.’ I didn’t have a network of individuals I could lean on when I started. All I had when I began this journey, the one thing that I can truly attribute to the distance I’ve travelled, is that singular desire, gnawing at my soul, whispering in the back of my head, ever since I held that Game Gear in my hands: you must make games.

I can’t control that voice, that side of me–it owns me. I can’t silence it, I can’t turn it off. It wants to talk. It wants to engage in the conversation of play. It drives me to read textbooks about game design. It drags me to hidden clubs to play local multiplayer games. It wakes me up at 3AM, demanding my attention. It’s loud, it’s obnoxious, and if I let it out, it won’t stop talking. Ever.

That voice will keep going forever–I feel it all the time. But I’ll stop here. For now. I talk about games a lot. When I’m not talking about them, I’m thinking about them. When I’m not thinking about them, I’m playing them. When I’m not playing them, I’m teaching them. Games are a part of my life.

If you ever want to talk to me about games, I’m–well–game! I’m right here on Fetchland. I’m on Twitter. I might even be at a convention. Feel free to say hi, shoot me a tweet, or leave a comment. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. I’m a game designer, and I’m in the business of doing what I love: making games.

-Anthony Conta