NSKN at gaming convention in 2013

Throughout the whole year NSKN will attend various gaming conventions and fairs where we'll present our new releases, demo our board games and play. From the very beginning of 2013 we have quite a busy schedule.

From 25th to 27th of January we'll go to Italy for GobCon de Luxe. It's the second time NSKN is attending this winter Italian convention and we're hoping it will go just as well as the previous one. It will be a weekend of gaming among friends. We're not going there empty handed, on the contrary, NSKN has prepared a special limited edition of Warriors & Traders: Middle Ages expansion in Italian. 

From Italy we're going north to Germany to attend the Nürnberg International Toy Fair, the biggest European exhibition of its kind. This is where the official release of Exodus: Proxima Centauri will take place. We will present also the English pre-release of Warriors & Traders: Middle Ages which we plan to publish in the fall of 2013. Besides this, we will bring along the prototypes of Praetor and W, two of our upcoming games.

We have another title prepared for Nürnberg  but since it's not a sure deal we must wait a bit before announcing this title.

At the end of the spring, from 24th to 26tf of may, NSKN will attend the UK Games Expo. After the success of last year, we plan to make a habit from going to Birmingham. Besides Exodus and Wild Fun West, we're hoping to have the final versions of Praetor and Warriors & Traders: Middle Ages.

As always, the main gaming event of 2013 for our team will be Spiel Essen. This is where we're going to release our new games, meet and play. The dated have not been announced yet, but as soon as we hear back from the organizers, we'll update our website and this post.

Besides all these events we have a few more in plan, but since we have not made up our minds yet and we're still talking to the organizers it's a bit too early to talk about them.

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More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website | Facebook | Twitter | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine | Blog

Warriors & Traders can also be found on its own website | Facebook |  BGG
Exodus: Proxima Centauri: website | BGG
Wild Fun West: website | BGG

Follow us on Twitter: Agni, Alexandra, Andrei and Vlad 

On the way to the top?

Exodus @ Spiel '12 Essen

When I was working on the design of Exodus: Proxima Centauri and I saw the game growing under my eyes, I set quite high expectations. It was my third game and my most important project, something in which I strongly believed. But... (there's always a but) NSKN is still a small publisher with limited reach to distribution channels and that prevents our games to be in the spotlight. So, I had to dial down my expectations and set my hopes to a realistic level. 

Just after Spiel '12 was over, I asked the other member of out team where would they see Exodus in half a year on the BoardGameGeek charts. The most optimistic answer was somewhere around place 2000 if we're really lucky. I dared a more optimistic estimation, hoping to see Exodus reach top 1000 before the end of 2013. 

It's January, a long time before the end of the year, but the progress Exodus has made up the charts is significant.

In October, Exodus was ranked 4800th on the BGG games chart and there was only one preview out. Today things look completely different. Exodus benefits from more than 10 reviews in 5 languages and the famous Tom Vasel ranked the game 3rd in his preferences for 2012 after giving it a great review (9.5/10).

http://www.dicetower.com/top_ten_lists/current-top-ten-list-top-ten-games---2012.html

On the BGG charts, Exodus has climbed up to place 3500 in the beginning of December last year and yesterday it just broke into top 2500,a ll these without reaching the hobby stores in the United States. With and average rating of 8/10, I am have reason to hope that the ascension of Exodus will no stop here.

For a major publisher this would not be a significant accomplishment, but for our size and history it's something to be proud of.

I am hoping that the end of this year will prove me right and that more and more people will open and play Exodus: Proxima Centauri and that all of them will be just as content as the games who have already played and expressed their opinions.

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More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website | Facebook | Twitter | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine | Blog

Warriors & Traders can also be found on its own website | Facebook |  BGG
Exodus: Proxima Centauri: website | BGG
Wild Fun West: website | BGG

Follow us on Twitter: Agni, Alexandra, Andrei and Vlad 

Middle Ages

Warriors & Traders: Middle Ages is the name of the new expansion for Warriors & Traders!

We've been already working on this for a while and it will be ready just in time to show a prototype in the Nurnberg game fair. The rules are not released yet, but you can take a look at the new player boards and have at least an idea of how will the expansion change the base game.

To shed a bit more light, here is a passage from the new rules:

Warriors & Traders: Middle Ages is an expansion which requires the base game Warriors & Traders. The rest of these rules will refer to the game and the expansion as a whole. This expansion may be combined with the Warriors & Traders: Italia expansion and with any other map expansion that has been or will be released. Specific rules may apply.

The Middle Ages expansion enhances Warriors & Traders by offering more interaction between players in the form of trade negotiations, military campaigns and peace resolutions. The new features include variable turn order and variable player power. The existing features, area control, action selection and trading are also improved. The deterministic combat system is replaced by a more attractive tactical combat system.

In a nutshell, the expansion will bring new rules for play preserving most the original concepts, it will come with new player board and info board and it will introduce a new combat system. 

We'll come back more news, including game images, before the end of the month.

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More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website | Facebook | Twitter | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine | Blog

Warriors & Traders can also be found on its own website | Facebook |  BGG
Exodus: Proxima Centauri: website | BGG
Wild Fun West: website | BGG

Follow us on Twitter: Agni, Alexandra, Andrei and Vlad 

New video reviews

The holidays season brought us a few gifts, some quite unexpected. After the release of Exodus: Proxima Centauri and Wild Fun West we gave a few copies to experienced reviewers all over the world who would in exchange share their opinions, pointing out what they liked and disliked about our board games. If last year it took a long time to see impressions about Warriors & Traders, this time things moved a lot faster and we got these unexpectedly quick gifts.

Wild Fun West caught the attention of Tom Vasel from The Dice Tower (English review)

Exodus was analyzed by Alex from ce-jucam.ro (Romanian review)

Last but not least, during Spiel '12 Essen, the NSKN booth was visited by Andreas from cliquenabend.de and who talked to our team about every single one of our board games and expansions, Exodus: Proxima Centauri, Wild Fun West, Warriors & Traders and the Italia expansion (English/German)

The video of Warriors & Traders is slightly too long to add it here, so please have a look at the original link http://www.cliquenabend.de/news/992500-Essen-2012-Neuheit-Warriors-Traders.html.

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More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website | Facebook | Twitter | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine | Blog

Warriors & Traders can also be found on its own website | Facebook |  BGG
Exodus: Proxima Centauri: website | BGG
Wild Fun West: website | BGG

Follow us on Twitter: Agni, Alexandra, Andrei and Vlad 

Bye bye 2012

We're back from holidays and among the first things we have to do at the beginning of the new year is to draw the line and analyze the last 12 months with the goods and the bads, so we can learn and improve.

For NSKN, 2012 was a very busy year, the second in our short history and the year with the greatest growth so far. We released an expansion for our first board game and two new ones, we attended several gaming events and we expanded our market. But, let's take it step by step...

Jan 2012 - NSKN attended GobCon, an event by gamers for gamers in Bologna, Italy. It was our first local gamin convention, we got to meet a lot of great people and we established a long-term relationship with La Tana dei Goblin, the largest board gaming community in Italy.

Feb 2012 - We announced our new games for 2012, Wild Fun West and Exodus: Proxima Centauri on BoardGameGeek. With the aid of the great people, we polished the games, we chose the right names and we organized play-testing sessions.

Apr 2012 - One year after being established, NSKN got a new look. We designed a new logo and a new website in our effort to increase awareness and to give better customer support to all of you who own or are interested in our games.

May 2012 - Our team went all the way to Birmingham, UK to attend for the first time the UK Games Expo. It was a unique experience, we met lots of great people and we discovered a community of great people. We presented to the public for the first time the final prototypes of Wild Fun West and Exodus: Proxima Centauri, our upcoming games for the fall of 2012. The feedback was encouraging and we decided to move further with both board games.

Jun 2012 - June marked our second trip to Italy to meet Tana dei Goblin for and to released the first expansion of Warriors & Traders, Italia. We got a lot of help from our fiends form Italy and we designed this expansion  especially for them. The first print sold out immediately and this represented another landmark for NSKN, our first ever sold-out product.

Jul 2012 - The graphic design for Wild Fun West was ready and we announced the game for Spiel '12 Essen.

Aug 2012 - Exodus reach its final state, with all the illustrations and it was ready to go into production. We made the decision to use Indiegogo for crowd-funding and we prepared the projects.

Sep 2012 - In the beginning of September, NSKN celebrated another brand new accomplishment, we were no longer a one-game-publisher, we had Wild Fun West ready and Exodus was getting significant support on Indiegogo, getting ready to be funded. At the same time, our new games were being produced and shipped from China.

Oct 2012 - October was by far the month with the most work, events and accomplishments for NSKN. Just a few days before Essen we reached our goal on Indiegogo. Our year long efforts were repaid by gaming enthusiasts who decided to back Exodus and we even exceeded our goal by 10 %. As soon as our crowd-funding campaign was successful, we shipped more than 130 copies of Exodus, in an effort larger than it looks for a still very small company.

Since the first print of Warriors & Traders: Italia sold out so quickly, we decided to make a second print, also limited to 50 copies. It was the last chance to get this exclusive expansion and we got preorders for more than half of the production.

The second part of October was marked by the mobilization effort for Spiel Essen. We attended the largest board gaming event in Europe for the second year, bringing a team of 8 people, three games and one expansion. 

Nov 2012 - NSKN went back to Italy for Lucca Comics & Games, a convention that brought together 138,000 people. We were the only foreign publisher and even though our Italian language skills were limited, we made an impression and sold out the last few copied of Warriors & Traders: Italia.

Dec 2012 - After we got back from Lucca until the end of the year we focus of sales and getting our new games to as many hobby stores as possible. We expanded our distribution network in Asia and Europe and this effort will continue throughout 2013. The year ended with a long overdue vacation from which we have just returned.

After we drew the line, 2012 was a good year with many highlights but also some mistakes. We managed to expand, we designed and produced two new board games, but we also encountered some production quality issues that we'e still fighting to solve. We have big plans for 2013 but we want to stay a small, friendly company which is capable to respond to any request in a matter of hours or days, putting our fans and customers first. We're still learning and every day we realized how special and amazing the board games industry is.

__________________

More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website | Facebook | Twitter | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine | Blog

Warriors & Traders can also be found on its own website | Facebook |  BGG
Exodus: Proxima Centauri: website | BGG
Wild Fun West: website | BGG

Follow us on Twitter: Agni, Alexandra, Andrei and Vlad