Nordingrå is a small fishing village smack in the middle of the high coast. Here we find the indie game creator hub The High coast game village. The community focuses mostly on supporting indie video game designers in the area but the Nordingrå Game Day is for all kinds of gaming! For us it was great to be able to attend since Per lives in the area and for once I (Åke) was the one who had to make travel arrangements.

The event turned out to be one of the most hectic days of demoing we’ve ever had! From 10:30 to 17:00 we barely had time to talk to each-other! We utilized our tables as best as we could and made room for up to four parallel game groups. When things wound down we got the chance to say hi to the owner of Orion Spel and try out Bauer by NordInk. (I ended out buying a copy)

It was a fun day that passed in a haze and when we got back to Per’s house after a dinner we just chilled and tried to recuperate.

LinCon is a convention we’ve visited many times now and it’s always fun. We showed our games all day Thursday through Saturday. There were lulls, especially in the mornings, but after the weekend we’d played many many games of both Perilous Pond and Bushido Duels with so many lovely people!

This year I think Perilous Pond was the more popular game, but we had a couple of die-hard Bushido Duels fans visiting as well. In addition to our released games we tried out an early prototype with visitors and a friendly game designer from Swedish Meeples.

LinCon is also a great place to meet old acquaintances and other game designers. We visited the Indie game designer room and checked out a bunch of really cool designs shared war stories.

Since we live far* from each-other we also make the most of these conventions by eating good, playing boardgames** and just hanging out.

After the conventions we’ve been recuperating*** and are already planning our next conventions

– Åke

* faaaaaaaaaaaaar

** Mostly in cramped spaces, but also at home

*** This means playing Slay the Spire 2

Conventions!

We managed to visit three conventions this year.

LinCon is one of the older^{[citation needed]} conventions here in Sweden and very much focused on playing board and role playing games.

NärCon Summer is a festival with cosplayers everywhere, K-Pop bands playing on large stages, lots of different foods, video games, arcades, an entire building with artists selling their artwork and much much more. Everyone was super friendly and the atmosphere was great.

…and BibbCon is a tiny convention hosted by Jönköping City Library (Bibliotek in Swedish) and just a single day. This convention is hosted in the city library so entry was free for all and small kids ran around trying new games or playing Mario Cart everywhere.

The most important thing about the conventions are meeting people. In addition to all the gamers, we met some exceptional creators. We met the people behind Falkenjack Gaming Woodcraft at LinCon, they make and sell custom dice trays, towers and DM screens (We managed to trade a copy of Bushido Duels for a lovely dice tray for Perilous Pond). We also met Emma, coordinator of Uniting Geeks. They run various events and geek markets. We also briefly met with Swedish Meeples and the Tody’s crew our friendly competitors and got some input for Perilous Pond.

Our Games!

Our upcoming title, Perilous Pond, has come a long way this year and is now in a very mature state. We’ve been getting feedback from We’ve done some rule changes after comments from play-testers and we’ve just received the first version of the Swedish rules from the printer, we can now start to send the first boxes to Swedish reviewers and content creators.

Bushido Duels has been ticking away. People at conventions still seem to enjoy the game which in my opinion is the most important measurement. Sales have also been ticking along slowly but steadily. We are now featured on the shelf of a large share of the stores here in Sweden.

And much more…

We contributed prizes to the Helpful Pixels charity stream for the Tim Bergling Foundation, we had a booth at the Nördarnas Julmarknad market, learned blender (to some extent) and much more!

/Åke