Spiel des Jahres nominee Brett Gilbert joins as co-lead developer

This will be a short and sweet blog post!

Since I started game design in Sep 2015 and moving into publishing other people's games, both as Alley Cat Games I have had the pleasure of practically being mentored by Brett Gilbert at my local playtesting group.

He's helped give constructive feedback on multiple playtests on our games inevitably making them better each time he gave his advice.

Alley Cat Games has grown rapidly since our first launch in June 2016 with Lab Wars. We now have 2 products in distribution and are the official kickstarter campaign managers for Sierra Madre Games, helping them to raise $309,000 a few months ago for Bios:Genesis 2nd edition and Bios:MegaFauna 2.

Having recently attended GenCon (separate post for this!) primarily to liaise with our distributors' needs and hear multiple pitches from 10s of designers we came to the realisation that we needed to grow again.

With that in mind, I contacted Brett to see if he was interested in vetting the games that I was pitched and liked, and further develop those games with us to get them to a publishable standard. Having been nominated for the Spiel des Jahres award for his game Elysium (co-designed by another excellent designer I respect: Matt Dunstan) and published numerous other popular titles with large publishers, we were delighted that he said yes!

Yesterday was our first official meeting together, vetting 5 games I took home with me from GenCon and couldn't have been more successful. We can't wait to continue working with Brett with his breadth of knowledge of game design but also marketability of games.

Brett joins Mike Nudd who is co-developer with us on our Dice Hospital project who vetted games with us in person at GenCon and is also co-designer of Dice Hospital. We hope that working with two heavyweights in the industry will give us the guidance and expertise to take Alley Cat Games to the next level as a brand that board gamers can trust.

Until next time!

Caezar