Housekeeping

We’re still here, but we have some cleaning to do.

Photo by Judah Wester

Hi there,

We haven’t been in touch recently, and we want to update you as we go through an important period of reorganization. Think of it like our annual deep clean, making room for new things, tidying the place up to invite others in without hesitation.

Here are a few major updates to show where we are now and what’s ahead.

A Sleeping Collective

We all participate in this project whenever we feel like it, only following the products that actually interest us. Some of us are objectively exhausted after 18 months of developing, writing, illustrating, and promoting new games as if it were a full-time job. Some have even preferred to take an indefinite break. It’s not a problem; in a way, that’s the nature of our agreement. We all care for each other as much as before, and our relationship goes beyond the time spent making little games. Those who moved away might come back, or they might not. As for those staying, we are so worn out for various reasons that slowing down a bit is certainly not an issue. If the collective effectively becomes a duo, trio, or quartet with a few star guests, we might officially introduce ourselves. However, our names are already among the most recurring ones in all the volumes you can download from the stores.

Monthly Games

And here is the first complication: our goal of providing you with one game per month has become nearly impossible with the current lineup of authors. Trying to get Goblindom over the finish line (more on that below) is blocking work on everything else. We are still considering how to offer you something nice to read and bring to your table without spending 50 to 100 hours a month on a game from scratch. Furthermore, the collective’s active members are currently more interested in producing games like Rise Up! for their vibes and scope, rather than more structured but silly games like Hellsquad. In the meantime, for new subscribers, we plan to provide a permanent coupon to download our paid games for free as a token of thanks for your patience.

This Fascist Bullsh*t

We’ve talked about this ad nauseam in recent months, but, like Zerocalcare (an Italian author whose animated series, dubbed in English, you CANNOT miss), we have a few non-negotiable rules: one of them is not sharing social spaces with Nazis and fascists. Substack has instead decided to monetize them under the ridiculous excuse of “free speech,” and we have no intention of ending up in a feed alongside that walking dregs of humanity. Part of our creative block stems from this: Does it make sense to invest content, time, and effort into a platform we want to abandon? Probably yes, because you are lovely people and we enjoy the interaction, but the fact remains that we have to leave.

We are considering Patreon, which would let us replicate most of our current structure without asking you for a single dollar. Still, it isn’t necessarily a much less problematic place, and it completely lacks the community feeling we have here. The last option would be to build a small site from scratch, but we are terribly unskilled on the technical side, and the budget is what it is. That said, we won’t delay our choice much longer; as soon as we restart our content schedule (whatever that may be), we will begin the migration.

Waiting for Godot Goblindom

Goblindom was supposed to come out in March, then May, then September, then November… then we realized that what was meant to be a complicated but manageable product had turned into a ginormous Frankenstein’s monster, written over the span of A DECADE.

Rereading the first draft at the end of last year, it was hard even to call it a manual; it was more of an interesting but confusing jumble of procedures, rules, and monsters. The illustrations by the ol’ Daniele Solari were many, but they weren’t nearly enough to fill the whole thing.

Now, in mid-February, the manual is technically finished, and we are finally laying it out… though we admit we would have liked to keep it in the oven a bit longer and, above all, have the money to hand it over to an English-language editor. They could help us eliminate the bucketload of Latinisms filling it, as well as prose that is a bit too baroque for what is supposed to be a streamlined manual. We did a decent job of proofreading and standardizing the text for a bunch of spaghetti-eaters.

Still, it’s hard to work on style without the literary sensitivity of someone who was born speaking Shakespeare’s language and studied it as an adult. For this reason, the game, which is nonetheless packed with material and, in our opinion, super fun, will probably be sold at a price so low it’s insulting. That way, those who buy it definitely get more than they spent, and we feel better when people write to us with stylistic or substantive feedback. As soon as we have the budget for a stylistic overhaul, it is clearly our intention to find an editor to do what we couldn’t. We could give you a release date, but honestly, we’ll pass… it’ll come out when it’s ready.

See you sooner than later

In the end, we didn’t disappear, even if it may have looked that way. We just decided to live a little more and play a little more. To let our friend leave their post in this collective and have a bit of a life. To talk to the people close to us, shake hands, and sit down at the table for a bowl of pasta and a glass of wine before throwing a couple of dice to find out what happens next. After all, what’s the point of writing games and talking about politics and society if you’re locked away in a dark cave, far apart from everyone else?