Hello, my name is Nicole Kline, and I am a tabletop game designer.
I’ve always been a creative person. I’ve written novels, worked on video games, and designed grants, which, while they can be boring, can bring beautiful ideas to life. My most recent foray into creativity has been tabletop design, which has changed my life. It has broken up the monotony of my day job and alleviated some of the stress of being in grad school. But it’s also helped me develop and strengthen friendships, stretch my mind creatively, and open myself up to a different way of thinking and living.
I live in Philadelphia, where we have a large, diverse, and very tight-knit community of game developers. I also happen to be dating my creative partner, Anthony Amato. We get together weekly with the other local devs at Cipher Prime’s “Philly Dev Night,” a place to share ideas, playtest games, and meet like-minded people. We have monthly games jams, and it was during one of these that created our first game, RESISTOR_.
After taking the game through several iterations, we started submitting it to various events, which culminated in our acceptance to last year’s Indie MEGABOOTH at PAX Prime. We had gone to several smaller events, but nothing prepared us for what we were about to experience.
PAX Prime 2014 marked my fifth PAX, and my third role (first as attendee, then as press, and finally as exhibitor). I didn’t know what to think when we first arrived. We were one of the only teams from tabletop that hadn’t published a game or run a Kickstarter in the group, and several of them had been on Tabletop Deathmatch. The anxiety and feeling of imposter syndrome was strong: we were afraid we wouldn’t be accepted, that we would be the only ones on the outskirts.
The good news is that I couldn’t have been more wrong about how things ended up.
Everyone was friendly, helpful, and generous with their time and attention. We got there before PAX started, and we all got acquainted the best way we knew how: by playing each other’s games, and then going out for dinner. IMB also had a mixer for all the devs, both video and tabletop, to help us get to know each other. By the end of the night, we had started some amazing friendships.
It’s important to bond before PAX actually begins, because once it’s in full swing, that small square of carpet on which the teams demo their games becomes your entire life. Being able to turn around and share a smile and a laugh, or hop into someone’s game to give them enough players, or take turns grabbing food and drinks for each other, or even give someone a spare minute to go to the bathroom, becomes vital to your survival on the floor. Sometimes you would turn inward, take a deep breath, and see someone else doing the same, and you’d catch their eye across the floor and both laugh. And bonding with someone across a crowded room can be a wonderful moment to share.
Of course, there were some challenges that we needed to face, the main one being that we don’t have a lot of money, and it was hard on us financially to plan the trip. IMB had a lot of submissions for tabletop, so we didn’t find out until a few weeks before PAX. Being out on the East Coast meant we had to get plane tickets, find a hotel, and take time off from work, which was difficult to juggle. The plane tickets were expensive because it was so close to the flight date, and the secret to finding a hotel at any PAX is just to hit up the forums. But taking off time from work was not easy for Anthony, who had run out of days from all the events we were doing.
But we gained so much by being a part of IMB. By the end of the weekend, we had become a family. The night it was finished, IMB had another mixer, and this one was far more intimate: we had all just survived that together, and it was time to relax. We went home with some great feedback, a burgeoning fanbase, some press, and lasting friendships. And even after Indie MEGABOOTH was over, we were added to the alumni list, meaning we could stay in touch with everyone and continue to see what they were working on.
These contacts were essential in the months that followed, because we needed help building our Kickstarter. Our friends gave us advice, pored over our rules, talked to us about manufacturing, and gave us feedback on our Kickstarter preview page. And we started to realize that everyone is in this together: we all started clueless, and we all worked our way up, not just through personal experience, but from leaning on others who had already been through it. So even though I would say that the time on the show floor and hanging out after hours, getting to know everyone, playing games, and sharing our life stories with one another is the most exciting part of the IMB, the true benefit is becoming part of a family that can help you in ways you didn’t even know you needed it.
This leads me to today. We’ve been through more events, and worked tirelessly on our Kickstarter. We’ve learned to appreciate our newly expanded community, and have relied on their advice and support to bring it all together. And through it all, we’ve been working on other games whenever we can, and helped others work on their own games, getting and giving feedback. The cycle of creativeness nourishes itself – the more you create, and the more you’re surrounded by others who are creative, you’ll find it’s easier to keep it going. So get out there and play games, make games, and get involved as much as you can. It’s the fastest and most beautiful way to level up as a designer.
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