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  PAX Aus 2022 is almost upon us, and it's going to be BIG. In fact, it's just seven days away now. As mentioned last month, Tin Star Games will be showing our next game "The Score" as part of the PAX Aus 2022 Indie Showcase! We can be found in the Indie Showcase area at booth TS18. Drop by for a chat to see the prototypes of The Score AND we'll be selling Relics and Partners if you need to grab copies! We'll have swag to giveaways, too, for every visitor; grab our card, and you'll get a free game on the back. Score! (see what we did there) We will be trying to run demos at the booth but if you want to guarantee you get to play The Score, swing by the PAX Rising Tabletop RPG area just past our booth. We will be running our showcase winner, "The Score", every day from 11 am to 11 pm—plenty of time to plot and execute your Score heist in this rapid-fire roleplaying experience. Although the game takes only 18 minutes, new sessions start every hour on the hour. Book your session at the RPG info desk for details. We hope to have other secret agents around the con running The Score everywhere they can, as fast as they can. Take a picture of your game and send it to us and we'll share it on the socials! (Also? We have a tikotk now. ) Want to hear more about The Score? Steve will be on a panel chatting about the Indie Showcase in the Fruitbat Theatre at 6:30 Saturday about what makes The Score a winner. And at noon on Sunday, Steve will be in the PAX Together space workshopping how YOU can make YOUR first RPG in one hour flat! That's right, an entire RPG, driven by you the audience! You can also read more about The Score and its design process in this wonderful interview we did with Player 2 Magazine. And in non-PAX news we have an equally exciting milestone: The Score Digital is now in open beta! That's right, we've built a version of The Score that plays on your computer, online, with up to five friends. Go to the itch.io page link, download the .exe (all players need a copy) and you'll be able to heist to your hearts content. It's still bare bones but with your help we will keep updating it and improving it! And we'll be running it every Friday night at our new FRIDAY NIGHT HEIST events on the Tin Star Discord. That's Friday nights from 8pm AEDT (Daylight Savings starts this weekend). Don't miss out on everything that's happening with Tin Star Games - subscribe to our blog or our mailing list! And of course - see you at PAX, gamers! Like Big Kev used to say: we're excited! 
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 We're In the Indie Showcase!Tin Star Games' "The Score" is a winner: we have been chosen as one of only four tabletop games to feature in the prestigious PAX Aus 2022 Indie Showcase! Come to PAX Aus (Melbourne) from October 7-9 to experience the quick-play heist adventure during the convention.
"The Score" is a rapid-fire card game where players roleplay a heist scenario and all its twists and turns. We're still looking for playtesters to beta test the print-and-play version of the game and take a post-game survey to let us know how you found your escapades. Want to get in on the action now? Sign up here, invite some friends and get heisting! Treasures At Last: It's been a long eight months since our failed Kickstarter but we are finally ready to produce the material we had planned. We can't make a beautiful hardcover book or the deluxe tarot box we wanted but we can give you the written rules. What was going to be one big book is now going to be four separate releases. Part 1 should be released sometime in the next two weeks, hopefully before the end of August. This first installment looks at making your own miraculous items and includes an all-new scenario. Subsequent books will contain the relics themselves! Treasures on Earth acts as an expansion on the tarot-based roleplaying game, Relics: A Game of Angels with a brand new fantastical campaign. Continue the plight of the angels in Relics: Treasures on Earth as they endure their battle against demons and all things evil. Patreon backers will have free access to ALL 4 PDFs of the books coming out over the next 6 months - good stuff! Speaking of Relics, we've just realized that the fire at the heart of the game - the tarot deck - has been available for download on our DriveThru page but NOT on our Itch page! An error for two years, finally fixed. Sorry about that. Before you go: Check out Steve's interview on the "Scheduled for Launch" podcast about Tin Star’s library and the thought processes that go into our games. You might not know just how deep the catalogue goes! Have you got a favourite podcast or reviewer that hasn't covered our games? Let us know and we'll send them free copies! As always, stay tuned for further updates next month and before - and keep on playing! It's Spotlight time!
This month we've been busy behind the scenes so while we're working away there, we'll be shining a spotlight on a Tinstar classic: It is Forbidden. This unconventional storygame suits 4-20 players, requires no GM and takes roughly 2 hours per session depending on player count. Splitting into teams, players develop culture within the world through adding to a list of laws, specifically about what is forbidden within the culture, rather than what is produced or valued. These laws help keep your deepest fears and your darkest desires at bay... At the end, two uniquely created cultures exist, and they serve as the basis for future storytelling. Nominated for Best Tabletop Game at the Freeplay Awards 2018, it will be available in August as part of the TTRPGS THAT TEACH bundle - along with forty other games. (It was also in an important bundle in July to raise funds for abortion rights and we couldn't be happier to be part of that.) Speaking of bundles, our heartwarming game of picnics, bike rides and lashings of ginger beer Five Go A-Roleplaying is in the HEARTWARMING RPG BUNDLE. 68 sweet, wholesome games for $20! More for the fans: You’ll be glad to hear that this month, the Tinstar patreons will receive some extra goodies. New to the High pledge backer level are SIX new micro games! Be sure to sign up to our Patreon to get every thing Tin Star Games makes! In other news: In preparation for the upcoming release of The Score, 'The World's Fastest Roleplaying Game', a title theme has been composed by Cameron Hays. That's right: we have an official The Score Theme! To get it into your ears we've put it up on Youtube with a dazzling showcase of the card art. Want to be part of the final beta playtesting phase for The Score? Sign up now! Till next month - hang tight to your ziplines, crew!  We’ve been hard at work this month as always, preparing a special offer in honour of Pride month, and making updates to our existing catalog!
Game Updates! A revised version of the core Relics rulebook will be put up on DriveThruRPG - owners of the game just need to log in to collect it from your library! This version is what fans have been asking for: the inclusion of proper digital bookmarks to make it much easier to navigate the book. The update will also go out for all those who purchased it through our itch store. Last month we announced the launch of The Score the fastest RPG in the world. This month we've released the print and play files for patreon backers at the Subscriber level or higher. This will allow you to start playing the beta right away - just print, sleeve and go! And don't forget you can now play The Score on Tabletop Simulator too! Happy Pride Month! In honour of Pride month, everything digital for Relics is on sale for a crazy $10! That's Relics (updated) and its first two supplements, a value of over $50, over 80% off! And if we reach our sales goal, everyone who grabbed the bundle gets a free scenario! Grab it now! Convention Season Convention season has begun and we'll be out on the road again - but staying safe too. Sometimes so safe we will only be online! On July 16/17 we will be playing The Score at Ettin Con online! Jump into their discord and we can run you through the fastest RPG ever made! Then a week later, on the 23rd and 24th of July, we will be in Canberra for Gamma Con running demos of The Score and selling all our games. Come say hi! This will be a dry-run for us appearing at PAX Aus in October and possibly other cons. We're still looking for GMs to join our PAX Aus team, so get in touch if you'd like free entry to the biggest con of the year. And uf you've got an event you'd like to run our games at, we will sponsor you and send you free stuff! Just ask! We'll also have copies of Relics on sale at GenCon August 4th to 7th thanks to the Indie Game Designers Network. They'll be 20% off for attendees so go gab a bargain! Those are also the last copies ever of the tarot deck - everywhere else is sold out. They really are a limited edition. Always More Next month we hope to finally bring you some more material for Relics that was supposed to be in the kickstarter from last year. We didn't make our goal but we are keen to bring you more relics, more scenarios and more stuff! If you like that, tell you friends: word of mouth is the best advertising of all This is it. This is the big one. This is it. This is the big one. This is the heist of a lifetime. This weekend we were thrilled to be a part of Role Call Sydney, the launch of a hopefully regular celebration of local rpg designers and demonstration of their craft. For us it was also the launch of our next big print RPG - big in impact that is, but very small in size! The Score is an 18 card 18 minute roleplaying game. With no GM and just a handful of cards the rules use a unique fast paced story prompt system to guide you through the heist of a lifetime - and out with the goods. The short playtime and approachable rules make it perfect for folks new to roleplaying, or as a filler any time you have a few minutes to spare. In a world of multi year campaigns and big chunky rulebooks, The Score is like nothing else. It is guaranteed to be the smallest, easiest and above all fastest rpg ever made. Get in, get great gaming and get out - in record time! We intend to bring The Score to crowdfunding in the first quarter of 2023. In the meantime we’ve put up our landing page and you can follow all the developments there and on our blog and our mailing list. Over the next nine months we’ll be revealing sneak peaks of the cards, run downs of the rules and more. In fact right now if you have tabletop simulator you can subscribe to the mod and start playing online today! But wait: there’s more. To celebrate the launch of this heist thrill ride, we’re giving you a steal: every product in our online store is 20% off for the next 18 days when you use promo code “thescore” when you check out! Nows the time to grab the missing parts in your collection! Finally, if you liked our March release of The Rent, you can now get a full printed copy now from The Game Crafter. Till next month, Steve
Storysynth was developed by Randy Lubin for his award-winning game For the Queen. Not unlike Partners, it uses randomly generated prompts, handed out in turn to characters to drive the story, as opposed to players driving their characters. So it was a perfect fit for Partners! For The Badge is also for two players and focuses on one night, on a stakeout. Both of you have bent the law a little. But maybe you have secrets you've never revealed. With a darker tone than the standard Partners game, this is perfect for an intense session of twenty to thirty minutes. Also works great solo, or with a group suggesting the ideas. By focusing on a single situation with dialogue as the key feature, we also encourage folks to record their sessions like radio plays, and create a new kind of intimate, actual play, that crosses the line between RPG and theatre. For the Badge is Pay What You Want on our itch site. This is our fourth month in a row of keeping our pledge to put out a new product every single month! We'll be back in May with another exciting Tin Star Games product! Next month we'll have an exciting new publication AND if you're in Sydney, watch for details for the first official preview of The Score, our next big RPG product! We'll be running it at a special event coming up at the end of next month!
Till next time, keep watch the (tin) stars! Howdy Star Gazers! We wanted to dive straight into this month and ask you a rather personal but reflective question. Do you think you could make it through a year below the poverty line? What will you have left at the end? Of couse, maybe you already have. Poverty touches far more of us than it would appear, even if we save up for a fancy game now and then. Maybe someone you love is struggling right now. These are the questions we ask our players to think about before, during, and after experiencing our newly released title The Rent.  What will you sacrifice?  The Rent is an 18 card game that was designed to be a cursory view in simulating life in poverty or near the poverty line. Month to month weighing up what is important to you, and what you may need to sacrifice to scrape by another week. The Rent is a remarkably simple single player experience that goes for roughly 15 minutes per session. Using just 18 cards (so perfect for print and play) it is also compact enough to slip into your pocket and be taken anywhere you wish. The Rent has had powerful effects on our playtesters, and we’ve been touched how they’ve expressed that to us. One of our interns played the game and said the following “My partner and I really liked rent. We were both quite touched by it. My brother is currently going through detox again, after doing rehab a good 9 months ago. He was in a week to week paycheck situation, which lapsed him back. The game really made me reflect on him and his situation and struggles." The Rent was originally designed for the Board Game Geek Solo competition and you can read all about its design and some of the early feedback we got on the BGG forums - and there are two actual plays online! Whilst juggling the exciting new content for Relics and Partners, our new upcoming over the top heist RPG, The Score, we are proud to announce the release of this short, yet impactful game. The Rent is currently available as a print and play on ich.io, where you can pay what you want. We will be bringing out a print on demand hard copy via The Game Crafter in the next quarter as well. On a lighter note: We thought we might sneak… (get it?) this exciting little card preview for our upcoming unique storytelling heist gameThe Score. We’ll tell you a lot more about it later in the year!  There are a lot of really exciting things happening within Tin Star Games, and a lot to share. You can keep up to date and maybe enjoy a game or two with us over on Discord.
Additionally, you can keep up to date with us on many various platforms via our Linktree. And remember that subscribers to our Patreon not only keep us making games, they get early glimpses and prototypes as well as everything we've ever made, free to access. Until next month. Stay safe, stay dry and play good games!  Do you enjoy world building games like Microscope or The Quiet Year? Then you're going to want to check out STATION, our new game for sale this month. You can grab it along with all our other games on our itch site, or you can become a patreon and get it plus dozens of other tin star games absolutely free. We're going to keep adding more and more to the patreon, and for the price of Station alone, you get it all!
We also have big news: Station has also been picked up to be part of the NOW PLAY THIS festival in the UK in April. The game will be running as an installation for the thousands of folks visiting the exhibition of play and shared activities, all themed around this year's topic of "Democracy". We'll have more on that as we get closer to the date. Also coming up is the Tiny Tome kickstarter! If you enjoyed our free game last Halloween, the ENnie Nominated Two Faces, you'll be able to get it and 49 other one page games in this incredible collection of indie treats! Follow the page now to be notified on launch! Coming up in March, we hope to have some more stuff for Relics coming your way! Till then, you keep playing games and we'll keep making them!  Happy New Year from Tin Star Games!As mentioned last year, this year we hope to bring you not just more big gaming releases but a steady ongoing stream of games every single month! Each will be available on our itch page or totally free to those of you backing our patreon! This month, we are extremely proud for our first release this year to be Five Women's Lives. This is a unique one session GM-less story game by the amazingly talented Steve Dempsey and Origins-Award Winning Paula Dempsey. The best part of being a publisher is when we get a chance to turn the spotlight onto games that haven't caught that light yet and very much deserve to be better known, and such a game is Five Women's Lives. Players take the roles of poor women living and working in the East End of London in 1888, and play out their search for their hopes and dreams. All proceeds made from the sale of this game go to support the East End Women's Museum and as such the price is set at Pay What You Want. That means that we have nothing available to purchase this month, so our Patreon supporters get a special treat: an exclusive one-session GM-less superhero RPG called After Action Report. You and your fellow superheroes have limped home from a battle and are sharing some grievances about the way it went down. But like most such discussions, it's about more than just the battle... High level backers get that and even more, as usual, as we continue to move all our back catalogue onto that tier. Back now to get access to almost everything we've ever published! But wait! There's more! We've also been honoured to be included in two exciting bundles on itch this month as well. See you next month, and keep playing games! Our one-player (or many) Western RPG The Tin Star is part of an incredible bundle to raise money for mental health charity called SOLO BUT NOT ALONE. We also were in this bundle last year and this year we hope to improve on the $25,000 raised then. It's ten dollars for 102 RPGs so you cannot lose! Like bundles? Like feels? You can pick up our terrifying game of childhood fears Afraid of the Dark in the BIG FEELS BUNDLE. 65 RPGs for just $25 and all proceeds go to the creators, which means folks like us - including us - can afford to make more games for you. We're trying to make sure that there's always a way to get our stuff at the lowest possible prices, so you get to spend less and play more! Till next month!  Hello stargazers! R. Chaucey Gummere again with the Tin Star Spotlight! Last month I left you off with some characters created for Partners, and this month I thought I would give you a breakdown of an episode with these characters. So, let’s just dive into the actual play of In-Between Cases.
The Crime Using a deck of cards, we drew our first card to figure out the profession and gender of our corpse. We drew an Ace of Spades, which meant our corpse was a fellow female Cop! The individual is also either successful or wealthy in their given field, which was determined by the suit the card belonged to, and in this case, a spade. Our next card determines the apparent form of death, we drew a 3 which means they were stabbed. The killer got up close and personal, was it an intimate killing, or a brutal one? The final step was to generate a couple words to incorporate to the scene; we got sentiment and beautiful. So, we decided this meant that the death appears on the intimate side. The next step of setting up the episode was determining four suspects. We drew 2, Jack, 6, and 7; respectively, these represented a lover, a fellow detective that was connected to our leads, a long-time friend to the victim, or the victim’s boss. This was already getting interesting! For their motives we drew in order of suspects the cards of conspiracy, desire, jealousy, and protection. Among all of these it appeared that the only one that looked negative on first inspection was our fellow detective. Now all that remained was to start running through the scenes, I decided to write up snippets of our little episode in short story format for you all to enjoy. In what follows you’ll note the randomly generated words via their bolded text and the drawn evidence by italics. Episode 1: The Star-Crossed Case Detective Zabaniyyaa Mahdavi arrives on scene, a detective from another precinct found dead in her own home. She was stabbed three times, once in the chest and twice to the abdomen. It looks like over dinner, the detective looked beautiful in her black dress, rose pedals strewn about the room. Lailah Valenzuela was brought onto the case as a non-biased third party to the investigation, as the precincts were under a lot of heat lately and couldn’t risk cops looking for justice for their own getting out of hand. Mahdavi didn’t like it, but she was good at following orders… Once the routine investigations got done with and forensic took over, the two hit the streets, deciding to start out by investigating the victim’s precinct and find out what they could about the lady. Lailah would not stop going on about her personal life as Mahdavi dug through the vic’s desk. She kept yammering on and on about how this was why she was a private detective and couldn’t imagine working in an office like this one, how glad she was to work alone. This struck a chord with Mahdavi as she came across a record; it had Benjamin Doon’s name on it, that was Mahdavi’s old partner, he had moved districts and apparently their victim was his partner or at least she used to be until she put in a request for a change in partners. For some reason it appears Detective Sheila Grace didn’t want to be working with Doon anymore. This didn’t bode well as old friends. Mahdavi must get his side of this and clear him from any suspicion… As the episode goes on, the job is starting to look like an inside job! Grace’s boss was implicated when a contact of Lailah’s informed them that he is spending more than he had at their casino. It appeared he had some dirty laundry, and their victim had been investigating him. Maybe he did it to silence her? But the death had seemed so personal, surely, she wouldn’t have met with her boss in that respect?... Halfway through the case and Lailah has the duo off track, she gets a call from a client from the agency. His son is a pledge at Berkley and has gotten himself into a little trouble during a hazing ceremony. Mahdavi is dragged off course to take care of this, but it is not all for not as the team runs into Professor Henderson, a lifelong friend of Ms. Grace whose alibi was: he was out of town. He had been dodging their calls, and now Mahdavi had a chance to find out why… …In the end they discovered a nasty tangled mess of a love affair, Detective Grace and her boyfriend were on the rocks, he had plenty of motive through jealousy, as it was found out she was getting back together with her ex, and longtime friend, Professor Henderson! And while there was plenty of reasons for her boss to kill her, the form of the murder and the fact that he had been trying to mend his ways cleared him. Detective Doon seemed like he was in the clear, their partnership had ended months ago and according to him he didn’t know why. Well, that was until his silk shirt was found covered in her blood in the trunk of his car. After a shootout and eventual capture of Doon, he confessed that he had fallen for Grace and after admitting his feelings she requested the change and did all she could to distance herself from him. He began stalking her, and after finding out about the affair she was having he couldn’t take it any longer. He killed her before Henderson arrived for their date, he was spooked and created an alibi that he was out of town. The partners had solved their first case together, but it was bitter one. Not only was it one of their own that was dead, but it was one of their own who had done it, a personal of friend of Mahdavi no less. To rub salt in the wound, their precinct decided that this was all the proof they needed that Lailah was necessary to keep them nonbiased in the public’s eye. It looks like this partnership was going to be permanent. Wrap Up! Oh boy! That was a lot of fun to play and write; hopefully in this little short story you got a taste of just how much fun and randomness can occur in a game of Partners. I would love to hear your own stories and episodes, so go ahead and jump on over to twitter @tinstargames1 or talk to me directly in the discord! Finally, to keep up to date with everything happening at Tin Star join the newsletter. Until next time! |
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