Every year in celebration of the spooky time of the year and in the spirit of handing out candy, we hand out a free PDF game or expansion. This year we present THE HORSE FILES. This was a backer-exclusive supplement for Partners during the kickstarter in 2021, but now we're giving it out to the world! Take on the role of horse detectives and plumb deep into the world of horse vice and villainy. This is the world's only horse detective RPG, but did you know we also publish the world's only Cyberpunk Horse RPG? It's true!

We're definitely not the only people making heist games, though. If you love heists, you might want to check out this game One Last Score crowdfunding now. It's not a story game like The Score but it is by Aussie designers and the artwork is amazing.  And speaking of The Score, we also now have versions of the rules designed specifically for vision accessibility and electronic reading devices, thanks to the amazing people at Vision Australia. Are there any other games in our line that we could make more accessible to disabled folks? Please let us know and we will do what we can!

We are also now in partnership with some software designers that may lead to a fully web-based version of The Score you can play anywhere in the world! Stay tuned for more on that! And as we said last month, everyone who backed the kickstarter should have their copy of The Score now. If you haven't, please reach out. We are also now in the process of getting copies into stores in Australia and around the world. If you see one in the wild, snap a pic and send it to us! We also want to get The Score at every convention we can in 2024. We're building our calendar right now so if you have an event or store in your city or town and would like us there - or would just like to run our games (any of them!) get in touch! We will send you all sorts of support goodies and cover expenses! The "Tin Starmy" of convention and demo volunteers is growing faster and faster and we'd love you to join! You can find out more on our Discord, where we also release sneak peaks of games, run playtests and give you the inside scoop of day to day design. 

And if you want to grab any of our games you don't yet own, please order within the next two weeks, so we can guarantee delivery by Christmas!

And speaking of Halloween, this Tuesday night is Tabletop Tuesday, our usual playtesting night at Game Plus in Sydney (always the last Tuesday of the month). Since it falls on Halloween we're turning it into a two hour Halloween game jam in partnership with the podcast/vidcast From Scratch 2 Shelf (featuring Tin Star president Steve Dee). You'll have two hours to make a game based on a revealed theme. You don't need to bring anything - you'll be split into teams, handed all the craft and cardboard you need, and you'll take home your finished game in its own box! Plus we'll have celebrity judges and prizes! So please come out. Whatever stage of your game design journey you are at, a jam is a great way to learn and have fun at the same time, and meet your fellow designers!

If you are looking to take your journey further, we also offer consulting services here at Tin Star Games. Steve Dee has been working in the industry for 25 years and has won several awards for his design work, as well as having his games published widely. Invest in a review of your work and get a plan to go forward - contact us today. 

Relics: A Game of Angels started out as just a game about angels. But during design we kept coming back to "what do angels do all day?". Watching angelic media, we found that most movies and stories are about finding objects, so quickly the game became about objects. And as we say in the rulebook, stories with mystical objects tend to fall into three categories. First, the item is hidden somewhere and must be found, like in the films Raiders of the Lost Ark or Constantine. Second, the item is already in use, causing trouble with its magical powers, sometimes without the knowledge or free will of those caught in its spell, like the hand in the new movie Talk To Me. Finally, the item is held in pride of place by those who value it, and it must be liberated from that protection. It must be stolen by relic hunters or tomb raiders or indeed, a heist crew. 

Last month we were pleased to announce the release of the first in a three part series of Relics expansions: Hunt. It contained 22 new items that needed to be tracked down. This month we continue part two of the series with Heist: 22 items, ranging from the small but useful to the earth-shatteringly dangerous, but all contained within defense systems, behind walls, guardians, traps and sensors. Unlock the power of Blackbeard's Chalice and David's Lyre. Steal the Holy Grails, plural, and wear the Crown of the King of Kings. Dare to enter the Last House By the Lake. All this and more are waiting, plus brand new fiction from Steve Dee and Jake Nelson AND brand new art from Dan Smith and Dean Maynard. You can find it on our itch page and on Drive Thru. 

Not played Relics yet? You're in luck if you're heading to PAX AUS this October - our team of GMs will be running Relics scenarios across the whole weekend in the RPG area. Hope to see you there!

All our packages of The Score have now gone out to backers, and in most cases should have reached you now. If you haven't got yours by October, please get in touch and we will remedy it as soon as possible! In the Kickstarter we estimated delivery to be September and we've fulfilled that promise despite several hiccups. We're proud to keep our promises to our backers, because you believed in us!

​Hello Tin Star Gamers, and welcome to another update. Here’s what we’ve been plotting and scheming for you this month.

There’s been a murder in the city, and it’s going to take both of you and a touch of magic to solve it. Our next supplement for Partners, The Urban Fantasy File, is out now on DriveThru and Itch. Wander down the mean moonlit streets where vampires are real, werewolves are real, and some crimes are just elf defence.

In fact, the whole world is full of magic – magical relics that many covet and most would kill to acquire. The Relics core rules featured 44 of these powerful items, but now it’s time to see what else is out there. So if you’re curious about the powers, provenance, and potential for mischief of such diverse objects as The Sideways Suit, The Clever Friend, or The Best Cat, we have you covered. The Collection Part 1 focuses on the Hunt session model, where the relics are lost to time and a race is on to track them down. Available on DriveThru and Itch as always!

Another two books of relics, completing the Collection – Part 2: Heist and Part 3: Haunt – are in final editing and will be available later in the year. We anticipate  Heist coming out in September and Haunt in November. This will increase the total number of published relics to well over a hundred!

The printers have done their work and the physical copies of the Score are due to arrive in Australia on August 31. The final look and feel are excellent, and we can’t wait to get them into your hands and onto the table. Expect a lovely surprise in the mail in the next month!

It’s a busy time of year for gaming-related events. Here is where Steve and our trusty band of volunteers will be popping up:

• September 23: We’ll be at the Board Game BBQ Sydney Event showing off our games and playtesting new ones. (Tickets via Eventbrite)
• September 28: We'll be at the Powerhouse Museum with our short yet beautifully sweet games. (Full program here)
• October 6-8: We'll have games of Relics in the RPG Area at running at PAX Aus and hopefully copies of The Score for sale (or for pick up).
• October 21-22: We'll be running events at the SXSW Sydney Games Festival but we can't talk about exactly what yet!

​That’s all for now. Keep on gaming, and remember: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

Right now the printers are churning out the first print run of The Score and while they are busy, we've been busy too. I mean, we did just run a kickstarter but we're always busy. It's our thing. It's been nearly two years since the last supplement for Partners, our unique two player mystery solving story generating game, but we've been working on it in the background. There were seven expansions unlocked in the original kickstarter but we wanted to do so much more. Six more, in fact! This new book Partners: The Lost Files contains the ideas we didn't unlock in the kickstarter and so much more, including some weird stuff...

Your mystery solving games will now be able to go deep into the brutal and dark work of psychotic serial killers. Then you can head out to the Old West, where you and your Pardner will see if civilizing influences temper the Wild Card's savage nature. Then you can team up a Paladin and a Rogue and delve into a classic D&D style dungeons crawl, all under Partners rules! Not weird enough? Pursue your nemesis across time and space to a showdown in Los Angeles, c1988, or team up with the dark reflection of your superpowered nature and punch evil right in the face in the Superhero File. Finally, when it comes to finding your Partner, what could be better than a Romantic Comedy file? Is there a bigger mystery than love?

All of these bring really unique twists and turns to the Partners system while keeping its unique element: the story isn't generated by the players but by the deck of cards driving the action. Play to find out! Partners has just recently sold out of its first printing but don't worry: new copies are on their way from the printer right now and should arrive in August. You can pre-order a print copy and we'll fulfill it as soon as we have them on dry land!
​

Did you miss the Kickstarter for our latest game The Score? Want to get your hands on the fastest roleplaying game ever made, where you can get in and out with the suitcase in under 18 minutes, in the heist of a lifetime? You can preorder copies from Guildmaster, and we should have them in the country by August. 

We've already delivered on several of the items for kickstarter backers. You can get the Print and Play version of the game on itch and you can play it on a virtual tabletop on Roll20. Those both include ALL the bonus cards we unlocked and the extra rules modes! All that's left for us to do is stick all of that into a cardboard box and then get those boxes into your hands, and that will be happening very soon!

We have sad news: we won't have a booth at PAX AUS this year, but we hopefully still will have folks running The Score everywhere they can. The reason we won't be at PAX is we are working with the folks at the new SXSW events happening in Sydney just after PAX finishes. We'd love to see you there!

We're also excited to announce that our president Steve Dee is now on a new podcast/videocast called From Scratch to Shelf. Right now you'll find this content weekly on our Youtube channel and surely coming to other platforms any day now. 

We're also not done with new releases this year. Our first game Relics is finally getting more expansions! The first of them should be dropping in September. These are the books we hoped to kickstart into print but alas it was not to be. Instead you'll get beautiful digital files instead packed with more angelic items and devilish enemies.

As always there's also likely to be more weird and wonderful digital games on the way as well. If you want to see some of those nobody else has seen and get all our digital games ever made, you can become a patreon backer. We don't update often but everything we make ends up there for high level pledgers! You can also subscribe to this blog or our mailing list and get all the news as soon as it drops!

This is the season to give thanks, at least in America. In Australia it's simply a time the days get hotter and it's still too many days until Christmas hols. But if you are doing your Christmas shopping early, then good news: this weekend (the 25th to the 28th) itch.io is having Creator Days - that means they stop charging their share for the games they host, so all proceeds go to the publishers (that's us). That means it's a great time to complete your collection of our games, especially those that raise money for charities. And as part of the deal, we've included Relics, our deluxe roleplaying game of angels and demons, in a yuletide themed bundle, where you can get 70 games for the price of Relics alone. 

And speaking of Relics, we know it's been a long time between supplements for this game line. And we'd like to thank you for keeping the faith. We do indeed have eight supplements planned to come out and we hope to have the very first out in the next few days! It's another look at relics and how they work in the setting plus an exciting new adventure by Nicholas Moll. 

And speaking of things to come, we've set up our pre-launch page for The Score Kickstarter! We hope to launch February 15th and of course we'll have all the updates on this on this blog, the mailing list, the fanpage, on twitter, facebook, Instagram, TikTok and most likely some of the exciting new platforms coming up. Want the easy option? Simply check out the pre-launch page and click the Notify Me button, and you'll get an email the moment we go live. Synchronize watches - The Score is coming soon!

Our last instalment was just before PAX. If you're following us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok, you know PAX was amazing for us. There was barely a minute we weren't demoing The Score on every table we could find. We ran something like 400 games! And we also had a lot of fun making a complete roleplaying game in an hour on a panel. We also got to catch up with the local design scene and all the incredibly talented local designers. PAX has now started to turn the spotlight onto the local tabletop industry and audiences seem hungry to know more. For example, Gameology is looking to promote local talent, so go here and nominate our games!

​The very same weekend was Essen Spiel, the world's biggest and most important game convention that happens every year in the German city of Essen. We weren't there but Goliath who distributes our collaborative card game There's Been A Murder was and they had a big booth to show off just how much fun murder can be! Until recently it's only been available in the US but we now know it is being exported (and translated) into Europe and Asia. Hopefully Australian stores will have it soon too. With all of this, we got word that sales of There's Been A Murder have topped 100 000 copies! Incredible again! We are so flattered!

We had hoped to get more Relics materials out this month but unfortunately it's still being developed (our head of layout has had to move house multiple times, among other things). But every Halloween we bring you a totally free one-page RPG horror extravaganza, like our ENnie-nominated gothic masterwork Two Faces. This year we have something a little different. In 1985, Freddy Mercury and Kenny Everett snuck Princess Diana into a gay London nightclub disguised as a man. This game retells that night with a horror twist. This is Princess Die. 

Can you survive until morning? Only the dice know...good luck and see you in November! (evil laugh)

Over the last few months, we've been very privileged to be assisting some of the newest Australian designers in producing their first game. Ryo Goh, Alice Maignan and Chloe Stager are all Grade Six students at the German International School and for their Social Entrepreneurship class this year, they have been working to produce a board game. The class focusses on creating a pitch for a commercial product that will produce both funding and awareness for a social issue. In this case the product is an exciting board game of koala movement, and the issue is the great risk of extinction that koalas continue to face. 

We went out to the school and helped the girls understand the basic steps of game design: making a paper prototype, testing ideas, iterating on design and playtesting, and then on to making a shinier version. Coming in to help there were the amazing folks at Launch Tabletop, who are about to launch their site for making prototypes, smaller print runs and personal game design projects. Their helpful staff took the girls start-up money and produced some dazzling prototypes. 

Next week, the girls will be presenting their work not just to the class but to an Impact Partnership Manager from the World Wildlife Fund. There's hope that the game will be perhaps of interest to them or sold to other school students, with all the profits going to help koala research. And we may even be able to offer the game to Tin Star Games fans. 

We'll have more photos next Thursday, so stay tuned!

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!

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!