By Chris Lewis | June 6, 2021
A Mount Pearl start-up is trying to get people around the kitchen table again.
In a world where most things take place in front of a screen, Brad Hiscock and his company Convivial Games are hoping to see people sit back with a few cards in their hands again.
The members of the Convivial team see their games all the way through, starting from the ideas phase, right up to the playtesting stage. Hiscock described them as designing board games “from scratch.”
Although Convivial Games has not yet released a game onto the market, they plan to open things up with two games that feature very different styles of gameplay: Feuds & Favours, a strategic card game with a medieval theme, and Free Agents, a Eurogame akin to Settlers of Cataan but with a hockey twist.
“The strategy card game has you in direct opposition with other players, whereas (Free Agents) is more about you trying to reach a more personal goal before other people,” Hiscock explained. “Those are the more immediate differences between them aside from the fact that one has a board and one does not.”
Hiscock, originally from Conception Bay South, came up with the idea for Feuds & Favours about a decade ago. At the time, he said, he thought the game would be a good bit of fun for him and his family, but eventually saw an opportunity to make something bigger.
“I just played it a little bit in my friend circle before putting it aside,” said Hiscock. “As I started developing it and bringing other people around to play it, I realized it was something everyone could get into. Creative-wise, I feel like I’m always at a project. Always keeping myself busy.”
The process of bringing a game from idea to manufacturing to market is not easy.
Hiscock compared it to producing a t-shirt, explaining that while the final product may look simple, there were a lot of moving parts that went into the shirt’s creation that are not immediately obvious to the person wearing it.
Hiscock admitted he is not an artist but still required art in order for Feuds & Favours to be a visually appealing game. So, he has been outsourcing that work to artists, all of which played a role in the game’s finalization.
Now, in only a few short weeks, Feuds & Favours will be gearing up for the next milestone in its creation: crowdfunding.
That’s a popular method of finding the funds to complete a project, allowing would-be buyers to aid in the financial costs of getting a project like Feuds & Favours off the ground. In return, when said project is complete and available, those early investors will be provided with things dependent on how much they contribute. In some cases this may include having their name credited somewhere on the project, or having access to early versions of a game.
For this, Hiscock has turned to Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website and plans to launch that part of the project in the coming weeks.
As for the board games themselves, Hiscock said the community has only grown in the face of an increasingly technological world.
Although he said this may be chalked up to the extra time people have been spending indoors during the COVID-19 pandemic, board games have seen an exponential increase in popularity over the course of the last 10 years.
“You’re seeing games like Wingspan or even Settlers of Cataan – which started with crowdfunding – becoming household names now just as much as your Hasbro games would be, which is really nice to see,” Hiscock said. “I find that people are starting to bond over these games in a way that wasn’t really done before. I think board games have only expanded, and a lot more people are coming together over a table than they were even a decade, two decades ago.”
