Introducing Night Crew Games: Let's Go

Games saved my life. They gave me a community. They taught me. 

It’s time to pass that on.

We want to make games that shake up the industry; that offer you new experiences and new designs; that leave you with something when you put them away, that give you something you remember when you get up from the table. And we want to do it by making our tabletop games both deeper and more accessible.

Now, I know that sounds like a lot, and you’re right, maybe this is all hubris. We’re not a big team, we’ll never deliver things as polished as Hasbro or at scale like Asmodee. We’re not mass market like Cards Against Humanity and we don’t have the mighty licensing team of Games Workshop. What we are is experienced, tenacious, and willing to move in ways no one else is moving.

Let’s talk about the state of the industry.

Tabletop Moving Away from Tabletop

In the last few years I've watched this move amongst industry giants to push players towards digital and squeeze out our friendly local game stores.

This is not ok.

Games have always been a place for people who didn’t have a place. A common experience we can share, no matter who we are. If we give up, that we give up the heart of tabletop.

Now, I get it, you move people to digital and the profit margins are better, you control the whole chain from production to retail, and it just makes sense on a corporate level. But you know what, it doesn’t always make sense on a human level. It doesn’t make sense on a long term level.

We do need digital versions of our games to make them accessible, to let people play together all over the globe. Digital is great, but not when it’s used to push out all the mom and pop shops that have supported this industry for forty years.

Our games are about community, about playing together. We’re going to support local stores, we’re going to provide them profit, heck, if we remotely can, we plan to send staff on tour to go to local game stores and teach people how to play. Because even if most of our community never plays our games at a game store, it’s important that we support them!

Game shops are our meeting houses and our guild halls. They’re the nervous system that ties us together. They’re what turns us from fans into a community.

Fear and Stagnation

Somewhere along the line a lot of the biggest industry players became afraid to innovate. Year after year we get the same products with minor evolutions. And hey, this even makes sense...depending on your perspective.

Once you made tabletop games because you couldn’t not. There was no fame, glory…or money…in it. But then it became big business. Multibillion dollar business.

Suddenly, everyone was afraid to kill their golden goose. People stopped making products that would compete with their tentpole games. RPG companies started focusing on a single RPG line. Card game companies stopped releasing new games and instead started releasing ever more of whatever their most popular product was. Wargame companies tried to homogenize their offerings. Games that would be immediately recognizable to players from 20 years ago account for something like 60% of tabletop game sales today.

That’s not Night Crew.

No matter how big we get we’ll never stop trying new things, we’ll never stop competing with ourselves. We even have a plan for how to do it (which I might talk about someday in a much longer post…). We are a design driven company. Without new design, what’s the point?

And that’s where the opportunity comes from for us. We have nothing to risk by trying something bold and new. Even if we fail, it might push some of the giants to branch out and try new things again: which is a win for all of us.

IP as Cash Ins

There’s some amazing use of licensed IP in the tabletop space, but more often than not you have companies just cashing in on large brands and large brands “creating an additional revenue stream” by putting out a tabletop game for fans and well-meaning (but sometimes clueless) relatives to pick up.

THIS ISN’T A PROBLEM WITH IP. It’s a problem with how we use it.

There’s a lot of intellectual property out there we love. It should be used well. It should be used for its secret superpower: to overcome people’s reluctance to try something new. If someone doesn’t have to process both new mechanics and new story/world, if they have a lot of love for IP they’re about to dive into, that will help get them over the hump of trying out new mechanics.

So that’s how we’re going to kickstart this company: With some awesome IP. From our years of working in the games industry we actually know the people who have the rights to some of our favorite properties out there. We’re going to grab the ones we can and use them to introduce whole new ways to play.

Because it’s time to shake things up...

Semper ad meliora punks,

JP