Indie Game Alliance

Big news from behind the protection spells and drunken haze. We joined the Indie Game Alliance! This organization gives us more community and support than we could have on our own. We're excited to join their ranks and collaborate with other small studios across the globe.

IGA offers us many tools to get more games into the world. They do retail distribution, online promotion, and offer discounts on services ranging from manufacturing to legal advice. Their freelancer and publisher network lets game developers of different disciplines contract work or help publish ideas from tiny studios. Finally, IGA has a lot of convention and store connections, letting us have a presence beyond the Pacific Northwest.

Best of all, gaming fans can join for free. IGA's Minion program gives games, both prototype and retail versions, to volunteers in exchange for demoing the games at stores or conventions. These volunteers also earn points to get free games and have opportunities to attend gaming conventions for free as IGA officials. 

If you want to help out CPG, join IGA and offer to playtest and demo games. They'll hook you up. We'll hook you up too. Everyone will give you stuff if you go to a store or con and play Catalyst or Drink! Hooray!

VDay Roundup

Happy World Radio Day Cherry Picked Fans. We have a plethora of things happening this week.

Game night! Tomorrow, 2/14, CPG is hosting a board game night at our office (read: @CrustlessPunk's house). All manner of games will be welcomed and played. We are playtesting Drink!, so we'll provide some booze for that.

Catalyst Sale! Grab a copy of Catalyst and our Campaign Bundle for cheap. Our sale expands to Amazon, if you are addicted to Prime Shipping. Seattle's Card Kingdom is also doing a huge sale, with RPGs 40% off (seriously, locals: take advantage of that).

Polls are still open for the "Cascadia Militia" drop-in Catalyst sessions. Vote for when and where today.

If you missed it, check out our playthrough with Roll for Crit. It's a truly genuine Catalyst experience, complete with overly-complex plans, absurd characters, and brutal fights.

One of our art team members, Dinah Juergens, was featured in Make Space Zine. This zine focuses on womxn creatives across the Pacific Northwest. Look for Dinah's amazing paintings and interview in Issue #2.

Finally, Drink! is still being played on the CSz After Party Podcast after our blurry visit. Getting comedians intoxicated is one of the goals we had designing this game. Good to see it's living up to the potential.

Cascadia Militia

Hello to all the new fans from OrcaCon. We had a blast running Catalyst games and playtesting Drink! in the bar (using all 2,000 coasters we supplied ). It was excellent to meet so many awesome people and see some friends from events past. Special shout-out to Jen Page for insisting we make Catalyst characters over wine and spawning the hilarious meme of "Jerry the Floppy" (a prisoner the group murdered to escape jail and kept as a souvenir). The positive reception we got for both games warmed our hearts (compensating for the lack of heating in the CPG office). To that end, there are a couple of things we wanted to follow-up on.

First, we're going to start a weekly drop-in Catalyst night. This would be a GM leading their campaign with mostly the same group then rotating to a new storyteller after a few weeks. To start, we would be extremely happy to finish any of the Runaways of Rehabilitation campaigns we began at OrcaCon. Help us schedule this event by picking the day and place.

Second, many people asked about the leather-bound Catalyst book we had. Despite warning this process is probably more expensive than you would expect, there was still a great deal of interest. We will look into that cost and add it as an option to the Catalyst Purchasing page. If you all want swag, we are happy to provide.

Finally, we received feedback on some layout choices for our Catalyst character and reference sheets. We are looking into tweaking those based on some suggestions. If you want to make sure your voice is heard, please contact our Catalyst lead at alex@cherrypickedgames.com. Expect a player app patch with usability tweaks soon too. App feedback should go to kaylee@cherrypickedgames.com.

Thank you for a wonderful experience OrcaCon. The Cascadian tabletop community is outstanding and we are honored to be a part of it.