Decided it was a good time for an update.

Mini Dungeon - Working hard on this concept. I like the portability of it and the replayability. I've had multiple playtests from multiple people, including running the game multiple times over days myself. This game is coming along nicely and has 'a good flow' (player's comment) about it. It's moving from Alpha to Beta staging. I'm starting to think about layout, colors, and ways to present the game to make it easier to understand. 
When originally thought of this game, I was inspired by donjon and the black and white maps that were procedurally generated. I liked the black and white theme and made my maps similar to those. As the game progressed I was introducing colored cubes to represent things such as treasure chests, monsters, and doors. This allowed me to make things easier to count with victory points, but as another player pointed out, 'using small cubes directly on top of the board makes it hard to see any paths.' More thought is needed for this issue.

Escape the Dungeon - I finished writing the rules, uploading documents, and am starting to receive parts from my suppliers. I hope to have a playtest of the game, in it's "Final Form", before I run some Blind Playtests at GameStorm Con. I know I'm probably going to have a few minor changes to implement before Gamestorm but I don't see any major changes before that.

Pocket Games - This is an area that has started to capture my attention. Games that can be created and played by people with only 18 cards. I've come up with a few ideas, themes, that I want to work on, (Space, Kittens, and Social Deduction) but haven't yet made them coherent enough to start actually creating a prototype. More thoughts on this later, I hope.

MicRxobe - This was a failure, I admit, but I've gotten some good ideas about what to do. The game itself is ready to be purchased and played. The area I was...lacking, was a following. I told myself that at 1,000 Twitter followers I would put MicRxobe up on Kickstarter and I did. What I failed to take into account was advertising among those followers beforehand, reviews from other gamers, and a lack of polish on my page. I thought that $200 was a pretty low number, that I was just begging people to throw down $9 for a game in the US. Well, not really. I had my failure, I've looked at what needs to happen and I'm going to make it happen. Just not now. The game deserves a launch and entrance into the world, but I've got other projects that need my attention. I'll be turning back to it later.

I'll leave anyone reading this, with this. If you want to be a playtester of Escape the Dungeon, head on over to the Contact page and let me know. The more people play the game, the more feedback I get, and the better I can try and make it.
Chris

Well...
Well uhh...
Shit.

Clearly I didn't make my goal with MicRxobe. I thought the game itself was ready, and that I was ready with the community to introduce it to. I set a smaller goal of $200 because I wanted to introduce it slowly.

At the current moment, I'm not even introducing it. I made the decision to cancel the Kickstarter with a heavy heart but knowing that I would try to cull together information about the failure and relaunch at some point.

I've revamped the page here on Alerion Games to give more details and better pictures of the game itself. In fact I've revamped most of the website. There haven't been many changes that can be noticed from the front but on the backside of things...

I'm unable to put more time into MicRxobe at the moment as I'm gearing up for Gamestorm 2018 and planning on running Blind Playtests of another of my games called Escape the Dungeon. This is a game I haven't had the chance to talk about here but I talked about it quite often when I was with the Four Fine Fellows here in Eugene. 

I've put 4 years into ETD and am much more comfortable to let it into hands, not my own, than any of my other games. I've also noticed a trend of mine to like Dungeon crawler games. I'm not sure if this is a flaw or not but fundamentally Escape the Dungeon and Mini Dungeon are two completely different beasts that happened to come from the same mind.

I may choose to spin Mini Dungeon off into space as a better theme, but for now I'm working with what I have.

If you'd like to be a Blind Playtester for Escape the Dungeon, head over to Contact, and let me know. I'd like as many opinions as possible.