Alex at Plane Sailing Games

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In headlines it was my most profitable year to date in terms of sales, but also my most expensive year to date in terms of reprinting material for a couple of distributors that I’ve signed on with. The end result is that I’ve made a loss in 2025. Putting a positive spin on it, at least I won’t have any corporation tax to pay this year!

I ran a kickstarter for Tail-End Charlie during zinequest at the start of the year. It is a small solo game about the dangerous life of tail-gunners in WW2 Bomber Command. It was one of my worst performing kickstarters, and I’ve been wondering if there was a particular reason. It might have been that being part of zinequest diluted interest because people were looking across a larger selection of games. It might be that is an element of kickstarter fatigue, or it might be that it just didn’t float people’s boats! I’m still proud of the game though, and I see more demand for solo games from people, so I hope it will live long and prosper.

The full review can be read here:

I try to get to Dragonmeet in December each year, and this time it was a bit different as I went along as a stall holder for the first time! I joined forces with Matt (Ursidice) who was looking for a stall partner, and I travelled down on Friday to help set up and attend some muppetmeet sessions, then manned the stall all day on Saturday. It was mentally quite exhausting, but I did enjoy meeting people and chatting about games even if I didn’t get to see the rest of the convention at all.

There is a fuller write up about that here:

In January I attended ConTingency in Hunstanton for the first time. The con takes over a holiday camp for nearly a whole week (although I was only there on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). I played in games of Starfleet Adventures which was full of appropriate technobabble and a Code of Cthulhu playtest which was horrific fun with ghouls and hospitals in an evil alliance. I also ran my upcoming game Escape the Apocalypse a couple of times, and both adventures went very well. One experienced gamer said “I prefer the completely random nature of dice. But this system was incredibly well constructed and the card-based rules worked extremely well.” Which I took as high praise.

I haven’t had as much opportunity to play recently as I would like, but there have been some games that I’ve very much enjoyed - one has been around for a long time, the other two are being playtested at the moment.

I’m sure that Microscope won’t need much of an introduction. It is an amazing world-building game where you jump back and forward in time, and zoom in and out on details. I’ve known about it for years, but only recently had the opportunity to play it. We played online, which does have some disadvantages. We used a ‘miro board’ for our shared environment for the cards.

This is a game about the masquerade ball in Romeo and Juliet, powered by a game of chess. No, really! It isn’t just a chess board as all the black and white pieces represent characters from the play - with Romeo and Juliet as the kings.

Characters are limited in their movement and interaction because they can only make legitimate chess moves. There are some additional rules that prevent some pieces moving too early, and getting the pawns out quickly to free up space, but apart from that it is genuine chess moves to create the story. When one piece takes another there is one of a set of small minigames which are played, depending upon whether it is dancing, flirting, disputing, fisticuffs or something else which results in the exit of the taken piece!

I’ve not written this up yet, but it is a lovely RPG about ‘the beautiful game’ — football (or soccer in the US). It isn’t just a match simulator although it does have an exciting mechanism for simulating a game. It also deals with the off-pitch lives of the players too.

Each of the players has an archetype and a position that they play on the field. My character (Tony Connor) is a Controversial Striker. Other players include the Young Upstart Midfielder, and the Dependable Backup Midfielder, along with the Past His Prime Wide Back. These affect the skills and talents they can call upon during the game, and the archetypes in particular give you milestones and relationships which support the narrative for that particular archetype.

As part of the playtest we are finding a few little things that we would like Colin to tweak a bit, but the base of the game is really solid, and although I wouldn’t say I’m a huge football fan I can recognise the archetypes and I’d say I’m learning about the game as we go along!

We initially agreed to a three week playtest, but we’ve decided to take it a bit further because we are all enjoying our characters so much!

The next game I’m going to be bringing out is Escape the Apocalypse, a game of post-apocalyptic survival with a wide range of choices in terms of how horrific you want it to be and what kind of apocalypse you fancy.

I’ve been playtesting this for a year now, and I’ve got the game into a really solid place. It was originally just going to be a reskin of my successful Long Road Home, but as I starting reading and watching more media in the genre I realised that resource scarcity was a much more significant part of these stories, and that there were opportunities to put more ‘meat’ behind the threats.

After my playtests at Metatopia and ConTingency I felt that there were a couple of things which I wanted to tweak - putting more mechanics behind the genre tropes chosen at the start of the game and bringing the Arrival mechanics more in line with what I had in A Cool and Lonely Courage. Just need to do some more playtests now to check that my changes work as expected!

The other thing that I’m working on is internal art to support the game - I’m going for a sketchy pen and pencil feel for it.

I’m particularly keen to find some playtesters who would be prepared to run a game and report back to me how it went, as ‘blind’ playtests can really reveal gaps in the writing. If you are interested, please let me know! There is a playingcards dot io zip file that allows you to play online with friends.

If you think this sounds interesting I’d love it if you could follow the kickstarter page here so that you will be notified when it launches. Also if you could share information about it too please! www.kickstarter.com/projects/plane-sailing-games/escape-to-utopia

I’m continuing to interview as many small independent RPG publishers as I can, and there are four recent ones which I commend to you - all of them are working on some really interesting things!

He is working on a niche cinema game, Il Fantasma del Giallo. It is inspired by Italian Giallo films and is a magical realist thriller/horror game.

Tanya talks about The Thunder Perfect Mind, an occult action thriller where you play undead revenants.

Lola is working on The Wanderers Bookshop, a solo journalling bookshop simulator.

Read a little bit about For Small Creatures Such As We and Death Road Services.

Thanks for reading!