Apologies if you are seeing this twice - I made a mistake setting the last one up which meant it didn't reach half of the people I was sending it to. I don't know which half though! 

The first big bit of news is that I'm using Shopify to power an online shop on my website. Any of my games can now be ordered online directly from me. You can find the shop here:

https://planesailinggames.com/pages/shop/

You can use the special newsletter discount code

Autumn2025

to get 10% off your next order before 17th December 2025. 

The Lord of the Rings provides the inspiration for this game. Imagine the hobbits on their way home after the quest was over—reminiscing about the adventures they had along the way, and wondering whether the ideals they loved would be waiting for them at their homecoming. Merry and Pippin became heroes, Sam married his Rosie, but poor Frodo found that he had saved the Shire… but not for himself.

Together you choose a genre, and create the realm and the great enemy of your quest, along with allies and threats. Then as you are returning home you use flashbacks to remember the story of your quest. The highs, the lows, triumphs and tragedies.

Ordinary playing cards are used to prompt the emotional content of scenes. You can defeat dragons, tyrants, undead or supernatural foes; across faerie, faded, or other realms. 

Last Spring I published my first solo game, Tail-End Charlie. A solo game about the tail-gunners of Bomber Command. Contrast finding love off-duty with the danger of operations

Statistically Bomber Command was the most dangerous branch of service in WW2. Over 44% of the volunteers didn’t survive a tour of duty. Will you?

This is a solo journalling game. A deck of cards is used to provide journalling prompts for the operations and off-duty time. The probability of you surviving 10 significant operations in the game is roughly the same as the tail-gunners had of surviving a tour of duty.

You keep a debrief diary of the after-action report on each operation, and a personal diary of the highpoints of life and love on and around the base. During the game this builds a unique story of your character’s wartime experiences.

Metatopia is an annual game designers and playtesters convention run by Double Exposure in Morristown, New Jersey, USA. I fly over there each year because it is a great opportunity to get high quality playtest input on the games i'm working on, as well as trying out fascinating new games that other designers are putting together. I was playtesting Road to Romance and Escape to Utopia. I wrote up a report of my experience on other peoples games here:https://planesailinggames.com/review/2025-11-12-metatopia-2025/

For the first time I'm going to be attending Dragonmeet not as a visitor but as a stall holder. If you are in the UK and/or plan to visit Dragonmeet at the ExCeL centre in London, it would be great to see you at the stand I'm sharing with a chap who runs Ursidice. It is at K8 on the floorplan, as per this little map.

I'm planning to run a kickstarter for Escape the Apocalypse next March. You can choose your apocalypse (zombie plague, alien invasion, robot uprising, nuclear holocaust, environmental catastrophe, or global pandemic). You can choose whether you want to play a Young Adult, Heroic, Grim, or Horror genre. And then off you go. A couple of decks of cards and the prompt tables are all provided to allow you to follow your beacon to Utopia... and find out what is waiting for you there!

A pre-launch page is available now, click on it if post-apocalyptic survival is a game you would like to try out!

Thank you reading, I hope you find it helpful to see what I'm doing!

Alex