Hi everyone.
I reached a point in game creation some years ago now where I still felt that tabletop roleplaying games are fantastic – I love them, I play them a lot – but they are a large time investment!
Sometimes you just want something that’s going to take you somewhere between five minutes and half an hour, just something that’s going to be a bit of fun. Something slightly more predictable and require less thought from me as a games master, but I can still play it with friends, and that’s where Champion of Earth came from.
Champion of Earth is a game where you are one of the last heroes of our world, trying to defend the planet from aliens who invaded. But the aliens also know that they usually lose, so they have raised the undead and brought forth creatures from the shadows.
This was always supposed to be a bit of a joke, and I was able to deliver something which I think is a fun light game that takes about 20 to 30 minutes to play. Since then, it has proven popular enough that I made a couple of expansions for it as well, and there’s been a couple more perpetually in the works!
Champion of Earth is an opportunity to let go and have a bit of fun, while even the more comedic universes that I create need a lot of thought, time and effort into running games in them. With champion of Earth, I created the concept, and then just started doing funny things, and that was a creatively liberating experience.
If you’re someone who’s struggling – maybe you’re a writer and you’re struggling with a big novel, for example – try doing a short story that’s just something totally different to what you would normally do!
I found it very creatively fulfilling to change things, and I found it significantly improved the larger, more serious projects that I was doing.
So I’ve kept doing it! Evil Overlord, Era: Survival – Colony, The Internship, Adapt and beyond, I have kept making card games. Not all of them have seen the light of day yet, but most of them are actually ready to go, and I just haven’t put them on Kickstarter yet.
So, in summary, watch this space for more card games from me, and don’t be afraid to experiment a bit with something slowly outside of your normal creativity!
– Ed
