Project Tidball

So, Rob Donoghue and I had an interesting chat around the beginning of the year about what we wanted to see Evil Hat do now that we’re past our previous Big Thing, the Dresden Files RPG. We got into a few bits & details there, but the big takeaway from that conversation was: let’s see if we can get Evil Hat to “grow up”, to act and achieve more like a “real company”. For me, that translated pretty easily into two basic goals: drive the company to do more than one thing at a time, and explore opportunities to do things we haven’t done before. A big, leading possibility in that latter goal was to get into something other than RPG publication. As a part of both goals, I formed a wishlist of folks I wanted to work with in 2011 and onward, and started asking folks on it what they’d be interested in doing together with Evil Hat.

Enter Jeff Tidball. Jeff is a writer, a game designer, and a card-and-board-games veteran bringing plenty of industry experience under his belt that we simply don’t have, over at the Hat. I’ve had a chance to contribute little bits to some books that Jeff & Will have published through GamePlayWright, as well as a few (too short) conversations at conventions over the past few years of Evil Hat build-up. Jeff’s background with card and board games makes him a natural fit for our new ambitions, and was the first person I thought of when our minds pointed in that direction.

And so Jeff went on the wishlist, got an email, and — good news — he was just as excited about working with us as we with him.

And now, the ball is rolling. Jeff will be designing and producing at least one, possibly several, card games with us over the course of the next year-or-so. Along the way I’ll be encouraging Jeff to blog about his side of things over at GamePlayWright, while I’ll be blogging here (as always) about the business lessons I learn as I do my best to drink up Jeff’s precious life force vast experience.

Early on, the first thing is simply one of scale. Card games aren’t the sort of thing one can easily do in a POD footing (though options are starting to show up). That means even a small card game like the one we’ll be starting out with has a five-digit dollar figure as its budget — for a company that started on maybe $10,000 total, any time that fifth digit shows up, it really spins my head.

But, importantly, if we want Evil Hat to grow — and we do — we’ve got to do the things that scare us a little. Business is risk. We’ll do it our way, like we have with everything: start smaller, find our feet, then build on those lessons, failures, and successes to do the next, bigger thing. And while we do that, we’ll do it publicly, transparently. With Jeff riding shotgun on this part of things, I’m confident we’ll meet our goals.

Hang on to your Hat.