Hey everyone! Wow! What a great day! I really appreciate you all coming along with us!
I do not write a ton of updates anymore, but Brooke extended the opportunity for me to write about the Ahoy project. Here are some of my thoughts.
Nick is the lead designer of the expansion. He started noodling on some ideas for alternate factions and it came together surprisingly quickly for him. He brought to us the pitch for doing an Ahoy expansion and we started to look into the project’s feasibility.
I met Nick around January of 2018. He was interviewing to be a Graphic Designer. I am not a huge fan of skill tests on interviews, but we offered to compensate the final few candidates for an hour of their time to design a card for the then new Vast: The Mysterious Manor. He also by coincidence submitted a card about an Island Revolt. Was it fate that brought us together?
He started in February that year and quickly started applying himself to graphic design. Nick was our seventh employee. He made the move into development, showing an appetite for the subject as well as a firm understanding of design from years of playing CCGs.
Nick has been designing for us for a few years now. He helped out a great deal with Oath and Arcs card design. In Root he got many of the pieces I struggled with to work, as well as designing the Landmarks. He is now a Senior Developer! Congratulations, Nick!
I would also like to thank our Marketing Coordinator, Brooke, who is super awesome, for pulling all of this project together.
Ahoy was presented to me at PAX Unplugged by Greg Loring-Albright a few years ago. I was interested due to the asymmetry but as usual, was skeptical. We were pretty busy with our projects and we already had Root covering a game about asymmetric warfare. I gave it a chance though. I asked Cole and Nick to look at Ahoy. They tried it out and brought it back to me recommending that we should publish. At the time, we were experimenting with direct to retail releases. We went that route for this new title and put Nick in charge of the project. It turned out pretty well but without the magical push of crowdfunding we found we would run into people at conventions that were surprised by Ahoy’s existence.
This expansion gave us an opportunity to bring Ahoy to a broader audience and I am delighted by the response. Our studio operates on a more creative-focused studio model. We create projects in house and bring them to the market internally, as opposed to signing games from freelance designers. I believe neither approach is superior, I just know what works for us. These rare moments of direct funding allow us the most freedom possible to continue working in this model.
One of the dangers of the model though is that it has been a challenge to scale, that we could only bring a project out every 15 months or so. Cole, Nick, and I all have things we want to work on and this project is one of our first tests to see if we can make the model work. It has been interesting and we will continue to track our progress as we grow.
That growth would not be possible without your help and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Coming up tomorrow, Kyle will be hosting a stream to do some art for Ahoy. I will also be on the stream fielding questions and rambling on about whatever I feel like. Find those details below!
Thank you for reading this for a bit. I will see you all at the finish line!
Patrick Leder
Leder Games
Celebratory Shark Cake!!!
Art Stream with Kyle Ferrin!
It's a bit of a Leder crowdfunding tradition to have a live stream with Kyle, doing what he does so well! Kyle will be joined by Patrick Leder, so bring your questions and watch some of Kyle's creative process.
