Happy Independence Day! Want Free Stuff?

- by Jeremiah For those of you who are reading from the US we don't need to tell you that today is the day we celebrate our independence as a country. We are grateful for a country where we have the freedom to write our thoughts, speak our minds, and worship our God! So what better way to celebrate than to eat delicious food, and watch flashy explosions in the sky!? Well blowing up stuff of your own would be fun, except the state of Ohio is one of the few states in America's heartland that doesn't allow its citizens to set off fireworks on their own.

Speaking of the heartland... You can celebrate our country's independence yet another way: by entering to win a free

copy of Jason Kotarski's "The Great Heartland Hauling Co." from Dice Hate Me Games. We couldn't be more excited about that—we really LOVE this game!! How?? I'm glad you asked!

It's simple: This month, as we celebrate our blogiversary, we'll be giving away as much stuff as we can get our hands on! And as our way of thanking our readers, we're giving them away to the folks who have subscribed to the blog.

So, get yourself entered by typing your email address into the box over on the right ------>

And then tell your friends and family about our contest and have them do the same; yes, this does lower your chances of winning yourself, but it makes our little marketing scheme a success and will enable us to keep doing cool stuff like this in the future! (Plus, if your mom wins, she'll probably just give it to you anyway...) If you're already subscribed, then you're already entered; thank you for supporting us during our first year!

Thanks as always for reading! If no one read, we wouldn't be able to do what we do, so we truly do appreciate it. And best of luck in our contest!

Don't forget you can find us all sorts of places on the interwebs: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube!!

Happy 4th of July!

TOG Visual—An Origins Interview With Jason Kotarski

We're very excited to bring you an interview with the designer of The Great Heartland Hauling Co., Jason Kotarski. Jeremiah had a chance to sit down with him at Origins Game Fair in Columbus this past weekend and he gave us a look at 2 new games he's developing, and chatted about his church plant in Flint, MI.

Jason gave us a look at a barber shop themed trick taking game he's working on, as well as a game called Fidelitas he's designing with Philip duBarry! Both are in an early developmental stage, but have the foundations of a couple of interesting and fun games.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHTfwQpYFc8]

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And you know where you can find us... Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!

A Look Back on Origins—Part 1

- by Jeremiah, with contributions from A.J. and Sepos. Last Friday we made our way down to Columbus and the Origins Game Fair, to cover the con as best we could for the blog—in just one day.

The con featured everything you'd expect from an event of this caliber: tons of seminars, officially supported tournaments and game play, an Unpub gathering, and of course, the exhibit hall featuring hundreds of vendors, publishers, and more.

We made our way through, and shot nearly two hours of video content, featuring interviews with Paul Peterson, Jason Tagmire, Kevin Sorbo, and many more!

The Games

As you would expect at a large-scale gaming convention there were a ton of great games, as far as the eye could see; we'll highlight some of the games we thought were of note over the next couple days.

The Duke—An Origins-released game, convention-goers were among the first to demo and purchase The Duke from Catalyst Game Labs. The Duke is a tile placement/tile moving, chess-like strategy game for 2 players. Each tile represents a different troop defending your Duke: Move a tile and flip it to show the different movement now available to that tile. The game plays fast but has massive replay value as it is tough to master, and different every time!

Council of Verona—Crash Games is currently Kickstarting this title as the flagship to their Pub Series of games. Council of Verona is a card-based strategy game with a very strong bluffing component. The Pub Series is a catalog of games that are compact enough to play anywhere, but still offer great depth in their gameplay. You can get in on the Kickstarter until July 3rd, and it's only $12 to get a copy delivered to your door!

Dice Hate Me lineup—Last year Dice Hate Me Games had a booth that pretty much consisted of one game: Carnival. This year they're celebrating a successful release of The Great Heartland Hauling Co., as well as VivaJava, and they're looking forward to the upcoming release of Compounded, VivaJava Dice, and Belle of the Ball. Chris Kirkman has been putting together a great lineup of titles using a stable of unknown/first-time designers to bring great and well-designed/developed games to market. We're excited to see what's coming from them next!

Dungeon Heroes—This exciting game brings you the full experience of a dungeon crawl in a quick-play style. This vs. game pits your heroes against a dungeon player who will try and thwart your efforts to collect hidden treasures. The game board is grid-based with miniature meeples as your characters, who move, attack, and defend based on character abilities. Most importantly, the game can be played in 15 to 30 minutes, giving a busy gamer an opportunity to participate in a fast-paced dungeon crawl. The game is completely expandable and will hopefully offer a multi-player aspect to the game as well as larger game boards. This game looks fantastic and has done great on Kickstarter. We'll be keeping an eye on its future.

We'll be sharing more about Origins over the next few days, not too mention all of our awesome video coverage! For more about Origins, and some good old fashioned social-media fun, look for TOG on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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Thanks for reading!

Heartland Hauling More Kickstarter News!

A few weeks ago Scott interviewed "The Great Heartland Hauling Co." designer Jason Kotarski, as he and game publisher Dice Hate Me Games kicked off their Kickstarter campaign to get the game into production. Since then they've hit their funding goal and they have also reached their first stretch goal! That means they've raised enough cash to include the Truck Stop INspansion. A feature of the game that will allow players to upgrade their rigs, give them special abilities, and hopefully an edge on other truckers while they're trucking cross country.

Last night we got a sneak peek at the next stretch goal for the project: truck meeples! Oh, and you can't have the orange one...it's mine.

Check out the Kickstarter campaign here.

And check out our interview with Jason here.