GAMA Recap

A snapshot at the Peppermill

I just returned from the GAMA Expo. That’s the Game Manufacturers of America’s annual trade show, where publishers pitch their wares to distributors and retailers, and designers pitch their ideas to publishers. This was the last of several years at the Peppermill in Reno.

When I got started in this business, we called this show GTS, the “GAMA Trade Show,” not to be confused with “GAMA,” the trade organization. But since 2005, “GTS” has been the name of a hobby distributor, so now we call the show GAMA again. I’m not even sure what the new GTS stands for, but it was formed when Talkin’ Sports merged with Gamus Distribution, so… “Gamus Talkin’ Sports?”

This all feels like recent news to me, because I’ve been going since 1997. Back then, GAMA was a floating show, hopping to a different city every year. By chance it happened to be in Reno the year that I launched Cheapass Games.

That week I wandered the floor without a booth, and showed my little white envelopes to every distributor in the hobby. And every last one of them scoffed at the notion of selling cheap games without any of their generic components. Little did they know.

2023 is my 30th year in this crazy business, and will mark the beginning of the fifth age of Cheapass Games. This time around I’m trying to figure out a way to make games even cheaper, without retailers or distributors, without printing anything at all. 

Getting the Brand Back Together

Let’s recap the Ages of Cheapass Games, shall we? I count five.

The Golden Age was the beginning, from 1996 to 2006. We operated Cheapass Games out of my basement, and later from a small office, and we made cheap little black-and-white games in paper envelopes. 

We could subdivide that era: FALLING was our first full-color card game in 1998, introducing the “James Ernest Games” imprint. We switched to boxes with The Great Brain Robbery in 2000. I’d say the heyday was around 2001: Witch Trial, Unexploded Cow, Girl Genius: The Works, US Patent Number One.

In 2007 we got tired of publishing, and shrunk our staff and our production volume. I got a job at Microsoft, managing game designs for Carbonated Games. This gave Cheapass some time to recover from publishing. This period was “The Dormant Age” and we released basically nothing between 2007 and 2011.

But we could not stay down forever. As the exigencies of the computer games industry wore me down, and the bad memories of game publishing began to fade, a return to tabletop publishing seemed better and better. Cheapass Games redesigned its business and its logo, and began offering free games online, starting with a new edition of Deadwood in 2011.

This would become The Kickstarter Era, with Unexploded Cow, the first of a dozen Kickstarter campaigns, launching in August of 2012. Cutting oddly against the grain of the Cheapass Brand, we upgraded some of our best titles with lavish production values, paid for by the miracle of crowdfunding.

Kickstarter was a good business model, up to a point, but we didn’t want to be game makers forever. Early in The Kickstarter Era, the crowned heads of Cheapass Games began looking for a “way out,” a chance to retire and sell the company, so that James might retreat to a comfortable corner of the world to design games without the hassles of production, marketing, and sales.

This chance at retirement came in 2019, with a sale to Greater Than Games. This was the start of what would come to be known as “The Silent Era,” another span when Cheapass Games seemed to disappear from the map. Try as they might, the folks at Greater Than Games could not recapture the spirit of Cheapass Games. Or apparently even update the front page.

Greater Than Games introduced just one new Cheapass product in those four years, a deluxe collection of Devil Bunny games that made literally no sense. Perhaps this product was Devil Bunny’s kind of irony: a deluxe version of a game that was never meant to be deluxe. Other than this, and a lot of good ideas that never reached proiduction, only two Cheapass Games remained in print: Kill Doctor Lucky, and Tak: A Beautiful Game. The rest languisued in the warehouse, often without even a link to buy.

During The Silent Era, James Ernest spun up a new design studio, Crab Fragment Labs. This was meant to be completely separate from Cheapass Games, to avoid any confusion about who was in charge.

But after four years out on its own, the prodigal games returned, with tales of pandemics, takeovers, and a general sense of not being valued. Crab Fragment began wrangling the free PDF catalog in the summer of 2022, and took over the mailing list later that year. Shortly the transition will be complete, and our URLs and trademarks will once again be our own.

And so we enter the Fifth Age of Cheapass Games, in which James Ernest will struggle once again to reinvent himself and his company in the shadow of this ever-changing landscape.

Playing “Tomb of the Ancients” at the hotel bar

Back to the Trade Show

So what was I doing at GAMA? Pitching games, new and old, to whoever would listen. I showed up without a plan, and left with several. In fact, things have been moving pretty fast over here, and I didn’t even know I was going to GAMA until about two weeks prior. 

By the time I checked, the Peppermill was booked solid: not just the GAMA room block, but everything in the hotel. I ended up staying at the Econo Lodge, a few minutes north. “Econo Lodge: A Distinction without a Difference.” It was genuinely scary, and not all that cheap, but at least there was some good food in the neighborhood.

I arrived on Tuesday afternoon, at a show that had started on Monday. I made a quick tour of the exhibit hall, set up a few meetings for Wednesday, and walked back to my hotel. Along the way home, I met the crew of Mission: Games from Kansas City, and joined them for dinner. That was a fun surprise, and they were good folks.

Wednesday was a flurry of scheduled and unscheduled meetings, including one where I think I sold Coat of Arms, which means that you might never get to see a version of this game at Crab Fragment Labs. I say “I think I sold,” because although there is no contract yet, the company rep sent my demo copy back to the home office. So, fingers crossed.

My dinner Wednesday was half of a sandwich that my friend Jake from Sacramento handed me in the bar, and half of a cake from Christopher Badell. Livin’ on the cheap here, folks.

Thursday was less of the same - I had done most of my business on Wednesday, though I did still have a couple of short meetings that amounted to setting up longer meetings after the show.

That night I had dinner at Bimini, the steakhouse at the Peppermill, with my friend Jeff Tidball. This place is amazing. The food is superb, and they bring you all kinds of surprise extras. A palate cleanser of sorbet and prosecco after the appetizer course; orzo with the steak; a king’s ransom in chocolates with the after-dinner coffee.

I felt some interest in a lot of the catalog (and some interest in the whole catalag, though I don’t think I want to do that again). Witch Trial, Littlebeard, Pairs, Button Men, Tomb of the Ancients, The Harvest, Veritas. One buyer said he’d have to change the theme of Shipwrights “because we already have an airship game” and I was reminded of how silly this business can be.

I will now spend a solid month following up on the conversations I started at GAMA, including a demo in Seattle tomorrow night. Sadly, this means I’m going to be a bit less productive at Crab Fragment, but the end result will (I hope) mean that some of these games will find a place in the world.

What’s Next?

What’s next, indeed? We are still finalizing our exit plan with Greater Than Games, after which this website will undergo a massive overhaul, repositioning Crab Fragment Labs as a section under Cheapass Games, not the other way around. We’ll consolidate our mailing lists, redirect our URLs, and all the other bookkeeping that goes with a transfer of leadership.

Meanwhile, I’m pretty excited to get back into game creation as soon as I can. Both The Harvest and Tomb of the Ancients got some interest at GAMA, but I didn’t hand my demo copies to anyone. So these will likely get dressed up for open beta at Crab Fragment over the summer. And of course I’m still excited to debut Bitin’ Off Hedz at KublaCon, at the end of May. 

Gigamic have a new and very familiar abstract game

Imitation, Flattery, and All That

So, at GAMA I learned that Gigamic have a new abstract game that’s really, really similar to one of mine. People say it reminds them of Tak. In fact, I tried to sell Tak to Gigamic when that game was new. I guess they went another way.

This isn’t the first time that another publisher has made a copy of one of my games, nor is it even the most accurate copy… despite appearances, this game actually has more in common with Veritas. It’s literally as if someone took all the rules to Tak and inverted them, which is kind of how I got to Tak from Veritas.

You start by placing one chip on top of any stack (if you play Veritas, this is called “Copy”) and then move that stack Mancala-style around the board, dropping one chip at a time off the bottom, on top of any stacks that are already there (if you play Veritas, this is called “Move”). You win with a straight line of four pieces, which is like a hundred other games.

I could say it was a shame that they didn’t come to me if they wanted a game like this, but in fact, I did have the chance to pitch them something during that time (and I did show them Tak, which they said was too complicated). I just coulldn’t think of anything good enough to pitch, even though the answer was clearly right in front of me.

My only revenge is how many times someone at their booth has to explain to a new player that this game isn’t Tak.