Right now, Brawl. I loved Falling, but no one got it. At least not right away. Brawl is a real-time game with a lot of similarities to Falling, but this time I made sure that people would get it on the first play. And it worked remarkably well in demos at GenCon.
Brawl is a perfect pickup game, just the right mix of speed and strategy, and it also appeals to my incredibly greedy side because it's infinitely expandable.
Which game was the most difficult to design?
I think I agonized for a long time over some games I really shouldn't have, and some games which are incredibly good took almost no time at all. For the sake of balance, I'd say I did the most rewarding working and re-working on Parts Unknown, a fairly complex economic game we released last year. But I probably put more work into Get Out, because the board was so complex and because it was, for about nine months, the only board game I was working on. First games always take longer.
Which game was easiest?
Although I spent months tweaking and refining it, the core mechanic of Brawl actually happened fairly quickly. I had a rough draft hammered out on the way home from DragonCon, which I played one evening with my Wednesday nighters. It was clunky, but we fixed it that night and created more or less the same Brawl that you see now. The main refinements after that night have been deck recipes, card names, rules text, and layout. Plus new card type designs, which you won't see until the expansions come out.
What can we expect from Cheapass Games in the next six months?
September: Brawl. October: Escape from Elba. November: Button Men, Brom. This is a 12-character expansion containing art from Brom's Dark Age set, a really nice collection of art that almost no one has seen. Also in November, we are releasing a limited edition full-color Lord of the Fries, complete with six menus, two new ingredients, and (hopefully) packaged in a take-out box. In December, I may be releasing a new Friedey's card game called Change, a simple little change-making game packaged like the Big Cheese. After that, I don't know, but probably a Brawl set of Button Men in January.
How about the next five years?
I expect to continue making about six Cheapass-style games every year, plus developing more full-color games like Falling and Brawl under the "James Ernest" label. I have a couple of good licensing opportunities for next year, including a game license from Phil Foglio, and I'm designing new games for a few other companies, including Wizards and others.
I also expect to see Brawl become the standard deck-fighting format for the next five years, with several major companies buying into the franchise. That's what it was designed to be, and frankly, it's cool enough to really work. And Button Men will hopefully become the standard format for new product promotions, which would be equally cool.
And now I must return to work on a project I can't tell you about.
