Welcome!

Hello.

'Age of Discovery' is a board game I first started back in 1995 - 1996.  The goal of the game is to play cards from your hand to discover new territory, send colonists to build up your empire, and deploy soldiers to defend your holdings and crush your enemies.  Recently I have redesigned the game and would like to get it published.

The Game:

For 2 - 6 players.  Estimated play time is 2 - 2 1/2 hours.

Each turn players draw to fill their hand, looking for cards that allow them to build up their colonies and attack their enemies. Cards come in five flavors:

• Action cards allow for the discovery of lands, gold mines, precious resources, etc., as well as meddling with the affairs of the other players.  this can range from sending diseases or pirates their way, or inciting the local native populations in their colonies to attack.
• Discovery cards represent important sites in the New World, such as gold mines, the locations of valuable trade goods like tobacco or beaver skins, or mighty native empires such as the Aztecs or Incas.  These sites produce the Wealth that allow players to win the game.
• Colonist cards increase the populations of your colonies.  Colonists provide labor which is required to make use of any gold mines, etc. the player has discovered, as well as the deployment of Military cards such as Dragoons or Artillery.
• Military cards provide for the defense of your colonies or the conquest of the colonies of your enemies.
• Battle cards allow the player to use their military forces to attack the other players.

All cards are multi-purposed; typically allowing a player to engage in an offensive or defensive action, depending on their circumstances and strategy of choice.  The idea is to avoid leaving a player with the feeling that there is nothing they can do in a given turn of play to advance their position. 

During the early rounds of the game, players are working to use Discovery cards to find valuable lands for colonies.  Then Colonists are deployed to build up the colonies to create Wealth that is used to win the game.  The labor from Colonists is then used to either further develop colonies or to create armies to steal colonies from other players and deal with the hostile native populations.  Strategy develops from making the trade-offs between having fewer colonies that are easier to defend or multiple colonies with a larger array of resources that will produce Wealth.  The game ends by playing through the deck one or more times depending on the number of players; at the end, the player with the largest combination of Wealth and Colonists is the winner.

What I need to do:

Currently I am satisfied with the new design and am happy with the game-play.  I have the following tasks on my plate:

• Trademark a name, and come up with a new one as a previous `Age of Discovery` was published in 2007
• Write the rules of the game and copyright them
• Establish a website to provide information about this and any other products I might try to publish
• Rework the cards so they can be printed in color and have some artwork

What I would like to do:

Depending on the final budget I have available to me, I can take steps to make the game extraordinary:

• Hire one or more artists.  Based on the number of man-hours available, I could start with just a nice box cover, and then migrate to artwork for the instruction manual and finally nice detailed images for each card.  As I work at a college that teaches computer animation and traditional art, I have access to plenty of reasonably-priced intern labor.
• Fund play-test sessions where I encourage people to come off the street and try the game.  the more people I can get to play the game before it sells, the more polished I can make the rules.  Again, working at a college gives me access to a large pool of cheap labor than I can enlist for this purpose.

I have already identified a nice print-on-demand website that could enable me to start selling copies of the game in only a couple of months, with the major delay coming from deciding what the final appearance of the cards should be.  Once this is determined people could start purchasing Age of Discovery in as little as six months.

With your support, I believe we can make this a possibility.

Thank You,

Christopher `Eggman` Theriault