Gamers and movie fans, you should check out my Movie Pitching Party game called Buy The Rights. I’ve been working on it since about April with my wife and my two best friends, and it’s up on Kickstarter!

In each round of Buy The Rights, one player is the Producer, and the other players are the Screenwriters. Screenwriters create their own movies by playing one card from each deck out of their hand. They then pitch their ideas to the Producer (getting as involved as they want with their pitches) and the Producer has a budget of $20 Million to spend on his/her favorites.

There are 400 cards, which equals to 100 Million possible combinations, and it’s a lot of fun! You can get the game for $25 with free shipping in the US, and we’re already over 30% funded in just a day and a half. Come check it out!

Back Buy The Rights on Kickstarter

Hey folks! Once again it’s been forever since I’ve posted anything here, and once again it’s shameless self-promotion that brings me back. This time it’s for something I’m ridiculously excited about though; I created a board game!

Well, it doesn’t have a board, but it’s a party game called Buy The Rights and I think it’s pretty cool. It’s a game where players create their own movies based on four decks of cards, trying to come up with the best/funniest movie ideas and pitching them to the Producer, who then ‘buys the rights’ to the movie(s) they like best.

I’ve been working on it for quite a while now, and it’s almost done. In just a few weeks it will launch as my very first Kickstarter project. I’m working with AdMagic, the company that prints Cards Against Humanity and a bunch of other awesome games, on manufacturing, and I already hired the awesome Jason Smith to provide art for the cards. The game looks great even in prototype form, and will look even better if when it gets funded!

Buy the Rights is a true party game. It’s meant to get people laughing and isn’t meant to have a ton of rules, and because of that, it’s my type of game. Each deck has 100 cards which makes for 100 million possible combinations, so the game will have a lot of replay value. Here are a couple of my favorite movies that have been made in playtesting sessions so far:

Players are encouraged to really pitch their ideas to the producer, who changes each round. The Producer has a budget of $20 Million to spend on their favorite movies and can divide it up however they want, and the player with the most money at the end of the game wins.

The base game will be available for a $25 pledge, and that gets you 400 cards in a 11×7 box with a molded plastic insert, custom printed Buy the Rights play money, and instructions. Then we’ll have all sorts of awesome reward tiers with rewards designed by a lot of awesome artists and friends of the site. Art prints, button packs and stickers, and an exclusive t-shirt will all be available at various pledge levels.

If you’d like to stay up to date or just find out some more information, head over to the Buy the Rights website!

I like podcasts, websites, and books about video games just about as much as playing them. A movie about video games? I’m so there. A trailer for the forthcoming documentary Video Games: The Movie was just released.

It got its start as a Kickstarter campaign. The project raised over $100,000 a year ago. This is the first feature for writer-director Jeremy Snead who has a few short films to his credit.

The film is executed produced by actor Zach Braff and game creator Cliff Bleszinski (Unreal, Games of War). Former Microsoft exec J Allard, the guy who lead Xbox’s creation, is a co-producer. The doc has interviews with a wide variety of video game celebs like Chris Hardwick, Clare Grant, Wil Wheaton, and Alison Haislip.

Video Games: The Movie will be available on demand and in theaters on July 15. You can preorder on VHX.

Today I’m dusting off the site (busy, busy, busy) and starting a new series of posts: Kickstarter Roundups. There are so many awesome projects on Kickstarter at any given time and it can be hard to weed through them all and find ones you want to back. Hopefully this new series will help point out some that have been on the radar of the Top Hat Sasquatch team and in return, you can let us know in the comments about cool projects you’ve backed.

The first entry in this series is all about games, tabletop games to be precise. Kickstarter is the perfect place to figure out if your game will have an audience and then fund production if it does. I’m sure there are a lot of awful games on Kickstarter, but there are a lot of awesome ones. I have had a few ideas lately for games I’d like to develop, and just browsing Kickstarter has been an enormous help. In the process, I have backed some cool projects that I’m really excited about.
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I follow a ton of comic artists on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and via RSS. It’s not hyperbole to say that none of them entertains me more than Joey Ellis. For my money, Joey’s tremendous art and hilarious comic sense are without equal.

Money is what I gladly gave to his Leaky Timbers project on Kickstarter. Leaky Timbers is Joey’s hardcover comic book starring a trio of monster brothers led by Wolfie. They live in an apartment complex named Leaky Timbers.
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