March 2022 update: more 'personal life', less 'game life'
Well, this has been a month to remember.
The last couple of months have been busy with a transition from the digital nomad lifestyle to a more traditional lifestyle in a new country.
Where is Chris now?
As of mid-March, we have arrived and begun settling into a three-bedroom apartment in Birmingham, England. Getting here from our previous place in Tbilisi, Georgia has taken a couple of months and multiple trips across the Atlantic Ocean.
Wait, what?
Yeah, that might require a bit of explanation. Back when we were tourists in England last year, we realized this might be the country to settle down in. We've slowly been getting tired of moving around every few months, packing up, and getting to know a new place. The digital nomad lifestyle is a wonderful one, but it doesn't last forever.
The process for getting residency in England was made simpler by my wife's grandfather, who was British. That qualified her for an ancestry visa, and essentially made the application process a formality... albeit a bureaucratic one, and one that took some time and money to undergo.
After filling out the applications online, we needed to return to our home countries to formally complete the applications, which put me in the US and Laura in Canada for a couple of weeks. Once we got our passports back, I flew to Canada to reunite with my wife and see her family.
We flew to Birmingham in early March, where during a couple of weeks in an Airbnb, we (by which I really mean Laura) looked at apartments, worked with a letting agency, and eventually signed a lease on an unfurnished. We moved in on March 18th, received our first pieces of furniture the same day, then started assembling and placing everything...
The next week or so has been all about settling in, outfitting our new place, ordering and assembling more furniture, and otherwise working with electricians and the landlord to fix some of the flat's pre-existing issues...
Say hello to my new office, by the way.
And then there was Airecon...
The second-largest convention in England, Airecon was amazing enough to deserve to its own post. Go read all about my Airecon experience here.
What games are you playtesting?
Playtesting and designing has taken kind of a backseat over the past month to getting real-world stuff set up, but there's been a fair bit...
A co-design codenamed 'City Business' - a deck-builder with some resource management, set collection, and a bit of bidding...
Parasite - a micro-social-deduction game with 9 cards and 9 pieces. Find the Parasites... or the Cures... or the Healthy people. Your goal depends on your role.
Downward Facing Panda - you're a panda doing yoga, and each turn you have one simple choice: lead a pose or follow a pose led by another player.
Build that Castle - a semi-co-op where everyone's building the same castle, but only some of you actually some of you want the castle to be completed...
What's happening behind the scenes?
I've seen some of the artwork for a couple of signed games, and while at Airecon I talked with the publishers of a couple of my other games. Things seem on track, but there's nothing to announce... yet.
What's the next big thing?
I'll be attending Fastaval in Hobro, Denmark in mid-April - that country's largest role-playing and board games conference. My game Transylvanian Lottery is a semi-finalist in their contest, and while attendance isn't required to participate, it's also a great chance to see a country I've never seen before. We may be settling down and retiring from the digital nomad lifestyle, but we'll still be traveling!