How I got involved in the design posse of Doomtown:Reloaded

I don’t know how many remember from my posting about it in the past, but I’ve been a huge Doomtown fan ever since I first started playing it back in 1998, in episode 5 of the first cycle, using common cards gifted to me from the FLGS clerk and a starter-home (literally. It was a starter box with the home card printed on the back).

My love for Doomtown is in fact what led me to start developing an OCTGN plugin to play it online, which was my first involvement with OCTGN around 3 years ago which eventually led me to develop my most popular creation plugin for it, Android: Netrunner.

Ye Ole Snakebite - Reloaded. This is one of the cards I helped tweak to be more universally useful in the new meta.
Ye ole Snakebite – Reloaded. This is one of the cards I helped tweak to be more universally useful in the new meta.

It was that renewed interest around that time which made me try to get the original Doomtown storyline in order. Because of this effort I was approached by Tim Meyer, and invited to help implement a Doomtown revival project working under the fan label of Harrowed Entertainment Group. We worked together for a while on story and design for that project even even though ultimately that effort didn’t pan out, it was not a bad experience and we worked well together. Tim went on to continue with more Doomtown-related projects while I went to continue coding more AEG, and later on FFG, games for OCTGN.

Then, around 2 years later, at around the summer of 2013 a certain Mark Wootton contacts me out of the blue with an offer I could never refuse:  Becoming part of the rebooting of Doomtown as an ECG!

It seems Mark had heard my name from Tim from our previous work together and told him I would be an asset, so I was asked to come on board voluntarily as one of the “old faithful” players :). I couldn’t believe it! Not only was one of the best card games ever coming back to life in the format everyone had been asking for, for years, but I was being asked to part of that effort. Christmas had come early!

I cannot be sure what exactly Mark saw in me, but after the first tumultuous months of early initial design planning, there was a definite split in the roles each volunteer would take, and myself along with Eric Jome were assigned to the Design team, to work alongside Mark in figuring out which mechanical elements of the original game to keep, which to tweak and which to drop altogether ((I won’t go into details on those aspects as this is a subject for a completely different post)).

And thus is comes to be that a year after that, not only is Doomtown: Reloaded finally announced like a wish-come-true, but beyond my wildest dreams, I’m sitting in the actual design team of my most favourite of games, actually crafting future cards and having a say in current and new mechanics!

Who woulda thunk it!?