Rob Burman is the social media and online sales manager for Mantic Games, a publisher of board game and miniature games based in Nottingham. He is responsible for marketing a wide variety of tabletop games, from licensed properties such as Hellboy and The Walking Dead, to more niche hobby products, like Kings of War and Deadzone. He also runs Mantic’s Kickstarter projects. After starting as local newspaper reporter, he went on to work in a variety of specialist hobby industries, including videogames, Japanese culture, collectable toys and tabletop games.
Project BASH - the Scrapyard Robot Fighting game
So who wants some exposure?
This morning, I woke up to a bit of a, er, kerfuffle on Facebook. For anyone who didn’t see it, a UK games convention posted up a callout for a graphic designer to do some work for a local board games cafe, reworking their branding, menus, adverts and possibly even logo.
Then the second paragraph started with the dreaded words “Unfortunately, the budget is zero”.
Newbury & Hobbes: The Plot Thickens...
A while ago, we announced that we’re working on Newbury & Hobbes: The Curse of Menamhotep with talented author George Mann. For anyone who missed it, the game is based on George’s long-running series, The Newbury & Hobbes Investigations, but unlike a lot of the licensed games we’ve created in the past it will be a brand new chapter in the series! We’ve been working on the story with George, crafting something that works as a game in its own right but also ties into both his existing novels and the ones he’s planning for the future of the series. Working directly with an author on a game that’s set in their IP is a bit of a dream, and we’re having great fun with it!
An Introduction to Tabletop Game Design: Round 2!
Hey readers!
We’ve been busier than ever these past few months - to the point that we never had a chance to post up a retrospective of the Introduction to Tabletop Game Design courses that we ran from May to July! In short, they were a massive success. Each course sold out, and was an absolute pleasure to run. We had attendees from all over the UK, and even one who came all the way from France for all three - talk about dedication!
Needy Cat Newsletter Relaunch!
You may or may not have noticed that we have relaunched our Needy Cat Newsletter. We realised that we had SO MUCH STUFF to talk to you all about and we were struggling to get it all out through our social media channels. So, the obvious solution was to relaunch our newsletter and celebrate it with a giveaway!
Finding Games Episode 4: Jack Caesar, River Horse Games / Caesar Ink
As a game designer for River Horse and independently as Cæsar ink, Jack spends much of his time thinking about fun ways to randomly generate numbers, the life cycles of monsters, and why a wizard decided to make a talking sword in the first place.
He can be found designing cool new dungeons on twitch every Monday at 8.00 GMT.
Needy Cat’s Second Birthday Party!
Finding Games Episode 3: Nathan Dowdell, Modiphius
Nathan’s been in the industry for almost a decade, starting out on licensed Warhammer 40,000 games like Black Crusade and Only War before working with the Modiphius on the third edition of Mutant Chronicles. He’s been full-time with Modiphius for a while now as Lead Developer for their 2d20 System, where his work has included the award-winning Star Trek Adventures.