Month: November 2023

  • Interview: BFF Games And Their Boardgames!

    Interview: BFF Games And Their Boardgames!

    Park Cooper here, of Wicker Man Studios, interviewing Andreas Müller of BFF Games. I first became aware of BFF Games because I jumped into the Kickstarter for their game Hidden Leaders, a fun game that brightened up months of the ongoing pandemic for my wife Barb (my co-partner Wicker Man Studios) and I. Hidden Leaders is a fantasy-themed boardgame where you draw and play cards to influence the realm of the kingdom to one of four outcomes, playing as one of six leaders (such as Lemron, Pavyr, Cyra, and Enned, just to name four that we’re about to mention during the course of this interview). Each of the six leaders (whose identities are hidden to the other players until the end of the game) want the kingdom’s war to come out in either of two possible ways—so there’s a certain amount of guessing (especially early on) about what your opponent even wants to happen… BFF Games also did a successful Kickstarter expansion, and are about to start a Kickstarter for a prequel game, titled Yield.

    Park Cooper: So let’s see. I watched a video about how y’all came to make Hidden Leaders– But I have questions.

    So– the world was the world that y’all role-played games in? Is that right?

    Andreas Müller: Sort of, yeah. So the game was invented based on the world we all did Larp in (live action role play) but once we got our artist on board (Satoshi Matsuura from Japan) we made changes to the world to take his art into account. You could say, we merged our world with his art.

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  • WMS November Newsletter 2023

    WMS November Newsletter 2023

    Hi there! Sorry not to post on the official first week of the month, but there were a couple of other things I wanted to do, as you’ll see.

    Let’s see: I want to point out some stuff that got posted here but which didn’t actually get put in a newsletter until now:

    –First up, I made a book trailer for our graphic novel Hungry Ghosts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKrJZh4VH9Q

    –I finished posting my old interview with writer Steven Brust– I’ll let you look at that yourself: https://wickermanstudios.com/blog/

    –I also did a fun interview with the creators of BITEMARK, a nailbiting manga that is also published by Lucha Comics, just like Wicker Man Studios’ HUNGRY GHOSTS: https://wickermanstudios.com/2023/10/11/interview-bitemark/

    –Also, comics legend Keith Giffen passed away. His daughter and son-in-law posted online asking for remembrances and interviews, so I hurried and got mine up. There’s no images, but I feel that that’s appropriately somber: https://wickermanstudios.com/2023/10/12/keith-giffen-2006-interview/

    –Finally, here’s footage of our very own Barb Lien-Cooper, being interviewed (and getting just a few words in edgewise during a panel) about her comic Gun Street Girl (see here: https://wickermanstudios.com/2015/04/15/gun-street-girl/ ) as part of Austin, Texas’ Staple! The Independent Media Expo! from 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XM-FwXBgyE

    Okay, now that that’s all done, here’s my feature presentation, as it were– every Halloween season, Barb and I try to watch as many scary/intense films and stuff as we can, which we call PARKTOBER. So here’s this year’s report!

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