And we have a News section

So the site has been up for about a week and a half without any kind of News section. So, I've decided to port my blog over to be the news section. This has the benefit of being rather full already, but not all the news is perfectly tied to Nathan Hansen Games per se. Going forward I'll likely be a little more cognizant of this being the professional face of Nathan Hansen Games. That will likely mean less hypothetical designs / thought experiments, and a more focused "this is what I'm working on" / pending release approach. But, this is all fairly new so, my conventions aren't really established.

Things I should have talked about as news articles already

The site launched on August 9th with 6 Print and Play games available for sale. These were all rereleases of game designs of mine that have since gone out of print.

• Battle of the Dale
• A fairly simple deterministic war game with a light fantasy theme.
• This one was renamed from Battle of 4 Armies because I integrated the expansion into it and the original title no longer makes sense as there are now 5 armies.
• Why?!
• A children's game about chickens crossing a road. Reminiscent of the video game Frogger.
• Pew Pew!
• What I would call a shoot 'em up. The screen cards represent depth and continuously scroll bringing enemies and missiles closer. Sort of a take on games like Zaxxon or Galaga, although perhaps a bit simplified.
• Dawgs of War
• A two to eight player airplane combat game that takes place in side view rather than overhead.
• Movement uses both the edges and vertices of the hexes so planes can move in 12 directions. Angle of movement affects speed, and gravity comes into play as speed gets too low.
• Your plane to break up if you push it too hard after taking damage.
• Swytch
• An abstract game where you have some control of how your units move, by rotating stacks of hexagonal counters to change the three directions they can move. This is a last player standing game in which you have to eliminate all opposing player pieces.
• Symmetric
• An abstract game about out positioning your opponent. There is no token elimination, but you when you move your tokens, the movement may affect the position of other tokens on the board, yours or your opponents.

Surrounded! With a Shotgun

On August 15th, the first new release of Nathan Hansen Games came out, which as you probably noticed from the heading above, was Surrounded! With a Shotgun.

Surrounded is a 1 to 4 player game in which players work together to hold of hordes of hoodlums trying to get into the building you are in. The game is supposed to evoke the feeling of a 1970's action movie.