Characters, Roles, and the Cop

Mr. Kevin Maxon (our artist) has been working very hard these past few weeks to bring you our biggest artistic update yet, the completed art on each Role card and each non-backer Character card!

Along with the new art, we are announcing for the first time a brand new role which we have added to the game, the Cop! We originally planned only 7 roles, but some re-balancing of the game made the Cop a necessary addition. Here it is, in all its glory!

The cop is one of three roles (along with the P.I. and Swindler) who add one to the total of Moxie cards you play during the Morning and Night Phases. When we decided to add Savvy to the P.I. and Duplicity to the Swindler, we needed an 8th role to receive a bonus to Gumption. The Cop seemed like a natural fit, and we’re very happy with how the Cop plays and feels in The Big Fix.

Now, for the Character cards:

We still have 3 Female Character cards and 1 Male character card left to draw, which will all be based on backers from our Kickstarter campaign. You can look forward to seeing those character cards, along with the rest of the art which we have yet to release, in early September. Next, the Roles:

As you can see, we’ve continued with our theme of shaded figures for each of the Role cards. We want our players to be able to easily envision their Character card in the setting depicted on their Role card, which is very difficult when you’re dealing with 2 different genders. Given the challenge of creating Role cards for both genders, I’m extremely happy with Kevin’s artistic ability to blur gender lines in Film Noir.

Hope you enjoyed the update! We’ve been working hard to get the beta ready for our Kickstarter backers, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback on the art and gameplay of The Big Fix.

‘Till next time,

Alexi Pors

How’s The Big Fix? Print and Play news, and new Art!

Hi noir fans, its mid August and time for our first real update on our progress on The Big Fix since the end of our Kickstarter Campaign.

I’ll start off with the question which is probably on most of your minds, hows the progress on the Print and Play coming? We said on Kickstarter that our target date for the play at home version of the game would be August.

Short answer – Its going great! August 30th is still August, right?

Long answer –  We are extremely happy with the current state of the game. The Big Fix has improved by leaps and bounds since our last update and its shaping up to be an even better game than we would have imagined possible a couple months ago. The art is coming along swimmingly (as you can see later in this post) and we plan to have the rest of the art completed soon.

With that said, myself (Alexi), Aron, and Kevin have all had busier summers than we had envisioned when we launched the Kickstarter, and as a result it has proven harder than we would have liked it to get all three of us in the same room. The playtests have still been coming along and continue to provide us valuable feedback. It feels like each time we play the game we can walk away with another small improvement. That’s exactly what you want from a playtest, to be able to walk away with something to improve the game, but it also means that the game still has improvement to be made before it can be considered finalized.

The Big Fix as it currently stands is a really fun game! We promise. It’s not perfect just yet, but its getting close.

So here’s the plan – only to our backers on Kickstarter, we’ll be releasing the “beta” version of The Big Fix very soon as a print and play (as soon as we finish up the last piece of art, which should be in a couple of a weeks). We couldn’t be more exited to release the beta version of The Big Fix, we view it as a win-win for both The Big Fix and our Kickstarter backers. Not only do our backers get the digital version of the game we promised them in the time-frame we promised it to them, but we can take this opportunity to improve and fine-tune The Big Fix through the advice and feedback of our backers on Kickstarter. How cool is that? Only through crowdfunding is it possible to have your investors, customers, and beta-testers all be the same person.

We’ll be sending out a message on Kickstarter and making another blog post on this site when the beta print and play is ready. That message will have more details on how to give feedback, the current state of the game, and the next few steps before the game is ready to be print. Oh, and just in case you were worried about it, we’ll still be releasing the final game as a print and play and sending said final game out to our backers as promised.

Now for the fun part. New art! First up, the final three Agenda cards:

Early illustration for The Detective Agenda

Early illustration for The Schmoe Agenda

Early illustration for the Suspect Agenda

And now, for the first time ever as a group, the vice cards!

Courtesy of our wonderful artist, Kevin Maxon.

If you haven’t messaged me on Kickstarter or via email before (the email is alexi.pors@gmail.com for those of you who would like to get in touch with me), I respond to every single message I get in regards to The Big Fix. I’m generally pretty quick to respond, and take each question and criticism I receive very seriously. If you have any questions about the print and play beta news or anything else regarding The Big Fix, don’t hesitate to send me a message or even to comment on this blog post.

See you soon,

Alexi Pors

The End of Kickstarter, Contest Winners, and the Start of Phase II

We did it! Thanks to all 447 backers, our friends and family who helped us share our campaign’s page, and to the wonderful Kickstarter.com staff and community, we successfully funded the card game of our dreams. Now is our time to give back to everyone who helped us, so lets start off by announcing the winners of our naming contest and the $200 reward giveaway!

Due to the sheer volume of excellent submission, we couldn’t bring ourselves to pick just one name. Instead, we decided to pick two male and two female names. Here are the winners:

Male – Jack Spade (named by Tyler Herman) and Frank Slattery (named by John Eckerd)

Female – Melanie Redlane (named by Stephen Rinker) and Tess Falcone (named by Tyler Herman)

Congrats to the winners, and thank you to everyone who submitted names to the contest. Choosing from all the great names was no easy task, there’s still a chance we might end up stealing a first or last name from the submissions for potential future expansions of the game.

Now, for the winner of the $200 dollar giveaway. She liked our facebook page… the winner is Geena LaFlam! We’ve already contacted Geena and will be working with her soon on making her custom character card. We’ll be sure to post the character card on this blog once its completed.

So now that the Kickstarter campaign is over, what have we been up to?

The first few week since our campaign ended has been spent getting everything ready from the business side of things – submitting business licence applications, forming an LLC, creating a business account, setting up this website and a couple of other boring business related activities. Now that these have all been taken care of, we can get started on the fun stuff – getting the game ready to ship!

We still have plenty of art to make and some more balancing/testing to do before we have a completed game. We estimate this will take us 6-8 weeks which would put us right on track for our August print-and-play delivery date. With that said, our first and highest priority is to deliver the best game we can possibly create. Making high quality art and running play tests to ensure the game is fun and balanced don’t cost us extra money, only time, so if we take a little longer than anticipated to get the print-and-play ready, please understand that we are taking the extra time to make sure that you’ll be getting the best game possible! We’re very excited to get the game to our backers, but we’d rather not rush things if it means the game will suffer for it.

For those of you who came here from our Kickstarter update, that update will be the last one you’ll receive on Kickstarter until we’re ready to deliver the print-and-play games. We’ll be using this blog from now on to keep you guys updated on our progress and share any exciting news. We’d rather not be spamming people’s emails with updates via Kickstarter each time we complete a new drawing. Expect to see new cards as we complete them, game play details as they continue to emerge and finalize, and anything else we to do with The Big Fix right here on this blog!

Thanks for reading,

Alexi Pors