Tell me that you'll wait for me

Good evening all you wonderful Patrons, or as I think of you, my friends. I'm writing this as the latest Nor'easter is pounding the city with some serious rain and wind, but it does make for some fantastic sleeping weather!

It's a busy week this week, leading up to the week of Essen/Spiel next week. So let's get to it:

Thursday night at 1900 EDT is going to be one heck of an entertaining play-through of Intrigue. The only way that this could ever be streamed is as a GtR stream, which is exactly what it's going to be. All Patrons at the $5+ level will get access to the stream in a separate post. Man, it's going to be brutal. Think Diplomacy, but worse, heh, in about an hour to 90 mins.

Friday night at 1900 EDT is this year's 'big' release from Spielworxx, Throne of Allegoria. This one has some nice mechanisms in it, even if the medieval theme and artwork leaves me feeling underwhelmed. 

Then Sunday at Noon EDT, we're tackling the monster that is High Frontier 4, which just arrived at HCHQ. It's a pre-production copy that not even Ion Game Design has seen. It came direct from the factory, airshipped to HCHQ so that we can stream it ahead of Essen (and the KS that starts next Thursday). I even have to bring it with me to Spiel so that they can use it as the demo copy there. While we don't have the PTZ camera yet and we're playing only the Core Rules, we do have one of the folks from the team helping develop it and a legit resident expert playing on-stream with us (it'll be 3p, Me, Geoff, and Joe...same fellas from Cataclysm). The plan is to stream it again ahead of the release with the PTZ camera! :)

And in a handful of hours, we should finally have the behemoth of the Essen Preview podcast w/guest host Richard Ham (Rahdo) for y'all. It's going to be released as a 2-part podcast because he and I can't seem to shut up. :)

• Top 20 releases at Spiel from each of us
• Top 10 demo-only at Spiel from each of us
• Top 10 Expansions from each of us
• Plus all the games we talk about on the front-end of the show. There's enough there to satisfy most everyone, I hope.

Then after the High Frontier live-stream, I'll be gone for the next 8 days for Spiel in Essen, Germany. The plan is to pick up between 100-200 games and see what is worth covering over the next year. In addition to that, I'll be recording audio and uploading it for Joel to edit and James to release to y'all while I'm gone on the podcast feed. 

If you're attending Spiel, be sure to come by the Board & Dice booth (2-C112). The awesome folks there were kind enough to offer us space and to host HC this year. I'll be at the booth on Friday and Saturday, 3pm-6pm, and Sunday, the last two hours of the show. We'll have all the HC merch with us and you can purchase it all even if you visit the booth when we're not there! 

Also, the biggest meetup of the year takes place on Friday night, 7pm at Fritzpatrick's. Lots of friends, designers, publishers, developers, and wonderful people come and spend the evening eating and drinking. I certainly hope to see all of y'all that are making the trip to Essen there! It's one of the absolute highlights of my year and hopefully y'all's as well!

I'm still catching up on correspondence and messages on Slack, but all of that will be caught up prior to my leaving Monday afternoon.

Thank you all for the amazing support and excitement for the content that's been coming out. I've been really happy with it and think we've found the right balance of things. I'd love to hear what y'all think on that note.

Have a wonderful rest of your week and I really hope to see y'all on the live-streams the rest of this week and to see y'all at Spiel next week!

Your friend,

Edward