Once upon a time (good stories usually start that way, right?), a little girl played board games with her dad. She watched him design new games. She went to game conventions with him. (Did you know there are such things?)
One day, without prompting from her parents, she announced, "I made a game."
It looked like this:
Her game designing daddy helped her refine her game. He helped her create new boards and packaging.
Then the game looked like this:
Then it looked like this:
Then, over a year (and maybe more like 2) later, her game designing dad showed her game to a company that had picked up some of his games for production.
They liked it. They agreed to develop it a bit more and then offer it for sale, as the girl said, "For really real."
Now, three years after the first little hand drawn tigers and handwritten rules, the game looks like this:
So exciting!
Here's where you come in: the game is being introduced on Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a crowd-funding site where people pre-order a project, providing the money for the project to happen. If the campaign is successful, you get your product once it's produced. If the campaign isn't successful, you don't lose any money.
We would really love to see her game succeed. My game designing husband tells me that most successful Kickstarters are funded within the first 24 hours. We've missed that window. Now we need your help to be the exception to that rule. This campaign is running through March 25, so there's still plenty of time to spread the word.
Could you please, pretty please, share this with your friends? A pledge of $35 - in the US - gets you your very own copy of Tiger Stripes. (OK, starting to feel like PBS or NPR here. Sorry, no tote bags currently available.)
Yeah, I know, $35 is kind of steep for a kids' game. But that price includes shipping. Game Salute is promising delivery by February 2015. I know that seems like a long time, but they hope it will be out sooner, they just don't want to make a delivery promise they can't keep. The nice thing about birthdays and Christmas is they roll around each year. Order now and have your birthday presents for 2015 already covered. (How organized of you!)
So that's the story. You can help it have a happy ending by sharing this post (or a link to the Kickstarter campaign) with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or whatever social media you prefer, and it would be really great if you could order a copy for your family's game stash. It would make a 12 year old girl I know really happy.
You can find my husband's game page here: Phantasio Games.
And his Facebook page here: Phantasio Games.
Don't forget, the Kickstarter for Tiger Stripes is here: www.kickstarter.com/projects/gamesalute/tiger-stripes
1. Write Good or Die. Nonfiction edited by Scott Nicholson. Free for Kindle. Covers all aspects of writing, from getting ideas to publishing, promoting, and pricing. Great advice and you can't beat the price.
2. My Man Jeeves. Fiction by P.G. Wodehouse. My Goodreads review: Great fun. This is the first Wodehouse I've read through. The short stories made it an easy bedtime read. Love the use of language and turns of phrase. I think I actually laughed out loud while reading this one.
(Yes, I love free books.)
3. Right Ho, Jeeves. Fiction by P.G. Wodehouse. More fun and games. Full length, instead of a story collection. (Did find myself feeling rather sorry for Bertie in this one, and I'm not sure that's the reaction the author was going for.)
4. Archetype. Fiction by M.D. Waters. My Goodreads review: Compelling story but not as clever as I would have liked. Rather too many scenes better suited to a romance novel for my taste. Still, it's provocative in good ways and hard to put down while you're immersed in the story. 
5. Goners. Nonfiction by Gordon Kerr. Quite the odd lineup. Monsters and princesses and Hollywood royalty and a few folks I'd never heard of. I suppose the recent death of Philip Seymour Hoffman might be one reason this book jumped out at me at the library.
6. The Complete Stories. Fiction by Flannery O'Connor. Not necessarily easy and not necessarily enjoyable but completely unforgettable. Whether you like them or not (and honestly I mostly did not), these stories will grab your mind and resonate there for longer than you might think possible. Flannery O'Connor is one of a kind.
, and that is the format I'd suggest because I had the paperback and it was heavy and unwieldy. Not great bedtime reading, for a variety of reasons. (I can't imagine what kind of dreams you might have after reading O'Connor!)
7. A Man Lay Dead. Fiction by Ngaio Marsh. First in the Inspector Alleyn series, but I had somehow missed this one. When I found I could check it out from our library to my Kindle, I snapped it up. The expected good fun, although I did miss Detective Inspector Fox and Agatha Troy.
