Podcast Archives - Board Game Design Lab · Gabe Barrett

Listen to this BEFORE you start an indie publishing company | John de Campos

·1 hr 23 min·5 clips

John says a 15-year-old at PAX Unplugged can click with Token Terrors in two turns.

How does a new company stand out? Gabe frames indie publishing as business, creative work, and a fight for attention in crowded campaigns and against big companies. John brings the publisher side. The conversation keeps coming back to one plain question: what helps a small game company meet people, earn trust, and keep going? Conventions get a hard look. PAX becomes the example for why showing up in person can matter even when the return-on-time math looks fuzzy. The useful part is the luck you can only get by being there. A lunch line, a food truck wait, or a quick handshake can turn into an artist contact, a designer introduction, or a message later on. Black Mold gives that idea a real shape. John talks about working with Nathan on Black Mold Solitude, a small solo roll-and-write built into the cassette-style J card interface. That meeting mattered because they were at the same table. The point is not that every convention pays off cleanly. It is that some chances only appear when people can bump into each other. Gabe adds another piece. He is there as a publisher, but he is also meeting designers who have never heard of Board Game Design Lab. That grows the community. One short conversation can move someone toward the podcast, other designers, or a group they would have missed. The episode does not pretend the path is tidy. John says Terrible Games did not end up hanging its hat on one thing, even though that was the original hope. The catalog keeps changing. He names an original RPG, a horror survival game, a card game, and a semi-abstract game as part of that path. That looseness feels like the lesson. Indie publishing here is planning, guessing, meeting people, and changing course when the table tells you to.

As heard by us

A grounded look at indie publishing, with its pressure, tradeoffs, and human side.

This episode treats indie publishing as a real business, not a romantic side project. Gabe and John DeCampos talk about Terrible Games, entrepreneurship, and the grind of getting games made, while also showing how crowded the market can feel when crowdfunding and bigger…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Before you start a tiny publishing company, hear the tradeoffs first.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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