Mangaka: The Game of Drawing Comics (and KrakenCon!)

by on November 16, 2016 at 7:52 pm

Happy upcoming holidays! The big news right now is that our game, Mangaka: The Fast & Furious Game of Drawing Comics, is FINALLY AVAILABLE! Our warehouse is filled with boxes of Mangaka 6 feet high, and we’ve fulfilled nearly all of the Kickstarter pre-orders!

Needless to say, this game is totally excellent and is a great gift for a creative friend or family member (ages 12 and up)! You can get Mangaka here from the Mock Man Store, including the 12-card bonus expansion “Decadent Heart!” If you’re a retailer and you’re interested in carrying Mangaka, go here to buy the game wholesale from our great partners at Japanime Games/Global Games Distribution.

The other big news is, I’m a guest at KrakenCon this weekend at the Oakland Convention Center in Oakland, California! This is a super fun convention I’ve attended before, and I strongly recommend going to the whole thing. We’ll be in the exhibit hall Friday through Sunday with copies of Mangaka. Plus, I’ll be doing two Mangaka demos and three panels!!

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MY KRAKENCON SCHEDULE

SATURDAY 11/19
12:15-1:15 pm
Best & Worst Manga of 2016 (Room 208)
We all have our own picks for the best and worst of everything and manga is no different. Join Jason Thompson, Evan Minto (AniGamers, Otaku USA) and Shaenon Garrity (Skin Horse, Otaku USA) as they look back on a year of great (and not so great) manga!

3:30-5:00 pm
Mangaka Demo (Card Gaming Area, Exhibit Hall)
Come playtest Mangaka and see what the excitement and speedlines are all about!

8:30-9:30 pm
The Scariest Manga Ever Made (Room 203)
Manga can be beautiful but can also be scary. Jason Thompson is here to guide you into the dark side of the art exploring just what makes something creepy. Gaze into the dark worlds of Hideshi Hino, Kazuo Umezu, Kengo Hanazawa and many other terrifying artists!

SUNDAY 11/21
11:30 am – 1 pm
Mangaka: The Fast & Furious Game of Drawing Comics! (Room 208)
Do you have what it takes to be a master mangaka? Jason Thompson is here to help you find out in a live play session of Mangaka: The Fast & Furious Game of Drawing Comics on the BIG SCREEN! Step up and draw to be the best, or join in the audience participation and decide what Trends the artists must deal with! Compete to win great prizes and have a good time!

3:00-4:30 pm
Mangaka Demo (Card Gaming Area, Exhibit Hall)
Another chance to play Mangaka in a casual environment before the convention ends! Come check it out, play, and take home a wild comic of your own creation!

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What else has been going on?

* My homebrew D&D class, the Priestess, is up on DM’s Guild featuring beautiful cover artwork by Konstantin Pogorelov. At $2.99 it’s a steal! Check it out and use it in your games!

* Speaking of RPGs, I’ve been drawing new art for Wizards of the Coast, which you can see on Wizards’ Dragon+ magazine app, or on the web at dragonmag.com. I’ve also done some artwork for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, of which I’ll be posting samples on Twitter (like most of my art) when the adventure is available for sale.

* And I’m almost done with the Map of Alien Invaders, which just has to print and go out to the many Kickstarter backers who made it possible. Thanks for all your support!

In addition, as usual, I’m working on some can’t-announce-them-yet projects… but more about that later. See you at KrakenCon, and please spread the word about Mangaka!!

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The Making of Mangaka: The Fast & Furious Game of Drawing Comics

by on July 1, 2016 at 7:56 pm

I’m working on some new stuff that I’ll be announcing before the end of July, but I just wanted to give a heads up that my first tabletop game, MANGAKA: THE FAST & FURIOUS GAME OF DRAWING COMICS, is finally available to people who missed the Kickstarter!

You can preorder Mangaka from Global Games Distribution, aka Japanime Games. If you’re a regular customer (or owner) of a game store or comic store, it’s also available from Diamond Previews. Lastly, I’ll be adding the game to the online store very soon. But the first month or so of store orders are super important for an indy game, so if you’ve got a favorite game/hobby/comic store, please buy it from the store and tell ’em to preoder a copy! (Preorders also come with a special promotional pack of 12 cards not available anywhere else, “Decadent Heart.”)

Making Mangaka took five years of playtesting, during which the game went through several huge transformations. It’s hard to believe that the game, which is now a creative drawing/storytelling improvisational exercise, was once intended as an indy RPG in which players played the dramatic lives of the most non-dramatic (?) profession ever, that of Japanese manga artists.

Here’s just a few of the insane permutations the game went through on the way to its Final Form:

Ver. 1 (2010): a joke indy RPG where you play a manga artist who has Obsessions and suffers various debilitating Impairments caused by their workload. The biggest inspiration to the game system is the amazing “Maid RPG,” which made me think that if one could make a game about maid anime tropes, one could make a similar game about “meta-manga” stories such as Bakuman, Disappearance Diary, the works of Kazuhiko Shimamoto, etc. At this point the game has seven (!!) statistics: Story, Art, Passion, Body, Mind, Social, and Birth. The core idea introduced at this time and preserved for later versions was the idea that the players have five minutes IRL to draw a sketch-comic representing a month of work in “game time.”

Ver. 2 (2011): still an indy RPG, but now the drawing element becomes more important, and you have to allocate ‘time points’ between various activities. A storygame element is introduced: when one player fails at a task, the other players tell a story of how they failed, which then becomes reality. The game is about making little stories about the miserable & glorious lives of overworked manga artists. However, the essentially isolated nature of manga artists makes it difficult to create a RPG story in which the characters are supposed to have some connections & interactions with one another.

Ver. 3 (2011): still an indy RPG, but now you have a ‘studio’ with limited space that you must fill with assistants and stacks of books and stuff, like a little farming/factory-simulation game. By making money, you can afford a bigger studio, and hire the poorer artists/players as your assistants, if they have enough time points to give you. Having the artists share a studio also makes it easier to create gameplay/RP events involving multiple artists… though the humble and pathetic nature of manga artists’ problems (Real example of interparty conflict: “You’re clogging up the bathroom drain with all these tissues!”) remains both the game’s blessing and curse.

Ver. 4 (2012): RPG storytelling elements and office-management elements ditched, the game now becomes more of a pure cardgame & drawing game. The statistics are pared down to Story, Art and Passion. Players draw comics of varying lengths (depending on what magazine they’re drawing for; weekly magazines require more drawing than monthly ones, etc.) for varying amounts of time (depending on their Art score). A RPG element remains: players ‘create a character’ by drawing a Motivation (Fame, Wealth, Art, Revenge, Love, Ideologue, etc.) and a Background (Delinquent, Otaku, Elite, etc.). There’s a strong element of entropy, as the game system virtually ensures that players will crash and burn, gaining more and more Impairments until it’s impossible for them to function as artists. Moral: only the strong will survive in the art world!!

Ver. 5 (2013): character-creation elements are ditched. Instead of being an elimination game that ends when all the players but one die of exhaustion and Impairments, the game now becomes a straight-up 4-round challenge where the victor is determined by the artist who has the most Fame at the end of 4 rounds. The more adult and in-jokey manga and anime-related Theme Cards gradually get phased out (or, as I like to think of it, saved for later)

Ver. 6 (2014): the game is massively simplified. Eventually it is streamlined into two versions: one ‘advanced version’ with Themes, Trends, Impairments (bad stuff) and Fortunes (good stuff) and another ‘basic version’ with simply Themes and Trends.

Ver. 7 (2014): after many playtests and tough decisions, Impairments (Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Alcoholism, Blindness, etc.) and Fortunes (Improved Art, Improved Story, Movie Deal, etc.) get shelved. The basic game’s age rating is set as 12 and up. Mangaka becomes a lean, mean machine of DRAWING AND GAMING.

All this is really true and all these versions were actually played, each one a step in the right direction for the final version. My wife Jumana was with me the whole time and helped me immeasurably in the game design process, as well as designing the box & cards. Derek Guder and Gregory Marques also provided invaluable advice, as did many other people not listed here, but hopefully listed in the thanks section in the game rulebook.

Mangaka is a personal project and was a blast to make. I’ve got lots of ideas for expansions waiting in the wings if the demand is there, including an entire “Cthulhu” expansion (yes, the inevitable Cthulhu expansion… -_- ) which I made for the HP Lovecraft Film Festival. Furthermore, the playtesting and game design practice that was so critical for Mangaka is also helping tremendously with the development of my indy RPG, “Dreamland.” I hope to be able to reveal more about Dreamland soon.

So that’s it: if you’ll forgive the self-promotion, the message is…. go get Mangaka!! Check out the sample comics at mangakagame.com! Go pick it up from Global Games Distribution, tell the family, and let all the pigs out of the barn! I really like making games and I want to make more. And to everybody who made this game possible, including all the Kickstarter backers, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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New Adventures (and East Coast Convention Appearance!)

by on May 4, 2016 at 7:58 pm

NEW DUNGEONS & DRAGONS WALKTHROUGH MAP!: My latest D&D walkthrough map is available exclusively at Dragon+, the D&D online magazine! You can get a small peek at it above (without text), but for the whole story you’ll have to go to the Dragon+ website or download the Dragon+ iOS or Android app. This map covers “Curse of Strahd”, the newly released 5th edition D&D makeover/expansion of the classic D&D module “Ravenloft”! In fact, the “Curse of Strahd” map is a prequel to my Ravenloft Walkthrough Map. So if it inspires you, enter the sunless land of Barovia and follow the path of the foolhardy adventurers from their first step into wolf-haunted forests to their final battle with the Vampire Strahd…

MANGAKA IS COMING OUT!: Our boardgame, Mangaka: The Fast & Furious Game of Drawing Comics, has a distributor and a release date!! Mangaka will be distributed into game & hobby stores by Global Games Distribution, and will be available in August 2016. Furthermore, Mangaka will be co-published with Japanime Games, whose focus on import Japanese and anime-themed games makes them the best partner we could have ever hoped for.

I’m really excited that Mangaka is finally coming out!! (I imagine that the Kickstarter backers are also glad it won’t be much longer.) This game which started as a whimsical side project in 2011 has evolved into something I truly love, a game into which me and my spouse put hundreds of hours of work and playtesting. That work and playtesting paid off, transforming a veritable Ugly Ducking of a game into… well… saying “a swan” seems vain, so I’ll just say a sleek, badass crocodile. We’ll be selling Mangaka at store.mockman.com as well, but game store sales are wonderful and help get the word out, so if you have a favorite local game store, please buy Mangaka through them and tell them to order it from GGD! All the information on the August 2016 release is available here.

OTAKU USA ANIME FAN FEST: I’ve been doing manga reviews and editing the manga section for Otaku USA magazine since the magazine debuted in 2007. Now, Newark, NJ is seeing the very first Otaku USA Anime Fan Fest, an anime/manga/J-stuff convention coordinated with myself and the other editors of the magazine! The convention runs from May 6-8 in the Garden State Exhibit Center. I’m a guest and will be running several panels, including:

* Saturday, May 7, 2-3 PM: A MILLION WAYS TO DRAW IN THE WEST: Are you an aspiring artist, graphic novelist or mangaka? Jason Thompson (Manga: The Complete Guide, Mangaka: The Fast & Furious Game of Drawing Comics), Tommy Yune (Speed Racer, Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles), and Secret Special Guest discuss the business of drawing and making comics. How can you improve your art and comic storytelling? Is there anything you can learn from “How to Draw Manga” books? How can you find a publisher, or use Patreon and Kickstarter to turn a hobby into a profession? What can American artists learn from the Japanese manga industry? All this, plus embarrassing manga industry stories!

* Sunday, May 8, 11 AM-12PM: MANGAKA: THE FAST & FURIOUS GAMESHOW OF DRAWING COMICS! Compete to make 5-minute comics based on crazy Themes & fleeting Trends in this live version of “Mangaka: The Fast & Furious Game of Drawing Comics”! Join the battle or watch from the audience as the competitors challenge their creativity to make the weirdest stories ever, based on manga Themes like Science Fiction, Shojo Manga, Zombies or Body Pillows! Featuring fabulous prizes, no drawing skills required.

* Sunday, May 8, 1PM-2PM: THE BEST & WORST MANGA OF 2016: What’s the best, weirdest and most underappreciated manga of the year? Join us for an hour of 100% manga with manga reviewers Jason Thompson (Otaku USA Manga Editor and author of Manga: The Complete Guide), Daryl Surat (Otaku USA contributor and Anime World Order Podcast cohost), and AM Cosmos (awesome manga/anime blogger). Discover the year’s best new and upcoming manga (both in Japanese and in English translation) and stare in morbid curiosity at the nominations for worst manga…if you dare. Talk manga with us, find out what’s new, and take sides in the inevitable argument between AM, Jason & Daryl!

That’s the news for now! Please stop by and say hi at Anime Fan Fest! If you don’t see me on the floor or on Twitter, check out the gaming area and maybe we’ll play a game of something!

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