A Long Road to Get Here!
In my childhood I spent a lot of time playing board games with my siblings. By the time I had reached high school I had graduated from Risk, Masterpiece and Battleship, to more advanced Avalon Hill games such as Tobruk, Squad Leader and Diplomacy. When I discovered Dungeons and Dragons, I fully embraced RPG, so much so that when I graduated from art school I applied at TSR, the publisher of D&D, and I was hired as a graphic designer.
After TSR, I went through a number of career progressions, from being an Art Director for an advertising agency, to a global Director of Marketing to a global Sales Manager. Throughout these years I retained my love for board gaming, and I never lost my desire to design games. In 2014 I began working on an apocalyptic survival game called Escape Hazard, which was never published. In 2023 my career took a turn when I found myself out of work for the first time since the age of 16. However, it was a golden opportunity to pursue game design full time, and now I'm living the dream!
Doom Peak - Curses and Calamities borrows a lot from Escape Hazard, but with signifiicant improvements. It's a competitive racing, push-your-luck survival game that offers fun thematic gameplay with enough crunchiness to challenge players, but without heavy, non-intuitive rules.
With my experience in graphic design, art direction, marketing, sales and international business, it made sense for me to self-publish. My plan is for Doom Peak to be the first of many fun, thematic games published by Kaptiv8 Games.
Board games have reached heights where it seems like they can't get any better. A few of my favorites are Dune Imperium, Apiary, Wyrmspan, It's a Wonderful World, Lost Ruins of Arnak, Cascadia, Twilight Imperium (4th ed), Clank!, Everdell, Dwellings of Eldervale and Castles of Burgundy. With Doom Peak - Curses and Calamities, I wanted to create a game that could compete with the best of them, but be differentiated enough that it would feel fresh and new. Hopefully you will agree once you play it!
If you would like to play test Doom Peak - Curses and Calamities, please subscribe for updates on the game conventions I will be attending or follow me on Facebook and Instagram. Playtesting will begin this fall. The game will be on crowdfunding (either Kickstater or Gamefound) in early 2025.