The Game Crafter: The Game Crafter (TGC) is a Madison, Wisconsin company that produces tabletop game components and custom print on demand card games and board games. They are wonderful indie game designer community too. Also, are you looking for art resources? Check out their Art Resources section HERE. Birdlight Games has used TGC to print and distribute their games!
BoardGameGeek: An amazing resource for board gaming hobbyists. Its database holds reviews, articles, session reports, images, videos, and files for over 77,000 different games. Check out the pages for Friend or Foe and Monkey :).
Canadian Gamer: Canada is home to many great game publishers, organizations, awards, blogs, conventions, tournaments, distributors, game cafes and retailers. Click this link to learn more!
SaskGames: This site is run to help organize and promote games in the Province of Saskatchewan (Canada).
PrinterStudio: A great place to design and print custom cards. What makes PrinterStudio so great is they can refine some of their design products as they work with you (and the shipping to Canada is excellent!). Birdlight Games has used PrinterStudio to print and distribute their games!
GIMP: GIMP is a free and open-source graphics editor used for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, resizing, cropping, photo-montages, converting between different image formats, and more specialized tasks.
YGG: The Yorkton Gamer Guild (YGG) promotes tabletop board games, card games and role playing games through education, demonstration and events. We believe games should be enjoyed as a way for social interaction, competition, and most importantly for fun.
Father Geek: Father Geek reviews games from the perspective of Child Geeks, Parent Geeks, and Gamer Geeks. Put another way, all games are reviewed with new players, non-gamers, casual players, and gaming elitists. Father Geek believes games are an excellent medium to teach children (and adults) important social and cognitive skills. The game becomes the medium of the lesson and the game play the teacher. Check it out!
Retail considerations
- Barcodes: The Game Crafter does a good job describing how to acquire UPC barcodes HERE. Also: Nation Wide Bar Code sells barcodes as well as provides a free ebook outlining everything you need to know about barcodes.
- Retail & Safety markings: Panda Games has put together this great resource for info about retail & safety markings as well other valuable design guidelines: LINK.
Contests
The CGDA or Canadian Game Design Award presented by the FallCon Gaming Society out of Calgary: Timeline –> submit in May, results in July. Great contest! Check HERE for more details.
The Golden Arbutus – The TCTC Game Design of the year, presented by Panda Games Manufacturing out of Vancouver: Timeline –> submit in October, results in March. Great contest! Check HERE for more details.
Ludopolis International Board Game Design Contest (Lisbon, Portugal): Timeline –> submit in January, results in July. Great contest! Check HERE for more details. (LINK: This is a previous iteration of one of their past contests).
TableTop is a web series about games, directed by Jennifer Arnold. It was created by Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day and is hosted by Wheaton. TableTop is published on Felicia Day’s YouTube channel, Geek & Sundry. In each episode, following a brief explanation of one or more tabletop games, Wheaton plays the games with guests, usually web or TV personalities. — Quoted from the Wikipedia page on “TableTop (web series).”
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