Nottingham has been the home of tabletop games ever since Midlands-based Games Workshop co-founder Ian Livingstone brought fantasy role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons, to the UK.
Stone Sword’s new game Senjutsu, and in-development title, Ogres 11, are set to be the next in a long line of successful tabletop games being played in boardgame cafes across the city.
Like Livingstone, former Confetti games tutor and co-founder of Stone Sword Games, Paul Allen, was keen to turn his hobby-gaming passion into a business, he said:
“Tabletop games is a hobbyist industry and the games are massively rising in popularity.
“After a series of lockdowns, people want to socialise face-to-face.
“We’ve seen a huge demand for our new title, Senjutsu, and our recent Kickstarter campaign has helped us to raise a lot of money up-front to help us finish production and manufacture to scale.
“Part of the game’s appeal is the great attention to detail we’ve taken to ensure the authenticity of the Japanese samurai culture, and also the high-spec artwork for the game.”
Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies nurtures its students’ talents, providing them with experience, practice and access to the right facilities to “do it for real”.
Confetti has a range of college and degree level games design courses, from Games Technology to Esports Production and Games Art.
In early 2022, Paul Allen is set to provide Confetti Games Art students with a brief for upcoming game, Ogres 11, a twist on the Hollywood blockbuster Ocean’s Eleven.
“I am looking forward to doing some worldbuilding for Ogres 11 with the students of Confetti.
“For us it’s a win-win, we get to support home grown talent and flesh out some of the fantasy characters within the game.
“Any ideas we run with, those students’ names will be included in the credits. I very much see a research and development component to Confetti that businesses can tap into.
“We are still finding our way as a business, and a session like this will help us to figure out how we can grow and how we can utilise Confetti as a resource.”
Dan Doughty, Confetti Games Curriculum Lead added:
“It’s been fantastic to be involved with Paul and James from Stone Sword Games and to see their company grow over the last few years, our students have really benefitted from working with a local company and have enjoyed playtesting games and developing artwork for their games.
“Tabletop games are a huge part of the Nottingham Games Industry which Confetti have embraced in our Games Curriculum at FE and HE, and I look forward to further projects with Stone Sword and other local games companies in the future.”
