Long Island Tabletop Gaming Expo 2024
By Chris LoBosco
April 5, 2024, Gravitary Games at Long Island Tabletop Gaming Expo 2024
Wow, what an experience this was. But first, hello! We’re Gravitary Games, well… we’re actually Nick, Vin, and Chris, but you know what I’m saying. As a new company looking to self-produce our first game, we thought this expo would be the perfect opportunity for just that. And boy were we right!
We’re pretty new to the community as a whole, and we met so many amazing people that couldn’t have been more welcoming. What I appreciated most was meeting so many other creatives, my day job is a graphic designer so I felt right at home. The passion that everyone shares for gaming as a whole is so infectious, you want to see everything on display and talk to everyone for hours about their passion projects.
This leads me to our main goal other than socializing, play-testing. With a few different concepts, we wanted to see if there were any flaws, reactions, or suggestions that we could get, and boy did we!
I’ll quickly explain our game, it’s a fast-paced card game where you have to play as many cards as possible within the duration of a song. Number ranges illustrate what cards can be played, but can always be changed by any player. It’s golf rules, so the player with the least amount of cards at the end, wins.
With that being said, people enjoyed the frantic nature of the game, some saying it “feels like a Mario Party mini-game”. We were honored to be mentioned in the same sentence as one of Nintendo’s flagship titles. What attracted people was the simplicity in the rules/gameplay, the short play time (~90 seconds per round), and the colorful visuals in the design, not to toot my own horn. The biggest red flag was how players can police others during the game, “What’s stopping me from misplaying cards to gain an advantage?”, which was a valid point. We’ve continued to ponder this, and trying to come up with quick solutions to keep gameplay moving.
We were thrown off by one person’s comments, at the end of each round, players collect their color cards and reshuffle to start the game over. One gentleman, at the end of his round, told us he was color blind, and that the red and green cards looked exactly the same. You could imagine we all had to admit we hadn’t thought of that with our tails between our legs. I know this isn’t a dealbreaker for most games, but this is why play-testing to a wide audience is so valuable.
After two days of listening to people, playing other games, and being a part of this amazing event, we’re ready to make tweaks, re-strategize, and digest a lot of candy and Popeye’s chicken. We’ll definitely be back next year so keep an eye out for the three brothers who will be overly passionate about gaming and fast food.
A quick shoutout to our other game creator friends we met this weekend!
Game Bard Games, Little Creature, RP Jesters, Tadaa Games, Tuowin Games
– Chris LoBosco, Founder/Creative Gravitary Games
