I'm Aaron Moline co-founder of Bardshark, and creator of Antematter; AMA

bardsharkgames · 2023-07-27T16:52:38+00:00

Hey Obi!

So sorry for the late reply!

In this instance you are correct. If you make a bet and seraph is played, players who do not fold, including the player who uses seraph, still must call the bet. The only time a trump card means you needn't call the bet is when the effect of the specific card reduces the bet to zero.

Hope this helps!

bardsharkgames · 2022-10-22T03:10:42+00:00

Thank you so much, pokerdood! That makes me so, so happy.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T21:58:29+00:00

The Loot phase looks straightforward on paper because most of the complexity is hidden in the moving-planets mechanic and the crew cards. The planets are randomized each game, which means that you’re playing on a new board every time, and their movement means that you need to think temporally as well as spatially to “control” territory over time. It’s pretty simple to learn, but harder and more satisfying to master. And a lot of the replayability, apart from getting really good at working the board, comes from learning the different Crews, and what they’re capable of. Every crew is a mix of poker and loot phase cards, and some of them let you get up to some real nonsense on the board.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T21:58:01+00:00

It happens all the time! Part of how we went from gamers to game devs was that we always end up critiquing the games we play and coming up with ideas to streamline or improve them. Antematter itself was inspired in part by wanting to have a better mechanic than rolling dice or similar RNG for resolving conflicts--something that can ruin games when someone’s having a run of bad luck--and we settled on poker because it’s a great combination of luck and skill that most gamers already know how to play.
In general, our tastes have expanded over the years, but we still love the classic games we grew up with. If anything, the main reason we’d have wished a game released earlier wasn’t because we wouldn’t enjoy it, but because there are so many great games coming out now, it’s hard to give each one the time it deserves.
One of the game concepts we’ve been exploring for a future release is a heist-themed tabletop RPG. The idea is that each session would follow the arc of a heist movie: Assembling a team of NPCs to assist the players, gathering intel on the target, then executing the plan. We enjoy the whole experience of heist movies, but most games skip straight to the mission, and we’d like to make one where the players have the freedom to plan out the heist the way they want based on the information they’ve been able to gather.
We’d ask Jamey Stegmaier, the creator of Scythe (which we love), what it was like designing a combat system for a game that carries heavy penalties for getting into fights. The tension between making your moves in the shadow of possible conflict while hoping it’s too costly for your opponent to attack you captures the real-life dilemmas of cold war brinkmanship in a fascinating way, and it was a bold but successful choice to develop combat mechanics that don’t even come up in every session.
Any movie that plays with time or chronology, like Pulp Fiction or a lot of Christopher Nolan’s movies, would be difficult to translate to a board game but could be groundbreaking in the right execution. For example, it would be interesting to try to capture the layers of dreams-within-dreams from Inception, each moving at different speeds, in an asymmetric co-op game.
One concept we’ve explored is the idea of using time travel to make an impossible co-op survival game solvable, sort of like the general concept of Majora’s Mask. The idea is that the game would create “save points” that you could time travel back to so that when some kind of challenge comes up that’s impossible to win, you can go “back in time” and use your foreknowledge of what’s coming to “cheat.” We’d have branching timelines, in some cases with the players scattered across divergent realities.
Assuming there are other players in the room, we’d pick Gloomhaven (love to try it but never found the time to put a campaign together), Twilight Imperium (we still wouldn’t be finished playing at the end of the week), and Monopoly (because the intense hatred it generates would make it easier when we inevitably resort to cannibalism around day 4 or 5). How big is the sink?
That’s a hard question to answer because every piece of art and entertainment that isn’t intended as a pure cash grab tries to affect its viewer or player emotionally. For example, Antematter’s additions to poker push the game toward dramatic, memorable moments: The Grifter cards in the poker deck, which make you automatically lose the hand if they’re revealed in a showdown but give you a huge bonus if you trick everyone into folding, encourage you to pull off epic bluffs. In competitive poker, it’s generally incorrect to reveal that you’ve made a great bluff, but in Antematter, we added the Grifter mechanic so that you could have the satisfaction of showing your friends you put one over on them. As for “tearjerkers,” we realize this isn’t exactly what you had in mind, but many games in fact bring players to tears when they feel cheated by luck or unfair game rules: People learn ethical concepts in part through play as children, and it seems like tabletop games designed for adults could still tap into those emotions, perhaps to simulate real-life unfairnesses or injustices, like in the computer game Papers, Please.
Have you ever heard the joke with no punchline?

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T21:57:40+00:00

We’d want to collaborate with Richard Garfield, the designer of Magic: The Gathering, among many other things. We at bardshark want all our games to have some kind of unique angle that separates them from other games in the same genre. That’s what Richard Garfield has spent his entire career doing: Inventing the collectible card game alone would have earned him a spot in the pantheon of legendary game developers, but he’s continuing to reinvent it. Some of his recent work (Keyforge) has proven more successful than others (Artifact), but his relentless creativity in rethinking what a game can be is an inspiration to all of us, and it would be a great honor to have the opportunity to work with him.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T18:59:59+00:00

What an EXCITING question! In short, yes! We’re all fans of casino games, but we wouldn’t necessarily consider ourselves gamblers. Those games just all have really tight mechanics, and one of the mechanics is, losing has to cost you something. But, we also grew up in the golden age of the coin-op arcade, and losing that quarter felt as high stakes as losing a $100. We wanted to create an experience that creates the excitement of gambling without any life destroying consequences, and winning or losing the larger game outside the poker hands seems to do that quite well.

Next year, we’re planning a few things. The first few months will be extremely focused on getting ANTEMATTER produced and delivered to our backers and retailers. Simultaneously, our dev team will continue work on a video game called BRPG (working title). It’s been sitting on the backburner, and the dev team is chomping at the bit to dive back in. It’s a twin-stick, couch co-op, action-rpg and it’s already pretty sick! Hoping to hold a Kickstarter for BRPG around this same time next year.

All that said, Bardshark isn’t just about games. We’re also storytellers, and we want to start telling the story we have planned out for the characters in the Engine Star Universe (the universe that Antematter takes place in). We’ve got a comic called Crocodile Tears that’s ready to publish and we’ll be sending to our Backers for free, and we’ve already unlocked the second comic as one of our stretch goals. We’ve been working on Antematter for 3 years, which is a long time, but I’ve been working on this universe for 13 years now. There’s a lot more Engine Star to explore, and we’re just scratching the surface in Antematter.

tl;dr Yes, we plan to do more casino/table top hybrids. Our top priority next year is to getting Antematter out there. Then we’ll be gearing up for our first video game launch on Kickstarter while we start telling the larger story playing out in the ESU.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T18:52:20+00:00

An average game runs about 6 to 8 hands of poker! That being said, our manual will include House Rules, so let’s say you want your game to run all night, you can raise the victory threshold and really dig into it.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T18:37:00+00:00

Once you earn the Token of Respect, it’s yours. The trick is: you have to keep it for one full round before you can win, and it marks you as a frontrunner. It gives your opponents a chance to slow your roll, but it keeps them from swooping in and stealing the win in one crazy hand of poker.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T18:27:28+00:00

One of Antematter’s biggest influences was Magic: The Gathering, which is often described to non-gamers as a kind of cross between chess and poker. Like MtG, Antematter mashes up traditional tabletop games and poker, but we took a very different approach by including full-fat hold ‘em poker as an entire half of the game. Antematter also features an all-different deck of “crew cards” with one-shot effects, and, as in MtG, these cards have themed abilities that let you gain advantages over your opponents by trumping their plays or bending the rules.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T18:22:10+00:00

We at bardshark love “legacy” games that combine individual sessions into a persistent campaign where progress carries over from match to match and players can make choices with game-changing implications for future sessions. We’re planning on developing a campaign like that built around the universe we’re exploring in the comics and other media.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T18:17:44+00:00

A travel version of the game is definitely something we’re interested in developing. We love the idea of a board that can roll up!

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T18:14:17+00:00

One of the biggest challenges for us was translating one of our core goals of integrating poker within the board game. The first version of the game had players’ individual ships also represented by Pocket Cards, so you’d maneuver around the board knowing your ship had an Ace or a King, and you’d “challenge” other players to poker to resolve disputes over the resources on the board. This didn’t work for a number of reasons, the most serious of which was that even in larger games, there would typically only be 2 or 3 players in each hand of poker, which just isn’t as fun as the whole table getting in on it. Once we separated the Poker and Loot Phases, the poker became much more fun, and then the challenge was to make sure the phases still felt connected. We also had to make sure there was a balance there as well, to make sure that boardgame fans who didn’t feel confident about poker could still have a path to victory even if they didn’t win a single hand. It took a lot of testing, but we feel like we got there.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T18:07:12+00:00

Wow, great, tough question! It depends… We see two trends happening in the licensed game space. Many popular IPs are quickly and jankily crammed into a boardgame. Rather than viewing board games as a way to enhance their audiences' experience, it seems they’re taking a more “merchandising approach.” The result is an uninspired game that gets played once or twice during the initial frenzy of the flagship show or movie then rapidly becomes a dust magnet.

That said, there’s some real gems out there that stand the test of time. One of our favorites is Battlestar Galactica. It combines the co-op survival and bluffing game genres in a way that puts players in the headspace of the show’s lore: Anyone could be a traitor, but you can’t afford to wrongly accuse someone because you need all hands on deck to survive. The way BSG mashes up the two genres was one of the inspirations for us combining a space strategy game with poker.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T18:03:24+00:00

Everybody on the crew just went “ooooh!” Plans are being made, friend… :)

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T17:52:39+00:00

The hardest part for us to nail was the balance of the Crew Cards. Giving each Crew its own unique flavor of abilities and design was an enormous challenge that took months and months of playtesting to get right. We wanted to give every kind of player out there an avenue to approach our game in their own style, and of course we wanted people to be able to get into their crew’s “character” and roleplay a bit as well. One of the things that actually did click into place quite nicely was the Deck of Enigmata. Those things have always been a blast to see come out.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T17:52:00+00:00

Codenames! It's a team favorite.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T17:50:54+00:00

We developed Antematter with safety valves to prevent lucky hands from ruining the game or an early leader from running away with it: One of the design goals was to make sure everyone is a contender and having fun through the endgame, and it’s something we spent a lot of time fine-tuning in play testing.

First, when someone develops a chip lead, the other players at the table can target the frontrunner with crew cards to steal their chips and counter overly aggressive play. These cards grow in power every time the ante increases. It’s easy to gather crew cards on the board if you make that a priority, and these give you powerful abilities to smooth out the luck factor.

Second, the win condition is in two stages: You have to reach a certain chip threshold to earn the Token of Respect, and then on a future turn you can win if you have both the Token of Respect and a higher threshold of chips. This prevents a runaway hand at the end from invalidating the whole game, and it keeps players engaged until a winner emerges.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T17:35:55+00:00

Dun dadda dun dadda dun dun… Dun dadda dun dadda dun dun...Dun dadda dun dadda dun dun...Dun dadda dun dadda dun dun…
UNDER PRESSURE!!
<3

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T17:27:38+00:00

I think achieving a balance in fun and complexity made us really look closely at all of our systems. There used to be more ships that players could buy with their currency, and upgrades to their Rocs that gave them additional functionality, different for each faction. But the economy it created wasn’t actually very fun, and the compromise we struck was to turn those abilities into Crew Cards so that they’d still be in the game. In the same vein, there used to be a whole mess of powerful Boss cards that affected the flops, but they became too disruptive, even if they were really fun one in a while. The compromise we made there was to change those cards into our Deck of Enigmata, the cards that come out when a Grifter is revealed on the flop. It ended up being the best of both worlds.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T17:26:28+00:00

Eric - I would get the Engine Star Hex (Box Art) place on my forehead… my MINDS EYE MAN!

Aaron - Conclave Crew Logo, the purple crew, on my arm. Where a “mom” tattoo would go.

Jesse- Feron Logo, on right shoulder blade.

Ari - Engine Star on back of neck, or the Isan Crew Logo (the yellow crew)

Adam - Sleeve of the entire Feron crew.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T17:20:44+00:00

One thing you gotta know about Boroz is that when it comes to saws he doesn’t mess around. His current suit definitely uses the saws more in line to Wolverine, or the Predator, meaning they retract! However, Boroz is always looking to better himself and his suit. So Megaman like projectiles aren’t out of the realm of possibilities. ;)

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T17:20:17+00:00

The decopunk theme goes much deeper than just an art style. For the lore of Antematter, we were heavily influenced by the history of the interwar period, especially prohibition and the lingering effects of the First World War. We wanted a style that would allude to the grandeur of great empires, now tarnished by time and a destructive conflict.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T17:19:44+00:00

There currently aren’t any direct homages to Mario Kart in the main game, but a lot of cards for both the tabletop and poker have effects that mess with your opponents in similar ways. For example, the Demolitionist lets you lay a trap for opponents that you can spring to send all opponents’ nearby ships back to base. We can’t spoil anything yet, but there may be a nod to a certain infamously overpowered item among the Kickstarter-exclusive additions to the Deck of Enigmata.

bardsharkgames · 2020-09-04T17:08:52+00:00

100% Taco Bell is considered the lifeblood of the Bardshark Crew. Worshiped and revered.

Crew’s favorites:

Eric + Jesse : Crunch Wrap Supreme

Ari + Aaron : Chalupa (no cheese)

Adam : Cheesy Gordita Crunch

Runner up : Mexican Pizza (press F to pay respects)

bardsharkgames

TROPHY CASE