In this episode:

We talk to Phil Walker-Harding, designer of Sushi Go!, Pack of Heroes and many more games from Adventureland Games. We chat about his process for designing Sushi Go! and Pack of Heroes, Kickstarter, the Australian board games design scene, favourite games and collecting comics in the 90s.

Download link below or on iTunes, and feel free to send us any feedback at theactionpointspodcast@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter as @action_points, and on Facebook and Google+

Episode 59 – Sushi Heroes and 90s Comics with Phil Walker-Harding

Music: Theme for Harold (var. 2) by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a CC Attribution 3.0.

Links for the things we talked about:

Check out Adventureland Games where you can find all of Phil’s designs, including Pack of Heroes (which also has a brand spanking new website). You should also try out Sushi Go!. You can also find Phil on Twitter at @AdventurelandG and on BoardGameGeek

Big conventions for board games in Australia are PAX Australia (coming up soon!), the Toy and Game Expo, and CanCon.

Phil also designed Archaeology

Phil will be doing the “Quest to Fund Indie Board Games” panel at PAX Australia on 31 October 2014, 9-10 pm and “The Indie Board Games Panel” on 1 November 2014, at 6-7 pm.

Also on the “Quest to Fund Indie Board Games” panel is Wesley Lamont, who we’ve previously spoken to on the podcast.

Sushi Go! will be appearing on Season 3 of Table Top

GameWright is usually associated with children’s and family games, but have also put out ‘heavier games’ like Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert

Paperback is a pretty great deckbuilding + word game mashup

7 Wonders and Fairy Tale are both games that use the card-drafting mechanism

Magic: the Gathering released a set called Conspiracy which focused on the drafting side of Magic

Race for the Galaxy is also one of my favourite tableau-building style card games

Blokus

Carcassonne with just two players is actually pretty cutthroat, as is two-player Scrabble

Phil’s brother, David Harding is also a game designer and designed Elevenses which was successfully Kickstarted

Pack of Heroes was Kickstarted twice, and managed to exceed its goals in its relaunch

John D-C is the artist on Pack of Heroes and has done a great job on the visual design of the game

Top 10 and Astro City are also chock full of homages to classic and obscure superheroes

The comics collecting boom of the late 80s and 90s (warning: TV Tropes), resulting in a lot of variants and gimmicks for issues

The relaunch of Prophet with Brandon Graham on writing duties has been pretty amazing

The Death of Superman debacle is pretty representative of the comics culture of that time

I listen to the Major Spoilers podcast which does pretty good coverage of all types of comics