Decemberween is coming! Decembeween is oh so near! Decemberween is for giving! Decemberween is almost here! Decemberween, Decemberween, it’s fifty-five days after Halloween!
If you are at all interested in Stuff I’ve Made as products for presents for people in the coming months, I’d like to make this my official opportunity to tell you to go check them out now. It’s November, it’s near the end, if you’re in the Mainland USA or Canada (which my metrics indicate you are), and if you want something to arrive for you over there in order to give it to someone as a gift, now is a good time to set aside some coins and check out the stores for our stuff!
Here, let me show you the kinds of things I make that you may want to spend some money on!
First of all, there’s a bunch of stuff on my most successful store, the Redbubble Store! This is a place where you can buy stickers of the different designs I’ve done, which includes these delightful ones:
And my shirts, which includes these designs that have been popular this year. Well, people have bought them this year. The point is, these are shirt designs I made, and these two designs represent designs people have bought as shirts, and not just as a stickers. I particularly want to shout out the buyer in Germany who bought a Thule Things Infant Onesie.
But hey, you might think ‘Talen? that guy makes games, why is he mentioning t-shirts as his most successful store?’ Well, you can get games too!
Almost all of my games are available at DriveThruCards as print-on-demand. This is a great way for you to grab them, they’re fast and they’re delivered in sometimes as little as a week. I like them a lot, I think they’ll meet your needs really easily again, if you’re in the mainland USA, you can buy them and they’ll arrive in a quick enough time!
If you’re looking for a game in my portfolio to check out, I want to recommend some games that I think hit a certain kind of interest:
- Fabricators is a dense, replayable economy game like San Juan, but built out of a single deck of cards, and with a thematic space that doesn’t represent its economy structures as being about Just More Colonial Capitalism.
- Good Cop, Bear Cop, is a hidden identity secret role game where players don’t have to talk to each other directly and deal with the ensuing anxiety. It’s meant to be faster and less pure than the games like it, so that players have more room to let the game choices communicate for them.
- Dark Signs is a horror-themed strategy game which I’m still incredibly happy with! It’s a strategy game, it works across multiple rounds, and the theme and aesthetic hold together in a way I really like. It’s one of my oldest games now and it’s one I still think is one of the best.
- Hook, Line & Sinker, is another small bluffing game about con artists improvising an optimal plan before the snitch in the party outs them all, it’s cheap, and it plays really quick. If your play group wants things to do while other players are rounding out larger, slower games, grab a copy and jam it in the collection!
- Dog Bear is a single book, fast-start RPG that I promote as a way to get people into roleplaying games without any challenges making characters. It’s meant to give you the tools you need to tell a short story about Metal Gear Solid style characters completing a mission, told in flashback.
- Our most successful and beloved game, LFG: Looking For Group is a simple drafter where you’re trying to build a team of adventurers to go on a quest, and they all beat each other up on the way out the door.
- Sector 86 is a big deck, single deck game where you build your own space station, with a push-your-luck mechanism. It’s a game with a lot of dedicated work in building out the flavour and giving players things to do in the course of their day, with a really simple set of mechanisms for playing the game.
- Finally, if you like the microgames like Hook, Like & Sinker, you should check out some of our other microgames, like Cat & The Mouse (a two player stealth game), Senpai Notice Me! (a multiplayer trading game about girls kissing girls), The Botch (a game about ruinously complex failed heists and bluffing your way through it), and You Can’t Win (a simple negotiator game about trying to win tricks in a way that mean you can win the last trick).
But if you’re not in the mainland USA, these shipping rates can get pretty hard and you might not be able to afford them. But if you still want some Invincible Ink games, and if you like craft projects, I’d like to recommend you check out our line of games, for the Print and Play options. These are all priced to be compared to numbers we find funny, like the value of a Tumblr Verified Stamp.
If you’re at all interested in making Print-And-Play versions of these games, you’re going to want access to some printable sticker paper and some cardboard. The cardboard can be anything, like a cereal box, if that’s your jam, and then you apply them together. It’s something that you can do a really nice job of if you take some time to do it.
I really recommend checking out print-and-play games as a sort of craft project. They take you away from the keyboard and screen, and when you’re done, you have something you can play with. There are ways to do fancy edging and corners on your cards with little hand tools like a cheap, ~$12 corner cutter kinda device. Consider that the bigger games can be around 120 cards, which can be a lot of time to make. Don’t feel you need to rush!
Anyway, this is hopefully useful advice for you if you’re interested in the kinds of things I make and think ‘Oh I should do that as a present for someone.’ This is a reminder that now is probably the best time to do that!
If you’re just thinking about giving me money for the media I make on the internet, and you don’t want any of these things specifically, then my Patreon exists and has been running on a consistent rule of not paywalling anything.