My first real blog post

Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc., has been in the game publishing business since 1999 and the game design business since somewhere around 1981 or 1982. Our primary game product line has been STAR FLEET BATTLES which was first published in 1979, and has been rewritten, updated, and expanded a lot since then. It has a strong following, but it's a huge game, hard to play, and requires a level of committment similar to marriage. It remains in print, continues to be expanded, and remains the largest selling space combat board game in human history. We won the Origins Hall of Fame Award last summer, and you don't get that unless you have been in print for 25 or more years and continue to expand the game with excellent products.

We wanted to reach a wider audience of more casual and less hardcore gamers, and created FEDERATION COMMANDER (which uses about 3% of SFB's rules, and doesn't seem to miss them). The whole point of creating FEDERATION COMMANDER was to reach that wider audience, since bringing "average" people to play SFB saw most of them run away screaming. Federation Commander makes most of them say "Cool, can we play now?"

We're going to be doing a lot of things all over the internet (and elsewhere) to bring people HERE to www.FederationCommander.com to see what we have to offer. [A few of these include Z-stores, Google, CafePress.com/StarFleetUniv, MySpace, Yahoo, and Geocities. Most of those don't exist today. Most of them will exist by a week from today.] THAT meant we needed a professional (expensive) web site designed to look like serious people doing a real (but not serious) product. Everybody in my office had a hand in working with Spellmann to build this web site. The point of the exericse is to build FEDERATION COMMANDER into a major presence in the gaming industry, and in the popular culture. I invite your comments, suggestions, complaints, occasional jokes, and anything else you have to say.

One warning. I'm leaving for Europe and will be gone for two weeks, so don't expect a reply soon. It's business, not pleasure (other than the side trip to see Stonehenge). We're going to Europe to find European distributors and retailers, since our products are known (outside of England) only by mail order.