After nearly 6 months of planning and play-testing within Palomino Labs, we’re extremely proud to announce the launch of our very first Kickstarter campaign for our new game Rumrunners. Rumrunners is a digital board game set in the Prohibition era of American history and focuses on bluffing, deception, and deduction.

We’re particularly excited about the digital medium that Rumrunners is going to use for gameplay. We’ve spent many of our weekly Spielnacht (Game Night) gatherings playing games in the “traitor” genre. Specific mechanics in this genre vary from game to game, but the common thread is the hidden information that’s handed out at the beginning of the game and the later discussion that’s used as an attempt to reveal that information. For example, one of our favorite games, The Resistance, has the players collectively trying to figure out who among them are spies. Throughout the game, players elect subsets of the group to go on missions. Loyal members of the resistance will help pass the mission, but if a single spy has been selected to go on the mission, they’ll cause it to fail. Whichever group can put 3 results in their favor first wins the game.

We love this type of game because of the social connections that it creates between players. Information is critical, so it really means that the group is encouraging everyone to take on an active role in the game. Unfortunately, the game can be completely ruined by something as simple as a card accidentally being flipped over.

After many, many games (with an embarrassing number of restarts due to accidents) we decided that we could fix these problems with a quick and dirty app. We started talking about what we wanted the app to do, and suddenly a whole new world opened up. We realized that in addition to making it easy to distribute secret information, we could create exciting new mechanics that wouldn’t have been possible. For example, what if a player had the chance to, once per game, make it so that no one could see the number of votes for or against some proposed action. As we began to tinker with various ideas, we realized that we were creating a whole new game, and it quickly grew beyond its initially humble beginnings.

I’d love to tell you about some of our more interesting ideas, but we’re saving those to reveal during our Kickstarter campaign. Become a backer today to stay updated on all the new gameplay mechanics that we’ve created. It’s going to be a wild ride!