By Jason Klaiber
Staff Writer
A group of friends who attended Fayetteville-Manlius High School together spent a lot of their school years together playing games.
After years of being on the player side, the group is putting the finishing touches on their own board game, which will make its official debut this fall.
Before and after graduating in 2012, classmates Kenny Chapman, Damian Roberts, Cole Jarvis and Stephen Kraus often played board games such as The Settlers of Catan and Boss Monster in place of partying on weekends.
“After we all went our separate ways and went to different colleges and started doing other things, every time we got back together we would just want to play a bunch of board games,” Chapman said.
It wasn’t until the four were well into their college careers that they began formulating what would be Knights of the Hound Table, their canine-themed creation.
With Chapman and Jarvis now in Los Angeles, Kraus in Pittsburgh and Roberts attending graduate school at SUNY Oswego, the board game entered the prototype phase this summer after three years of brainstorming and collaborative work facilitated through emails, text messages, Google Docs, Slack and Discord.
The process involved authoring a rule book, sketching the playing cards, attending to social media outreach and working on mechanics to ensure no inconsistencies existed in the framework of the game.
A friend of theirs who attended the Rochester Institute of Technology named Claudia Dillard illustrated all of the rough sketches.
“She’s been incredible,” Chapman said. “When we first saw our fully colored, finished drawing of a dog for one of the cards, that was kind of the moment where we knew we had something.”
With wordplay abounding, the game takes place in a medieval fantasy world fully inhabited by dogs, namely pugs, great danes, golden retrievers and dachshunds.
“You can draft a full team of pugs if you want or you can mix and match,” Chapman said.
The two-player game allows each person to recruit an army of dogs for battle, each side vying for control of a territory labeled Boneshire.
“If a dog loses, they faint,” Chapman said. “It’s nothing gory or anything like that. It’s fun for the whole family.”
Each player selects three cards—an attack card, a defense card and a special ability card—after drafting their battalion of armor-wearing, catapult-firing hounds.
“One of the hindrances of the game is that because you’re only drawing three cards and playing three cards, sometimes you get kind of stuck with whatever you drew, so there’s a little bit of a luck-of-the-draw-type element to it,” Chapman said.
The deck has over 30 cards altogether and circular, cardboard tokens denoting treats.
“In a sense, if you’re not playing for money necessarily, [the tokens] are the same as how you’d use poker chips in Texas hold ‘em,” Chapman said. “Whoever ends up with the most at the end is the winner. It’s basically your indicator of how well you’ve done in battle.”
The four designers presented their tabletop game at Gen Con in Indianapolis, Indiana, earlier in August.
Crowdfunded through Kickstarter, Knights of the Hound Table will be launched on the website on Sept. 17. There will be an option on the site to request for a character in the game to be created in resemblance to one’s own dog.
The game’s targeted age range will be eight and up, since it contains what Roberts calls “cartoonish violence” and requires math and reading comprehension.
“It is extremely accessible and easy to pick up but surprisingly fun to keep playing and rather addicting,” Roberts said.
