Origin: Paul

I’ve always loved playing games.  I have many happy memories of playing Risk (and other games, even Monopoly) with my parents and of playing D&D (a lot of D&D) with friends after school.

Work and life got in the way of gaming for a few years, until I read about Carcassonne.  My wife encouraged me to ‘try it out’ by going to Beyond Monopoly! a gaming club where I live in York.  It rekindled my love of playing games.

I started a weekly games night with friends (and friends of friends)… and through Beyond Monopoly!, I came across this nice chap, Jack, who was looking for someone to help playtest his game.

I’d won the lottery, of sorts.  Suddenly, my life was busy with a lot of gaming and I found that I genuinely enjoyed playtesting and developing games.

But even more suddenly, I became ill with Limbic Encephalitis.  I had to give up work, and my memories of the previous day would vanish overnight.  But I had amazing gaming friends, who would still come round for games night, and patiently reteach me the rules of a game I’d learnt the week before.  And in time I recovered, retrained for a new career, and got a job as a teacher.

Then I changed jobs from teaching to working on a project to help teachers teach computing. And of course, those weekly games nights continued.

Throughout it all, I remained friends with Jack... even after he moved away from York.   In fact, we’d spend perhaps even more time together, staying for the weekend with our families at each other’s houses.  We would stay up late… long, long after the children had gone to bed, playing games and playtesting.

It was one such weekend visiting Jack, that I had an idea for a game.  Inspired by a game the night before, which had promised so much but never quite made it for me. Jack and I talked it through, designed it together, and FlickFleet was born.

I won the lottery, of sorts, again when Jack asked me to join Eurydice Games. No longer on the sidelines, playtesting for him, but instead a partner with him in our games company. 

We endured a nail-biting 4 weeks for our first Kickstarter and just managed to fund.  And suddenly there I was, with a laser cutter in my garage which I needed to learn to use.

We had more successful Kickstarters.  I was balancing the laser cutting, and bagging of components, around my day job.  But it was getting harder to fit it all in.

And then I won the lottery, of sorts, yet again.  The contract for the project I was working on ended.  But Jack and I calculated that Eurydice Games could pay me just enough that I could focus on manufacturing games… and my wife was OK with the drop in our household income.

And I love it…  the manufacturing, the playtesting, the demoing at events, even the packaging and posting. I get to do my dream job.

I’m so lucky to be here, doing this.