Mission Statement
At Cravon Studios our aim is to give back to the world by creating great games people love. We want to bring friends and family back to the table to play our games and hopefully have great experiences that bring them closer together. We want to create tabletop game experiences that delight, enthrall, and entertain. We will give back by teaching the lessons we learn and helping others new to the tabletop game hobby either as a player, or as a creator discover a new world of gaming. When you play our games, you are choosing to give us your time that we know you could have spent doing other things. We will respect that time and be thankful for it.
Cravon Studios creates and publishes tabletop games. It is run by Rocky and Stefanie Heckman. We work with designers, artists, graphic designers, manufacturers and a myriad of others, especially those new to the industry, to bring our games to life.
Guiding Principles
- A game is a work of art, invest in world class art
- A game is an investment. Ensure the highest quality production
- A game should bring people together and create the best of times
- A game should be as emotionally and mentally engaging as possible
- Do no harm, commit no social injustice
- Make the best game possible for the audience. Not every game is for every person
- Don’t rush. Take the time required to make the best game that can be made. When the design is done is when we start he real work on a game through testing, revision, and improvement.
15 Tenets of Board Game Design for Cravon Studios
- Choices are empowering and have consequences, good or bad.
- Only have as many rules as required to provide the gameplay structure. Don’t let the rules get in the way of the game.
- Setup should be less than 5% of the game time.
- Never remove players until the end of the game.
- Players should always feel like they have a chance, until they don’t.
- Luck plays a part in everything, but planning and smart play should mitigate luck.
- Players should be engaged when it’s not their turn either planning, or participating.
- Games should be easy to read and accessible. Game state or game components that take more than a glance to understand are too complicated
- Avoid AP by having clearly understood components, state and choices.
- Games without tension are not interesting, but we want to bring people together, not drive them apart.
- Reward good play, don’t punish bad play.
- Everything should ‘make sense’. No exceptions to rules, special conditions or complex cascading effects
- Theme is everything. Mechanisms should fade into the background like electricity. Always there, always supporting and driving the theme. Don’t make things to fiddly.
- Games should have great table presence. They should draw people from across the room and ask about them.
- Asymmetric goals are a huge plus. A game should be different every time you play it, and make you want to try every strategy you can think of. Foster that desire.