ONCE UPON A TIME…

In the spring of 2018 in Huntington, West Virginia, my cousin Caleb Huff told me he had a bunch of ideas for board games. “That’s nice,” I thought. It was only a few weeks later that my longtime college friend Kyle Quinn, unprovoked and out of the blue said, “I’d like to make a board game, I just don’t have any ideas.” “That’s nice,” I thought…Wait a minute…a rusty cog started to slowly turn in my brain as I connected the dots…“My cousin was just telling me about all these ideas he has for board games! Let’s sit down with him.” And so began my unpurposeful interest in designing board games, stuck somewhere in between creativity and craftsmanship.

Caleb pitched us a few suggestions, some lavish, sprawling, complicated, worker-placement games with resource gathering, over my head, but others closer to my level of competence and patience, such as one idea that captured our imagination immediately - A game he was considering naming ScrapBots. The original proposal involved collecting money and multi-tiered upgrades, but the resident dummy in the group, I championed for stripping it down to its essence and trimming out any of the over-complicated concepts. We beat it around for a couple weeks and once we had our mechanics settled on and did some play testing, Kyle and I (being former art majors at Marshall University) went to work drawing out the 60 Mission Cards, 110 Junk Cards, and 105 Robot Parts.

Finally, after settling on the name JunkBots, we met at Caleb’s office with a paper prototype - he’s one of those baby-delivering doctors btw. “Hey,” we thought, “This game is actually fun. How did we do this? Making games is easy. We might have this printed in a few months.” Har har. How innocent. How ignorant. How imbecilic.

We knew right away who we wanted to do the actual artwork. In art school, Kyle and I had become close friends with Glen Brogan, who has earned a name for himself doing illustrations for Disney, Marvel, and many other big time fancy-shmancy corporations. We anxiously wondered if he could make time for his old pals in between his more illustrious gigs, and he did…kindof. Glen began by designing the box art and creating three of the 21 full robots for the game then he got buried in other work. Of course we totally understood and were grateful to even have some of his original art included in our game. The reins were picked up by Jesse Lewis, an artist I had worked with while managing a frame shop a few years prior. We waited patiently - of course drawing hundreds of pictures can take a while - especially when you have another full time job!

When we finally had our art, we produced 3 copies of the game, ordering the cards through Game Crafter and spray gluing/cutting the robot pieces by hand (for those of you keeping count at home, that’s 105 pieces x 3 = 315 at 4 cuts for each side, drumroll…1,260 cuts, phew!)

Now who is going to print this thing? Having no clue what we were doing, we more or less flipped open the phonebook and stuck our finger down. Got a few quotes from China and actually began working with a company that ended up changing ownership and in the end didn’t seem to fully understand what we were asking for. We decided to find a printing company in the United States so there would be no language barrier misunderstandings. Staring at a list of US printers I found online-…Hmm Florida. Sounds exotic. Shuffled Ink it is! So totally by random chance we began work with the Americans at Shuffled Ink and couldn’t have been happier with their customer service. Charles Levin and his team are professional, patient, and detail oriented. He had every opportunity to take advantage of us (again, if what we knew about producing a game was leather, we couldn’t saddle a flea), but rather, mentored and advised us even when it meant making less money for his company. 

And here comes October 2020. It is brought to our attention that there is a toy called JunkBots where you use pieces of trash to build robots. Oof. Rather than chance it, we renamed the game to RustBots and with some clever photoshopping, were able to redo the box title. With the new name in place, it was off to Kickstarter where we were most thankful to have our project successfully backed by 260 wonderful individuals! I’m sure my over-attentiveness to tiny details bugged the snot out of the Shuffled Ink staff, but they remained tolerant throughout the years of email exchanges. It was exciting for us to receive our white box and proofs from the printer as well as approve our production copy which began the process of manufacturing 1,000 games. We couldn’t have been happier with the quality of the components. After five years of on and off work and through our trusted relationship with Shuffled Ink, in February of 2024 we finally had our completed games. It’s a pretty crazy and humbling feeling to go from some scribblings on a piece of notebook paper to something that looks and feels like a real live board game and further unfathomable that is now on four continents!

Michael Valentine

co-creator of Rt. 60 Man Gaming Company