2nd May 2023
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - APRIL 2022 EDITION
Hello everyone!
Some things in life are guaranteed to happen. April is going to end, spring will arrive and every single month we’ll publish another monthly round-up full of information about all the fun stuff we’ve been up to! Last month wasn’t too stressful for the team here, as we continued working on CATAN® - Console Edition alongside some other exciting things.
So without further ado, let’s get into it once again!
This might come to a shock to long-time readers of the Nomad Games monthly round up, but last month we once again spent a lot of our time working on CATAN - Console Edition! Post-release, our team here at Nomad (and the awesome folk over at Dovetail Games) have kept up the hard work on the game with post-launch support, updates and more. Following the announcement of the Nintendo Switch version, we can now confirm that we’ve been working on it in April, and progress is coming along well so far! We’ve still got a long way to go, but our experience in bringing our other games to everyone’s favourite Nintendo console is already proving to be a big help.
In April, we were also working on the turn timer update, which was officially rolled out on April 26th! The biggest feature included a turn timer for online play, alongside a whole host of other improvements and fixes. You can check out the full patch notes here!
Reception to the patch has been great so far, and we’re making sure that all your feedback gets seen by both the Nomad Games and Dovetail Games teams. If you’d like to share your feedback on the update or the game in general, don’t forget to join the official CATAN - Console Edition discord!
Continuing our April CATAN goodness, at the start of April, the CATAN - Console Edition roadmap was published! Check it out in the shiny, cool video below:
Both us and the team over at Dovetail are super excited to bring more CATAN goodness to you all. As time goes on we’ll have more and more information to share with you about our future plans, as we’re planning on releasing a content roadmap every three months. So keep your eyes peeled for those exciting updates!
If reading is more your thing, there’s an entire article over on the CATAN - Console Edition website you can read here. It goes into a ton of detail about each of these future updates, so it’s well worth a read.
Since we all began working from home in 2020, we’ve had the occasional time where some people would get together in the office for an in-person meeting. However, we’d still never put a proper effort behind getting the entire team together in one place so that we could all hang out! Well, in April we finally set that right.
Last month, we organised a team visit to Fanboy 3 in Manchester (which we can highly recommend visiting by the way). We played board games, met our new starters and then grabbed some food afterwards to have a proper catch up. For many of us, it’d been years since we’d had a chance to see the rest of the team all together. Sadly not all of us could make it, but it was such a success that we’re definitely going to be doing it again in the future.
We’re massively aware that working from home can put a strain on the relationships we’d normally be able to naturally build when we all work in an office together, so doing get-togethers like this is critical to ensure we remember that we’re a team! Also, working out who is the best board game player among us is important for bragging rights.
In our last news Round-Up, we mentioned that we had three new team members joining us here at Nomad! They’ve now settled in a little bit, and are getting stuck into learning Unreal Engine in order to be prepared for our next, exciting (but still super secret) project that we’re going to be hopefully undertaking soon.
If you want to find out more about who these exciting new members of the Nomad team are, read our blog update here.
Does this also count as a secret project update too then? You bet! While we can’t share any real new information, we’re getting a lot more confident in the fact that we’ll be taking on a new project soon - and taking on these new team members is partly due to that strong confidence in ourselves and the skills that we’ll need from these new members!
In April, our very own Tom Young got the chance to sit down with Scotsword, organiser of the League of Dracula, and talk all things Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition! You can check out the full chat over on Scotswords Youtube channel, or in the video below:
Every month we answer questions from you, the community! We got just two questions this month, so make sure you scroll down to the bottom of this round-up to find out where YOU can send your questions to us into.
From Fabrie [Translated from French]
Good morning, I bought Catan's game on Playstation I really appreciate this game that I know since I have all the expansions on the shelf I would like to know first of all if you have the project to add the expansions it would be so attractive and interesting. I would also have an idea for a game of the same order as Catan but in a different universe but rather nice and new.
Thanks for getting in touch Fabrie! Glad to see someone who’s very invested in CATAN approves of our version. As mentioned in the roadmap, we’re planning on adding Helpers of CATAN to the game, followed by a big expansion that we can’t talk about just yet. So keep an eye out for updates on all the different CATAN - Console Edition social places for the latest updates.
As for your idea, we’re always happy to hear about cool ideas that people have! Feel free to send them our way via email again or on the CATAN - Console Edition Discord.
From Darren
When you’re making a digital board game and a rule in the game is open to interpretation, how do you handle that?
A very good question! As we usually make a physical board game at the request of the company that originally made the game, we can get in touch with the designers/creators of the game to clarify any nitty-gritty rules questions that only really come up in niche edge cases. We still need to account for those cases though, so often we have to push the rules system harder than the original designers ever intended.
If there’s ever a case where we can’t get clarification, we’ll discuss the best course of action internally and make a judgement call based on that. Not everyone will always agree with that call, but that’s okay! We can always explain our reasoning if asked, as we’ll have thought through that decision enough to have a solid reason to back up that choice.
Also, we have the ability to put in house rules! If two different interpretations of the rules can be made, we can judge give players to choose between the ones they prefer.
And that’s the end of this months update! Don’t forget, if you’ve got questions you want to ask the Nomad team, you can always send your questions to questions@nomadgames.co.uk, or fill in the form below! We answer each and every question that comes in, so don’t worry if you want to ask us something weird. In fact, we’d encourage it!
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