Hi! We are very glad to introduce you to Fun Dome Games in this first post.
Fun Dome Games is an indie board game publishing company that was born with the purpose of gathering under a single name a series of card and board projects that our game developer, Fabio, along with his team mates Matteo and Serena, are working on.
Spicify is the first game we created. It is a hot party game that can be played both with a special person, to break the ice and initiate more intimate moments, and with friends, to spice up a game night and get to know each other at a whole new level.
Spicify was born in 2017 as a first prototype made just to play with our own friends at a bachelorette party, but given the interest it received both during the party itself and a lot of further play-testing, we decided to give it a chance and started a Kickstarter Campaign in June 2022 which was successful and helped us covering some of the costs associated with the game production. By November 2022 we were already shipping the first copies of the game to our backers. This is something we are very proud of since the average time from the end of Kickstarter Campaign and the delivery of the game it’s way way higher than that! For a first time creator it was not an easy challenge to take but we learned a lot along the way and in the following years we created an interesting network of contacts in the board-game industry.
Spicify is currented distributed in Italy by Cranio Creations and we are working together with Albi to release a localized version for the Czech and Slovak markets. Nonetheless, it is available for sale in USA, Australia and all of Europe through its dedicated website.
As the time went by we began to work also on other projects.
The second game we designed, again, just for personal use, is The City of Zombies a cooperative game for kids where all players have to work together to defeat the zombie hordes infesting the city. This project was created with Fabio’s nephew, Christian, a 5 yo boy at that time, whose imagination, stimulated by Fabio’s questions, came out with most of the elements composing the game, both as a theme and as how players can play to reach their goal. Who better than a kid may know what they want to play? Fabio helped Christian to keep the imagination within boundaries that would allow the game to be playable and balanced. After this first iteration a very rough prototype made of some written paper-cards, a big paper sheet serving as a board and a few Lego characters as players and “Zombies” we began some play-testing to refine mechanics and components. When the gameplay reached a sufficient refinement Fabio began working on an early prototype, creating some of the artwork (the board) and using some AI-place-holder graphics to get the idea of the look that he wanted to get with the game. Right now Fabio is working on the artwork of the game, so stay tuned to get updates on the design phase.
In the meantime, we started to work also on a “softer” version of Spicify, which may help players who love the game mechanics, but think it’s a bit too spicy, to play the game with their friends. Right now, the name of the expansion is “Appetizer Edition“, which gives a good idea of what is meant for: an opener to the original game. All of its challenges are completely new, and, while they keep intanct the soul of the original version, they are much easier to play with any group of friends since they don’t require the same level of intimacy that even some of the challenges in the cold deck of Spicify needs. Another key difference from the original version is that it introduces a whole new set of modifiers (26 in total) that can be used in both versions of the game. These modifiers were created to serve two purposes: increase the variety and replayability of the challenges, and involve more players in the action, so they don’t have just to “watch” when they are not directly participating in a challenge. The other major difference is that this time the game does not require players to pick a partner of a specific gender nor it specifies what to wear during the challenge, again, with the purpose of making the game easier to try and allow more players to experience the fun we had when playing it with our friends.
Following the spirit of “Mens sana in corpore sano” Fabio and Serena often take a walk in the woods nearby his parents’ house in Tuscany. Walking in the nature is very inspiring, and helps to get new ideas. Since they both love spirits and experimenting with mixology and cocktails, on one of these walks they began to talk about a possible game about cocktails, with Project name “Cocktail Bars“. A few miles on the way and they had drafted most of the key mechanics of game, later refined with further conversations (also while walking in the woods). Right now the game is still in a conceptual phase, and Fabio is looking for unique ways to test different strategies and balance the game before creating a first prototype and begin with the actual playtesting phase.
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