COLONY Update: October 2026

Hello everyone!

This month was a bit of a mixed bag, but we’re coming out on the positive overall! To give a little life update, and for those unaware, since November of last year, after befalling an accident while moving back down to Arizona, I have had painful difficulty using my left knee that went largely unknown of the root issue until recently with an MRI, revealing that my ACL was all but completely torn away, hanging on by only a few threads. I had surgery near the beginning of the month (after I returned from RinCon) to reconstruct the ACL, and I have been in recovery from that since, and while that has somewhat slowed me down, I’m still kicking (well, metaphorically, gonna have to get some PT in before I’m back to actually kicking). But enough about all that, I’m sure you want the juicy details for this month, so let’s get into it!

RinCon 2026 - A Report

For the unaware, RinCon (named after the Rincon mountains near Tucson, AZ), is a tabletop gaming convention that runs the first weekend of October. The majority of the convention floor space is dominated by two varieties of tables: hosted event tables, and freeplay tables. Hosted event tables are manned by a game master to guide the table of players through whatever game the game master has brought to play, with dedicated time slots scheduled ahead of the event for their sessions that convention visitors sign up to fill a seat. The freeplay tables are, as you might expect, a free-for-all for usage that visitors can take at any time to play a game they have brought from home or a game they have purchased from one of the vendors.

We were lucky enough to be invited to the event by its foremost showrunner, Karen, when we were showing off our game at Tucson Comic-Con back in September. We were given the privilege of a dedicated table space in the main gaming hall near the front entrance for the entire weekend, and thank god, because it would have been impossible to run it otherwise. I was accompanied this time around by my friend Malik, whom I met through a dear group of board gaming friends from when I lived in Tucson. He was quick to learn the game and helped me man the table whenever I was burned out from playing (shoutout Malik, you’s a real one, brother). I don’t know if there was more than an hour each day when we weren’t playing either a full or nearly-full table of players, and the response was nearly unanimous: “When can we get our hands on the full game?” Not only were players loving the gameplay and the themes, but they also would sit and listen to me rattle off about the lore and the worldbuilding until my voice was sore. It was an incredible weekend!

We saw our friends from Tucson Comic-Con, Xander and Bash, who pulled their parents into a session so they could all play at home with the print-and-play demo. They would come and play at least one session a day, and knew the game so well from Comic-Con that they were also able to help out teaching and clarifying game mechanics for newcomers. What superstars, dude.

We also got to meet up with Kenny, who actually met up with us at our Demo Day at Tucson Games & Gadgets back in May earlier this year, but couldn’t stick around to play with us. Luckily, he was able to squeeze in a game with us this time around, and told me that he was so impressed with our presentation in May that he went home and binged all of our stuff on YouTube and our website. Being as small of a project as we are, it’s surreal to meet up with, let alone have superfans like Kenny, but it's so cool nonetheless. Shoutout to you, Kenny, it was great to talk with you!

Also of note was we got to hang for a bit with Levi from Talarius Gaming, whom we also met at Comic-Con. He invited Malik and I to join in on a one-shot he was running on Saturday evening, but both Malik and myself were dead tired, so we opted instead to watch from the sidelines the opening act. As stated in last month’s newsletter, Levi’s RPG, Legends of Kralis, is a wide open science-fantasy game with a d100 roll-under system, and Levi spun an excellent opener to his one-shot which ended up being a very fun flavored twist on the classic “Last Voyage of the Demeter.” While we couldn’t stick around to find out how it ended, we did have one of his players at our table the next morning, and they said it was a very fun and enjoyable one-shot! If you want to check out Legends of Kralis for yourself, you can check it out at www.talariusgaming.com!

Beyond the old friends and acquaintances we caught up with, we also met loads of new people, both players and developers alike, who had kind things to say about our game, as well as wonderful advice and feedback. I saved our sign-up sheets so I could give some shoutouts to the folks who came by for our scheduled games, so I want to give a big shoutout to Jacob, Sean, Justin, Samantha, Matt, Daniel, Jonathan, Gabriel, Adrienne, and Brian, and to the countless others who came by for walk-up sessions. I couldn’t catch all your names, but to all of you, I thank you for giving our humble game a try, and I hope you enjoyed your time at our table!

I also want to give one last shoutout to the illustrious and prolific game designer James Ernest, whom I got to shake hands with, and whose YouTube videos and advice have been a wonderful tool in teaching me on my game design journey. Despite my mild fanboyishness I’m sure I was unable to hide, he was an absolute gentleman, and even came by my table to give Colony a look, and interviewed me for his YouTube channel (I’ll be sure to share that on our socials when that goes out).

RinCon was a wonderful experience with lots of great feedback from our players, and I’m sure I’ll be back again next year! As for upcoming events, I’m in talks for another Demo Day here in Arizona sometime in December, but nothing is set in stone just yet, so if you’re in the area, keep an eye on our channels so you don’t miss out!

Before I close out the State of the Game, an interesting piece of critique we got a few times over the RinCon weekend from a mechanical standpoint is that rolling above a Hit Score for dealing damage and rolling under a Skill Score for Skill Checks felt incongruous with each other. Since we’re pretty well set on the roll under system for Skill Scores (it gives us a much cleaner way to handle difficulty), and the Hit Score is a pretty simple system to just flip numbers around and have the same effect and roll outcome, we are now working toward implementing a roll-under system for the Hit Scores, or at the very least, in the first stages of playtesting and seeing if there are further ways we can further improve dealing damage and combat in general. If you feel so inclined to fudge some numbers around on your character sheets (6 > 1, 5 > 2, 4 > 3) and give it a try in your own sessions, let us know what you think!

State of the Game

As mentioned previously, I’ve been somewhat indisposed, but that didn’t stop me from getting some good ol’ R&D in for our wargame format, Swarm. While I’ve dabbled much more in the realms of deck-building games and RPGs, the world of wargames has been more of a stranger to me, even being surrounded by a myriad of friends throughout the years who enjoy the genre far more than I ever have. So delving into this, I am leaning on their experience to help me understand more of what can make a wargame special, and more than that, what makes wargames fun.

From a core mechanical perspective, I’ve been brainstorming some of the more basic functions, such as unit creation, deployment, activation, turn sequence, and the like, and whittling them down into a core list to present to the playtest group at Deuces Wild this upcoming Saturday (November 7th). As always, if you are in the White Mountains of AZ and want to come through, I try to hold a playtest session the first Saturday of every month (barring conventions and events held out of town), and all are welcome to join!

Song of Origins

We’ve been making more progress on Part 3 of the Song of Origins this month. Charles has been working on art for Movement 8, and Hahli has been animating and editing parts of Movement 7. We look forward to bringing you this final installment, which will tell the early folkloric history of the Sekuta as well as revealing more of the dark works of Zek, in the coming months. While we have been tirelessly working toward getting the art assets completed so as to get Part 3 out by the end of the year, given our available resources it may end up releasing later than we had originally expected. We are, as always, doing everything we can with what we have, but we may just not quite make it in time. We’ll have a better idea of what that timeline looks like by this time next month, so we’ll give you an update in our next newsletter.

And with that, friends, we are out for the month! Thank you all so much for your continued interest in our humble project, we feel so blessed to be able to make this wonderful world for you all to play in and experience, and we hope you all have an absolutely wonderful month! Take care, be curious, and stay creative!

Cheers,

Isaac Muir

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