At Gen Con, ICv2 sat down with newcomer Griggling Games, Inc., and spoke with Ian Brody, the company president and main game designer, about Quartermaster General, a WWII game debuting at Gen Con, their other games, and where the company came from.
 
Quartermaster General is a fast-paced WWII game for 2- 6 players that plays in 90 minutes.  "What makes it different from a lot of others is that it’s card-driven," Brody explained. "Each of the major powers has a unique deck of cards that plays differently, much like a collectible card game might have different decks with different strategies."  The goal of the game is to keep supply lines open for the army, while destroying enemy supply lines and forcing their surrender.  The game is for players 12 and up, and has an MSRP of $49.95.
 
"It has an incredible amount of replayability because you don’t know what you’re going to do until you draw that opening hand," Brody said.  "It’s really accessible to all different types of people.  I came home to find my wife and proofreader playing a game just for fun, and if two women are sitting down to play a war game, something good is going on with that game!"  British distributor Esdevium recently picked up Griggling on the strength of the game.  "The response has been so phenomenal that we’re already working on a small expansion adding airplanes," Brody shared. 
 
Another title of note is Destination Neptune.  "It’s a science-based optimistic vision of the next 100 years in space, where you build colonies, factories, you gain fame," Brody said.  "It’s very much like a heavy, serious, solid Euro-game, but it doesn’t have the space theme pasted on, it actually came from a space simulation that was simplified into a Euro-game.  So we had a good response from self-identified astrophysicists and space hounds."  The game is for 2-4 players, ages 12 and up, and plays in 90 minutes.  MSRP is $49.95.
 
Griggling also offers a light cooperative card game called Celestial Rainbows with illustrations by visual artist Aurora.  "The goal is to build rainbows," Brody said.  "Games Magazine said they liked it more than Hanabi."  The game is for 2-8 players, ages 8 and up, and plays in 15 -30 minutes. MSRP is $12.95.
 






Griggling’s next release will be Santa’s Bag, releasing in October.  In the light family game, players are elves in Santa’s workshop, building toys for girls and boys from Santa’s list.  The more complex the toy, the more points are earned.  When Santa’s list it completed, the player with the most points wins.  The game is for 2 -8 players, ages 7 and up, and plays in 15 minutes.  MSRP is $24.95.
 
Brody also shared how he started the company.  "I have been a lifelong gamer, and I worked for a long time saving money.  One day I just decided it was time to stop being a contractor on the Death Star and to live my dream, so here I am, trying to do that."
 
As for the company’s name: "A griggling is an apple or pear that is too small to be sold on the market, and a grig, which people know from fairy literature, is a fairy that cleans up an orchard and takes those apples and pears.  In reality, it was starving kids from the village in the Renaissance that would take those, but if the lord of the manor knew that a human could eat them they would have insisted that they be sold.  So the kids would clean up the orchard, take these little apples or pears to make applesauce or whatever, and the workers or farmers would say 'Oh it was the fairies that got them.  The grigs got the grigglings.'"