Hi, my name is...

Hello there, my name is Paul Brook and I have two birthdays, two children, two fathers, two mothers, dozens of board games, thousands of toy soldiers and a wonderful wife that has somehow tolerated my many and varied flights of fancy over the years. 

Back in 2013 I started East Street Games with visions of building a wargames company to rival Games Workshop since then a number of things have changed, firstly East Street Games is now focused on developing board games and secondly given the lack of commercial success I've experienced my dream is to one day break even! So, in order to pay the bills and feed my board game and toy soldier addiction I also work as a software developer.

So why start a blog? There are a couple reasons for me to start blogging; firstly I'm not a huge fan of social media but I as a board game publisher I understand it would probably be helpful if I had some sort of online presence in addition to the web store. Social media often makes me feel a little bit grubby and I'm not always comfortable posting and engaging on it, I intend to explain my feelings on that in more detail in a future blog post. Secondly sometimes when first coming up with a concept for a game there can often be holes in the game that become blockers that stop me from turning what I think is a good a game idea into a prototype, so I want to use this blog as a cathartic game designing tool where you, dear reader can see the challenges I'm facing and chime in if you have any thoughts. 

In this blog I intend to talk about the games that I'm designing from vague ideas and concepts through to those that are published. I design both board games and wargames and will be talking about them both along with a few things to do with publishing from an East Street Games perspective.      

I'm looking forward to showing my workings and I really hope you enjoy this blog. 

Happy Gaming

Paul 

P.S If you want to know why this blog is called "The Whole Pigeon", you'll have to read the next post...