Rt. 60 Man Gaming Company creators Caleb Huff,
Michael Valentine, and Kyle Quinn
ONCE UPON A TIME…
In the spring of 2018 in Huntington, West Virginia, my cousin Caleb Huff told me
he had a bunch of ideas for board games. That’s nice,” I thought. It was only a few weeks
later that my longtime college friend Kyle Quinn, unprovoked and out of the blue said,
“I’d like to make a board game, I just don’t have any ideas.” “That’s nice,” I thought…
Wait a minute…a rusty cog started to slowly turn in my brain as I connected the dots…
“My cousin was just telling me about all these ideas he had for board games! Let’s sit
down with him.” And so began my unpurposeful interest in designing board games,
stuck somewhere in between creativity and craftsmanship. Caleb pitched us a few
suggestions, some lavish, sprawling, complicated, worker-placement games with
resource gathering-over my head, but others closer to my level of competence and
patience, such as one idea that captured our imagination immediately –
A game he was considering naming ScrapBots.
The original proposal involved collecting money and multi-tiered upgrades,
but being the resident dummy in the group, I championed for stripping it
down to its essence and trimming out any of the over-complicated concepts.
We beat it around for a couple weeks and once we had our mechanics settled
on and did some play testing, Kyle and I (being former art majors at Marshall
University) went to work drawing out the 60 Mission Cards,
110 Junk Cards, and 105 Robot Parts.
Some of Kyle Quinn’s prototype homework
Finally, after settling on the name JunkBots, we met at Caleb’s office with a paper
prototype – he’s one of those baby-delivering doctors btw. Hey,” we thought, “This
game is actually fun. How did we do this? Making games is easy.
We might have this printed in a few months.” Har har.
How innocent. How ignorant. How imbecilic.
Caleb Huff and Kyle Quinn take the prototype for a spin.
We knew right away who we wanted to do the actual artwork.
In art school, Kyle and I had become close friends with Glen Brogan,
who has earned a name for himself doing illustrations for Disney, Marvel,
and many other big time fancy-shmancy corporations. We anxiously
wondered if he could make time for his old pals in between his more
illustrious gigs, and he did…kind of. Glen began by designing the
box art and creating three of the 21 full robots for the game before
he got buried in other work. Of course we totally understood and were
grateful to even have some of his original art included in our game. The reins
were picked up by Jesse Lewis, an artist I had worked with while managing
a frame shop a few years prior. We waited patiently – drawing hundreds of
pictures can take a while – especially when you have another full time job!
RustBots artists Glen Brogan and Jesse Lewis
When we finally had our art, we produced 3 copies of the game, ordering the cards
through Game Crafter, then spray gluing to chipboard and cutting the robot pieces
by hand (for those of you keeping count at home, that’s 105 pieces x 3 = 315 at 4 cuts
for each side, drumroll…1,260 cuts, phew!) Now who is going to print this thing?
Having no clue what we were doing, we more or less flipped open the phonebook
and stuck our finger down. Got a few quotes from China and actually began working
with a company that ended up changing ownership and in the end didn’t seem to fully
understand what we were asking for. We decided to find a printing company in the
United States so there would be no language barrier misunderstandings. Staring at a list of
US printers I found online-…Hmm Florida. Sounds exotic. Shuffled Ink it is!
So totally by random chance we began work with the Americans at Shuffled Ink and
couldn’t have been happier with their customer service. Charles Levin and his team are
professional, patient, and detail oriented. He had every opportunity to take advantage of
us (again, if all we knew about producing a game was leather, we couldn’t saddle a flea),
but rather, mentored and advised us even when it meant making less money for his company.
And here comes October 2020. It is brought to our attention that there is a toy called
JunkBots where you use pieces of trash to build robots. Sound familiar? Oof.
Rather than chance it, we renamed the game to RustBots and with some clever photoshopping,
were able to redo the box title. With the new name in place, it was off to Kickstarter where we were
most thankful to have our project successfully backed by 260 wonderful individuals! Next came
some final tweaks to the art -I’m sure my over-attentiveness to tiny details bugged the snot out
of the Shuffled Ink staff, but they remained tolerant throughout the years of email exchanges.
It was exciting for us to receive our white box and proofs from the printer as well as to approve the
production copy which began the process of manufacturing 1,000 of our games. We couldn’t have
been happier with the quality of the components. After five years of on and off work and through
our trusted relationship with Shuffled Ink, in February of 2024 we finally got to hold our
completed games. It’s a pretty crazy and humbling feeling to go from scribblings on a
piece of notebook paper to something that looks and feels like a real live
board game and further unfathomable that is now on four continents!
-Michael Valentine, co-creator of Rt. 60 Man Gaming Company/RustBots
Caleb Huff and Kyle Quinn contain their excitement
checking out the first RustBots shipment
Check out what else we are working on at: rt60mangamingco.com
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