Since the beginning of my journey to create a card game, my family has been incredibly supportive. My wife, Kirren, has been super supportive of me chasing this dream and has helped out in numerous ways, but today I want to call out my ma as truly making it possible for me to launch a Kickstarter this Summer.
My ma, Beth Seiler, is a retired teacher with an English degree and many years of teaching experience. When it came time to come up with topics for my game, who better to come up with topics than someone that has lived through it all and has published her own writings, with books like, "Give Me A Chance." Oh, and did I mention she has accomplished all this being legally blind for most of her life, and completely blind for the past decade?
My ma was eager to volunteer to come up with topic ideas for TOP TALE, and she started long ago when the game was still called, "Top That!" In the above image (Photo Credit, Wild Horse Ranch Photography), I show my ma with a couple of our horses, and the picture is surrounded by one of the first topic lists that she sent, with TWO HUNDRED TOPIC IDEAS! For every volume of TOP TALE, I only plan to release 100 topics, which is enough to get several hours of game play without repeating a topic, and when you play the same topic with new players, the responses are almost always different. Anyhow, she went on to deliver another set of TWO HUNDRED TOPIC IDEAS, just a few months after the first.
One of the biggest hurdles I struggled with while starting the development of TOP TALE, was coming up with topics. Having my ma hand four hundred topic ideas, to me on a silver platter was a huge accelerator. I would have probably felt bad for her going to all the effort, but she claims she really enjoys coming up with ideas, then racing to her computer to type them into her list. Even today, she is continuing to develop new topic ideas, including topics for a kids-focused game of TOP TALE.
What I've done is take each topic and created a caption to go with each one. In some cases the topic was reworded slightly, but other than that, the cards are all written by my ma. Given that it was such a struggle to come up with topics at first, it may have lead to the game taking twice as long to develop to this point. It's possible I would have given up along the way.
Being that it's Mother's Day this weekend, I wanted to give credit where credit is due, and describe how my ma helped bring TOP TALE to life. She deserves credit as co-author for the majority of the content of the game. Thanks Ma!
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