Can’t make it to this year’s Fantastic Arcade or want to get a leg up on the competition? Come join us next Thursday, September 4th, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as we present a special preview of some of this year’s best tournament games, including Gang Beasts, Push Me Pull You and Astro Duel.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

Headlining the event will be Boneloaf’s upcoming slapstick party-game Gang Beasts, already a verified indie cult hit, where players “grab, push, pull, punch, and throw their friends from wrestling rings, speeding trucks, and suspended platforms” with “doughy ragdoll physics and horrific environmental hazards.” We’ve previewed this one a bit before, and it became an instant favorite.

We’ll also be running Push Me Pull You, House House’s “2v2 sports game about friendship and wrestling” where connected snake-y worm-y contestants “love each other, work together, communicate and coordinate” as they use their shared body to “wrap, writhe, and wrestle the ball into your half of the court.”

And finally, we’ll be showing Astro Duel, the competitive multiplayer tabletop game from Austin’s own Rusty Moyher, where 2 to 4 players “blast each other using asteroid-style ships”, in fast-paced rounds “inspired by endless nights of Super Bomberman.

All three games will be run in tournament play during this year’s Fantastic Arcade, so come join us as we drink, play and get ready to better face your competition, Thursday, September 4th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public!

If you thought the Adventure Time Game Jam was going to be hard to top, we might just have done it: organizers of Fantastic Arcade have just announced the Barfcade Game Jam, a two-week jam open to developers world wide to create a ton of two-player head-to-head games based on food, cooking, eating and (obviously) barfing.

Why barf and why now? Fantastic Arcade’s special guest this year will be Thu Tran, frequent Babycastles collaborator and creator of the super amazing cooking/puppet show Food Party (above) and its MTV2 followup Late Night Munchies.

Thu will be providing the special secret ingredient required in all the jam games, which will be announced just before the jam begins on Saturday, August 30th, and will be co-hosting the Barfcade proper, a live game-show event held on September 21st that will be streamed for the rest of the world to see on Venus Patrol’s Twitch channel.

Games for the jam are meant to be fast, competitive, and no longer than 30 seconds each — the best of these will be strung together for the Barfcade event, giving the live competition a sort of head-to-head WarioWare vibe. Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman has created a brand new example game (pictured above), which you can play at the Barfcade website to get a sense of where to head!

The jam will run Saturday, August 30th through Sunday, September 14th — more details are available at the Barfcade site, which will be where you can also find the secret ingredient at launch. Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are presented here for your reference.

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It’s been on our most-wanted lists for ages, and the time is finally here: come join us next Thursday, August 7th, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as we host the local premiere of the super gorgeous exploration game Hohokum.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

Created by Honeyslug & Richard Hogg and due for simultaneous release on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 & Vita on August 12th (also available for pre-order right now!), we’ll be taking the game’s kite-like “long mover” protagonist for a spin on the North Door’s massive screen, and introducing attendees to the game’s fantastic soundtrack, produced in conjunction with indie electronic record label Ghostly International.

Honeyslug themselves best describe the game as “a place to wander about and get lost in”, so come join us as we drink, play and explore the world of Hohokum, Thursday, August 7th, promptly at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public!

Did you visit us in Marfa & want to learn more, or are you curious what’s up with JUEGOS RANCHEROS at the Marfa Film Festival? It’s currently day two of the four-day pop-up Space Cowboy Arcade, and the reception so far has been great!

Chosen from the nearly 60 submissions we received after the two-week Space Cowboy Game Jam — all of which are free for everyone to download and play at the jam website — visitors to the Arcade are able to explore and play through a rotating selection of games (including those seen above).

Our hope was that we could provide a down-tempo quasi-chill-out-space for festival attendees to experience games that reflected the same lonesome, existential romance of the surrounding desert, and we wanted to give a quick thanks to Marfa Film Festival organizers for bringing us into the fold alongside a fantastic lineup of features & shorts.

We’ll have more images from the Arcade in the coming weeks, but thanks as well for now to everyone who’s stopped by, and — of course — to all the devs that participated in the jam (and to the amazing Irene Koh for her poster image at top!) and gave us something incredible to show!

Spaceteam isn’t just one of our favorite mobile games, it’s one of the most enduringly engrossing, and so on Thursday, June 5th, at 7:00PM, Austin’s North Door will be host to the first of a set of worldwide tournaments as we present the Spaceteam Admiral’s Challenge.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

First released in late 2012 and best described by its creators as a “cooperative shouting game”, Spaceteam has been a local party and any-other-downtime mainstay since. And so when word came that creator Henry Smith would be relaunching his campaign to fund new games through the Spaceteam Admiral’s Club (after coming just shy of his original Kickstarter goal), we knew we wanted to officially take part.

And so, on Thursday we’ll be hosting the first of a series of Spaceteam tournaments that will be happening from June 4th to July 5th, across dozens of worldwide locations that’ll also include New York, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Melbourne, and Montreal.

Participants will be able to download an updated tournament-ready version of Spaceteam that’ll include new special achievements & in-game rewards for competitors, and physical prizes for the best Spaceteam captains of the night.

We’ll have more information on how this is all going to work the night of, so come as a team or be prepared to form a crew the night of, but either way we hope to see you out on Thursday, June 5th, promptly at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public — come drink, play, and meet the people changing the way you think about videogames!