Want to get the first look at some of the best independent games of 2015? Then join us Thursday, February 5th, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as JUEGOS RANCHEROS presents a selection of games recently nominated for top awards at this year’s Independent Games Festival.

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

With the festival headed to the expo floor of the Game Developers Conference in March, JUEGOS RANCHEROS will be showcasing a number of this year’s finalists — jury selected from a pool of over 1000 entries — from the Main competition as well as the Student Showcase, ahead of the IGF’s official ceremony on Wednesday, March 4th, 2015.

All the games — including some not yet available to the public! — will be playable beginning this Thursday, February 5th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!

In some horrible twist of Gregorian fate, the first Thursday of the new year lands directly on the first actual day of the new year, so come nurse your holiday hangover in a dark room this Thursday, January 1st, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door, where we’ll be screening two episodes of our local favorite TV show: GameCenter CX.

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

If you’re unfamiliar with the legacy of GameCenter CX (now in its 18th season in Japan, and sometimes known stateside as Retro Game Master), the premise is simple: comedian Shinya Arino is confined to a room and made to marathon-complete retro games from the NES forward in a single sitting.

This can, on rare occasion, simply take until sundown — more often, the brutal difficulty can push game sessions well past midnight, where Arino’s exhaustion ratchets up the challenge.

While the prospect of watching a middle-aged man play an 8-bit game to completion may not sound like the most thrilling way to ring in the new year, we can promise that skilled editing — and the universal sense of triumph that comes from seeing someone overcome adversity that many of us painfully recall from our own youth — makes this honestly one of the best TV shows about videogames ever created.

We’ll be screening two episodes: the first starting quite promptly after 7pm, followed by a short intermission, and the second up until the venue’s next act. It’s OK if you show up feeling as bad as you look — probably all of us will be.

Come spend the evening with us this Thursday, January 1st, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The screening is free and open to the public. We’ll be back to our usual, brighter-eyed and bushier-tailed programming in February!

In our estimation he’s one of the best and most undersung interactive artists working in videogames today, and this Thursday, December 4th, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door, we’ll take a look back at the work of New York based artist Vectorpark, including the debut of his upcoming iOS game, Metamorphabet.

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

Probably best known for his 2009 adventure game Windosill on iOS and Steam (pictured below), Vectorpark was a pioneer of interactive web art, and is a reigning champion at creating both dreamlike environments and creatures which inhabit them that all feel unbelievably tactile and alive.

We’ll have a number of these early and more recent works on display at the ND, and will also be giving Austin the first chance to play his latest game, Metamorphabet, an “interactive, animated alphabet” which, says Vectorpark, “presents the 26 letters of the alphabet as a series of luminous and unexpected transformations, inviting playful participation from kids and adults alike.”

All the games will be playable beginning this Thursday, December 4th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!

For the November edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we’re bringing back some of our favorite crowd-pleasing multiplayer games that aren’t widely available elsewhere. Join us this Thursday, November 6^th, at 7:00 PM at Austin’s North Door for a special encore showing of Tenya Wanya Teens and Musclecat Showdown.

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

Tenya Wanya Teens is a cute, crazy, thirty-two button multiplayer party game from Keita Takahashi, perhaps best known for his Namco cult classic Katamari Damacy and the even cultier PS3/iPhone game Noby Noby Boy. Tenya Wanya Teens, co-produced by Takahashi’s studio Uvula as well as Wild Rumpus and Venus Patrol, returns to Austin after making several other choice appearances, including its most recent showing at XOXO, Portland’s indie art and technology festival.

Musclecat Showdown is a game from Major Bueno & Bee and Puppycat creator Natasha Allegri that we first premiered at Juegos Rancheros in March. It’s received such wide acclaim and wide grins from players alike that we had to bring it back to the North Door for a second showing. The goal of Musclecat Showdown? To settle a schoolyard rivalry by battling your handsome, beefed-up cats in a stylish pose-off, of course!

Both games will be set up and ready to play on Thursday, November 6, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!

Want to spend your Thursday night wrestling a pitbull to the ground & high-fiving a pizza as you lose yourself in a ‘giddy apocalypse’? Then come join us this Thursday, October 2nd, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as we present the local double-feature premiere of Kevin Cancienne’s local multiplayer dog-em-up Dog Park & Jane Friedhoff’s Slam City Oracles.

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

Developer Cancienne — also known for his design work on area/code’s early classic iPhone puzzle game Drop7 — has described Dog Park as “a fighting game without the fighting”, a four-‘person’ brawler where players choose their dog & score points for chasing, wrestling, cavorting & gamboling in perfectly-pitched canine fashion.

Various JUEGOS RANCHEROS organizers have also described it as “omg the best game ever”.

In addition to Dog Park, we’ll also be showing Slam City Oracles, a two-player body-slammer by Jane Friedhoff, with art by Jenny Jiao Hsia & music by Prophets & Kings.

Already drawing a number of favorable comparisons to Katamari Damacy from sites like Kotaku for its cheerfully chaotic cartoony slapstick physicality, Oracles is a vertically-oriented game where two girls have four minutes to joyfully & wantonly break the entire world around them.

Both games were commissioned for the NYU Game Center’s No Quarter exhibition — the yearly local-multiplayer focused show which has spawned games like Nidhogg, Bara Bari Ball & Bennett Foddy’s Speed Chess — and were first debuted there September 19th, alongside Naomi Clark‘s consensual card game Consentacle and Corporate Vandals, a physical game from Shawn Allen, creator of Treachery in Beatdown City.

Both games will be making their local debut Thursday, October 2nd, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!

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!