All the way back in 2011, JUEGOS RANCHEROS got its start thanks to the generosity & support of Alamo Drafthouse & its offshoot lounge, The Highball.

Though we eventually had to relocate our monthly meetup due to construction at the Alamo’s South Lamar location, we’re very proud to announce that beginning tonight, May 13th, at 10:30PM, we’ll be returning to The Highball for a new, weekly Fantastic Arcade event.

These new events will be held weekly on each Wednesday night — following Geeks Who Drink trivia — except the first Wednesday of each month, the night before our regular JUEGOS RANCHEROS events at The North Door.

The events will run from 10:30PM to basically whenever everyone gets tuckered out, and while they’ll be somewhat more relaxed than our North Door events, we guarantee they’ll be no less enlightening & fun.

It’ll likely take us a little time to settle into this new, weekly groove and set up programming that you can rely on (we’re still working out hosts & themes for each event), but expect us to try out new things both more experimental (non-videogames??) and more traditional (beloved multiplayer console games??).

We hope you’ll join us beginning tonight, May 13th, at 10:30PM at The Highball’s 1120 S Lamar Blvd location (directly next door to the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse), for food, drinks and late-night play!

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!

As you might recall or have seen yourself, our February meetup consisted of local developers Tiger Style taking to the stage and giving Austin the first look behind the curtain at their upcoming game Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon.

The game — a sequel to the 2009 iPhone original Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor — is set to expand on the first with an even larger and richer world, which again layers super approachable web-slinging and insect-eating mechanics over the deeper, unspoken mysteries of the locations in which it takes place, left for the player to delve into and uncover of their own accord.

To help give everyone everywhere equal opportunity to prepare to piece together those mysteries, we present here full video of the night’s proceedings. Above you’ll find a complete walkthrough of some early levels that introduces many of the mechanics you will remember from the first, as well as a number of new features, including one that changes the content of the game based on the time & weather around you in the real world.

And, at top, Tiger Style co-founder Randy Smith gives some background on the locations, magic & secret societies which inspired the fiction of the game, which will be followed by some additional new material appearing on Tiger Style’s own blog soon… along with more information on the game itself, which you can find right here.

As you’ve by now probably heard, JUEGOS RANCHEROS is now an Austin Creative Alliance sponsored group, meaning that we can now accept cash & in-kind donations via ACA that are tax-deductible for you.

And while we haven’t yet pulled together anything as formal as the membership drive currently being put together by our friends at Babycastles, all of our internal discussions keep coming back to one thing: all we want for Xmas is one Windows laptop.

As Adam mentioned in his post, every public event we put on results in a mad scramble to beg/borrow/steal hardware from friends & family for you to play games on, and having the freedom to know that we had official, reliable JUEGOS hardware would be an unbelievable first step for us.

We don’t exactly have a dream machine, but something along the lines of this Lenovo laptop is a good start — quad-core, pretty future-proof & able to handle whatever we throw at it.

That’s a big “ask” though, but we also know that local studios frequently upgrade their own desktop/laptop hardware at the end of the year, and would like to remind everyone that you can get an additional tax writeoff by giving JUEGOS your last-year’s models — everything helps!

We’re also always in need of additional hardware like wired Xbox 360 controllers for Windows, 25″+ HDMI widescreen monitors, non-powered 4-8 port USB hubs & USB extension cables, over-the-ear headphones, wired mice, powerstrips & more!

If you or someone you know might be able to help us reach our goal of a single, nice, reliable Windows laptop by the end of the year — or any other donations that can help us better serve Austin’s indie community! — please let us know by emailing juegosrancheros@gmail.com & we can help guide you through the donation process!

Since May of 2011, JUEGOS RANCHEROS has been putting on some pretty ok events here in Austin: games inside planetariums at the ND, intense JS Joust battles at The Highball (when The Highball still existed), the Nation of Indies workshop, curation and volunteering for Fantastic Arcade, school presentations, bringing TEXATRONS both to SXSW & a permanent home at Guzu Gallery, and more.

It’s been challenging, sure, but it’s also been our complete pleasure to help bring the most amazing and inspiring new independent games to the public every month for absolutely free. And it almost goes without saying that we couldn’t do it without our volunteers or our awesome venue partners, like the Alamo Drafthouse, the North Door, and SXSW Gaming.

Over the course of the last couple years though, some rough patterns have emerged. The main thing we’ve noticed is that our preparation process and display equipment leave a lot to be desired. We are really happy with how our events have all come together, but that’s only been possible through a lot of last-minute panic and mountains of emails every month as we collect whatever laptops and desktops and monitors we can get our hands on the week before. It’s gotten to the point where having some dedicated equipment, especially some laptops and game controllers, would actually make a huge difference, in the quality of our monthly events especially.

However, buying a handful of laptops out of pocket is a bit rough. Becoming a full nonprofit organization would allow us to accept donations more easily, but there’s a ton of overhead involved. This is why we are so happy to announce that JUEGOS RANCHEROS is now an Austin Creative Alliance sponsored organization. In a nutshell, this means that we can now accept both cash and in-kind donations, via ACA, with negligible extra overhead for us as a group.

By accepting donations of equipment we can streamline the preparation and execution of our monthly events, which in turn gives us the flexibility to put on even more and better free events throughout the year. Even cash donations can be a huge help: we can purchase new equipment ourselves, or put the funds toward covering venue rental fees for our longer workshops. Our ACA sponsorship will make it easier to work with local school and art venues without losing or overcomplicating that special JUEGOS RANCHEROS sauce.

We’ll be updating again soon with more specifics about how you or your organization can help us with technology needs, but in the meantime, you can make a tax-deductible cash donation via the Austin Creative Alliance site (be sure to select JUEGOS RANCHEROS in the “to which organization” dropdown!), and you can email us at juegosrancheros@gmail.com to talk more about other donations!

So, with this news, what does JR look like going forward? Basically the same, only better, and more of it, with a bit less stress for us organizers. More workshops, more fostering of Austin’s independent and artful games culture, more TEXATRONs, and more FREE monthly events. With your help, and the support of the Austin Creative Alliance, JR’s third year is looking like the best ever.

Hey everyone! JUEGOS co-founder Adam Saltsman here. It is with a potent mixture of relief and regret that we post this reminder that we are SKIPPING the regularly scheduled JUEGOS RANCHEROS meetup ND during October.

We are all taking a much-needed break after this year’s uber-successful Fantastic Arcade event (seen above), and will be returning with a great JR meetup at the usual time and place at the ND, Thursday, November 7th. We’ll post more details about that in a few weeks!

In the meantime, we are also working on a bunch of administrative and organizational tasks within JR itself that will enable us to do more and better events going forward, and we’ll be posting a bunch of information about that very soon too.

That’s all for now! Have a great October. We’ll have some cool good news and new plans to share very soon!