How do you navigate a videogame world when the game itself keeps re-writing the rules around you? Come find out this Sunday, April 1st, at 4PM at our special tenth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball, as we give Austin its first chance to play ANTICHAMBER, Demruth’s upcoming mindbending game of psychological exploration, with creator Alexander Bruce in attendance.

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

ANTICHAMBER comes to Austin fresh off its win at the 14th annual Independent Game Festival a few short weeks ago, where it took home the prize for Technical Excellence — the latest in a long string of recognition which also includes accolades from IndieCade, Penny Arcade and Japan’s Sense of Wonder Night.

There it also was named one of BitMob’s top three games of GDC 2012, who called it “an enlightened nightmare, a beautiful trap, a revelatory puzzle,” and added:

Alexander Bruce’s deliciously devious rabbit hole doesn’t set out to trick you so much as it wants you to stop tricking yourself. You don’t have to jump over everything…just walk instead. It can get frustrating if you stubbornly hold fast to everything video games ever taught you, but take a breath, step off the path, and do something that doesn’t feel quite right just to see if it works. That’s how you play Antichamber.

Come hear from and meet creator Bruce — visiting Austin from his native Melbourne — and take the opportunity to dive down this rabbit hole yourself!

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, April 1st, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come hang out, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!

What does an Oxford bioethics teacher and a former member of Cut Copy (?!?) know about videogames? Come find out this Sunday, February 12th, at 4PM, at The Foddy Winter Olympics: our ninth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball that will show you exactly why Bennett Foddy‘s become one of indie gaming’s most notable (and funniest!) cult-hit creators.

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

A little background: it all started with QWOP, a free web game (later ported to the iPhone) that took the button-mashing simplicity of 8-bit classics like TRACK & FIELD to its totally illogical polar extreme, giving you direct control of each muscle of your athlete’s legs and asking you to learn how to walk all over again. A true viral hit, soon YouTube & Tumblr were full of people attempting to do just that, as well as some inspired cosplay and the best animated Cosby-sweater-photo of all time.

Then came GIRP, which turned rock-climbing into a game of Twister for your keyboard, WINNER VS LOSER, a competitive, slapstick return to TRACK & FIELD for drunks, and, most recently, POLERIDERS, a two-player polo game played out using hyper-realistic vaulting-pole physics.

So, what will our Winter Olympics consist of?

First, the Texas debut of MEGA GIRP, a remix of the rock-climbing hit by Doug Wilson, the creator of JUEGOS-favorite JOHANN SEBASTIAN JOUST. Played out on four dance-mats laid out like a giant full-body keyboard, MEGA GIRP turns those finger-Twister gymnastics into the real-life counterpart. Wear stretchy pants!

We’ll also be debuting: multiplayer QWOP! — a head-to-head version that sizes up just who the real muscle-manipulating champion really is. And we’ll obviously also have lots and lots of pole-riding and winning versus losing: give all of them a try via the links above & get your fingers (and whole body) limbered up to take the championship!

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, February 12th, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come hang out, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!

Hey all — it turns out the first Sunday of February happens to be Super Bowl Sunday, so our next JUEGOS will be taking place the following SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12th, at the usual 4:00PM time, at the usual Highball place!

We’ve got a pretty wicked one planned for February, so clear off your calendar now!

It’s the first meetup of the New Year, and we’re celebrating it by bringing back two fan favorites from 2011: this Sunday, January 8th, at 4PM, our eighth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball will see the return of Die Gute Fabrik’s slow-motion dueling game JOHANN SEBASTIAN JOUST and Messhof’s NIDHOGG (via our prototype indie-game arcade machine, the TEXATRON).

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

First debuted here in Austin all the way back at our second meetup, J.S. JOUST instantly became a local hit, as we saw again last month at its return for the Venus Patrol party. If you’ve still not had the chance to play, you’ll definitely want be there this Sunday to experience how it transforms any group of friends & strangers into a slow-motion dancing, dueling swirl.

We’ll also be bringing back our in-progress version of the indie arcade machine TEXATRON to project on the big screen, which we understand essentially means another few hours devoted to Messhof’s crowd-pleasing low-res masterpiece NIDHOGG.

Both games are still basically unavailable to play elsewhere, so this will be your only chance to see why they’re so well-loved, worldwide!

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, January 8th, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come hang out, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!

What better way to celebrate the super-successful funding of a Kickstarter campaign than with a party? For a special seventh edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at the Highball, this Saturday, December 10th, from 4PM-8PM, join us as we bring together the games, music, art & people behind the upcoming launch of videogame culture site VENUS PATROL, with a live performance from Disasterpeace, the composer behind Polytron’s highly anticipated indie game FEZ.

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

Be sure to arrive before 7PM, when Disasterpeace will kick off his performance, including special arrangements of his songs for FEZ. As you can hear below, his compositions are already promising to be one of the best soundtracks to come from indie games, and, as above, they’re a special treat experienced live.

From 5PM, we’ll also harken back to an earlier edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS with the re-appearance of the latest version of JOHANN SEBASTIAN JOUST, Die Gute Fabrik’s fascinating & dramatic slow-motion dueling game we debuted in June, now enhanced with a number of new bonus features that we’ll be revealing to the people of Austin for the first time.

Attendees will also be among the first people in the world to play the games being created exclusively for VENUS PATROL’s Kickstarter campaign, including GUN GODZ, a “polytheistic, hiphop action first-person shooter” from Dutch indies Vlambeer (SUPER CRATE BOX, RADICAL FISHING), CAPSULE, a unique deep space adventure from Adam Saltsman (CANABALT, Flixel), and an early look at a new game from SWORD & SWORCERY EP creator Superbrothers.

We’ll also give Highball attendees the first chance to hear the songs from the Moon Grotto 7″ — a collection of original & remixed songs from Superbrothers’ SWORD & SWORCERY EP by composer & remix artist SCNTFC — and will have with us a few handfuls of 1″ buttons, VENUS PATROL T-shirts from designer Mikko Walamies (freshly printed by Austin’s Bearded Lady) and other fun stuff.

Basically, it’ll be four hours of low-key but high-awesome hanging out with drinks, games, music and friends and we super hope to see you there.

Everything will be kicking off Saturday, December 10th, at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come hang out, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!

[*PS: Hey everyone! As usual, bring your 3DS again! We’re doing awesome with these StreetPasses!]

It seems like only four weeks ago that JUEGOS RANCHEROS graced the pages of the Austin Chronicle (oh, it was? oh, we were named part of 2011’s Best of Austin?), but now we’re back!

Grab a copy of the Chronicle between now and next Thursday, flip to page 44, and there we are: five whole column width’s worth of Wiley & Adam & I talking about the birth and future of the collective.

Or, you can just click here and get the full skinny (and the full color version of our goofy mugs) right now:

Even as attendance grows each month, Juegos’ goals are loftier than just regular drinks with kindred spirits. “We’ve been able to get people from big studios and people from tiny studios sitting down together eating burritos and talking about stuff, and that just seems good in the long term,” says Saltsman. “I don’t know if we’ve been able to get as many non-video-game people to come as we’d hoped initially, but we’re still working on that.”

One particularly successful meeting included playing an as-yet-unreleased game called Johann Sebastian Joust that isn’t technically a video game since no screen is necessary to play. The game is simple: Grab your motion-sensing controller, pull the trigger to signify that you are ready to play, and keep your “jousting” hand from moving too quickly or you’ll be out. Of course you will be encouraging your opponents to jostle their controllers and get eliminated. “Joust is kind of the poster child for introducing people to indie games,” Wiggins says to explain its allure. “You can see the whole game right there physically, and it immediately makes sense.” As Juegos attendees played, Joust managed to entice the tastemaking and often difficult-to-impress waitstaff at the HighBall, who were soon lining up to show their skills. Getting Austin to rethink the definition of a video game is step one in an ongoing attempt to encourage the local nongaming population to consider interactive media as something within their artistic purview.

Thanks to James Renovitch and the Chronicle for paying attention, and for helping to get the word out to hopefully at least a handful more people that haven’t yet made it out!

The next meeting of the JUEGOS RANCHEROS will be at the Highball Saturday, December 10th before returning to its regular Sunday service. Mark your calendars now!