NEWS!

GUBS gets some attention by News 10 while at ConQuest Sacramento; we're featured at the end of this short clip.

Fan Art

Katie Pool drew some Gub girls. I think these are great, and so I put one of my favorite drawings of hers up for show:

GUBS has so far reached 24 states in the USA. We've also mailed decks to Canada, England, Italy, Taiwan, China, Austria, and South Korea. Reviews are good and many people who purchase a deck return to buy a few more as gifts.

A Few Good Reviews:

Tom Vasel
Carlos Robledo
Steve Oksienik
Jeffrey Vaca
Julie Zack

KANGA GAMES!
GUBS can also be purchased through the Kanga Games website, a company based in Taiwan. They are working to translate the rules into Chinese. They are also considering printing a Chinese version of GUBS sometime in the next year. More on this as it develops. Be sure to check out their site!

About GUBs and the people who made it possible

History of the Game

The Gub characters began a long time ago. They have been in my life for so long, I can't even accurately pinpoint the date of their creation. Perhaps it was 1992. I was in the 4th grade, a big fan of doodling figures on my school work, and Gubs, in their original form, were easy and fun to draw.

I remember the card game first appeared late one night several years later. I was up into the evening, drawing little Gubs and Mushrooms and Tanks (yes, before Toad Riders the primitive Gubs rode around in little cartoon tanks). The first set of cards were made from cut up index cards, cut into uneven squares covered in pencil drawings and an abundance of spelling errors.

We played the game more and more, and cards were added. Eventually I wrote up the rules. A few times I'd sit down and redraw all the cards, attempting to make them better as my artistic skills slowly grew.

Eventually Gubs evolved and a story was built around them. They lived in the forest, rode moths and lived in mushrooms, fighting to survive in a dangerous world. This backstory appealed to me and others. Rules were tweaked and cards added. The game grew. My friends and I played it all the time, and everyone knew all the rules even though they were not even written on the cards:

In 2002, I began working with Darin Quan to create some professional artwork for Gubs. It was the first step in a long road to creating a good looking prototype. The first drawing he sent me was the Omen Beetle (then called the Grey Beetle) and I remember being so excited to see it. It was the first time my creation took on a professional look. I was thrilled.

Over the next year or so, Darin would draw up the remaining 30 or so drawings. The sketches he did were in black and white, so I set about using Photoshop to add color.

At this time I was doing a lot of research to find a company where I could print the game, but didn't find much luck within my price range. I tried printing the cards onto business card sheets, but the printing never lined up correctly (much to my continued frustration) and I gave up on that idea.

Aaron Peterson and I scoured the internet for some kind of temporary solution, believing a personal die cutter (like a cookie cutter but for paper) might be the answer. I eventually found pre-perforated card stock which I could print the cards out onto myself and then just punch them out. So I ordered that.

The process to make a prototype was very time consuming: because the card stock wouldn't go through my personal printer, I took it to Kinko's and put it into the color copier. I then color copied (using master sheets printed on regular paper) all the artwork onto the card stock, sending it through the machine twice to print front and back. Half the time the machine ate my pre-perforated pages and spat them out destroyed. Half the time the printing did not line up right on the card stock. It took hours.

Once I had a few printed correctly, I would hang them all up, spray seal them, hope they dry without streaks or random bits of dust sticking to them, punch them out carefully (a painstaking process), and finally sand down the edges of the cards to be smooth. All that work took about 10 hours per deck to produce the very first prototypes:

I started shopping the game out to different companies. I contacted Steve Jackson Games, Days of Wonder, Looney Labs, and Mayfair Games to mention just a few. Days of Wonder told me they were busy on ‘Shadows Over Camelot' and Looney Labs was not accepting submissions. Mayfair, however, looked at the game quite closely, eventually even requesting a prototype to playtest. I sent them a deck and, after some deliberation, they decided it did not fit with their current line of projects.

That was when I decided to self-publish.

I contacted Custom Playing Cards R Us and started getting templates from them. This was in 2005. I then spent a year working on the box art and the card layouts and final rule changes. After that I spent another year working on the rule sheet. It went through 8 drafts and many, many playtests… not the game, mind you, just testing which rule layout made sense to people. It is very difficult to explain a game, even one as simple as GUBS, in only 2 pages of easy to read text.

Main Contributors to Rule Sheet Revisions:

• Pamela Medeiros
• Robert Medeiros
• Alex Medeiros
• Aaron Peterson
• Chandra Peterson
• Maria Diploudis
• Will Clark
• Sara Henne
• Jered Boggs
• Santiago Heredia
• Leah Smith
• Wan-Yin Tang

Finally, with everything finished on my end, I had to work with the printer and also a lawyer to get things set up. Gubs was already copyrighted but the name needed to be trademarked, which was finished this year. Custom Playing Cards R Us was incredibly helpful a patient, but the process took a long time to get everything set up correctly. Proofs were sent back and forth many times.

Once everything looked good, I gave the final ok and waited for about 4 weeks before the decks came back: 14 huge boxes, a total of 1000 Gub decks (half of which are still in my living room!) And that's how the game got where it is.

Who We Are

Let me just say first, there are too many people to thank. So many contributed to make the game what it is, and I hope they all already know how much I appreciate them. If you're not on this list and you should be, let me know. I wrote this all when I was tired.

• Alex Medeiros: Co-designer, All-Around Assistance, Support
• Pamela Medeiros: All-Around Assistance, Investor, Support
• Robert Medeiros: All-Around Assistance, Investor, Support


• Darin Quan: Pencil Drawings


• Aaron Peterson: Research, Rule Sheet Development
• Chandra Peterson: Rule Sheet Development


• Maria Diploudis Rule Sheet Development, Support
• Will Clark: Rule Sheet Development
• Sara Henne: Rule Sheet Development
• Jered Boggs: Rule Sheet Development


• Santiago Heredia: Rule Sheet Development
• Leah Smith: Rule Sheet Development


• Julie Zack: Support
• Matt Griffin: Playtester, Support, Fellow Game Maker
• Derek Wright: Playtester, Support, Rule Sheet Development
• Karl Neuharth: Playtester, Development
• Jake Wolf: Playtester
• Nate Hall: Playtester
• Brittany Chandler: Playtester
• Aaron Coe: Playtester
• Preston Greene: Playtester


• Steve Oskienik: Website Programming


• Micheal and Charles from Custom Playing Cards R Us
• Scott March: Legal Advice and Services
• And Special Thanks To: Pam Pimental, Paul Fernandez, Amy Juliano, Bret Juliano

Many, many friends and family contributed in smaller, but no less valuable, amounts along the way. All along GUBS has been a very home-grown, personal project that I am very happy to have been a part of.