There’s a special kind of confidence that comes from someone who’s been quietly making games for nearly a decade, the kind that doesn’t shout, doesn’t oversell, and definitely doesn’t pretend the business side is glamorous. That’s exactly the energy Tom Allen of Triple Point Publishing brings to the table.
I caught up with Tom at The Game Expo to talk about his journey from long‑time designer to first‑time publisher, and what happens when you decide to fund your own games, print them overseas, sell them yourself, and somehow still enjoy the process. (Mostly.)
Triple Point Publishing is still young, but the ideas behind it are sharp: fast‑to‑learn, family‑friendly games designed for real people with real time constraints, especially those “it’s Thursday and the birthday party is Saturday” moments. From potion‑brewing witches to dice‑stacking chaos and vowel‑only crossword bingo, Tom’s designs sit comfortably in that sweet spot between clever and approachable.
This conversation dives into the realities of self‑publishing, why simple games are often the hardest to make, and how teamwork sometimes means one person polishing endlessly while the other says, “That’s good enough, sell it.” It’s a candid, thoughtful look at what it takes to turn a great idea into a boxed game on a table, and why, despite the spreadsheets and shipping quotes, Tom keeps doing it.
Pull up a chair, stack your dice carefully, and meet one of Melbourne’s most quietly prolific game designers.
Ben: All right. I’m here with Tom Allen to talk about his games and the company Triple Point Publishing. So, Tom, tell me all about yourself.
Tom: I’m an Australian game designer based in Melbourne. been making games for almost 10 years now. In the last couple of years, I set up a publishing company, and I’m now self-publishing a bunch of them.
B: That is awesome. So are you designing all the games you’re publishing?
T: At this point, yeah, designing them all ourselves. It’s me and another colleague who is working on it with me. Mostly, I’m the designer. He helps with development, marketing and selling, and hopefully making us some money out of this venture.
B: Yes, the financial stuff is always important.
T: If we get big enough, we’ll publish other people’s games, but at the moment we want to learn what we’re doing first.
B: Do you go for Kickstarter, or are you self-publishing?
T: We are self-publishing in the sense that we are just funding it ourselves, with savings. Hopefully making some money back on that. But we’ll see how that goes.
B: Investing in the future?
T: Umm, kind of. We are specifically targeting our games; basically, our demographic is mums. Mostly those who need games for kids, possibly because they got a birthday party on Saturday and it’s Thursday and oh shit, what do I do?
Hopefully, they can go to our webpage and get one delivered quickly, or they can go to Amazon or other e-commerce sites like that. Choose a game, pick it up, jump on in.
We make family-friendly, fun games that are easy to learn. We’ve got a couple that we can talk about today. For example, one is called Gumbo. It’s about witches and wizards making potions in a forest and competing with each other. It plays kind of like Uno, but backwards. Instead of starting with seven cards and trying to lose them all, you start with zero cards. When someone gets to seven and thinks they can win, they call gumbo.
At that point, it becomes Munchkin, and everyone gangs up on them for one turn. If anybody else beats them, everybody else wins. If, however, they win, they win. If they win, they are the master witch/wizard.
B: How long’s the game?
T: It’s only about 15 minutes. Very simple. There is a kind of variant single-player mode. A lot of unique player powers that add a little bit of variability to it and make it a lot more fun.
B: I know that in my discussion with other designers, when people say it’s a simple game, easy to learn, etc, that usually means that it’s really hard to make the game. Is that your experience with Gumbo?
T: This one, I would say, this one went through a bunch of different iterations. Like most games do. I think the core of it was pretty much there from day one, which is you’re going to accrue some cards, those cards have points on them.
Then the cards are either secret in your hand or they’re revealed in front of you. I think the biggest change that ever came was this kind of munchkin aspect to it.
Because it doesn’t actually change the game at all. The winner is still the winner, but what it does, it means people who have no chance of winning still feel like they’re part of it because they’re part of a team that wins. So it means on your final term, when you know you individually aren’t going to win, you can at least contribute to screwing over the person who said they were going to win, and that makes your team win. You still feel good about it.
B: I love that kind of mechanic, where it’s, you know, it flips the tables a little bit, because at the beginning, it’s all in against each other, and then it’s, we’re focusing on them. That’s it. We’re gonna get them.
T: There’s nothing a witch hates more than another witch doing better than them.
B: Yes, for sure. I love that. So was that the first game you published?
T: Yeah, so this Gumbo is literally getting printed right now. It’ll be available within months. The next one on my table here is Crack and Stack, which is a cerebral dexterity dice stacking puzzle solving game that uses all halves of your brain simultaneously. (The game box displays different-sized dice stacked up)
B: I think I play this every time I play D&D.
T: Well, people do like the dice stacking aspect. It is a ridiculous game. It shouldn’t work, and yet it does. Basically, you are racing to build towers of dice. And when you’ve built a tower, you grab a puzzle card, which has a simple little puzzle on it. It might be, reverse this word and say it backwards. Or do this simple piece of addition, or remember these two shapes. You then have to solve that card, put it face down, and remember it until the end of the round.
Because once you put it face down, you now grab a new die from the table, and you take the nicest looking one. If there are any D6s, take those. Because otherwise, you’ll be stacking D20s. Or D4s, which are ridiculous.
B: D4 are always the top of the stack!
T: Yes! Then, while still remembering that puzzle you’ve just solved, quickly restack your new dice and all your other dice into a new tower that’s even bigger. Don’t let it fall over.
Finally, when everyone’s done that, you remove your tower and answer your puzzle card. If you get it right, you keep the puzzle card and all its points. If you get it wrong, you put it away.
There are three ways to make points. You either are really good at puzzles, and you keep all the cards, or you’re really good at stacking dice. So you do that faster than everybody else, and you get a bigger tower. And last, if you’re really, really fast, there are even little points for racing through it.
B: It’s got an element of a memory-type game with the puzzle. Also, dexterity to build the towers, I love that.
T: Yeah, it feels like it shouldn’t work, and yet, it does.
B: That’s great. Is that one out now? Have you published it?
T: Again, that’s being printed. Both of those are being printed at the same time to save on shipping. They will be out in about a month or two. They’re available right now for pre-order on our website, at www.TriplePointPublishing.com.au. Please check them out.
B: I will! The last one is Yowie Kapowie, which I have seen before.
T: You have (Tom knows I am friends with the publisher). Yowie Kapowie is a collaboration between Alex Wynnter and me, and his company, Maggie Box Games, has published this. That’s out now and available on his and our websites. Also in a variety of retail stores around Melbourne, at least, and probably around Australia, imminently.
B: Nice. Yeah, that’s awesome. As a designer and a creator, designing the games is one whole aspect, and that has enough work in it itself. But adding in publishing, then you’re dealing with printing overseas. How do you find that? How does that work for you?
T: I mean, realistically, that is not the fun part, but it is interesting to learn how to do it. I always said for many years that I would never self-publish my games because it seemed like too much hard work. Then I found a colleague who wanted to do some of that hard work.
B: Sweet, so you teamed up. You do that boring bit, and I’ll make games.
T: Unfortunately, that’s meant that my job is now to make games fast. Which is difficult. I like to polish them. His job is to crack the whip and say, it’s polished enough. Move on. We need to sell it. We need to sell it.
B: The selling bit is kind of important. You sell through your website, but do you stock any other games?
T: I haven’t yet tried to sell other people’s games on our web store. I’m not sure that that’s really something to go to. I don’t want to be a retailer.
B: How are you getting that into retailers?
T: At this point, Alex has taken that on because Yowie Papowie is his game, his company’s game. With our games, our intention is to sell them as a first party primarily because I don’t know if your audience knows this, but as a publisher, you make a lot more money if you sell direct.
B: Yes, selling direct, you keep all the margin.
T: If we sell to wholesalers, we probably take 50- 60% off if we sell to retailers. You end up making money by selling in volume, but you make less of the money per individual sale. Sometimes that works out, and we hope that it does. Certainly, if someone said, hey, we’ll take all 1,500 orders. Sweet, you can have it. Then we’ll do another print run.
That’s that whole complexity of self-publishing, and this is the thing for the readers is if you can buy from the publisher themselves directly, that’s the best value, the best way you can support them.
B: If you want to support them, absolutely do it directly. I love supporting our friendly local game store as well. But the best way to support the designer is to buy from them. You’ve got these two coming up. What else is Triple Point Publishing working on?
T: Well, today, I am demoing a new game that we’re working on called Crosswords. It is very like bingo meets crosswords.
I’ll reference another game, which I think is fantastic, called Super Mega Lucky Box by Phil Walker Harding. It is quite evocative of that. It has a similar effect where the bingo caller calls out something, and you write it down on a card, and if you complete something on that card, you’ll get a reward Ideally, you manage to chain those rewards together, so you have these turns that kind of explode in complexity and fun.
In Super Meg Lucky Box, it’s literally bingo; you’re doing it with numbers. Here, we’re doing it with letters. In particular, I’ll call out one of the 5 vowels, AEIOU, and you then write that down in one of the open slots on your crossword. We’ve got one here that’s got L something N something.
That could be line, lane or lino. It intersects with another word. Where you’ve put that I, or A, for line or lane, is gonna determine what the other word is as well. Although that looks like all the words are very open and you can put almost anything anywhere, the more letters you write in, the more you constrain yourself.
B: It’s only vowels that are called out.
T: Yes, it’s only vowels.
B: Okay, so that at least limits the number of options there are available.
T: It’s also interesting, though, that on the back of each card is one of the many solutions. That means you’ll never get stuck.
B: Because there’s always a solution available to you.
T: Yes, but you’ll find more interesting ones as you play.
B: That’s awesome. I liken it to the mix-up of crosswords, similar to Bonza games; they do a crossword jigsaw puzzle. (You can read our review here) you should check them out. Thank so much for talking with me, Tom. Are you here all weekend?
T: Well, demoing this morning (Saturday) at the Game Expo. Then I will wander around and play lots of other people’s games.
B: Thank you again, all the best.
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