Page 13 - May/June HER 2020

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that instead. He does all of the electronics. We both build and things like that. The escape room has kind of turned into more of his thing now. I still help manage and run it.
“We both really like to create story-driven games, and so I do the same things with tabletop games. We’ll kind of pick a theme. I know when we did A Clinical Trial — I kind of started designing that one first — and it was more of a futuristic type game, and he said, ‘Well, let’s make it part of the history of Hot Springs.’ So we switched it, and it’s set in the ’50s now. We included tidbits of information from the Army-Navy Hospital. There actually was a doctor named Dr. Wade and things like that. It’s really fun to incorporate Hot Springs history when we can into the games. We pick a story or an idea and then we figure out what would be a fun way to escape this or fix a problem in there, and then you kind of work backward from there.”
As Kendall mentioned that the escape rooms are more of her husband’s main focus, the Camden native took to creating her own trade of tabletop games.
“The problem with escape rooms is they’re a one-off thing,” she explained. “People play them, but once you play it once, you really can’t play it again because you know all the answers. So we wanted to make a game that our customers could take home with them and play over and over again. It went from, ‘We were looking for an escape room type theme’ and then we thought, ‘Well, what do you escape?’ You escape parties when you don’t want to go to a party, and how you do that is you come up with excuses, so it became Killjoy, which is the game of excuses.”
The couple has a blanket company, Light Entertainment, which owns A Narrow Escape, and Kendall independently publishes games under the same company. Self-publishing via Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform, is why the development took longer than anticipated.
“Once I got the game designed and finished, I had to go out and market it to generate an audience so I could actually publish it,” Kendall noted. “I did the art for it. I did everything for the game. It kind of just started out being a placeholder art, but I really liked the cartoony look of it so I thought I’d just keep it like that.
“It’s pretty simple,” she continued, detailing the gameplay. “Basically, you draw excuses and action type cards — different types of actions — and your
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HER MAGAZINE ¯ May/June 2020 13