Welcome to Hoke's Games!

Welcome!

Hoke's Games was created in 2013 to publish the board game Emperor's New Clothes through a Kickstarter campaign. Although the funding drive is now over, this site is an archive of the campaign itself and will also be a place to share variant rules, photos and videos of gameplay, and future Hoke's Games releases.

I've copied over the Kickstarter campaign posts and updates—that way it's a little easier to read through the Kickstarter campaign in the order it was published. All of those posts will be back-dated so that they appear on the date they were posted to Kickstarter. If you'd like to follow along with the story from the beginning, simply start from the first post and then click the "Newer Post" link at the bottom of the page (on the left).

Thanks for visiting—I hope you enjoy your stay!

Jonathan H. Liu

Kickstarter Summary

By the end of the campaign, the front page of the Kickstarter page had a list of all of the artists named in all of the updates, as well as several links to other sites that had written about it.

Here's a list of what appeared on the home page:

• "Anything that challenges my imagination and encourages creativity is going to score big points for me." - Jason Tagmire, Fruitless Pursuits
• "Though the pieces might make you think it’s a ruse…it’s actually far from it." -- Cathe Post, GeekMom
• This gets a big thumbs-up from me, too. Often games with this many mechanisms don’t do any of them particularly well, but they’ve managed to combine everything into a nearly perfect whole. Emperor’s New Clothes should be seen to be believed. -- Firestone, TheologyOfGames
• Keith Baker's "Six Questions: Jonathan Liu"
• "I think it’s hilarious and I have to applaud them for bringing the narrative of the game to life in such a clever way." --DMBigfoot, The Inlay
• "the naked brilliance of the design is undeniably thought-provoking." -- Matt Blum of GeekDad
• "There are many Kickstarter projects that seem too good to be true, and that’s mostly because they are–but we spend money on them anyway." -- Byron Campell of NerdSpan
• "I give it three thumbs up (I borrowed one from my wife). This is truly a gem." -- Edd Allard, on boardgamegeek.com
• "I find the project highly transparent, especially with the availability of the print and play version, which both allows you to check that you can see ROOS and to make sure that the game is to your liking." -- Greg, 3DTotal Games
• "I must admit however that this campaign is probably the most unusual I’ve ever seen." -- Dad's Gaming Addiction

Plus there was this video review from UndeadViking, which I mentioned in Update #22:

You can also check out the Kicktraq charts for the project here.

Emperor's New Clothes Rules

This is where I'll collect rule sets for Emperor's New Clothes. Right now I've got the "official" rules for my version of Emperor's New Clothes, as well as rules for The Boy Who Cried Wolf, which can be played using the components you'll have in ENC.

• The original (blank) Emperor's New Clothes rules from the Kickstarter campaign
• Emperor's New Clothes rules
• The Boy Who Cried Wolf rules

Here's a video that explains a little more about how to play the game.


If time permits, I'll try to make a fancier version of the rules with diagrams, and I'll update this post. Also, if you come up with other games to play with your components that you'd like to share, I'd love to post them here as well. Either email me directly (jonathan [at] geekdad [dot] com), or post them to the BoardGameGeek files section and send me a link!

You can also see variants on the BoardGameGeek page, although some of these are ROOS-enabled and you may not actually be able to read them.

Note to backers: I noticed there is an error on the printed "Roles Summary" card included in the game. For the Farmer, it says to discard all gullibility and dignity, and then "score 1 point per ___." The blank should have a gold coin icon there.