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Who are we ? La Haute Roche is not “a true” company, with offices and warehouses, files and employees. It is a small home-based self-publishing game company, but if you look well, you will also see offices and files. La Haute Roche is staffed by two people. Sylvie Barc, who has designed games for almost thirty years, games more or less known like Pass The Bomb, games designed to bring pleasure to gamers. And Dominique Granger, who put away his sound engineer’s mixing desk, gave up the « Festival d’Avignon », jazz festivals and contemporary music to devote himself to publishing. And two people are enough to wreak havoc on files and desks! In practice, Sylvie designs the games, writes most of the texts and deals with management (beurk!), and Dominique takes care of graphic design, websites management, marketing policy, and the manufacture of the games. The publishing policy is made jointly by the two of them. One can thus consider that La Haute Roche is more an artisanal company than a “traditional” company since we make or design everything except artwork and sales. And we cannot wreak havoc on the warehouses since our games are in those of Asmodée Editions which takes care of our distribution for our greater pleasure and relief! Where are we ? We are based in Ladignac le Long, a small french village located in Limousin and three kilometers away from the Dordogne « département » in Périgord, well known for its prehistoric sites and foie gras (amongst other things, of course !).
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What is our publishing policy ? A game one takes pleasure to play! That is the fundamental. Next, its theme must tickle the imagination and must be supported by a suitable set of mechanics (instead of being artificially adapted on existing mechanics). The game must be able to excite a wide audience : the rules must be simple, easy to understand and to explain, and the playing time must be relatively short. And of course, it must be addictive. Where are our games manufactured ? All our card games from the « Kangourou » series are made in Belgium, and when they include other elements than cards, such as counters, sand-timers and so on, these come from Germany or the United-Kingdom. Our other games can come from France or Germany (cardboard, printing) or France, Germany and United-Kingdom (wooden pieces, plastic pieces). History of the company La Haute Roche began its activities in 2002, by publishing Shabadabada, to make people sing… and to try its hand at publishing. We must say that our friend Philippe des Pallières urged us to do so, and he was right ! Shabadabada has now (2007) sold largely more than 40 000 pieces, and it’s always a pleasure for us to see that people like this game and continuously bring new gamers to it ! We liked this new trade, and Sharad’ was born, near the end of 2002.
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In 2003, Dindons & Dragons (Turkeys & Dragons) came to being. It’s title is of course a wink in the direction of the grand-father of all role-playing games (which we still regularly practice), and the artwork was signed by Didier Guiserix, formerly editor of Casus Belli, the most famous french role-playing magazine during twenty years. In some ways, this game is for us a symbolic tribute to role-playing, as we were somewhat involved in its beginnings in France, in the eighties as designers, publishers or press people. Yes, that’s a long time ago ! Well… Quite quickly, we became hooked on publishing, and our small structure became more professionnal. 2004 was more more ambitious with Casbah and Carambouille, much bigger games than what we were used to produce. And there, we sort of fumbled. We thought that Casbah was for gamers, and it was much more successful with a family audience. We meant Carambouille for family gaming, and it was the gamers who (rightly) saw the machiavelism in it. It doesn’t change much in the end, but there we learnt something about audience targeting. In 2005 we published La Griffe & le Croc (The Claw & the Fang), a novel based on a role-playing campaign. A novel and a RPG game in the same book is not a very bright idea, in the commercial sense, as we now know. What’s more, as the RPG system is an « experimental » sytem of free magic, with no predetermined spells, and is only suitable for seasoned players, its commercial scope is somewhat reduced. And due to technical problems, we could not have the gorgeous colour cover we meant, but we had to fall back on the one you can see which is a bit drab… Anyway it was a project we wanted to do and we loved doing it, so there it is !
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As publishing a whole book is a lot of time consuming work, we could not follow the Casbah/Carambouille format and went back to the « Kangourou » format with Sharivari, which is an adaptation of a well known (in France) traditional party game. Shabadabada’s success (with regard to our company’s size) lead on in 2006 to a follow-up, Shabadabada 2. In the same year, totally different, designed to be played with children without the grown-ups being bored, came Dragon. As for now, in 2007, we will release only one game but a bigger one : Rattlesnake City. And what comes next ? We’ll see !>>> more on our games (French) >>> a quick look at Sylvie's games (French) >>> Sylvie's website (French/English)
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