If you decide to invest in a Fiendish
Board Game, who are you trusting with your hard-earned
cash? Fiendish Board Games is a
cooperative venture started by two die-hard board-gamers,
John Harrington (the short thin one) and
Mike Woodhouse (the tall fat one).
John Harrington
John
is a game-design addict. Nothing stops him from working
on a new idea, unless it's Lin, his wife or one or more
of his three children. A freelance smart-arse since being made redundant
in 2007, John can also
sing, well enough to have once had a record deal with his
band, The Guvnors (a band that had all the worst elements
of the Small
Faces and Blur).
A long-standing Tottenham Hotspur fan he's
continually being told to sit down by the stewards at White Hart Lane, John was also co-editor of the UK postal games
zine Take That You Fiend! for over
fourteen years and 161 issues. TTYF! is
a one-time winner of the UK Diplomacy Zine Poll, despite
never having run a game of Diplomacy in its life. Since
giving up editing TTYF! John has taken
on Mission From God, the directory of UK postal gaming zines, and
successfully killed off the postal gaming hobby in the process.
Scruffy games inventor demonstrates
Office Politics to politely uninterested passer-by at the
Games Fair in Essen.
Picture courtesy of Pete
Card
Mike Woodhouse
Mike
is very much the brawn behind the operation. More
accustomed to play-testing than original thought, this
self-proclaimed computer genius works for (and indeed is)
Fiendish Business Systems. Currently he
is contracting, accepting money from a investment banks in London in return for doing some very clever
stuff. Formerly editor of the seldom-lamented postal
games zine Blackmail, Mike is now more
famous for his rich fund of cricketing anecdotes.
When not found at the Valley, home of Charlton
Athletic FC, Mike relaxes at home with his partner, Pam,
his greedy cats and his two still relatively young
children. Mike used to spend far too much time
playing Hollywood Stock
Exchange (HSX) and devising sophisticated trading
strategies, but since he has stopped trading so actively
he has been perturbed to see his all-time ranking go
up...
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