About Dead Alive games

Since 2018, Dead Alive Games has aimed to design and publish high quality games that are inclusive and representative of the diverse gaming community they belong to.

Our first game, the award-nominated miniatures game, Omicron Protocol, is an “intra-apocalyptic”, cyberpunk-themed, skirmish board game designed to be fun and accessible for both board and miniatures gamers alike.

Alongside that, our second game, Lunar Rush, a simultaneous-play board game that combines time-based resource management, market economics, bidding, and tableau/engine-building into a refreshing new genre, was successfully funded on Kickstarter in October 2022 and delivered in October 2023.

We are currently working on our next game, Cyber Pet Quest, scheduled for a Q1 2024 Kickstarter, where players join a group of cybernetically-enhanced pets on an action-packed co-op adventure in search for their owner in a world where humans have gone mad.

History of Dead Alive Games

It was just another weekend afternoon spent painting miniatures in 2017 when Brendan turned to Bernie and said, “Hey I have an idea for a game.” The rest is history.

Brendan’s idea of a skirmish game that contained a “3rd party enemy” was something that intrigued Bernie greatly.  The pair tested the basic ideas with proxy models, and after a month of test games, the beginnings of Omicron Protocol (OP) were established. The pair founded “Dead Alive Games” (DAG) in early 2018 and began to create the concepts for the initial factions, characters, world story, and game rules. Working with a wonderful team of creative artists (Viktor Kolodiazhniy, Nick Brown, Andrew Martin, Amit Thulasidasan, and Tania Gomes), they were able to see their vision come to life.  

As the development continued, the designers focused on making the OP world diverse and inclusive, and the game streamlined enough to welcome non-miniatures gamers, but tactically challenging to keep the hard-core miniatures players engaged. Brendan and Bernie hope that a wide variety of gamers will enjoy the world, stories, characters, and tactical challenges of Omicron Protocol!

In late 2020, Bernie was helping a friend, Steve, playtest his new game on TTS about mining the moon. After 10 playtest sessions in a span of a couple months, Bernie was hooked. At this point, DAG was in the middle of producing OP and both Bernie and Brendan had their hands full with all the manufacturing and shipping logistics (in the middle of the pandemic shipping crisis), so there was no time to continue designing their own games. After many discussions, more playtests, and some convincing, they signed Steven “Skippy” Brown’s Lunar Rush (LR) as the first game DAG will publish.

Now that Omicron Protocol is available, and Lunar Rush will soon be (Q3 2023), the pair continues to move forward with their third game, Cyber Pet Quest, scheduled to be available in 2024. Meanwhile, they’ll continue to create expansions for OP and LR hopefully for years to come!

About the Designers/Owners

Brendan Kendrick got started in miniatures gaming with the “gateway game” of X-Wing (version 1.0) back in 2014. After a couple years, he wanted something more challenging in terms of strategy and more involving as a hobby. With classic skirmish games such as Malifaux and Infinity, he honed both his competitive and painting skills. After a few years of practice, his self-taught painting ability advanced so quickly that he won the “People’s Choice Award” as well as a gold medal at the KublaCon painting competition in 2017.  He later got into Guild Ball and won numerous painting awards, to the point where there is a “Brendan Kendrick Best Painted” award named after him at the local Guild Ball tournaments. As a player, he’s not too shabby either, winning many local Guild Ball tournaments and always terrorizing the other Guilds with his Butchers. He has since become a dad (and a pet dad) and hails out of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Bernie Lin got drawn into the world of miniatures the moment he picked up a 4th edition Warhammer 40K rulebook in 2004. After a short hiatus due to school, he returned to miniatures gaming in 2014 with X-Wing, and met Brendan at his first local tournament. Since then, the two have been sparring partners in X-Wing and later Guild Ball. In the meantime, Bernie built up the San Francisco Bay Area X-Wing & Guild Ball community by going store to store to run tournaments and leagues.  His efforts in X-Wing resulted in an 800+ member community on FB where tournaments and leagues are still being run in dozens of game stores around the Bay Area. After he picked up Guild Ball, he also built up the local GB community by being a Pundit for a couple of years, running multiple tournaments and leagues every year to keep the scene going, until the eventual demise of the game. While mainly a miniatures (and board gamer) for the tactical/strategic aspects, he’s learned to enjoy the hobby aspects thanks to Brendan’s tutelage, graduating to the role of Brendan’s “base coat painter” for the Omicron Protocol models. After leading his first Euro-game development effort on Lunar Rush, he’s excited to get back into designing games again with Cyber Pet Quest. He hails from San Francisco, California, where DAG was founded.