A big thank you to everyone who volunteered to help me test the storytelling card game. In addition to those of my current playtesters who have expressed an interest, I would like to send copies to:
Please could you guys email me with your street addresses so I can get copies in the post to you.
I've been enjoying the words of wisdom of Brett J. Gilbert recently. One of the things he said recently made me think, and it is the starting point for this blog post. At first I thought it was something he had said in one of his two recent blog posts, but on re-reading them I think it must of come from an email he sent me and a few other UK games designers.
What Brett said was:
... when game players (hopefully) say “I want to play that game again!” what they mean is that they want to repeat the *experience* of playing the game, something that is more than simply the sum of the game’s mechanics.
This is something I've considered in the past when discussing Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game. BSG:TBG is a fairly simple game when you get down to the mechanisms involved, but the experience (when played with the right group of people) is much better than the sum of the mechanics. It's a game of paranoia, suspicion and table talk. Everyone is trying to uncover the hidden traitor, except the hidden traitor who is trying to frame someone else without being too obvious. It's a game where a lot of the fun comes from accusing everyone around you of being a "frakking toaster" (the TV show's TV-friendly swear word, and epithet for the TV show's robotic bad guys who are all chromed up - like a toaster). It's a huge amount of fun.
Why bring this up now? I've been sent a submission fairly recently that's tickled my fancy. In the two months since I received it I've played it with a bunch of people, who have all been entertained by it. Those of you who stalk me on the internet will probably know I've been enquiring about artists for it, and looking for North American playtesters for it.
It's different from the other games I've done. It's a pure card game (no components other than cards) and it's a very simple game, strategically very simple. But the experience makes it something more than the mechanisms would have you believe. It's a story-telling game, driven by your handful of cards. There's no deep, overarching strategy: you play the cards you've got. What makes it so entertaining is the cards themselves. Some of them are sensible, some of them are funny by themselves, but when you combine them in one of the 260,000 possible combinations even the straight ones often end up in hilarious stories.
Is this game going to wow fans of deep strategic eurogames? Probably not. But I think it might sell very well, especially in America (where most of my business is), if I can just get the marketing right. It's a silly, funny game, that could potentially appeal to the legions of Munchkin fans in addition to anyone else with a sense of humour.
It's still early days - I've been constructing playtesting copies to send to my playtesters. I need more feedback. Is it really funny? Could it be funnier? Is it too simple? Too complex? More information will help inform my publishing decision. But at the moment I think I'm onto a winner...
It's that time again. I've received a submission that I need to get playtested more widely. In particular I want to find playtesters from North America (the best market for this game, I believe).
The game is a fun, silly, card game for 2-6 players than plays in less than 30 minutes. It's very language dependent (hence I'm not looking for European playtesters, I can't see I'll sell many copies there), since it's a fantasy-themed storytelling game.
If you're up for some light-hearted, simple fun, please post a comment explaining why you'd make an awesome playtester for Reiver Games. I'll pick some people (using my arcane selection criteria) and send them a copy of the game.
All I'm asking from you is that you play the game several times, keeping records of game length, scores, number of players, what everyone thought of the game and any ideas you might have for tweaks to the rules or cards.
Thanks!
Technically I've been in the business of making and selling games for over three years. That makes me an old hand now, right? Not really. I've only been 'professional' (not just in the sense that this is now my full-time job, but I'm also getting the games manufactured for me, and selling primarily to distributors and shops rather than direct to customers) for eighteen months and I've only had stock for the last thirteen months. I'm still doing a lot of stuff for the first time. And, as with Essen, when I'm doing stuff for the second time it's often under such different circumstances that it's hard to draw any conclusions from the past experience.
The reason I bring this up is that I've started graphing my sales over time, and it's teaching me new stuff all the time. At the beginning I assumed that sales for a new game would peak when it was released and then decline steadily over time. To some degree this statement has been true, but there have been some interesting deviations from what I expected. It's Alive! didn't sell many copies in its first quarter (but it came out in September near the end of the July - September quarter). In its second quarter (the run-up to Christmas) it did exceptionally well, helped by Essen and a few big stocking orders. Carpe Astra did much better than It's Alive! in its first quarter (the run-up to Christmas) and both did well in the first quarter of this year - when I signed the two biggest US distributors. Sumeria got off to a great start (best first quarter sales of any of my games) but then did less well in its second quarter (which for Sumeria corresponded to the Summer: July - September).
If I look at graphs plotting the sales of each game by quarter, with the x-axis corresponding to quarters since release it's hard to draw any conclusions: they are all over the place with dips and peaks that don't correspond at all (note that the last data point in each case is for this quarter which is less than halfway through):
So length of time since release is clearly not the driving factor behind how many games I'll sell in any given quarter. So what is I wonder? People say that the Summer months are often quiet, with the best sales being in the run-up to Christmas. This seems reasonable, so I've drawn the same data on a different x-axis. This time its still in sales per quarter, but the quarters relate to a single instance in time: 1 is last Summer (July - September when It's Alive! was re-released), 2 is last Autumn (October to December, including Essen, the run-up to Christmas and the release of Carpe Astra) and so on. Suddenly things become clearer:
Despite the fact that this quarter (Autumn) is only half done, all three games are showing a clear boost over the preceding Summer months. There's a noticeable decline from Autumn through Winter and Spring into Summer, before a sharp jump into Autumn again. Sumeria, which came out at a fairly quiet time, shows the same pattern, but with higher sales due to the initial stocking orders. I'm expecting a few more re-stocks before Christmas too, so hopefully the climb for this Autumn will become steeper across the board in the next couple of months.
With so little experience to base my decisions on, it's hard to see whether a game is doing well or badly. Are low sales due to the time of release, or something else? As the years go on I'll have more hard data to base my assumptions on, and can make more informed decisions as a result. The important thing is that rather than just waving a finger in the air and using gut feelings I'm collecting the data I've got so I'm more informed for next time.
Despite the slight disappointment of Essen, things are still going very well considering how new I am to this. While at Essen I sold my 4,000th game. 4,000! That's way more than I ever expected to make, let alone sell at the beginning. So I'm going to do a brief retrospective about how things have changed in the just over three years since I started Reiver Games.
In October 2006 my company was four months old. I had released Border Reivers only three months ago, and was still manically constructing copies by hand in my spare time. Each copy of Border Reivers took three hours to assemble from the pieces I had ordered - since I had to construct the boxes, tiles and cards from scratch. Things seemed to be going pretty well, I was making good progress through the print run, and the people I met at shows seemed to enjoy it. But giving up my weekends and evenings (and even some holiday from work) to manufacture the copies was hard work. I was already doing slightly better than I had hoped, but never in a million years did I think I would have sold 4,000 games in three years time.
A year later it felt like the company was going somewhere. I'd sold out of the original 100 copies of Border Reivers and made a reasonable profit. I was now a publisher too: Yehuda's It's Alive! was the second game in my catalogue, released five months earlier in June. Loads of people self-publish their own board game design, fewer make the jump to publisher of other peoples' games too. It's Alive! was selling well and proving very popular, I'd decided to make 300 of these, again largely by hand in my spare time around a full-time job, and I was on course to sell out of these too within the year. Could I do this professionally? I was beginning to wonder...
Six months earlier I'd made the jump to full-time publisher, quitting my fairly well-paid job in IT Project Management for a life of playing board games and begging for food. The first five months of full-time work had been disappointing, I'd decided to re-print It's Alive! professionally after selling out of the 300 copies limited edition in May. The reprint had taken a lot longer to manufacture than I had hoped, and I had spent many months without any products at all. Still It's Alive! had finally arrived in September, and I'd just got back from my first Essen. Essen had been a huge success and I was on a real high. I'd take 840 copies (a full pallet) of It's Alive! to Essen. Sales to punters hadn't been huge (I'd not really advertised at all) but I'd got rid of the rest of my stock to a couple of distributors and picked up four distributors in total. I was ready to conquer the world!
In the year since last Essen things have gone extremely well. I've picked up six distributors in North America, seven in Europe and two in the far East. I've released another two games: Carpe Astra and Sumeria and sales look promising. I've still not broken even on any of my games, but they continue to sell well (after a Summer dip) so I'm hopefully that I'll reach that point on at least one of them fairly soon. Essen this year was slightly disappointing, I'd hoped my advertising spend would have led to more sales to customers, and the freight prices for carting my games to and from the show meant that I didn't make a boat-load of cash (like I did last year). But with no brand new games and good distribution in Europe, there were more people there who owned my games, rather than had never heard of them. Still, I've got interest from a whole bunch of new distributors and the Christmas season is approaching, so I'm hopeful of better things to come.
I'm now beginning to feel like a proper publisher - I've several games in stock, pretty good distribution and people are beginning to know who I am. Onwards and upwards!
I finally returned from my second Essen at midnight on Monday. It's been a pretty busy few days since I got back too, so this is the first chance I've had to really take stock.
First a big thank you to all of you who swung by and introduced yourselves - it was nice to meet you all and to know that somebody out there reads these musings!
The run-up to Essen as I've already mentioned was pretty stressful, in particular the travel arrangements. When I finally found out I could get the games freighted to Essen for £160 (as opposed to £1000 for the van hire and freight rate on the ferry) I felt much better about that, but the banners didn't arrive until lunchtime on the day I left - thankfully they were ok!
Just to make things more exciting on the shipping front, I heard from the freight company (after they'd already collected the stock) that there would be a couple of extra charges. I wanted the games delivered on Wednesday (so I could unload them myself to save money) which was an extra £40, and then when they realised it was going straight to the fair there was an additional charge for unloading delays which I still don't have a final amount for. As it turns out they didn't deliver on Wednesday, but Tuesday instead. This was good in the sense that I knew that the games had arrived safely, but bad in that it incurred extra costs (warehousing at the fair and delivery to my stand by fork-lift - £140€ in total). The freight company did waive the delivery on Wednesday surcharge though.
A pretty good day. It took a little longer to get to the fair than I expected, we'd got up at 4:50am, caught a 6:50am plane to Dortmund and arrived in Dortmund at 9:05. Then we managed to miss every connection to Essen, so we didn't arrive at the fair until lunchtime. We set up the furniture, hung the banners (which looked great - much more professional than last year's posters) and waited for the games to arrive. A fork-lift dumped the two pallets and then we set up the rest of the stand and went about adding the errata sheets to all 630 copies of the expansion I'd taken. That took Andrew and I three hours, it would have been a bit quicker but I kept having to stop to speak to people :) There were even a few sales of Sumeria and the expansion too :).
Sans crowds the fair was easy enough to negotiate so I took advantage of the space to chat with my Taiwanese and one of my German distributors. My Taiwanese distributor said It's Alive! was selling well for them, and stock was running low. Since the cost of shipping to Taiwan is so exhorbitant, he was keen to collect stock from me at the show. I delivered four cases to him that day, and he said he might want some more, depending on how much space they had left at the end of the show. The German distributor hadn't yet collected any Sumeria, and assured me that he wanted to, it had just got lost in the run up to the show chaos. He asked me to come back to him at the end of the show - he'd take some of my left over stock if I had any - maybe 60 copies of each?
Feeling pretty chipper about things and with the stand ready to go by early evening, Andrew and I headed off to the apartment and a welcome Chinese takeaway (we'd eaten at about 5:30am in the airport, and then not until 8:30pm at night. Mmm. Hungry! That evening Dunk and Lucy arrived from Duesseldorf and the team was complete.
Thursday was the first day of the fair proper, and since Dunk and Lucy had arrived late the previous night, and Dirk (the Sumeria designer) was going to be helping out on the stand Thursday morning, I gave them the morning off - so it was just Dirk, Andrew and I until lunchtime. It got off to a fairly slow start - it takes a while for people to percolate through the halls to Hall 4, which is right at the back. Sales were pretty good though, lots of Sumeria and the expansion alone, plus more It's Alive! and Carpe Astra than I was expecting. The hardcore geeks tend to come on Thursday and Friday in an attempt to miss the weekend crush, and to get what is on their lists before they sell out. There was also some interest from new distributors in Finland, Japan and Singapore and my Belgian distributor collected some Sumeria too.
Friday was slower than Thursday, but not a bad day at all. I sold a box of each game to a shop in Switzerland (my first confirmed Swiss stockist) and sales were not too bad. It's Alive! and Carpe Astra continued to do better than I had expected, but it was definitely looking like my 50 copies a day target for Sumeria was optimistic. I gave Andrew the afternoon off - he'd earned it!
I wasn't expecting much from Saturday - the crowd is usually more family-oriented, tends to stick to the front halls and is less free with their money. Still nothing prepared me for just how bad it was. Sales were just over half the previous day's and it felt like we weren't selling anything at all. People seemed to enjoy the games though, and a couple of distributors swung by after apparently hearing good buzz about Sumeria. Alliance, my biggest US distributor sent a couple of guys over from their sales team. Previously I'd only dealt with their purchasing team so it was nice to meet them. They said that they'd heard good things about Sumeria and wanted to push it on their return to the States as a game with good Essen buzz. Plus a potential new French distributor had also been told about Sumeria and was interested in ordering 120 copies (a larger order than any I'd had outside America). Sales were very disappointing, but the buzz and distributor discussions left me feeling better about things.
Sunday was a real roller-coaster. Sales were going really well, my second best day of the show. Several people who'd played the games on Saturday came back and bought them and I picked up another Finnish distributor. I still had a bunch of stock left, but I hoped after the German distributor took some it would be a manageable amount to possibly send back in another UK publisher's van.
Then disaster struck. The boss of my contact at the German distributor came round, and seeing that my games were also distributed in Germany by someone else decided it would just be easier to buy from them rather than me. NO! Now I had a lot of stock to somehow get home. Time to panic! I went back to my Taiwanese distributor who took a bunch more It's Alive! and one of my UK distributors offered to take some of my stock to an Italian fair they were visiting the following week. I tried to see my contact at the other German distributor to see if they wanted some stock, but I couldn't get to see him - he was way too busy.
My last option was to buy a pallet, put the games on it, shrink-wrap them and then get the fair freight handlers to warehouse it for the night and ship it back to me in the UK. 460€. We finally left the fair at 9pm after a very stressful final few hours.
The next day Andrew and I pootled round Essen before heading over to Dortmund airport for our 4:15pm flight. Which eventually took off at 9:30pm, 7.5 hours after we arrived at the airport. I finally got home at midnight, tired and emotionally exhausted.
On Tuesday I paid my take into my bank in the UK, although I brought home fewer Euros than last year, even with the huge cut the bank took, the weaker pound meant I paid more pounds into my account than last year. Of course with the sweaters, banners and the freight costs my expenses were much higher than last year, it was still a profitable week, but not by much.
Since then I've been busy on personal things and following up on all the distributor contacts I made - trying to expand my market presence further round the world. Next year things will be cheaper (the sweaters have a one off cost I've already paid and the banners are re-usable) and I really need to find a more affordable way to get my games to and from the fair.
I'm off to Patriot Games in Sheffield on Saturday for another demo day, and things on the home front will quieten down on Monday. Then sleep. Lots of sleep.
This evening my journey to my second Spiel convention in Essen begins. Despite my best intentions it's been a largely last minute panic yet again, but now most of the panic is over. I've just been told my games have arrived at the convention centre, and I've collected my float (a whole bunch of five Euro notes for change at the booth), so the only thing I'm waiting on now is the banners which will hopefully be delivered shortly.
As I've mentioned before, last year's Spiel was a huge success for me and I'm hoping to repeat that this week. Several things are different though, and since this is only my second Spiel I don't have enough previous information to judge how that will affect things.
Last year I had rented out a third of my stand to Peter Struijf of Geode Games, and I only had one game of my own (though I had posters for Carpe Astra and a homemade prototype, the finished product was still a month away). My games weren't available in Germany yet (I picked up my first German distributor at the show, with my second signing on shortly afterwards) and It's Alive! had only been out for about five weeks - so it was pretty new.
This year I've a whole stand to myself and three games (the latest of which came out four months ago) which are all already available in Germany. I've spent more money on advertising this time (Boardgame News with their excellent English-language Spiel preview and SpielBox which is apparently the place to go for German-language Essen information), and signed up for a couple of deals with other people too (I'm in the Spiel fuer Spiel magazine again and I'm doing a deal with the Spielerei German-language magazine which will hopefully lead a few more people to my stand. Plus I'm doing the 'free 2 player expansion with every Sumeria sale' deal too.
How much will any of these factors affect my sales at the show? With so little information to go on I have no idea. The show will have cost me a lot more this year, hopefully that will pay off, but I can't be sure until next week, when I get home and work it all out.
Last year I sold 140 copies of It's Alive! to punters and another 96 or so to shops and distributors before finally getting rid of the remaining stock to a couple of big distributors. Those big distributors are unlikely to take any stock from me this time, but I'm hoping to get some orders from the smaller European distributors and betters sales to punters, due to the advertising and deals.
I'm taking a full pallet of Sumeria (504 copies), plus 192 It's Alive! and 96 Carpe Astra. My limited experience as a paid salesman back in my late teens seemed to focus entirely on targets. So I feel I should set myself some. I'm thinking 50 Sumeria, 5 Carpe Astra and 10 It's Alive! sales to punters per day. Is that achievable? I have no idea. Only one way to find out.
Wish me luck...
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