The Games Factory: Day 2

Well, The Cast Are Dice has been and gone, and it was a blast, but I'm going to let you know how the construction went first before getting around to a convention report. So here's how last Thursday panned out.

Thursday got off to a great start with the 8am arrival of the two print jobs I was waiting for. An offer of a customer testimonial and a plea for a swift turnaround got me my print jobs three days earlier than my printers Asterisk Digital had originally estimated. The print quality was great and I really liked the lamination - it made the print jobs look and feel much more professional - well worth the large increase in cost. I immediately got cracking on completing the rulebooks I had prepared the day before, I just needed to fold the covers (one of the two print jobs) and staple them together. It felt great to be finishing things, until that point I had been starting loads of stuff (constructed boxes that weren't labelled, rulebooks missing covers and not yet stapled, cards that were cut out but without rounded corners) but nothing was finished.

Just as I did the last of the 24 rulebooks the doorbell rang again and this time it was my new toy - the very expensive corner rounding tool. This was very cool - I set it up, calibrated it and started corner-rounding - I got through 24 decks (480 corners) in about an hour - another completed component - this felt great. At this point I knew I'd have some copies to take to TCAD, but how many I'd complete was still up in the air - I was aiming for fourteen: two of my pre-orders would be in attendance, my copy to play with people, a copy for the tombola table and ten to sell - which was way more than I thought I'd need.

After lunch I started labelling boxes, each one took about half an hour, and I worked my way through the fourteen boxes, finishing about 9pm. I was delighted with the boxes, the laminated paper labels looked really good once they were glued on, and it looked surprisingly professional - so far so good.

I finished the day with a set of tiles. Each set of tiles consists of seventy-two tiles which start out as a sheet of 2mm thick greyboard slightly larger than A2, and four sheets of A3 with the front and reverse designs on. I have to glue the two front sheets on, line up the back sheets and glue those on then cut out the seventy-two tiles. I was using the same watered down PVA glue that I'd used for the boxes, and it really didn't work very well - it took ages to stick it down (you need to apply pressure for quite a while) and then it needed a lot of re-sticking in areas where it hadn't stuck so well - this was going to take ages. In the end I stopped just after midnight - a sixteem hour shift.