Festival Of Construction

Around the Beyond Monopoly trip Saturday and most of the day on the allotment yesterday, I've managed to get a fair chunk of construction done again.

I've now got fourteen games ready, apart from the tiles, enough to fulfill the remaining pre-orders, orders and review copies. I spent most of Sunday evening on sets of tiles: first gluing and then cutting them out. I've got five sets of tiles in various states of completion and I finished one off, ready for delivery at Paul's games night tonight.

I can't begin to describe the amount of time I'm spending on construction. I think I've managed to get the construction down to under three hours per game, but for the one hundred copy run that's still three hundred hours, or a game every evening for three and a half months. This is not an undertaking for the faint hearted, or the flighty.

If I manage to sell the one hundred copies within a year I'll consider it a success - I've got no marketing budget, and I'm an unknown designer. I think I'm on course so far, I'm hoping for spikes around the conventions I attend, and I think there might be a few more sales to come yet from friends and family. There's a paradox here. I need to sell all my copies (or at least break even), as quickly as possible, so selling to friends and family is a good thing. However, I need to sell to gamers who are going to play the game, to boost sales (through having played it and liked it enough to buy a copy) and raise my profile. Friends and family are likely to buy it as a favour to me, or in the hope it'll be worth something later, rather than to play it. So who to sell to? I'm going to try to aim for more gamers, but I do need to make my investment back sooner or later...

The game still seems to be well received (Exhibit A: Andy's comment from a couple of days ago) and so far I've not had any bad feedback. People have told me they don't like it, or it's not their type of game, but I've not had anyone tell me it's crap. I guess being a newbie, and a fairly nice guy those who really don't like it are keeping quiet to protect me. Thanks guys!