There Goes My Free Time

Border Reivers has required a huge investment in time. It's required a large investment in money, but a huge one in terms of time.

For the last ten months or so I've been spending a very large proportion of my free time on Border Reivers. Initially there was sourcing materials and doing the artwork, now I spend a lot of time on construction and blogging.

Border Reivers has been more successful than I was hoping, and with the review and interview coming out in the future and hopefully some reviews appearing on BoardGameGeek soon, it will hopefully continue. Still at the current rate I expect to sell out within six months. That's a long time. In the mean time I'm working on other game designs - all of which will require time to bring to fruition.

In some ways my real job helps, in that I can finish as early as 14:50, and come home to post copies or do some construction, in other ways it doesn't. Most of the time I get the bus to work, and due to the journey time and the lack of choice of bus, on those days I'm out of the house for eleven hours - that doesn't leave much time for construction.

Board game design is hard work - it takes a lot of time and effort. Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of taking it on, in addition to a full-time job. But, I still enjoy it, and it's a great feeling when you hear from people who really enjoy your efforts. I'm also amazed at the number of people who are doing it. The number of people I know or have met who are designing games is huge - much larger than I expected. It's great stuff - the more games designers who are at it the more great games we'll end up with. Sure, not all of them will be great, but some will.

I've received my first submission from another designer, and somehow need to work out whether it's worth the time, cost and effort of publishing. I've no idea how to go about that yet, other than play it a lot and see if I like it.

I've done a fair bit of construction the last couple of days, made some good progress. I've finished the boxes for the batch of four copies I'm working on (including labelling), and I've bagged up the components. All I need to do now is cut out the scoreboards and mountain ranges (five minutes per game), make the decks of cards (half an hour) and glue and cut out the tiles (one hour). We have visitors this weekend so I won't get anything done for a few days. I'll not be blogging for a couple of days either. Have a good one.