Slow, Then Faster

It's Alive! construction is continuing. I've been managing around six copies a week for the last few weeks, which has been good, but I've over fifty outstanding orders, so I've some way to go. I'm going to have a couple of slow weeks of production due to weekends away and working in London for a few days next week. So I'm going to have to do something else as I can't take all the construction kit with me.

While I'm in London I need something to occupy my evenings, so I'm thinking of taking the bits for my next Jorvik prototype so I can take that and do some prototyping and solo-playtesting. This prototype will be slightly higher quality than previous ones, I'm thinking of colouring the cards in using pencil crayons to aid differentiation between different stages of the game. One of the problems we had during the last playtesting was remembering to score before a new stage started, and I think coloured cards will help with that in the absence of final artwork. I've also received the first of four prototypes I'm expecting in the next few weeks. I can take that with me too and read the rules and maybe even solo it to see what I make of it.

In the meantime I need to get some copies of It's Alive! ready and shipped. I've two remaining copies of Border Reivers too that have been waiting to be shipped. I hope to get those sent off in the next few days (ideally by Thursday so that I sold out within eleven months :-) ). I'm going to spend Wednesday night making copies of It's Alive!, hopefully finishing off the next batch and getting the tiles done for the last copy of Border Reivers.

In other news I took Monday afternoon off work, so that I could post the box artwork to the box-makers in London and get some prototyping raw materials for the next version of Jorvik. I hope to receive the finished boxes in about three weeks which will allow me to step up my production of It's Alive! to maybe twelve copies a week. This will be good as I've a convention in early August, and a lot of outstanding orders to make. Once I'm ahead of the game I can add the PayPal buttons to the site and start publicising the game again, I've been pretty quiet since the Expo as I didn't want to attract more sales until I had some stock to sell, rather than a backlog of orders.

I've also had someone who ordered a copy of It's Alive! pull out when they realised just how bad the exchange rate is at the moment. This happened once with Border Reivers, I was hoping the lower price tag and shipping costs would avoid it for It's Alive! but sadly not.

All in all, things are ticking along quite nicely, but it's definitely the amount of time I have available that's holding things back at the moment.