What A Week!

Last week was a blinder of a week. The combination of shipping twelves copies to Games Lore and The Cast Are Dice convention lead to my highest weekly sales of It's Alive! so far. Thirty copies! Games Lore received the games today and apparently two have sold already :-)

The Cast Are Dice

This year's con was slightly bigger than last year as it starts to become established. Nick and Sue of Shire Games had 169 tickets pre-ordered plus a few on the day. Nick had reserved me a table right in the entrance that you pretty much had to walk past, so the location was perfect. I was right next to Dean of Ludorum Games who was demoing Fagin's Gang and a new prototype that was getting a lot of positive feedback. Dean and I chatted throughout the con and he gave me a lot of really useful advice about professional runs, having made 1,000 copies of Fagin's Gang last year in Germany.

After being stymied at the Expo by a lack of stock (both my printer's presses broke the week before so I didn't get any artwork until the Thursday morning, leaving me two days to make as many copies as possible), I was determined to take far more than I needed. I was donating a couple of copies to the raffle table, delivering four pre-orders and hoped to sell ten. So I reckoned I needed about sixteen copies. I took twenty-six. Anything I didn't sell would go to the next people on the waiting list.

Sales-wise I set myself the target of ten sales, to match the income I got from selling five copies of Border Reivers last year. By the end of Saturday I had six, and I got another six plus one order on Sunday, so I'm counting that as thirteen, a good result in my book.

As well as seventeen games of It's Alive! over the two days I also managed to get a game of Fire & Axe: A Viking Saga and fellow blogger Luke's Tour. Both were very enjoyable. I meant to play Luke's games last year but I didn't find him until a couple of minutes before he left, and even after a year's waiting the game definitely lived up to my expectations - great stuff. Rumour has it Border Reivers also hit the table somewhere, which is nice.

This Week

This week is already off to a good start, I've sold three copies already (in the last eighteen hours), and tomorrow after work I'm off to see another publisher to demo Border Reivers and It's Alive!