I've been so busy over the last week or so that I've not had time to report on my progress in June. There was lots, plus a lot of game playing too. As usual I'll start with my game playing first.
Play
June was a busy month for playing games. The Expo finished on the 1st of June, I managed to get to both Beyond Monopoly! and Hugo's GarforTTGamers, and I had Mal and Linz down one weekend, saw Mal, Linz & Robin another and finally Mal again for a Monday afternoon on his way home from Manchester. It saw Race for the Galaxy return to the top of my most played list, and a whole bunch of first plays:
- Race for the Galaxy - 13 plays
- Mix-Match - 6 plays
- Carcassonne - 4 plays
- Carpe Astra - 3 plays
- Carcassonne: The City - 2 plays
- Hive - 2 plays
- Lord of the Rings - 2 plays
It was good to get out Lord of the Rings again, though we were crushed both times. Carcassonne: The City was a present from Dunk for being Best Man at his wedding, as well as coming in a neat wooden box, it is also a pretty good game.
I also had a lot of single plays: Ave Caesar, Canal Mania, Cartagena, Confucius, Diamant, Dominion, Galaxy Trucker, Guillotine, It's Alive!, Mr. Jack, Pandemic, PitchCar, Puerto Rico, Star Wars PocketModel and TransEuropa. Of those Ave Caesar, Carcassonne: The City, Confucius, Dominion, Galaxy Trucker, Mr. Jack, Pandemic and Star Wars PocketModel were new to me. Best new game of the month is probably a toss up between Dominion and Pandemic. Dominion was just a prototype but it was a nice original game (very hyped at the moment). Pandemic is a co-op game (like Lord of the Rings) which is also very popular at the moment. I think Pandemic for the win, but more plays of a published Dominion might well up it's rating. It was great to get so much gaming in, especially with people I rarely see.
Creation
It was a good month for game design/publishing too. I got to play Carpe Astra with Eric Martin of Boardgame News, almost got It's Alive! to the printers and finally got around to playtesting a lot of my submissions.
It's Alive!I got the last of the It's Alive! artwork back from the designer, and after some negative feedback here, got him to make a few changes to the box design. It's still less popular among Geeks than the old one, but I prefer it and I think it'll stand out on the shelf better. I got a quote I was happy with for manufacturing It's Alive! and almost sent it off to the printers (that slipped to early July). I also had a decent amount of interest from shops and distributors, still only a small fraction of the print run are spoken for, but I'm hoping that once a few shops start stocking it, word of mouth will do the rest.
Carpe AstraI continued the never ending tale of tinkering with the Carpe Astra scoring, and at the end of the month came up with something that I think I'm happy with. I'm now making some more representative prototypes to send to a couple of playtest groups in the US. The new prototypes have been done of the computer so they look more professional than the hand-drawn effort I've been using, and they also have the flavour text on, which should help improve the immersion.
Codename: AncientI've finally dusted off this prototype (which didn't look like anything special) and fallen in love with it. It's been getting really good reviews wherever I play it too. The only slight problem is the designer is not replying to my emails - I don't know whether he's on holiday, ignoring me or the emails are being eaten by a spam filter somewhere.
SubmissionsI'm still going through the rest of my submissions, there's still some I haven't played yet, and some that some pretty good, but I'm not sure they're good enough. I'm looking for something fairly cheap to manufacture next (maybe a card game?) since with It's Alive! and Carpe Astra so close together I'm running up a lot of costs. Something cheaper next is definitely the order of the day, especially seeing as it will take a few months before I start recouping the costs for It's Alive! and Carpe Astra.
1 comment:
Hiya Tim,
Thanks very much for the offer. At the moment I'm limited by time and money (it costs a surprising amount to make a prototype on my A3 inkjet printer). As a result I'm not looking for extra playtesters for Carpe Astra, but in the future I may well want more playtesters for other games. So watch this space :-)
Cheers,
Jack
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