A Day of Rest

or not. One of things you quickly learn working for yourself is that 'normal' nine-to-five hours go right out the window. In some ways I was used to this, as I'd been running Reiver Games in my spare time for eighteen months before turning pro. I'm also ideally set up, since The Wife usually works one day of the weekend, so I can too. Yesterday, a Sunday, and traditional day of rest I did twelve hours work laying out the components for Carpe Astra.

I spent most of that time on the cards, as they, along with the boards, need to go to the printers first. Since Friday I've received most of the remaining artwork, which meant that I could do the layout for the final components. I'd done mock-ups of the layout for the prototypes I sent out a couple of months ago for testing in the US and Germany, but several things had to change for the real thing. I had to go through the cards replacing all the guild logos (each card has one, two or three guild logos on it) with the final art, and then I had to tweak the text layout. It was a little close to the border of the new art, so I had to move it in. This of course then requires adjusting as the text starts to drop off the bottom of the frame. So I spent most of the afternoon and evening editing the text.

Today I have to sort out some boxes to box-up cartons of It's Alive! for shipping out to shops and distributors. I've a few orders of multiple cartons (a 2, a 5, a couple of 8s and a couple of 12s), and the boxes could do with grouping together, as a more sturdy box means the games inside are less likely to be damaged in transit. There's a box shop just round the corner I'm investigating this morning, but if they don't have anything useful there's an online shop that does boxes to your specifications (though at what cost I don't know yet).

This afternoon I intend to pop over to my warehouse again and pick up some more games so that I can box them up and have the orders collected from my flat tomorrow. It'll mean our flat looks like a warehouse, but hopefully only for one night! In other news, Boards and Bits have upped their order :-)