I Can See My Sofa!

Three more boxes of It's Alive! have been collected today, freeing up valuable space in my flat. I've still got boxes for a couple of UK distributors at home, and I'm hoping to get confirmation of an order from Germany. I'm still in negotiations for US ditribution, I'm going to try to speak to the guy on the phone this afternoon and hopefully nail an agreement.

My parents are coming to visit this weekend, so I really would like to get shot of the boxes I've got at home tomorrow. I'm waiting on a consignment agreement from one of them (my fault - I made a typo in the address so the copy they returned to me is lost in the post) and a purchase order from the other. I've not managed to get through to my contact at all at that company, I've left him a few phone messages, which he has yet to return, and my emails go unanswered too. Hopefully I'll hear from him this afternoon, but I'm not holding out any hope.

Carpe Astra is nearly there (though I feel like I've been saying that for months!). I held a playtesting session at my flat last night (amongst the boxes) and it went really well. Only a couple of minor changes since last week, but I think they improve things. I've sent the 'final' rules off to Ted in the US for feedback, as well as a couple of other playtesters in the US and Germany. I finished laying out the cards and boards yesterday and managed to get them printed in time for my playtest evening. As a result I could get some feedback from my playtesters, which has led to a couple of changes which I intend to make in the next day or two. It's all coming together. I hope to submit the art to the manufacturers next week, then I've two weeks to get the box and the rules to them. Exciting times.

In other news, this has been a community blog since the beginning, but there's never been many contributors, and recently there's only been me. I decided that I'd like to make Creation and Play a personal effort, and so I contacted my fellow contributors a couple of days ago and they all said 'go for it'. So I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Luke, Bobby, Phil and Dave for all their contributions to Creation and Play and wish them best of luck in their future games designs. From now on Creation and Play will be known as 'The Voice of Reiver Games' :-p