Winding Down For Christmas

The orders I'm waiting on are unlikely to arrive before Christmas now. My distributors have been very busy in the run-up to Christmas by all accounts and several of them close between Christmas and New Year for stock-taking. I'm still hoping that several of the orders arrive in time for me to send them off before we move. Two of them sound hopeful, with another saying it'll be last week or the week before! Not holding out much hope of that one arriving any time soon. I had tried to gain some information on the rough size of the US order, but they won't give me a ballpark figure, they'd rather wait until they are ready to place the real order.

On the weekend I bought myself an external USB hard drive. I needed something to backup my data onto and it seemed like the best option. Being a computer-based company I'm particularly sensitive to data loss, and my laptop isn't that new :-/ Still, I finally got around to getting a drive, and on Saturday I wrote a little shell script that performs the backup. I plan to do weekly backups, and the disk will hold around twenty of them without any clever-ness (to do with only storing changed files), so that seems ideal.

I've been doing a fair amount of playtesting recently, but of new stuff, not the stuff I've had for a while. I think my next playtesting project is to send out some blind playtesting copies of Sumeria to get some objective feedback and some new ideas. To do that I'll need to make a bunch of prototypes. I'll need to get some wooden pieces (probably from Game-Components.com in Germany, though the weakness of the pound versus the euro means they'll be pretty expensive), make some boards (I'll probably wait until after we move and I've my own garage to doing the gluing in) and update the rules. Not making any changes to the game rules, but improving (I hope!) the rulebook by adding examples and clarifying a few things.