Marching Forward

It's been a week of steady progress this week. I've been working on a logo for my new games publishing company with my dad (a retired art teacher, artist and graphic designer). I don't really want to announce anything about the company until I've got all its accounts set up, and that's waiting on having a bank account to pay for them. I've an appointment with the bank when I get back from the U.S., so that should all get moving then. I'm going to use last week's blog post as my business plan when I go to the bank, that and my previous experience running a board game publisher should carry me through I hope. That blog post also led to a couple more pre-orders, so I'm slowly climbing towards break even point already.

Before then, the main things to work on are the Zombology graphic design and a draft website, plus any Zombology art I feel capable of making. I've got a bunch of time this week before I go on holiday - I'm babysitting for a friend on Monday night and then have four hours on trains on Wednesday as I head down to Sheffield for my quarterly hospital visit. I'm hoping to get next week's blog post written as well as make some progress on Zombology during that time.

One of the other things I'm working on is trying to streamline the rules around the Gurus a bit. Gurus represent an expert in each of the six suits in the game and they provide their owner with an in game benefit in their suit. Initially they all start out neutral, but during the game players can recruit them (or steal them from an opponent). Functionally they work pretty well, but it's a bit clunky and hard to explain, so it will be good if I can come up with something similar enough to still work well, but simpler to explain and smoother to play. We tried something on Thursday lunchtime, but it seemed like a step backwards, so that's fallen by the wayside.

In other news, I had a second consecutive Games Night last week (I've only managed four in the last nine weeks!), but sadly it's the last for another three weeks as I have a week's holiday immediately followed by a trip to St. Louis for work. While in the States I'm going to try to make it to a St. Louis Board Gamers MeetUp on the Wednesday, like I did a couple of years ago in Minneapolis, should be fun!

At Games Night I managed to tick another game off my ten plays list, King of Tokyo is safe too now. But I'm starting to think about another purge (not using anti-aircraft guns!). There's seven or eight games that are great games, but we just don't play them at Games Night, so I'm thinking quite seriously of getting rid of them to free up some more shelf space...