Not much to say this week.
First with my family.
Then with The Wife’s.
Lots of time in the car.
But also eating, drinking and hanging out.
Plus a little gaming too.
Just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support in 2024.
Paul and I really appreciate it.
And to wish you all a happy, healthy, and fun 2025!
We've spent the weekend in York.
Visiting Paul and his family.
For Fauxmas, our fake Christmas.
Complete with Fauxmas Eve, Fauxmas Day (including presents and Fauxmas Dinner) and Foxing Day.
It was a lovely weekend.
A great chance to catch up.
Play games.
Drink.
Eat.
And be merry.
We played lots of games. Mostly including at least one of my kids.
So lighter games.
Lots of Apples to Apples, Codenames, Just One, A Fake Artist in New York and UNO.
But also Las Vegas.
Get his feedback.
Discuss some new ideas.
I've got a new version to try now :)
Plus some weeding of the many ideas for FlickFleet: A Box of Xeno Flicks 1.
A great weekend :)
I've spent the last week fighting with my bank.
Mano-a-telephone.
Toe-to-handset.
I lost.
Despite last week's blog about how we would pay royalties that week I'm still in limbo.
Eventually I pulled the money from PayPal, rather than pushed from the bank.
It's left the bank.
And now it's in the ether.
The bank says they have fond memories of it.
PayPal say we await it patiently.
It'll arrive in a week or two.
Where the hell is it?
The ether.
So the royalties are still pending. Until the money is in the warm embrace of my PayPal balance.
Which could be another week or two.
I can only assume someone is carrying it on foot.
In the meantime, I've been working on my third print at home roll and write again.
And planning 2025.
This weekend we're going to York to spend 'Fauxmas' with Paul and his family.
There will be food and presents and games and playtesting.
And more work on the next FlickFleet campaign.
Box of Flicks 2 was largely designed by fans of the game.
A fan contributed to Box of Flicks 1.
There was lots of fan content in the Box of Pirate Flicks too.
We make a big thing about how we credit them and pay them royalties.
We've been meaning to pay the last lot for a while.
It includes the last year's reprint and this year's Box of Pirate Flicks.
So it's quite a lot of money.
Things started going wrong at the beginning of the year when we ran out of FlickFleet for a few months.
So web sales tanked as we had nothing to sell.
And overheads started eating into the profit from the Pirate Flicks campaign.
Website sales were pretty slow all summer.
The pot dwindled further.
When it came time in August to ship the Pirate Flicks games to the US we had three options.
We choose the fastest.
And most expensive.
Then VAT bit us.
The quotes were excluding VAT. I forgot that.
We had to pay them, and another £1,500 in VAT.
We'd get most of that back. In early December.
We've been almost out of cash for five months.
I've had to lend the company money a couple of times to pay the bills.
We've just got the VAT back!
And had our best ever week of website sales. And another really good one.
It's time to pay the royalties!
A weight off my mind. I hate owning people money.
I've spent most of the weekend trying to sort it out.
The transfer to PayPal was blocked by the bank as a suspect transaction.
I'm hoping I'll have the money available to pay out this evening...
This week has been bizarrely good for website sales.
Last three weeks have been within 50p of each other.
This week was more than double them!
And I’ve no idea why!
Not complaining though.
That’s eased our ongoing cashflow issues.
And it’s, in combination with the VAT rebate that’s coming shortly, means we can make some long over due payments :)
But that’s an aside.
The main focus of this week has been…
Our seventh FlickFleet campaign.
The campaign is created.
There’s a very basic holding page.
Which already has over 100 followers!
In addition to starting work on the campaign, I’ve been reviewing the fan submissions.
Starting to shortlist them.
Playtesting is next :)
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