Excited

For the second time in a few months I’ve been really excited about a friend’s game.

Both created by designers at Newcastle Playtest.

Which is growing and gaining strength every month.

In both cases I’ve wanted to publish the game.

I’ve spent this week playtesting the latest with my mum, and The Wife and Daughter the Youngest a bit too.

Ideas fizzing.

Working on naming.

Playing with art styles.

But he’s not ready to hand it over to a publisher yet.

And the designer of the first one wants to try to find a bigger publisher.

Which is fair - we’re tiny.

Everything we’ve published so far I’ve designed or co-designed.

I’d love to branch out to other designer’s games.

But my time is very tight, so I don’t want to announce we’re open to submissions - I’ve not got the time to review them or do them justice.

Newcastle Playtest is perfect - I’m there already.

Hopefully at some point we’ll get there.

Maybe even with one of these two…

Me waiting patiently for the perfect game to drop into my lap...

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

Family

My parents are visiting for a week.

They live 300 miles away, and so I see them rarely.

Two or three times a year.

And dad is getting less mobile.

So it’s harder for them to travel.

It’s going to be lovely seeing them for a whole week.

Not just a brief video call.

But I run Eurydice Games in my spare time.

Around a full-time job.

And a youngish family.

So visitors pretty much pause game company work.

The print and play rewards are almost done though. Half a page left of the rulebook, then proofing and it’s ready to go.

It’ll be a month late :(

I have at least done some playtest of my mate Joe’s solo dungeon crawl (it’s very good!).

Loads of fun!

Mum, The Wife and Daughter the second joined in too!

Back

It's been a very busy week post-Expo.

There's been loads of Expo tasks to catch up on.

We've had a very busy week of UK sales (post Expo ones?).

So loads of bookkeeping.

And I'm back on the P&P rewards graphic design.

One thing I needed to do was physically print the dashboards.

And cut them out.

In their Print and Play configuration.

For two reasons.

One: it's easier to spot errors in physical form than on screen.

And two: I needed to check that I'd lined the backs and fronts up correctly for the P&P rewards.

In that the correct fronts and backs were together.

And the orientations were right too.

The good news is the P&P configuration was all correct.

But I spotted a few issues with the dashboards that needed fixing.

Cheaper to fix them now, than after printing 350 of them!

Conventions

I'm back from the UK Games Expo.

I'm knackered.

But it was so good.

We had our box manufacturer, W. MacCarthy & Sons, hand-deliver some Xeno Wars boxes to the Expo, from London!

We sold more games than ever before!

We demoed FlickFleet to loads of new people and could see how much fun they were having.

I had a few really useful business meetings.

We had a crowd of spectators for most of the time.

We had people go out of their way to come to our stand, just to tell us how much they love FlickFleet.

And someone even came up to us during dinner, to tell us how much he loved it!

I've done conventions in four jobs now.

Games ones with Reiver Games and Eurydice Games.

Scientific ones in the day job.

And during my PhD.

I really enjoy them.

Games ones in particular feel like I'm among my people.

And I love meeting so many people I know.