Board Games - Creation And Play

Gaming Buddies

2012-01-23T19:57:00.003Z

I've not made a huge amount of progress on Codename: Vacuum the last few weeks - it has been fairly hectic for a number of reasons. In the meantime, a trip to York made me think of something.

In the last seven years I've lived in five houses in three towns over 250 miles apart. During that time I've made a bunch of really good friends - the sort of guys you stay in touch with despite living hundreds of miles apart and try (not as much as I'd like!) to make the effort to visit them despite the distance. And I've made all these friends through gaming.

This weekend we had to pop to York (90 miles away from our new home in Newcastle upon Tyne). While there we popped in to see my friend Paul. Paul responded to a request for Border Reivers playtesters back in 2006, and I then joined his twice weekly games night and he became one of my best mates and Reiver Games playtesters. While in York I also met Dave through the local games group Beyond Monopoly!. Dave and I shared an interest in gaming (I think it was Space Hulk that first drew us together, but we liked very similar games, and liked the same things - except the Star Wars prequels!). Sadly, after a couple of years Dave moved to Plymouth (350 miles from York) and I haven't seen much of him since (though it's definitely my turn to visit (now 410 miles away!).

Then we moved again, 160 miles further south to near Bedford, and I joined a new game group. Terry, Graham and Andrew were available during the day on occasion, so we formed a playtesting group. As Reiver Games slowly withered and died our group changed from a playtesting group to a regular gaming night.

In a couple of weeks we're going down south to spend a weekend playing games with Terry, Graham and Andrew. We saw Paul and his family yesterday, and have agreed to see them on the way down south for another catch up and some gaming. I'm hoping to arrange an epic trip down to Plymouth to see Dave in the next few months (which will probably involve, you've guessed it, some gaming).

We moved back to Newcastle at the end of last year, where we still have some really good friends (several of whom come to my games night), but through the local games club (which I've hardly made it to yet) and a games night at the local games shop: Travelling Man I'm hoping I'll make some more excellent friends.

I'm really glad I have gaming as a way to meet new people, and that the people I meet share my interests and often turn into some of my best mates. Who have you met through gaming?

The Beginning: First Steps in Crafting a New Game

2011-12-03T15:55:00.005Z

My games design process starts with a spark of an idea, either theme, mechanics or a combination of the two. This usual sets my head to buzzing with a whole raft of ideas, from mechanics, artwork, market segments, and the inevitable riches that will follow from the million copies sales it is bound to achieve. At this stage I have to ride the wave of unrealistic optimism and get as many of the ideas down as possible before I forget them all. In the past this means getting to a notebook as fast as possible and just dumping all my thoughts onto paper. These thoughts will mostly be theme and mechanics ideas, with maybe a mission statement for the game describing which sector of the market I'm aiming for, target play time, etc.

Recently I've started using a draft email to myself as a virtual notebook that I can access from anywhere I've got internet access, without having to remember to cart the notebook around with me. I've found this really useful, but it has it's strengths and weaknesses like anything else. It's quick to use, and very portable, and also allows editing as your ideas change over time. The downside is that sketching images of design ideas, card layouts, tile distributions, etc. is much slower than scribbling something quickly with a pencil.

The ideas keep coming and the game will evolve pretty quickly at that stage with everything potentially open to change. Over a few days I get enough down (and have enough ideas) to begin the prototyping journey. I've a lot more ideas down on paper than prototypes - lots of these ideas fail at the first hurdle as I come to the conclusion that they won't work, won't be fun or just lose interest in them. After the first year or so of running Reiver Games I went off games design, aiming instead to position the company as an independent publisher of games by other designers. For some reason, I'm back in the designing mood.

If the game keeps my interest enough to make it off the paper of my notebook, the next stage is to make a paper prototype. The early prototypes are just something that you can play (probably by yourself) to work out the worst of the kinks. There will be loads of them and at this early stage everything is still changing constantly, so you want to make something that's playable but doesn't require too much effort to construct. Normally I do this all with pencil and paper. I take sheets of A4 paper (similar in size to US letter I think) and literally tear them down to size. Cards are a sheet folded into 16ths or 32nds, player boards might be a sheet folded in half (i.e. A5), a game board might be two sheets taped together (or a sheet of A3). There's no artwork, just enough text/iconography drawn on with a pencil to be playable. I use pencil rather than pen as I fully expect to be rubbing things out and then re-drawing/writing them after every test game. Using paper for cards is definitely sub-optimal from a play point of view (they are very hard to shuffle!) but this version isn't really intended to be played by anyone other than me, and rather than spending tens of hours cutting out and making pretty card ones, it's more important at this stage to make sure this early game idea actually works enough to play with other people (which is when the real playtesting begins).

The game I'm working on at the moment (Codename: Vacuum) is a card game in the Dominion vein, i.e. it has hundreds of cards. I started making a starter set of cards a few weeks ago and got to just about enough to start testing it to see if the basic premise works before I came down with a filthy cold and then we had Christmas. I'm back home again and I'm already thinking of changing up my process for this game.

Folding and tearing all the cards, then drawing on them the basic layout is a lot of work when you do it hundreds of times. To add the fact that this version is almost unplayable in terms of shuffling is making me think of cutting to the chase and making the Phase II prototype straight away. Or at least Phase 1.5. This would be made out of craft card (about 220 gsm) and be partially printed with a basic card layout to reduce some of the drawing drudgery. I'd still leave the game without any artwork and write the game text in pencil to make it easy to change as I work out the strengths and weaknesses of the various cards.

I still have the Adobe InDesign software I bought for Reiver Games, so I can use that to quickly knock up the card outlines and cutting guides, print those out and then fill in the text with pencil afterwards. I also got an A3 inkjet printer that was capable of printing on card - specifically for printing prototypes - so I'll be able to print them at home too. I've got three days before I have to go back to work - time to get cracking!

What is your process? What steps do your designs go through? What tools do you recommend?

Which Came First? The Mechanics or the Theme?

2011-11-30T19:14:00.004Z

With my earlier games: Border Reivers and Carpe Astra the mechanics definitely came first, and the same is true of It's Alive! one of the games I published on behalf of someone else. With Border Reivers I started trying to make a game like Mighty Empires that played faster and less randomly; I really liked the networking mechanic in the submission by Ted Cheatham that became Carpe Astra, though the theme changed quite dramatically. It's Alive! had been through several themes before I changed it to building Frankenstein's monster. So in my experience, mechanics first seems to work ok.

To further reinforce this, most of the many games I've started designing but failed to finish/lost interest in/couldn't get working started out with a theme first, which I tried to find mechanics that fit after the initial idea.

The theme acts as a hook for the game to interest people, hopefully enough that they want to play or buy the game. It's often possible to re-theme a game by picking something that roughly fits the mechanics and then tweaking the mechanics, action names or card wording to get the game to make sense with the new theme. In my experience it's often possible with very few changes to the game.

As I mentioned earlier this week after a conversation with The Wife a new game idea sprang into my mind almost fully formed. Theme and mechanics combined. Since then I've tweaked the theme slightly to distance it from a couple of similar new games (which I've added to my Christmas list so I can play them and ensure my game develops differently) and the mechanics have begun the long road of changes that will hopefully lead to a great game.

For me personally, I think the mechanics-first approach is the way to go. What are your experiences? Are you a theme-first or mechanics-first designer? How will my new game idea develop: theme and mechanics in lock-step, or will the theme change as time goes on? Stay tuned to find out!

Hello? Hello? Anyone here?

2011-11-28T21:21:00.003Z

Well, it's been nearly six months since Reiver Games officially shut down. The email addresses and website will be disappearing this week probably, the bank accounts are shut and the only time my games are mentioned on BGG is people trying to offload their copies in trades or auctions.

It's Alive! is now available on the iPad (a version which the designer arranged, I gave him the rights to the game and let them use the artwork for free, but otherwise had nothing to do with it).

I've moved back to Newcastle upon Tyne, where I lived when I first designed Border Reivers (hence the northeast theme), and I'm back working for the company I worked for at that time again too. I'm still into games, hosting a regular weekly gaming night at our house and trying to get along to Newcastle Gamers when my busy schedule allows.

Games design-wise I've done almost nothing for a while now, I've had a couple of ideas over the last few months, but it's been hard to drum up any enthusiasm for anything with the spectre of Reiver Games hanging over me, reminding me how bad I was at it. In the meantime, I've been moping around the house clearly bored: "In need of a hobby".

Until yesterday. Yesterday was a day of driving, at the end of a weekend of driving. The Wife and I were coming back from Bristol where we'd been visiting family and we had a five and a half hour drive on which to amuse ourselves (I was supposed to be driving, but driving-schmiving). We got to talking about Reiver Games and The Wife asked how sad I was about it. I admitted that I was disappointed that I couldn't make it work, and that every now and again I thought about how I could have done it differently: smaller print runs, not make the leap from hobby self-publisher to selling to distributors and trying to make a living from it in one go, etc. And then something weird happened.

You could do it again, you know. As a hobby. I'd help.

Wow. In the (para-phrased) words of Wash from Firefly: "Good wife". I'd tried. I'd failed. Miserably. To the tune of several thousand pounds of (almost) our money. And The Wife was willing to let me try again!

We got talking about the sorts of games I'd make if I had a chance to do it again differently. We talked about the sorts of games I think sell really well and the sorts of games she likes. And then I had an idea. It sprung from something she said and suddenly my mind was whirring with game ideas, I had a fairly well-formed concept in my head and I was fleshing out mechanics and card examples in my head instead of the things I should have been doing (like sticking to my lane and avoiding HGVs). It's Codename: Vacuum by the way, more to come on that front hopefully (especially if anyone is listening!).

So where now? I'm designing again, and I've got a load of enthusiasm back. I'm making notes and hoping to do some prototyping in the next couple of days. Will I have another go at a publishing company? Probably not. But the possibility is there and you never know. I'd certainly do things differently this time round and I know so much more than I did when I started Reiver Games, so it would definitely be less of an uphill struggle.

Reboots seem popular these days (Star Trek, X-Men: First Class, the new Spiderman), maybe I should hop on the bandwagon...

The End

2011-06-07T19:08:00.004+01:00

It's been almost exactly a year since my last post here, but I'm back for a one-time only update on the state of Reiver Games, me and a brief retrospective on the five years of Reiver Games.

A Year! What's Happened?

Since I last posted here I've been trying (successfully :) ) to get back into paid employment. After a brief spell of work experience working for a previous employer in Newcastle, I found a full-time role in software development (my official trade) near home and I've been doing that for the last seven and a half months. I'm nearly back to full steam, relearning those skills I'd learnt in the eight years before I quit coding to try Reiver Games as a full-time concern. The job is going well, they seem to like me and the work I'm doing, and I've got to say I'm loving getting a pay-check every month. It's awesome :)

Bored Now. What About Reiver Games?

Reiver Games has been very slowly ticking along in the intervening twelve months. I cut the prices of the games I had on consignment at distributors in the UK and the US in an attempt to get rid of them so all my stock was in one place. It worked, I sold the last games on consignment at the beginning of this year.

That left me with just over three thousand games left in my warehouse (and my office): predominantly Sumeria, but with a decent chunk of It's Alive! and Carpe Astra too. Plus about 600 copies of the 2-player expansion of Sumeria. I've been trying to sell these to liquidators over the last few months and getting little traction.

About a month ago all that changed, Tanga.com got back to me (I'd assumed at that point that I'd heard the last from them) and agreed to take 300 of each game (and 300 expansions) to sell in the US (so if you're in the US they should be arriving in about two weeks...) and with that sale I could afford to sell the rest to a UK liquidator for a laughable amount. Between the two they should just about pay off my bank loan, so I can close the company down and pay off my creditors without having to dip into our personal funds.

I've got about a dozen games left at home (the loose ones I couldn't sell to a liquidator) that I'm selling on my website at pretty much cost plus shipping. Once those are gone it's just the final 300 copies of the Sumeria expansion, and then I'm done. I'm thinking of sending the remaining expansions to BoardGameGeek, so that at least they should find loving homes :)

You Rich Enough To Retire?

Sadly no. I don't have the exact figures, but I reckon I lost about £13,000 ($19,000) on Reiver Games. Dear God, that sounds awful. The one slight redeeming feature is that the vast majority of that was some money we came into unexpectedly (which was the only reason I could afford to invest in the company and not earn anything for two years). I say again: Earning a wage again is awesome.

What Went Wrong?

Clearly I screwed things up. How? Can I at least provide some pointers to the intrepid among you to help you avoid my mistakes?

Firstly, I made the jump from hobby publisher to professional publisher too soon and too quickly. The games I made by hand were very successful - I sold out of both print runs within a year and pretty much doubled the investment both times. 100% ROI is pretty good going. But that was selling a few hundred games mostly direct to gamers, not selling thousands predominantly to distributors and shops. Rather than rushing into things, I should have continued to make the games by hand and sell them to gamers at conventions, while building up my reputation and stable of games. Once I had a strong reputation and 5-10 games under my belt, I should have moved to a half-way house, where I got the games professionally manufactured in much smaller print runs (500 - 1,500) but still sold directly to gamers - that way I could afford the high costs of small print runs, since there were no middle men taking their cut. The fully professional model could come later, once I had a bunch of awesome games with a proven track record and a wider reputation. This is similar to the model Martin Wallace has taken with such success (though clearly it helps that his games are extremely popular).

My second mistake was around print run sizes and manufacturer choices. I decided to get the games manufactured in Europe for three reasons: it would be easier to liaise with the manufacturers, the environmental cost of shipping the games to me would be less than from China, and I knew that working conditions and materials would be of a known high standard. I was very happy with the second manufacturer I used: LudoFact in Germany. Their customer service was excellent. The production quality was excellent. They delivered on time and as budgeted. Sadly, getting the games manufactured in the EU cost me, as the unit cost was significantly higher, which both raised my retail price and squeezed my margins. In an attempt to overcome this problem, I increased the size of my print runs to reduce the unit costs. This left me with me with more games than I, as a new relatively unknown publisher, could sell. As a result, the capital I needed to invest in new games was instead sat in my warehouse as unsold stock, and even worse, it was costing me money to warehouse it there.

Mistake number three was related to mistake number two. In an attempt to get retail prices to an affordable level, while still selling at 40% of retail to distributors I squeezed my margins too far, to the point where I was making nowhere near enough money on each game, and yet still the games were expensive, especially in Germany (where they had to compete with local manufacturers doing vast print runs) and the US (where they had to compete with local manufacturers doing much larger print runs and getting the games made in China). With high prices people were less likely to take a punt and see if they liked it, so sales were lower than they needed to be. Making the games in the smallest box I could fit them in, while popular with collectors with huge collections and saving money on shipping, also made the games look even more expensive when compared similar sized games in the shops.

Finally, there was the bank loan. The bank were very happy to lend me £10,000 to get Carpe Astra manufactered, just after It's Alive! was released. It's Alive! was several months late, due to problems at the manufacturer, and with my pitiful margins had hardly recouped any of its investment when I wanted to release Carpe Astra. It turns out that the bank made a good decision: I'm going to re-pay the loan in full a few months early. Sadly, it was a terrible idea for me. I was paying £330 a month servicing the loan, which meant the money I was making month in, month out was quite rapidly disappearing from my account, leaving me little to invest in new games. In hindsight, I should have gone more slowly as discussed above, without having to rely on a loan. If I really wanted to jump straight in at the deep end of selling to distributors, then I needed a much larger initial investment, probably on the order of £50,000 - £100,000 - enough to fund five or ten games without relying on external finance.

It probably shouldn't be the last point, but I also needed a much better understanding of marketing and a solid marketing strategy. Considering how little I knew, it's a wonder that I managed to sell 5,500 games worldwide before the end.

Final Thoughts

I'm proud of what I achieved during the last five years with Reiver Games. From a pipe dream of making a board game in Newcastle eight or nine years ago, I sold four games (8,500 copies in total including the liquidators), to five of the world's continents. I got my products into 21 distributors in North America, the UK and throughout Europe.

I really enjoyed the graphic design and learning new skills in sales and marketing and dealing with manufacturers, distributors, shops and logistics. I loved going to trade shows and conventions and introducing gamers to my games.

I'm really glad that I decided to go for it, and that The Wife gave me her unconditional support. Had I not done it, I'd be financially better off, but I would not have learnt everything I did over the last five years, nor would I have met so many gamers who share my passion for board games.

I'd like my last words here to be a huge thank you to all my customers (thanks again for your support), all the gamers I've met (thanks for your enthusiasm), the designers (including those who sent me games I didn't publish) and my friends and family (especially The Awesome Wife) for your support, encouragement, advice and for not treating me like the lunatic I clearly am. I'll leave this blog up, hopefully the information contained herein will provide information, advice, a cautionary tale and entertainment(?) for other wannabe designers, publishers and entrepreneurs.

Rollcoaster Finally Falls Off Tracks

2010-06-09T11:47:00.003+01:00

So I hinted that there might be some exciting news coming soon on my blog. Sadly this isn't it.

After I announced that I was closing the company I had several enquiries from people interested in acquiring either some or all my stock or even a share in the company. Despite being obviously very disappointed to be closing down the company after three and a half years, this interest in buying bits from me was a silver lining as it meant I might be able to pay off my debts and even possibly re-coup a small chunk of my initial investment.

Then, just over a week ago I went to a meeting with another UK publisher: Spiral Galaxy Games to discuss the possibility of a co-publishing deal for Braggart, the fun card game I've been alluding to on my blog for many, many months. It was a productive meeting, we came up with an agreement we were both happy with and it looked like Reiver Games was going to rise from the ashes and continue publishing games. I contacted the designer and the artist I had lined up, everything looked good, everything was go. We were going to try to get everything ready for Essen in the hope I could get a stand booked at the last minute (it was already past the booking deadline).

The designer had already seen the contract (though not yet signed it) and was up for it, but he wanted to finalise the game before signing the contract. The artist needed to get working immediately, and wanted me to sign a contract with her. I was a little wary about signing the artist's contract before the designer's one was signed as I didn't want to be left carrying the can if the designer dropped out.

After a chance meeting with the designer at the UK Games Expo it became clear to me that the designer wanted to finalise the game before signing the contract so that he could negotiate a new contract where I didn't have the right to change anything - he wanted complete control over the game design (which I can understand - it is after all his baby). Sadly, that meant that he was not interested in signing my standard contract (which give me the right as the publisher to make changes to the game as necessary after seeking input from him). With the designer pulling out, I'm left owing the artist a couple of hundred quid for the early artwork she's done (which was fantastic).

With no hope of publishing that game, and nowhere near enough cash in the company to publish anything else any time soon I'm back to shutting the company down. I've sold a bunch of stock to a UK distributor and now I'm trying to close a deal to get rid of the rest of the stock to a publisher in the US.

The last couple of weeks have been very intense. First very down, then very up then down again. Fortunately, on another front things are looking up as I've got a chance to work with a former employer in Newcastle on a short-term contract. It'll give me a chance to refresh my IT skills and add some recent experience and a recent reference to my CV.

An Update

2010-05-08T10:53:00.002+01:00

Just a quick update to let you all know where things stand with Reiver Games.

Firstly, I'd like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has got in contact to commiserate or show their support - thanks also to everyone who has ordered games from me since the announcement :)

So, where do things stand? At the moment Reiver Games is continuing as it always has, shipping direct orders and dealing with distributors as before. I've received several enquiries from people or companies interested in helping me close out. I've no firm offers yet, but one indicative offer and several expressions of interest.

As far as I can tell from the early information I've received these range from 'I would like to buy all you stock' to 'I would like to buy Reiver Games as a going concern complete with website, licences and possibly even your continued involvement'. I've also had some interest in re-printing my games in other languages.

Obviously, there's many a slip betwixt cup and lip, so none of these may materialise into a confirmed offer. But at this point I'm quietly hopeful.

Au Revoir

2010-04-29T17:25:00.005+01:00

As you will all know I've been finding things hard the last few months. Privately I've been agonising about what to do with the company. I had a game that was very nearly ready to go, but to go with it I would have needed another £15,000 or so in the company (in liquid asset form - i.e. cash). I've been leaning towards going back into IT work (full-time or part-time, contract or permanent) to earn some money not only to fund my personal life, but also to generate enough cash to fund my next game.

The other option that was floating round in my head was just to jack it all in and shut Reiver Games down. I've invested £13,290 of my own money in Reiver Games, and as things stand although my stock is worth more than that (at the price I paid, let alone an 'average' sale price), with all my money tied up in stock the company is not going anywhere. I've tried a whole bunch of things to try to drive sales but without cash to advertise heavily the sales have been pretty slow. Is it really worth throwing another huge wad of cash at the company and hoping I do things better with my next game?

I've decided: No, it's not. So I'm now officially winding Reiver Games down. As you can imagine I'm pretty gutted about this, but it's a hard market to succeed in, it's been a lousy couple of years economy-wise and I have to accept some responsibility and admit I'm not the guy who can make this happen.

What's next? I'm not sure. I've a lot of stock left (which I'm still paying to warehouse), and a bank loan to service. Some options are:

Sell the company on to someone with more business nous and a bigger wad of cash who can afford to advertise the games to drive sales and fund more products. I can't see this being that likely.
Sell a large amount of stock to a distributor/competitor and dispose of the rest.
Sell off what I can and bin the rest
Fire-sell what I've got

What to do? I really don't want to fire-sell the stock - the designers have entrusted me with their games and I want to them earn the rewards they deserve for their brilliant designs. Also, I really don't want to hurt those distributors and retailers who took a chance on buying my stock and have done a huge amount to support me. Undercutting them just to turn a quick buck feels like a really crappy thing to do. I'm going to be speaking to a few people in coming weeks to explore the options I have.

On a personal note I'm spending most of my time looking for paid work now, but I hope to post a few retrospective posts about what I feel went right and what went wrong. Consider them cautionary tales for those of you who would love to get into the gaming business.

I'd just like to take this moment to thank everyone who has supported Reiver Games over the last three and a half years - I definitely couldn't have done what I did without you. Thanks. Also, special thanks to my designers: Yehuda, Ted and Dirk. Thanks you trusting me with your designs - I'm sorry I couldn't make them as successful as they deserve to be.

On a final note, if you'd like to commiserate in person (or point and laugh) I'll be attending Beer and Pretzels in Burton on Trent in a few weeks.

Crowdsourcing Support

2010-04-19T09:53:00.004+01:00

Since I announced the sad news that I'm going to have to go back into IT to pay the bills (Reiver Games hasn't reached that point yet, and doesn't look like it will any time soon), I've had lots of contact from gamers, friends and customers wishing me well and even offering support/help.

This got me thinking. If there's people out there who are interested in helping what could they do that would actually help Reiver Games get off the ground? The obvious answer is to buy one of my games, either from a local or web retailer (which will probably be cheaper for you and encourage them to buy more stock from their distributor) or take advantage of free shipping and a bundle deal when buying from my website. However, money is tight in the current economic climate, and many of the people offering support already own my games, so here are a few more ideas I came up with:

Already got my games and want to help?

Play them with friends you think might like them
Take them to conventions/games nights and get them to the table
Offer to demo them in a local shop
Get one as a Christmas/birthday present for a friend or family member you think would like it
Write a review or a session report of one of my games on BoardGameGeek

Don't yet have any of my games?

Ask a friend to bring a copy to games night/a convention
Ask your local store to carry my games
Read the rules to It's Alive!, Carpe Astra or Sumeria on my website - anything take your fancy?
Recommend one of my games to a friend who you think might like it

Once again, thanks to everyone who has supported Reiver Games over the last three and a half years, and for your recent messages of support - they help!

If you've got any more ideas please let me know in the comments.

The Goodwill Of Others

2010-03-26T11:31:00.003Z

Yesterday I posted a Geeklist on BoardGameGeek describing my two years trying to get Reiver Games to the the point where it could support me as a full-time employee who draws a reasonable salary.

I've had to admit in the last couple of weeks that Reiver Games is still a long way from that point and that I need to bring in some money way before Reiver Games reaches that point. So I need to take some form of gainful employment and run Reiver Games in the background. I've really enjoyed running Reiver Games and I want to continue to do so.

What stood out on the Geeklist was the goodwill of several of the commenters. Several people were disappointed that it hadn't worked out for me, several offered their sympathy.

A couple of guys who had visited my stand at Essen felt bad for not buying a copy of Sumeria, despite it not being their sort of game! While that sentiment is nice, I don't want to do well because people feel sorry for me, or because they want me to live my dream. I want people to buy my games of course. But I want them to buy my games because they think the game will provide enough enjoyment to make it worth the cost. I want them to be bought and played until they fall apart, not sit on a collector's shelf as another unplayed game in their collection.

What also stood out was the comment by my friend and playtester Paul:

I'll keep supporting you and sending good wishes your way whatever shape Reiver Games takes - I still believe that if anyone can make it in this industry it's you! And I promise, in public, that I will purchase at least one copy of every Reiver Games publication to do my part to keep you in biccies! Maybe others could do the same ?!? If your next project is the one we've playtested then I AM OFFICIALLY VERY EXCITED!!!! It is an awesome game of much awsomeness! With extra awesome on the side! It will be perfect present material for friends (both gamers and non I think) and has been enjoyed by all the York fraternity who have tried it so far. Good luck! Don't give up!

Paul's pledge is incredibly generous. It's in no small part due to his generosity, his compulsive collecting of games and his friendship and wish for me to succeed. But I like to think it's also because we have a similar taste in games and he figures anything I publish will be to his tastes. Paul is a True Fan.

With 3,000 true fans I'd have sold out of all my games. But that's one in every 2,200,000 people in the world population. Considering most of the world population will never hear of me or my company, and of the proportion that might have a slight chance of stumbling across me most have no interest in board games it's a pretty tall order.

What I need to work out is how to reach those potential true fans and convert them. The games I like are pretty popular - there must be more people out there who would like It's Alive!, Carpe Astra and Sumeria if they played them. How do I get the games in front of them?

Sumeria Computer Game v0.2

2010-03-15T15:03:00.003Z

As promised last week, there's a new version of the Sumeria computer game available for download and testing.

This version is a big step up from the last version in that you can actually play the game! However, there's still some functionality missing: noticeably, there's no AI (all human players) and you have to play on a single machine (no play by email/online functionality).

The setup file will run on a windows computer, and requires version 3.5 of the .Net Framework. Please feel free to download and play it and post any feature requests, feedback or bug reports in the comments below.

Comes a Time

2010-03-12T13:37:00.003Z

I've been running Reiver Games for three and a half years now. For the first year and a half I was running it as a hobby - making the games by hand in my spare time around a full time job in IT. Two years ago, I decided to give it a go running Reiver Games as a full-time career.

After two years I'm now in a position to determine whether or not I've been successful. For the first three years Reiver Games was both profitable and growing (both turnover and profit growing). This year the turnover will be slightly down on last year and I probably won't be profitable. It's clear that even in the good years I'm earning nowhere near enough money to invest in new games and make a living. My games just aren't selling quickly enough.

I've been in the enviable position of not needing to earn a decent wage for a couple of years, but sooner or later I need to start bringing home the bacon. It's clear the Reiver Games is a long way from doing that at the moment.

So now what? I've got a few options, thanks to my IT training, which can earn a decent wage, and the fact that Reiver Games is not really enough work to keep me busy full-time. My options in preference order are:

Do some part-time work as an IT consultant through Reiver Games. I keep the company running, continue making games and yet still earn a decent wad of cash.
Get a full-time job in IT, working for a company that will let me continue Reiver Games in my spare time. Games production will probably decrease but at least it's still going.
Find a business angel who will invest enough cash in Reiver Games that I can draw a salary from the company.
Shut Reiver Games down, fire-sell the remaining inventory and get a proper job.

I really want to continue running Reiver Games, so Option 4 is a last ditch that I really don't want to do. Furthermore, to get an IT job I'd need more recent programming experience which I don't have.

Interestingly, I've recently been approached by a former employer to see if I want to do Option 1 with them; and a very famous, very successful web company who were wondering whether I'd like to work with them (Option 2 or 4 - not sure which yet). This company is notoriously difficult to get a job with, so I was flattered to be approached by them, and now have a second interview next week.

To get back into the swing of things I've been doing some online coding exercises at TopCoder and making some progress on the Sumeria computer game. It's almost at the point that you can play it on a single computer (only against human opponents). I'll post when the next version is ready.

Which option will I choose? That depends largely on what opportunities I'm provided with - I'm hoping that one of these two developments comes to fruition, and I can choose Option 1 or 2. Either way I'm going to have to sort something out fairly soon.

If you're disappointed that this sounds like the end of Reiver Games, I certainly hope it won't be - and I hope to be announcing my next game within a month or so.

Promotion Response

2010-03-02T13:39:00.003Z

Three weeks ago I mentioned that I was trying to set up a promotion to encourage US shops to stock my games, and to help those that already stock my games to sell more.

The deal was that Alliance one of my US distributors, who have my games on consignment would offer my games at a discount price to their retailers. The games would be offered at 25% of US MSRP to shops that buy from Alliance. The restriction was that each shop could only buy at most one copy of each game, for demo purposes only - this wasn't a way for the shops to get cheap copies for resale.

The way my consignment deal works with Alliance is that at the beginning of each month they email me purchase orders for all the copies they've sold during the previous month, and then I invoice them for those sales.

This means I've got a very good idea of how well the deal is going, since I'm told at the end of the month how many copies they've sold. Sales last month were up on January's sales, and I know that in the first two and a half weeks of the deal they've sold 28 copies of It's Alive!, 32 copies of Carpe Astra and 25 copies of Sumeria through the deal. Since I know that each shop can only buy a single copy of each game I know that at least 32 shops have taken advantage of the offer already.

I arranged to offer the promotion for a month, and then we'd check how it was going and work out whether it was worth continuing it. I'll be checking in with my buyer at Alliance in a week or so to work out whether it's worth continuing the promotion.

In the meantime, I'll be able to track over the coming months whether sales seem to have increased (remembering the seasonal dip in sales at this time of year).

One thing I'm still not sure about. Why the differences in sales of the promotional copies? Why has Carpe Astra sold more than the others (considering it's my slowest selling game overall). I'm also wondering whether the total is more than 32 (i.e. did every retailer than bought a cheap copy of It's Alive! and Sumeria also buy Carpe Astra, or are there more than 32 takers?

New Website Feedback

2010-02-25T15:00:00.003Z

My friend Dunk is trying to get into web design, and as a portfolio project he's giving my website an overhaul. If you've got some spare time I'd appreciate it if you could compare the current website with this version of a new homepage (with no working links) and let me know in the comments what you think.

I'm also interested in what you think the current website is missing, or what cool new stuff you'd like to see.

Hit-Driven Industry

2010-02-19T13:58:00.003Z

Recently I had some friends round for a day's gaming, and one of them happened to mention that board games must be a hit driven industry, like computer games (one of them works in computer games). He mentioned that most games probably don't make much money, or even make a loss, but this is covered by the hit, which is so wildly successful, that it pays the bills for years to come, and provides plenty of income which can then be risked on another batch of contenders, one of which may also be a hit (but most of which won't).

In the three and a half years that I've been publishing board games, I've read a bunch of things that make me think my friend was correct in his description of the market:

Wired report that over 15M copies of Settlers of Catan have been sold.
In 2008, 75% of Steve Jackson Games' nearly $3M turnover came from Munchkin products (7 years after the original Munchkin release).
Bruno Faidutti, designer of over 50 games was making more money from Citadels than the rest put together in 2004 (several years after Citadels first came out).

If you're going to start a company publishing original games there's two likely ways to succeed doing it:

Start with a massive hit, that funds the rest of your product line for a while, until you're established.
Start with a massive wad of cash, that allows you to establish yourself with a reasonable product line and gives you time to find your first hit.

Success or failure will rely on a few things: ability to manage your finances, ability to market your games, ability to keep costs down and not least ability to choose successful games.

There's no way to guarantee a game will be a hit. Playtesting helps, but that's not the be all and end all - your playtesters might love it, but be unrepresentative of the market. Gut feel combined with a good knowledge of the market and what's successful helps, so does excellent marketing that makes everyone want a copy before it's released.

It is at least six months since the release of all my games, with none of them selling like hot cakes I realise they are not going to become massive hits. I still hold out hope for them being successful (i.e. profitable), but it's not going to happen overnight. I need a real breakout hit, something that is hugely popular and sells extremely quickly. But how do I convince the designer of such a game to bring it to me rather than the established publishing companies, and will I recognise it if I see it?

Liquid Assets

2010-02-12T10:50:00.003Z

In the publishing business you want to do two things: make stuff (in my case board games) and make money. If you're honest you're doing thing A to do thing B.

But the whole process is cyclical. You can't make games without some money to buy them (and pay for the artwork and marketing), and you can't make money without games to sell.

Publishing is one of those businesses where you have to shell out a lot of cash up front. I pay my artists before the game has been manufactured. I pay my manufacturer before I've sold more than a handful of copies.

For the last three years my company has been profitable, i.e. it's worth more now than it was last year, and so on. All sounds fantastic doesn't it? The problem is that my assets are mostly stock. Stock is not a liquid asset. What's a liquid asset? According to Wikipedia:

A liquid asset has some or more of the following features. It can be sold rapidly, with minimal loss of value, any time within market hours. The essential characteristic of a liquid market is that there are ready and willing buyers and sellers at all times.

Clearly I can't just sell all my stock instantly at full price, it takes time to sell stock, so stock is not very liquid. Why is this a problem? If I receive an excellent prototype tomorrow that I want to make immediately I need to be able to pay for it. The manufacturer will only accept cash, so I need lots of cash on hand to fund the manufacture of my next game. If all my assets are stock then I can't make another game until I've sold enough to fund the next game.

Of course, the other problem with stock is you don't know how much it's worth. You know what you paid for it. You know what it could be worth if you sold it all at full price, whole sale price or even the average price of your sales to date. But you don't know how many you can sell. You might have sold the last game you will ever sell yesterday and all your stock is all firewood. Or worse: firewood you are paying to warehouse.

What can you do to avoid this problem? Probably the easiest thing is not over-produce. If you order 5,000 games and only sell 1,500 then you're in trouble. If you produce 1,500 and sell 1,500 you're on to a winner. The problem there of course is that the more copies you make the better your profit margins or the cheaper the final product - which could lead to more sales.

Another thing you can do is try to drive sales early. The faster you sell your games the sooner you turn them into cash that can be re-invested into new games. It's probably worth making less money sooner than more money later.

Breaking into Shops

2010-02-10T09:01:00.002Z

If you take a look at my stockists page on my website, you'll notice that there are almost as many UK stockists of my games (that I know about) as there are American. America however is a much bigger market (I know of 600-odd games stores in the US and Alliance service 2,500 game and comic shops.

So why is my market penetration so much better in the UK despite several US distributors? There are several reasons:

UK shops like to carry UK publishers' games: they're local
It's easier for me to contact UK shops by phone and in person
It's easier for me to organise events in UK shops
My games are cheaper in the UK (less shipping)

So what can I do to improve the number of shops in the US (and Canada, Germany and the rest of Europe for that matter) that carry my games?

The first thing I did was to email all the shops I could find an email address (or web form) for, introducing my games and asking them to consider stocking them. That seemed to go pretty well, but several of the shops wanted demo copies of the games, either to see them before deciding whether or not to stock them or to allow demos of store-owned copies to help them sell the stock they have.

It costs me at least £21 to send a set of all three games to the US so it would be a very expensive effort was I to supply copies to all those who wanted them from the UK. However, my US distributors have stock on hand in the US, and can fold demo copies in with the rest of their stocking order to the shop in question, so the shipping is effectively free. So I'm trying to set up a promotion where one of my distributors allows shops in the US they service to buy my games at a reduced price. Apparently some big US publishers offer shops the chance to buy demo copies at 25% of the full retail price - so that's the deal I'm trying to set up.

One of my US distributors currently have my games on consignment: they have a decent amount of stock of all three games, and they just let me know how many they've sold each month and then I invoice them for those sales. Since they haven't already paid me for the stock they've got on hand, it's going to be easier to set up a promotion with them than someone who has already paid me full wholesale price for the stock they are offering at a reduced price.

Obviously the price I've negotiated with the distributors for the ordinary copies is based on them selling the copies at the ordinary price, so I've got to negotiate a new price for each game when sold through the promotion. Also, I don't want each shop to stock up on cheap copies - I want it limited to one copy per game per store, purely for demo purposes. Fortunately, this is something the distributor can organise.

I've gone around the houses a bit trying to find the right person at the distributor to talk to about this, but hopefully it's going to be sorted pretty quickly, now that I'm talking to the right guy. Things are also being slowed down by the time difference - it usually takes 24 hours to get an answer to my questions :(.

The Offer That Will Not Die!

2010-02-06T11:07:00.003Z

At the beginning of January I offered free worldwide shipping on games bought from my website, as an effort to boost sales and to raise awareness of my games and company.

Due to some technical problems at PayPal, I've been unable to cancel the deal at the end of January like I planned, so it's still running on my website at the moment, and it will remain so until PayPal fix the problem with their buttons feature. I would say that this could be your last chance to take advantage of the offer, but it might finish Monday or it might finish in 2011!

Was the offer successful? I think it was. I sold nearly thirty games that I doubt I would have sold otherwise, either through my website or through retailers and distributors.

My big concern was that the offer would spark a rush of sales from countries where I already had distribution, effectively hurting those retailers and distributors who are already my customers. The good news is that only five of those sales were from countries where I already had distribution (four from the UK and one from Hawaii). The rest came predominantly from Australia (half of all the sales), the Far East and Norway.

One of my other reasons for the offer was that I hoped that getting the games into the hands of gamers would hopefully lead to some more sales - Aaron buys the game and plays it with Bob and Carol, Bob thinks it's okay, but Carol loves it and buys her own copy (which she later plays with Dave and Ellie ...). In one case this definitely happened, which is a great feeling. Aaron (real names have been changed!) bought a copy of Sumeria. A week later he bought another copy - he said he loved it and he was buying a copy for a friend. It's this kind of sale that's the ideal - the game is bought (this applies to all sales by definition), played (some collectors own hundreds of games they've never played), and the people who played it enjoyed it enough to lead to another sale.

In my mind that's a win, now I need to drive more sales, to hopefully lead to more. I'll blog again next week with what my next plan is.

Contacting Shops

2010-01-21T16:46:00.003Z

Over the last year or so I've managed to pick up twenty distributors for my games. This is obviously a Good Thing(tm), since I can now get my games in more shops and hence more exposure and hopefully more sales to actual customers.

So far, when I bring out a new game I get initial stocking orders from my distributors, and often a restock of the others. Occasionally I get a restock order for one or more of my games out of the blue.

Over the Christmas and New Year period, with no new games released, I've not had many restock orders - most of my distributors still have stock of my games on hand. In an effort to help them sell their stock and encourage them to re-order, I've been contacting shops in the US introducing myself, my company and my games.

I've managed to build a database (read spreadsheet!) of 611 stores in the US, including their location and contact details. That's great - if I could sell two copies of each game to all those stores I'd have sold a huge percentage of my print runs in one fell swoop. Now obviously, lots of those won't want to carry my games because they're not that heavily into board games and they only want to carry the really big names. However, a few of them would want to carry my games, only they've not heard of them - they've slipped under the radar as they receive a welter of information about hundreds of new games.

I think my email marketing campaign has been remarkably successful. I've got to assume a lot of my emails will end up in a spam filter and in many cases won't even be read. However, of the stores I have contacted before today (the ones I contacted today haven't had much of a chance to respond!), 10% have responded to me via email.

That 10% includes 4% who already stock my games, and another 2.5% who have placed orders with their distributors as a result of my emails. Where I've been copied on the emails to their sales contact at the distributor they have usually picked up two or three copies of each game.

What surprised me the most though was the number of stores with no website (not even a Facebook or MySpace page) and the number who don't provide an email address on their website. I can see why they wouldn't want to expose an email address to the world (I get enough spam on mine), but there are ways around it (online email forms, possibly with captchas, obscured email addresses (e.g. jack (at) reivergames (dot) co (dot) uk). I would have thought as a store you would want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to contact you. In total, I couldn't find an email address or form for 113 of the 611 (that's 18%!).

I think this has been a pretty successful effort, I'm just kicking myself that I didn't do it sooner - especially when I had a new game coming out. I'm going to extend my efforts to Canada and then Europe, and possibly other countries where I already have a distributor.

Incentives

2010-01-11T13:25:00.003Z

In my last quarterly newsletter I did a special deal for subscribers where they got to buy my games at a discount price. There were a few takers, but not a huge number - there's only four hundred or so people on my newsletter mailing list, and most of them already own one or more of my games.

At the moment I'm running another incentive: free shipping on all my games (but not the Sumeria Expansion) when bought from my website - regardless of where I'm shipping the games.

Incentives like these seem pretty harmless - I get a bit less money than selling at full price, and the customer gets it a bit cheaper than full price plus shipping. However, it's not quite that simple.

I've already agreed to sell my games to a bunch of shops and distributors. Those shops and distributors want to sell my games in their backyard, and due to their nature they will be much better at it than I am: A game shop in Lancaster, PA will have a much better idea of who in Lancaster, PA buys board games than I do, and far more people there will know about the local game store than my website. So I want to keep them as customers, and support them however I can.

The shops and distributors that have bought from me have invested their money in buying my games in the hope that they can sell them on at a profit. If I invite a few select people to get the games cheap from me, that's not really any skin off their back - those people were unlikely to buy from them anyway. In fact, as more people get my games and play them, the awareness of my games increases and it might even lead to more people interested in my games and more sales for my stockists.

If, however, I start undercutting them and making a big splash about it, then it might drive some of their customers who would have bought my games from them to buy them from me instead. That's not playing nice. Instead of supporting them in return for buying my stock, I'm hurting them. In that situation they'd be unlikely to buy more of my stock - leading to fewer sales overall.

There are some places in the world where I've got pretty good distribution: the UK, the US, and a chunk of mainland Europe. Similarly, there are a bunch of places where it's really hard to get hold of my games: Australia, New Zealand, Africa and South America. The free shipping deal was designed to help those hard to reach customers, while having minimum impact on my stockists in the well-supplied regions.

So far, it seems to be working, only one of the orders I've received since starting the deal came from a country where I've got good distribution, the rest came from those hard-to-reach countries - people who probably wouldn't have bought my games otherwise.

So I've sold a few extra games to people who were unlikely to get them otherwise; some people who wanted my games but couldn't afford full price plus shipping got them and the shops that stock them didn't get screwed. All sounds good.

The downside is that I really don't make much money on these copies. For example a sale of Sumeria (plus the expansion) to New Zealand gets me £25. £3.72 of that goes to the tax man as VAT. £1.18 goes to PayPal. £8.81 goes to the Post Office. £0.58 goes to Staples for the packaging. I'm left with £10.71. Still, it's more than I'd get selling to a distributor, and it's money I wouldn't have got without the incentive.

Sales Over Time

2010-01-07T14:26:00.004Z

Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all had a good Christmas (or other appropriate holiday season). I had a proper break for Christmas and New Year - it felt like the first proper break in years, but I'm sure it wasn't.

I read something recently (I think it was on BoardGameGeek but I can't be sure), that said that the vast majority of sales of a game are in the three months after release. I think they even gave a percentage. I can see that for companies with big marketing budgets that would be the case. Before the game is launched lots of money is spent to prime the market to expect and want the game. When the game comes out lots of people will buy the new hot game, but over time there's another new hot game, and then another, so sales tail off. However, I can think of at least two occasions when the front-loaded sales profile is not the case:

The Smash Hit

I've also read that over 15 million copies of The Settlers of Catan have been sold in the 15 years since it was released. Settlers has been a breakout hit, being re-published in tens of languages and becoming a perennial best seller. I can guarantee that most of those 15 million sales weren't in 1995. It's the same for Carcassonne, Magic: The Gathering, Monopoly, Munchkin, Risk, Trivial Pursuit, and any other game that becomes hugely successful. As more people play it, more people buy it and it becomes a juggernaut.

These games sell because people try it, love it, introduce their friends to it, they love it, some of them buy it, they introduce others to it and so on. As time goes on the demand for the game increases - not decreases.

The Sleeper

When the game is unknown and the company is small and has limited marketing budget then it's possible for initial sales to be slow. Distributors and shops don't pick up the game initially, waiting to see if it's got legs before investing in it. Maybe they get demo copies, try it out, like it and get a few copies in. Those copies won't fly off the shelves because no-one's heard of it, but maybe someone takes a chance and tries it out. Things then follow the Smash Hit path but only on a much smaller scale.

Without much of a marketing budget to speak of, I need my games to fall into the Sleeper category. I've not sold the majority of any of my print runs in the first three months. I've sold a decent chunk of my games in their first three months, but not a majority and certainly not 2/3 or 3/4.

How do I intend to do this? Two main strategies. I need to reach new markets where I don't currently have any presence, and improve my market penetration in markets where I do currently have a presence.

For the first point, I'm going to be contacting as many new distributors as I can, focussing on those that have recently expressed an interest in carry my games (particularly those who approached me at Essen) and those in territories where I don't currently have a distributor (notably France and Australia).

For the second part I'm going to continue contacting shops in North America (I'll do Canada once I've finished working through the US States), this seems to be working - several stores are now going to carry my games as a result of me contacting them.

I need sales this year to be at least as good as last year - it's a tall order, but I've got to make it happen. If you've got any ideas on how to boost sales, I'd love to hear them in the comments.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-23T15:18:00.002Z

Right, I'm clocking off for the holidays now, so thanks to everyone for reading this year and I hope you all have a great Christmas (or other winter holiday) and a fabulous New Year and I'll see you all in 2010.

The Best Laid Plans

2009-12-18T12:01:00.004Z

Sometimes you have a great plan, and things outside your control throw everything into disarray.

For the last couple of weeks I've been spending a decent chunk of my time email shops in the US, trying to get them to stock my games. It's been pretty successful, so I am keen to continue. This week, I was going to be playtesting on Monday and I had a hospital appointment Tuesday morning, but other than that I planned to spend 3.5 days on the email campaign.

Monday I went playtesting, then to my German lesson on Monday night. Tuesday morning I nipped over to the hospital as planned. So far so good. I got back to my computer on Tuesday afternoon and experienced yet more internet problems, which had been a continuing problem over the last couple of weeks. Webpages were timing out when I tried to view them, emails were repeatedly timing out when I tried to send them. Everything was a bit flaky. I'd checked with my ISP and they weren't reporting any problems, so perhaps it was a local problem. I pinged Google. Very slow with up to 75% packet loss. Not good. I pinged my wireless router. Very slow with up to 75% packet loss. WHAT? This is not a good sign. I rebooted my computer in Windows (it's a dual boot machine) and got the same result, so it's either a problem with my computer or the router. Then I set up The Wife's computer in my office and her computer was fine, 0% packet loss to the router and 2ms response time. So it was my computer, and since I was getting the same problem in Windows and Ubuntu it was a hardware problem.

This could have been a real disaster, but since The Wife has less need of her computer now, she'd already offered to swap with me. She's also got a work laptop she brings home too. I'd started to install stuff on her machine in Windows (Vista :( ) a few weeks ago, but it hadn't been a priority. Now it was. Wednesday I spent all day trying to get Ubuntu onto her machine. She had a single large partition on her hard drive, so I needed to re-size that to make room for a ext4 linux partition. Fortunately, Vista comes with partitioning tools. Unfortunately, there are some problems. You can't shrink a partition if there are files at the end of it. You need to move the files first. Which you can do with a defragment and optimise. But not if the files are immovable. So I needed to reduce the number of immovable files. This was well into Yak-shaving territory by now. I turned off hibernation, deleted the hibernation file, turned off paging and deleted the page file, I turned off system restoration, and deleted most of the restore points. Finally I was able to run defrag and optimise (two hours), shrink the partition, turn everything back on and install Ubuntu. I finished at 11pm on Wednesday.

Thursday morning was spent setting up Ubuntu how I wanted and re-installing my data. The Wife had booked Friday as holiday, but decided to take Thursday afternoon and Friday morning off instead, so I took those off with her.

So I've got a working computer again, and I got my playtesting done, but not a lot else this week. It's frustrating when unexpected circumstances take control, but every now and again it can't be helped :(.

The Links in the Retail Chain

2009-12-10T10:20:00.003Z

As I've mentioned before, there are basically four links in the retail chain: manufacturer (that's me!), distributor, shop and customer. Ideally what you want is to get your product to the customer as quickly as possible.

It's possible to skip steps, either by selling directly to the customer (via your website or at a convention for example), or directly to shops, but you'll never hit the big time doing that unless you have an extremely popular website.

What you want to do is get your game carried by most shops. Most shops won't want to order enough copies of a game to make it worth your while selling to them directly, in addition, they want the convenience of dealing with a single supplier (or two) for all the products they carry, rather than dealing with hundreds of manufacturers. So you want distributors to carry your products.

Distributors will either pay you when you invoice them for an order or when they sell to a shop (if the games are 'on consignment'). If they pay on invoicing, they won't place another order until they've sold the first order to shops, so you want shops to carry your products.

Similarly, shops will only re-order your games if customers buy them, so you need to get customers to want your games.

You will get a little help from one link to the next (distributors will tell the shops that they are carrying your products, shop staff will tell customers that your games are available), but you really need to get your marketing to work on each link in the chain.

I've got a pretty good network of distributors, some of which I've contacted myself, some of which have contacted me and some of which have been asked by their customers (the shops) to carry my games. I've spent some money on online advertising and I occasionally make a fuss on BoardGameGeek to contact customers. In addition, I attend Essen, several UK conventions and I'm currently doing a tour of UK game shops to promote my games to customers.

So the missing link is clearly the shops. I've been thinking for a while about how I can best contact the US shops (there's at least 2,500 of them!), while spending the least amount of money. I've considered paying my distributors to advertise my products to their customers; getting volunteers to demo games in their local stores and now I'm trying something new: email.

Email has the advantage of being free, and simple to do. The downside is that any email I send is going to be to a public email address from a webpage which is likely to be heavily spammed, so my emails might not get through, and if they do they might themselves be considered spam.

I'm currently sending a brief email to every shop I can find out about, introducing myself, my company and my products and asking the shop to consider stocking them. I ask them to let me know if they will start stocking them (or do already), and give them an incentive to reply by offering to list them on my website as a stockist.

In addition to sending the emails, I'm building up a spreadsheet of all the shops I find out about, including their contact details (phone number if I can't find an email address) and whether or not they've replied and are a stockist. I'm using the FLGS of the USA meta-thread on BGG as a starting point to try to find out about the shops.

So how's it going? I've had nine replies so far from about 100 emails. Most of them already carry at least one of my games, two are going to carry them from now on. That seems a pretty good response rate for an email marketing campaign. I'm going to keep it up for a few weeks, and see if it leads to any re-stock orders from my US distributors.

Hobby Publishing: Less Risky

2009-12-01T10:42:00.003Z

In my last post I showed you just how scary the figures could be for trying to make games for a living. They weren't actual figures for one of my games, but they were indicative. In the comments Daniel asked what about hobby publishing - how does that compare (I paraphrase!). So here's the answer.

Just over three years ago I decided to make and sell some copies of Border Reivers, a board game I had designed over the preceding five years. With little money to throw at the effort and little faith in my ability to sell a lot of copies I chose to go down the hobby publishing route: I would make a small number of copies, largely by hand to keep costs down.

I worked out that I could make 100 copies for £1,255 plus £376 on overheads (I wasn't paying warehousing costs, or myself any salary, but there were a bunch of tools I needed to make the games. To keep costs down I ordered the wooden and plastic pieces all at once (the more you get the cheaper they are), and did the same with the printing. I got a digital printer to do all the printing for me, just onto SRA3 sheets of paper and thin card. I got them to laminate it all to to make it more durable, but I was going to do all the assembly myself. The total price was £1,631 or £16.31 per copy. To cover my costs (plus the cost of attending various conventions and setting up a website I chose to price the game at £30, less than twice the manufacturing cost. I doubted very much whether anyone would pay more than that for it, especially as the cost of shipping would be on top of that. Obviously I couldn't afford to sell to distributors or shops, so I had to hope that I could win enough people over at conventions and via the internet to cover my costs.

With no fixed overheads (no warehousing, no salary) the time it took me to sell the copies didn't really matter - it just came down to whether or not I could. I needed to sell 55 copies to break even, which considering I had no market presence and no reputation seemed like a lot. If I did sell all 100 copies I would stand to make £3,000, or a £1,369 profit.

In the end I damaged some pieces so I only ended up making 96 out of the 100, and some of those I gave away (or kept), I made £2,600, so just under £1,000 profit. Since all those sales were within the first year I gained 60% on top of my original investment, a far better rate of interest than any other savings investment would have offered!

Boardgame Publishing: Not for the Risk Averse

2009-11-26T17:08:00.003Z

I get lots of emails from people who are interested in publishing a game of their own design. Some want to start small, like I did with Border Reivers and the limited edition of It's Alive!, others want to jump in at the deep end and get their games manufactured professionally and try to sell to shops.

To do the latter you've got to be prepared to risk a large chunk of money and hence the possibility of failure and the loss of that large chunk (or a proportion of it). I thought I'd give an example here with some numbers, so you can see what I mean. These aren't accurate figures from one of my games, but they are indicative, so not miles out either.

Let's say you're a small publisher (like the now legendary Reiver Games), who want to aim at the smaller, lighter, cheaper end of the market. You've designed a game, and you think it's a winner. You think it would sell well at around £20-25. So the first thing to do is to price up getting it made. The more copies you make the cheaper it will be per copy, but the bigger the risk involved as you will have to invest more money, and sell more copies to break even/make a profit.

To sell to shops and distributors you need to be able to make a profit when selling the games at 40% of retail: i.e. £8-£10. Out of this you need to be able to pay your overheads, wages and marketing, so you really need to be getting the games make for around 20% of retail: £4-5.

You approach a manufacturer and get some manufacturing quotes. Your quotes come back as: £9,000 for 1,000 copies (£9 per copy), £12,000 for 2,000 copies (£6 per copy) or £15,000 for 3,000 copies (£5 per copy).

If you want to only make 1,000 copies you need to either sell it at £45, sell it at £25 with almost no margin, or do something in between. Remember to make a profit you need to sell at least the break even number (if you are selling at £10 to distributors and they cost you £9, you won't break even until you've sold 90%, i.e. 900 copies, and even if you achieve a sell out, you'll only make £1,000 profit, which is probably not enough to cover your overheads, wages and marketing budget). If the market for your game at £25 is only 900 people will buy it then you will at least cover the cost of manufacturing, but you will lose money on overheads, etc.

Making 2,000 copies you need to either sell it at £30, sell it at £25 with a 66% margin, or do something in between. Now the break even number at £25 RRP is a smaller percentage of the print run (60%), but with the bigger print run this means more copies (1,200). If you manage to sell 1,200 you've covered the cost of manufacturing, but not your overheads. If you sell out, you've made £8,000 (minus overheads, wages and marketing budget), but can you sell 2,000 copies? It doesn't sound that many when you consider there are 300 million people in the US and more in Europe, but with your marketing budget what proportion of those people will hear about your games? And what proportion of those who hear about them will be interested? If the market is 900 people you will lose £7,500.

If you go for 3,000 copies then selling at £25 RRP (i.e. £10 to distributors) then you will break even at 1,500 and if you sell out you will make £15,000! Of course, that means selling even more copies. If the market for you game is only 900, then you will lose £10,500.

The million dollar question is how many copies of a game can you sell? It depends on a lot of factors. The quality of the game. The effectiveness of your marketing. The price point you've pitched at (you'll sell more games at £5 than at £50 all other things being equal). When you start out in this business you don't really know what you can achieve, that information comes from experience. If you've never made a game in your life you've no idea how many copies you can sell. If you've sold 20 games, with sales of between 1,200 and 12,000 copies you've got a much better idea of how many copies you can sell of a given game at a given price.

A further spanner in the works comes from the time to sell out. Say you make 2,000 copies and you will sell them all. Great. That's £8,000 in the bank. Minus overheads. Let's say your overheads are £1,500 a month (which includes a modest wage, warehousing and a few other things). If you sell out in a month you've made £20,000, minus the manufacturing cost: £12,000 and one month's overheads: £1,500. So £6,500 of profit. Nice work. But one month seems a little unlikely. Let's say it takes you six months to sell out. Now the overheads are £9,000 and you've lost £1,000. If it takes two years, then you'll lose £28,000!

How on earth can I still be in business I hear you ask? My overheads are extremely low (I'm still not taking a salary), and having multiple games means I've spread the risk. Also the overheads only apply once. My overheads are the same whether I have one game or several, so getting income from multiple games all offset the overheads.

For the record, It's Alive! has been out nearly 15 months and I'm still a good distance away from selling out of it.

Playtesters Chosen

2009-11-17T12:08:00.003Z

A big thank you to everyone who volunteered to help me test the storytelling card game. In addition to those of my current playtesters who have expressed an interest, I would like to send copies to:

Skiznills
FatherPhoenix
jafrank

Please could you guys email me with your street addresses so I can get copies in the post to you.

The Experience

2009-11-13T13:23:00.003Z

I've been enjoying the words of wisdom of Brett J. Gilbert recently. One of the things he said recently made me think, and it is the starting point for this blog post. At first I thought it was something he had said in one of his two recent blog posts, but on re-reading them I think it must of come from an email he sent me and a few other UK games designers.

What Brett said was:

... when game players (hopefully) say “I want to play that game again!” what they mean is that they want to repeat the *experience* of playing the game, something that is more than simply the sum of the game’s mechanics.

This is something I've considered in the past when discussing Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game. BSG:TBG is a fairly simple game when you get down to the mechanisms involved, but the experience (when played with the right group of people) is much better than the sum of the mechanics. It's a game of paranoia, suspicion and table talk. Everyone is trying to uncover the hidden traitor, except the hidden traitor who is trying to frame someone else without being too obvious. It's a game where a lot of the fun comes from accusing everyone around you of being a "frakking toaster" (the TV show's TV-friendly swear word, and epithet for the TV show's robotic bad guys who are all chromed up - like a toaster). It's a huge amount of fun.

Why bring this up now? I've been sent a submission fairly recently that's tickled my fancy. In the two months since I received it I've played it with a bunch of people, who have all been entertained by it. Those of you who stalk me on the internet will probably know I've been enquiring about artists for it, and looking for North American playtesters for it.

It's different from the other games I've done. It's a pure card game (no components other than cards) and it's a very simple game, strategically very simple. But the experience makes it something more than the mechanisms would have you believe. It's a story-telling game, driven by your handful of cards. There's no deep, overarching strategy: you play the cards you've got. What makes it so entertaining is the cards themselves. Some of them are sensible, some of them are funny by themselves, but when you combine them in one of the 260,000 possible combinations even the straight ones often end up in hilarious stories.

Is this game going to wow fans of deep strategic eurogames? Probably not. But I think it might sell very well, especially in America (where most of my business is), if I can just get the marketing right. It's a silly, funny game, that could potentially appeal to the legions of Munchkin fans in addition to anyone else with a sense of humour.

It's still early days - I've been constructing playtesting copies to send to my playtesters. I need more feedback. Is it really funny? Could it be funnier? Is it too simple? Too complex? More information will help inform my publishing decision. But at the moment I think I'm onto a winner...

Looking for More Playtesters

2009-11-10T10:12:00.003Z

It's that time again. I've received a submission that I need to get playtested more widely. In particular I want to find playtesters from North America (the best market for this game, I believe).

The game is a fun, silly, card game for 2-6 players than plays in less than 30 minutes. It's very language dependent (hence I'm not looking for European playtesters, I can't see I'll sell many copies there), since it's a fantasy-themed storytelling game.

If you're up for some light-hearted, simple fun, please post a comment explaining why you'd make an awesome playtester for Reiver Games. I'll pick some people (using my arcane selection criteria) and send them a copy of the game.

All I'm asking from you is that you play the game several times, keeping records of game length, scores, number of players, what everyone thought of the game and any ideas you might have for tweaks to the rules or cards.

Thanks!

You Never Stop Learning

2009-11-04T15:20:00.005Z

Technically I've been in the business of making and selling games for over three years. That makes me an old hand now, right? Not really. I've only been 'professional' (not just in the sense that this is now my full-time job, but I'm also getting the games manufactured for me, and selling primarily to distributors and shops rather than direct to customers) for eighteen months and I've only had stock for the last thirteen months. I'm still doing a lot of stuff for the first time. And, as with Essen, when I'm doing stuff for the second time it's often under such different circumstances that it's hard to draw any conclusions from the past experience.

The reason I bring this up is that I've started graphing my sales over time, and it's teaching me new stuff all the time. At the beginning I assumed that sales for a new game would peak when it was released and then decline steadily over time. To some degree this statement has been true, but there have been some interesting deviations from what I expected. It's Alive! didn't sell many copies in its first quarter (but it came out in September near the end of the July - September quarter). In its second quarter (the run-up to Christmas) it did exceptionally well, helped by Essen and a few big stocking orders. Carpe Astra did much better than It's Alive! in its first quarter (the run-up to Christmas) and both did well in the first quarter of this year - when I signed the two biggest US distributors. Sumeria got off to a great start (best first quarter sales of any of my games) but then did less well in its second quarter (which for Sumeria corresponded to the Summer: July - September).

If I look at graphs plotting the sales of each game by quarter, with the x-axis corresponding to quarters since release it's hard to draw any conclusions: they are all over the place with dips and peaks that don't correspond at all (note that the last data point in each case is for this quarter which is less than halfway through):

So length of time since release is clearly not the driving factor behind how many games I'll sell in any given quarter. So what is I wonder? People say that the Summer months are often quiet, with the best sales being in the run-up to Christmas. This seems reasonable, so I've drawn the same data on a different x-axis. This time its still in sales per quarter, but the quarters relate to a single instance in time: 1 is last Summer (July - September when It's Alive! was re-released), 2 is last Autumn (October to December, including Essen, the run-up to Christmas and the release of Carpe Astra) and so on. Suddenly things become clearer:

Despite the fact that this quarter (Autumn) is only half done, all three games are showing a clear boost over the preceding Summer months. There's a noticeable decline from Autumn through Winter and Spring into Summer, before a sharp jump into Autumn again. Sumeria, which came out at a fairly quiet time, shows the same pattern, but with higher sales due to the initial stocking orders. I'm expecting a few more re-stocks before Christmas too, so hopefully the climb for this Autumn will become steeper across the board in the next couple of months.

With so little experience to base my decisions on, it's hard to see whether a game is doing well or badly. Are low sales due to the time of release, or something else? As the years go on I'll have more hard data to base my assumptions on, and can make more informed decisions as a result. The important thing is that rather than just waving a finger in the air and using gut feelings I'm collecting the data I've got so I'm more informed for next time.

Looking Back

2009-10-30T11:27:00.003Z

Despite the slight disappointment of Essen, things are still going very well considering how new I am to this. While at Essen I sold my 4,000th game. 4,000! That's way more than I ever expected to make, let alone sell at the beginning. So I'm going to do a brief retrospective about how things have changed in the just over three years since I started Reiver Games.

October 2006

In October 2006 my company was four months old. I had released Border Reivers only three months ago, and was still manically constructing copies by hand in my spare time. Each copy of Border Reivers took three hours to assemble from the pieces I had ordered - since I had to construct the boxes, tiles and cards from scratch. Things seemed to be going pretty well, I was making good progress through the print run, and the people I met at shows seemed to enjoy it. But giving up my weekends and evenings (and even some holiday from work) to manufacture the copies was hard work. I was already doing slightly better than I had hoped, but never in a million years did I think I would have sold 4,000 games in three years time.

October 2007

A year later it felt like the company was going somewhere. I'd sold out of the original 100 copies of Border Reivers and made a reasonable profit. I was now a publisher too: Yehuda's It's Alive! was the second game in my catalogue, released five months earlier in June. Loads of people self-publish their own board game design, fewer make the jump to publisher of other peoples' games too. It's Alive! was selling well and proving very popular, I'd decided to make 300 of these, again largely by hand in my spare time around a full-time job, and I was on course to sell out of these too within the year. Could I do this professionally? I was beginning to wonder...

October 2008

Six months earlier I'd made the jump to full-time publisher, quitting my fairly well-paid job in IT Project Management for a life of playing board games and begging for food. The first five months of full-time work had been disappointing, I'd decided to re-print It's Alive! professionally after selling out of the 300 copies limited edition in May. The reprint had taken a lot longer to manufacture than I had hoped, and I had spent many months without any products at all. Still It's Alive! had finally arrived in September, and I'd just got back from my first Essen. Essen had been a huge success and I was on a real high. I'd take 840 copies (a full pallet) of It's Alive! to Essen. Sales to punters hadn't been huge (I'd not really advertised at all) but I'd got rid of the rest of my stock to a couple of distributors and picked up four distributors in total. I was ready to conquer the world!

October 2009

In the year since last Essen things have gone extremely well. I've picked up six distributors in North America, seven in Europe and two in the far East. I've released another two games: Carpe Astra and Sumeria and sales look promising. I've still not broken even on any of my games, but they continue to sell well (after a Summer dip) so I'm hopefully that I'll reach that point on at least one of them fairly soon. Essen this year was slightly disappointing, I'd hoped my advertising spend would have led to more sales to customers, and the freight prices for carting my games to and from the show meant that I didn't make a boat-load of cash (like I did last year). But with no brand new games and good distribution in Europe, there were more people there who owned my games, rather than had never heard of them. Still, I've got interest from a whole bunch of new distributors and the Christmas season is approaching, so I'm hopeful of better things to come.

I'm now beginning to feel like a proper publisher - I've several games in stock, pretty good distribution and people are beginning to know who I am. Onwards and upwards!

My Second Essen

2009-10-29T19:34:00.004Z

I finally returned from my second Essen at midnight on Monday. It's been a pretty busy few days since I got back too, so this is the first chance I've had to really take stock.

First a big thank you to all of you who swung by and introduced yourselves - it was nice to meet you all and to know that somebody out there reads these musings!

The Run-Up

The run-up to Essen as I've already mentioned was pretty stressful, in particular the travel arrangements. When I finally found out I could get the games freighted to Essen for £160 (as opposed to £1000 for the van hire and freight rate on the ferry) I felt much better about that, but the banners didn't arrive until lunchtime on the day I left - thankfully they were ok!

Just to make things more exciting on the shipping front, I heard from the freight company (after they'd already collected the stock) that there would be a couple of extra charges. I wanted the games delivered on Wednesday (so I could unload them myself to save money) which was an extra £40, and then when they realised it was going straight to the fair there was an additional charge for unloading delays which I still don't have a final amount for. As it turns out they didn't deliver on Wednesday, but Tuesday instead. This was good in the sense that I knew that the games had arrived safely, but bad in that it incurred extra costs (warehousing at the fair and delivery to my stand by fork-lift - £140€ in total). The freight company did waive the delivery on Wednesday surcharge though.

Wednesday

A pretty good day. It took a little longer to get to the fair than I expected, we'd got up at 4:50am, caught a 6:50am plane to Dortmund and arrived in Dortmund at 9:05. Then we managed to miss every connection to Essen, so we didn't arrive at the fair until lunchtime. We set up the furniture, hung the banners (which looked great - much more professional than last year's posters) and waited for the games to arrive. A fork-lift dumped the two pallets and then we set up the rest of the stand and went about adding the errata sheets to all 630 copies of the expansion I'd taken. That took Andrew and I three hours, it would have been a bit quicker but I kept having to stop to speak to people :) There were even a few sales of Sumeria and the expansion too :).

Sans crowds the fair was easy enough to negotiate so I took advantage of the space to chat with my Taiwanese and one of my German distributors. My Taiwanese distributor said It's Alive! was selling well for them, and stock was running low. Since the cost of shipping to Taiwan is so exhorbitant, he was keen to collect stock from me at the show. I delivered four cases to him that day, and he said he might want some more, depending on how much space they had left at the end of the show. The German distributor hadn't yet collected any Sumeria, and assured me that he wanted to, it had just got lost in the run up to the show chaos. He asked me to come back to him at the end of the show - he'd take some of my left over stock if I had any - maybe 60 copies of each?

Feeling pretty chipper about things and with the stand ready to go by early evening, Andrew and I headed off to the apartment and a welcome Chinese takeaway (we'd eaten at about 5:30am in the airport, and then not until 8:30pm at night. Mmm. Hungry! That evening Dunk and Lucy arrived from Duesseldorf and the team was complete.

Thursday

Thursday was the first day of the fair proper, and since Dunk and Lucy had arrived late the previous night, and Dirk (the Sumeria designer) was going to be helping out on the stand Thursday morning, I gave them the morning off - so it was just Dirk, Andrew and I until lunchtime. It got off to a fairly slow start - it takes a while for people to percolate through the halls to Hall 4, which is right at the back. Sales were pretty good though, lots of Sumeria and the expansion alone, plus more It's Alive! and Carpe Astra than I was expecting. The hardcore geeks tend to come on Thursday and Friday in an attempt to miss the weekend crush, and to get what is on their lists before they sell out. There was also some interest from new distributors in Finland, Japan and Singapore and my Belgian distributor collected some Sumeria too.

Friday

Friday was slower than Thursday, but not a bad day at all. I sold a box of each game to a shop in Switzerland (my first confirmed Swiss stockist) and sales were not too bad. It's Alive! and Carpe Astra continued to do better than I had expected, but it was definitely looking like my 50 copies a day target for Sumeria was optimistic. I gave Andrew the afternoon off - he'd earned it!

Saturday

I wasn't expecting much from Saturday - the crowd is usually more family-oriented, tends to stick to the front halls and is less free with their money. Still nothing prepared me for just how bad it was. Sales were just over half the previous day's and it felt like we weren't selling anything at all. People seemed to enjoy the games though, and a couple of distributors swung by after apparently hearing good buzz about Sumeria. Alliance, my biggest US distributor sent a couple of guys over from their sales team. Previously I'd only dealt with their purchasing team so it was nice to meet them. They said that they'd heard good things about Sumeria and wanted to push it on their return to the States as a game with good Essen buzz. Plus a potential new French distributor had also been told about Sumeria and was interested in ordering 120 copies (a larger order than any I'd had outside America). Sales were very disappointing, but the buzz and distributor discussions left me feeling better about things.

Sunday

Sunday was a real roller-coaster. Sales were going really well, my second best day of the show. Several people who'd played the games on Saturday came back and bought them and I picked up another Finnish distributor. I still had a bunch of stock left, but I hoped after the German distributor took some it would be a manageable amount to possibly send back in another UK publisher's van.

Then disaster struck. The boss of my contact at the German distributor came round, and seeing that my games were also distributed in Germany by someone else decided it would just be easier to buy from them rather than me. NO! Now I had a lot of stock to somehow get home. Time to panic! I went back to my Taiwanese distributor who took a bunch more It's Alive! and one of my UK distributors offered to take some of my stock to an Italian fair they were visiting the following week. I tried to see my contact at the other German distributor to see if they wanted some stock, but I couldn't get to see him - he was way too busy.

My last option was to buy a pallet, put the games on it, shrink-wrap them and then get the fair freight handlers to warehouse it for the night and ship it back to me in the UK. 460€. We finally left the fair at 9pm after a very stressful final few hours.

The Aftermath

The next day Andrew and I pootled round Essen before heading over to Dortmund airport for our 4:15pm flight. Which eventually took off at 9:30pm, 7.5 hours after we arrived at the airport. I finally got home at midnight, tired and emotionally exhausted.

On Tuesday I paid my take into my bank in the UK, although I brought home fewer Euros than last year, even with the huge cut the bank took, the weaker pound meant I paid more pounds into my account than last year. Of course with the sweaters, banners and the freight costs my expenses were much higher than last year, it was still a profitable week, but not by much.

Since then I've been busy on personal things and following up on all the distributor contacts I made - trying to expand my market presence further round the world. Next year things will be cheaper (the sweaters have a one off cost I've already paid and the banners are re-usable) and I really need to find a more affordable way to get my games to and from the fair.

I'm off to Patriot Games in Sheffield on Saturday for another demo day, and things on the home front will quieten down on Monday. Then sleep. Lots of sleep.

Off To Essen

2009-10-20T11:49:00.004+01:00

This evening my journey to my second Spiel convention in Essen begins. Despite my best intentions it's been a largely last minute panic yet again, but now most of the panic is over. I've just been told my games have arrived at the convention centre, and I've collected my float (a whole bunch of five Euro notes for change at the booth), so the only thing I'm waiting on now is the banners which will hopefully be delivered shortly.

As I've mentioned before, last year's Spiel was a huge success for me and I'm hoping to repeat that this week. Several things are different though, and since this is only my second Spiel I don't have enough previous information to judge how that will affect things.

Last year I had rented out a third of my stand to Peter Struijf of Geode Games, and I only had one game of my own (though I had posters for Carpe Astra and a homemade prototype, the finished product was still a month away). My games weren't available in Germany yet (I picked up my first German distributor at the show, with my second signing on shortly afterwards) and It's Alive! had only been out for about five weeks - so it was pretty new.

This year I've a whole stand to myself and three games (the latest of which came out four months ago) which are all already available in Germany. I've spent more money on advertising this time (Boardgame News with their excellent English-language Spiel preview and SpielBox which is apparently the place to go for German-language Essen information), and signed up for a couple of deals with other people too (I'm in the Spiel fuer Spiel magazine again and I'm doing a deal with the Spielerei German-language magazine which will hopefully lead a few more people to my stand. Plus I'm doing the 'free 2 player expansion with every Sumeria sale' deal too.

How much will any of these factors affect my sales at the show? With so little information to go on I have no idea. The show will have cost me a lot more this year, hopefully that will pay off, but I can't be sure until next week, when I get home and work it all out.

Last year I sold 140 copies of It's Alive! to punters and another 96 or so to shops and distributors before finally getting rid of the remaining stock to a couple of big distributors. Those big distributors are unlikely to take any stock from me this time, but I'm hoping to get some orders from the smaller European distributors and betters sales to punters, due to the advertising and deals.

I'm taking a full pallet of Sumeria (504 copies), plus 192 It's Alive! and 96 Carpe Astra. My limited experience as a paid salesman back in my late teens seemed to focus entirely on targets. So I feel I should set myself some. I'm thinking 50 Sumeria, 5 Carpe Astra and 10 It's Alive! sales to punters per day. Is that achievable? I have no idea. Only one way to find out.

Wish me luck...

Almost on Top of Things

2009-10-14T13:25:00.002+01:00

Off topic: 600th post - w00t!

Last Tuesday I posted about how unprepared I was for Essen next week, and how my travel plans had been through several iterations in an effort to avoid paying ridiculous shipping costs.

Things are finally sorting themselves out now. I've ordered the sweatshirts and seen the proofs, this morning I booked the pallets to Germany and I've got to get the banner art to the printers this afternoon/evening.

Even though the pallets to Essen are booked I've still got a bunch of stuff to do for that. I'm taking a full pallet of Sumeria (504 copies) plus a mixed half-pallet of It's Alive!, Carpe Astra and the Sumeria 2 Player Expansion. Tomorrow I'm going up to York to pick and package the mixed pallet, and also to bring a car-full of Sumeria back home (I'm down to 8 copies at home, from where I fulfil almost all my orders). It'll be a fairly early start as the shipping company want to collect the pallet that afternoon, so I've got to get up there (3 hour drive) and sort out the pallet before they arrive.

We're in York again on Friday, since The Wife has a meeting there. Having sorted out the pallets on Thursday, I now get to spent Friday afternoon hanging out with my friend Paul and doing some playtesting.

That leaves me the weekend and Monday to catch up with my books (I've got a VAT return to do by the end of the month and I'll have a lot to do the week after Essen if last year was anything to go by, so it's better to get it out of the way before I go. If last week was very stressful, this week is still busy, but a bit calmer.

When I get back, as well as sorting out all the paperwork from Essen there's a couple of prototypes I need to get made up and distributed to my playtesters. No peace for the wicked!

Sumeria 2 Player Expansion

2009-10-11T18:57:00.005+01:00

As I've mentioned before, when Sumeria was initially submitted to me it was for 2-4 players. During playtesting one of my playtesters spotted a problem with the scoring in the two player game. I was at this point sailing fairly close to the wind (sounds familiar!) and so Dirk and I made the decision to take the two player game out of the mix.

At a later stage we came up with a solution to the two player scoring conundrum, but by that point it was too late to add it back into the game.

Last year at Essen I had one game that had been out just over a month. I had very few distributors, so very few people owned a copy of it. It was to all intents and purposes a new release for Essen. This year I've a game that came out last September, and was at Essen last year, a game that came out last November (so hasn't been to Essen yet) and a game that came out in June. While most of my European distributors haven't picked up Sumeria, I can't really describe it as an Essen release - it's been out for three months.

There had been interest in the two player game and I had considered making an expansion at some point. When it became clear to me that sales over the Summer wouldn't be good enough to fund a new release for Essen (and in fact I've not received a submission that was ready to go in time anyway), I started thinking of ways to entice people to my stand. Since all three of the games I've got are theoretically available in stores - why come to my stand at Essen to get them when there's so many shiny new things coming out?

So I went back to the 2 player expansion idea. I wanted to make the expansion as cheap as possible for the buying public to make it more of a impulse purchase, and also to allow me to provide it as an Essen promo freebie - buy Sumeria at my Essen stand and you get this limited expansion for free!

That lead me down a particular route. If I sell a game to shops via distributors the retail price should be 5 times the manufacturing cost - i.e. if it costs me £2 to make it, it should retail for £10 (it doesn't work out quite like this - my margins are tighter). If however I only sell to people directly (at cons and via my website) then I can price it at 2 times the manufacturing cost (e.g. a £1 per copy manufacturing cost leads to a £2 retail price). I choose the latter route. The next decision was packaging. If you're selling to shops you want a nice pretty box that will look good on the shelf and attract peoples' eye. If you're selling directly you don't need that. The expansion can come in a baggie and the customer can store it inside the original box. This further cuts manufacturing costs (no box art needed and a baggie is much cheaper than a small box), and fits with my "small box, no wasted space" ethos. Again that cheaper option is the route I chose.

The expansion arrived at my house last Monday. I'd chosen to have it delivered to my house instead of the warehouse since it would be quite small and I was expecting it to be delivered by a courier. Instead a 7.5ton lorry turned up with the expansion on a pallet. It was five medium-sized boxes, which failed to even fill the bottom of a pallet - seemed like overkill! The lorry driver helped me cut the shrink-wrapping off the pallet and lift the five boxes off the pallet, which I then carried into my office. Opening the first box the expansions looked like exactly what I was expecting - no surprises there.

It's not been a completely smooth ride though. On top of the mental week of Essen travel disasters, there was a small problem with the expansion. In the two player game each player takes four turns per round, whereas in the three and four player games you only get three. The sticker in the expansion is designed to cover the three space turn track with a new four space turn track.

Unfortunately the sticker is a bit too transparent, so if you put it over the turn track as designed you can see the old turn track underneath. It looks rubbish.

Fortunately there is a solution: Cut the sticker in half between the three and four spaces and throw away the 1-3 bit. Add the 4 bit to the board just below and to the right of the three space printed on the board.

Works fine :) But it's a bit inconvenient and doesn't reflect especially well on my production values. I think I'll include a slip of paper in each bag at Essen explaining this fix.

Essen. Yeay! Arrgh! Yeay! Arrgh!

2009-10-06T20:36:00.003+01:00

It's that time of year again, we're just over two weeks away from Spiel '09 (or International Spieletage '09 to give it its full name). Spiel is the largest event on the board gaming calendar, a chance to demo and sell you games to over 150,000 (predominantly German) board game fans.

Last year my preparation for Essen was all a bit last minute and I vowed to be more organised this year. I've not succeeded in any significant way :-(. I did manage to book my accomodation in March, and I obviously got my booth organised in time for the May deadline, but I only booked my booth furniture a couple of weeks ago, and the saga of how I'm getting my crew of awesome volunteers and my games to Essen is ongoing!

Last year I took three volunteers: Mal, Dunk and Lucy. They were awesome, they worked extremely hard, were knackered like I was and they were doing it as a favour to me, not for personal financial gain. We all shared a car, (which Dunk and Lucy drove - again with the awesome), got the ferry from Hull to Rotterdam and stayed in a couple of self-catering apartments. Dean from Ludorum Games, took my games for me in his van (we're racking up a lot of awesome here), I just paid £35 to ship a pallet of games from my warehouse to his house and then him some petrol money.

It all worked out ok. I liked the self-catering apartments (only 10 minutes walk from the venue, fairly affordable and they allowed us to cook for ourselves and hence eat cheaply). I booked the same place again this year. The ferry cost about £400, and was fun in a roadtrip kind of way.

Yet again I left several important things to the last minute. Who I was taking was up in the air until last week. Dunk and Lucy had volunteered again (gluttons for punishment!) and I was hoping to take The Wife. Sadly work commitments had ruled out The Wife a couple of weeks ago, and Lucy was unsure too. It might just have been Dunk and I. Four people on the stand takes some of the pressure off, you can take a break, wander round or come in late/sneak off early. Just the two of us would have been very hard work. So I started looking around for replacements. In the end Lucy was able to make it (yeay!) and I found a fourth in Andrew - one of my playtesters. Excellent. People sorted. Now I can sort out travel.

Games first. I'd phoned around last week and none of the other UK publishers I know had any space in their vans. Not a problem. I could hire a van and drive it over full of games like Dean had done last year. I phoned a few van companies and got a quote of £192. The Wife sensibly pointed out that since I haven't driven on the continent before (on the wrong side of the road!) and I have a medical condition, I should probably have a co-pilot who can share the driving. £66 for a 2nd driver. Then I phone the ferry company. Last year I'd paid £400 for a return ferry ticket for four people, a four-berth cabin and a car. This year I was looking for two people, a two-berth cabin and a small van (Citroen Berlingo about the size of a car). I'm chatting to the woman on the phone and she asks what the vehicle registration is.
"I don't know - it's a hired van." I reply.
"Van?" she asks, "What are you taking?"
"Some board games to a trade show."
"Oh, you'll need to speak to our freight department." They quote me £755. It's going to cost me over a grand to get my games there. A grand! A GRAND! Ok, that plan goes out of the window. After examining the options for just getting a freight company to ship the games there, I think I can go down that route, but it's not booked yet and nor are the flights for the four of us.

There's a couple of other things I want to get sorted too. Last year my Point of Sale consisted of a few posters I'd got printed at York University, which then fitted in simple top and bottom frames (don't ask how long that took - they were a nightmare!). I wanted something a bit more professional looking this year, so I've been looking at getting some vinyl banners done. Time's getting a little tight (especially considering I haven't designed them yet), but I've found a company online today that have a 48 hour turnaround, so that can be put off for a day or two.

The other thing was some kind of uniform (no, not french maids and firemen!). Last year we were all in civvies, so it was hard for passing people to work out who to speak to. I'm getting some sweatshirts done with the Reiver Games logo, so it will be clear who's working the stand and who's visiting it. At first I thought of T-shirts, but I seem to remember wearing a jumper all the time last year due to the temperature, so a sweatshirt seems like a better idea. They have a 7-14 working day turnaround (I found out today with 9 working days left), but I spoke to them on the phone today and for such a small order it shouldn't be a problem.

I found out about the ferry price this morning. I've spent the day trying to sort out getting the games to Essen, getting us to Essen, and sorting out the sweatshirts and banners. Numerous phonecalls to various companies (several in Germany) and not a small amount of stress. I'll be glad when I get there.

Publishing is Cyclical

2009-09-30T09:15:00.003+01:00

The Summer has been pretty quiet here at Reiver Towers. After the rush of orders for the release of Sumeria, the quiet Summer months have just seen the occasional restock and submission.

With not a huge amount to do, and mixed sales, I've been feeling a little down and hence I've put off a whole bunch of things I should have been doing. Now all of a sudden I've got loads of submissions, a weekly playtesting session and only three weeks to go until Essen. Panic!

Let me explain the mixed sales comment. In a lot of ways my sales look awesome: I've got year-on-year growth of 1000% for the first quarter of this financial year and 150% for the second quarter. My second best month of sales ever was in June. For the first eight months of 2009 my monthly sales were up (and often by a lot) over the corresponding month of last year.

Of course, as with any statistics you can spin them any way you want, and if you're not feeling too chipper you look at the other side: September was the first month where sales were worse than last year. October last year will be a very hard month to beat. Last year with two games coming out in September and November, the vast majority of my sales (85%) were in the last half of the year, so although I've done much better this year so far the real test will be the next six months when I don't have any new games coming out. My sales so far this financial year are half of last year's total, with half the year gone and no new games on the horizon. I'm hoping for a boost from Essen and the holiday season, but how much of a boost will I get?

Anyway, I digress. The last few months haven't been that busy. All of a sudden there's loads going on and I'm struggling to keep up. I've been approached by Grégory of Vassal Factory to do a Vassal module of Sumeria. I've got to finalise everything for Essen (and by everything I mean: flights, getting my games there and any overstock back, stand display), I'm trying to work on two prototype games and trying to get playtest copies for a third made up and sent off to my blind playtesters. In addition I've got to catch up on my books, do a VAT return and calculate and pay my designers their royalties.

This is definitely a business where I go through cycles. When I'm getting a game ready to go to the printer, or getting ready for a big convention like Essen, there's loads to do (and of course a bunch of other stuff just happens to fall at the same time), then there's a lull until the next period of frantic activity. Fun!

The Curse of the Good Prototype

2009-09-20T11:15:00.003+01:00

As a publisher, I'm always looking for new games to publish. I'm fortunate to receive a lot of games submissions on a more or less constant basis. Quite a lot of these are types of games I'm not interested in (mass market, trivia, sports), and so can be instantly discounted. Some sound interesting, but have so many components that I have to rule them out on cost. Lots sound interesting at first blush and so I ask for a prototype to play with my playtesting team.

Some of those I try aren't very good when you actually play it and can be quickly discounted. Occasionally, you get an awesome one which is pretty much ready to go (Sumeria was one of these). The vast majority however are 'good'. Which is a bad thing.

There are tens of thousands of board games out there (BoardGameGeek has over 50,000 in its database) and hundreds more get released every year. If you're a big company like Fantasy Flight or Games Workshop, you've got the marketing budget and market presence that means your games will sell well. If, however you're a little guy like me with a tiny marketing budget and very little market presence your games will have to fight tooth-and-nail to sell themselves. For comparison, the third edition of Space Hulk was released two weeks ago. It has 761 ratings on BGG and 1554 people listed as owning it. Sumeria has been out fourteen weeks and has 100 ratings and 116 owners. Very few people rush down to their local games store to buy the latest Reiver Games release when it arrives on the shelves. Instead they might hear about it, add it to their wishlist or want to play list. Maybe wait for a friend to get it so they can try it out, or hope to find it at a convention where they can try it out. Of the much smaller number of people who are interested and who find a copy to play, only people who really like the game will tend to buy it.

If I publish a game because I think it's good, the chances are most of the few people who play it will also think it's good. Nobody rushes out to by a good game. They rush out to buy a great game. The internal conversation goes: ' I know Bob's got Zombie Ninja Pirates in Space, but it's frickin' awesome, I need my own copy', not: 'I know Bob's got Watching Pastel Paint Dry, but it's a pretty good game, I need my own copy'.

I need games that at least I think are great, in the hope that I can find several thousand other people who think the game is great enough to warrant buying.

Still, it's very hard to go back to a designer and reject their game because it's good. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's solid, it works. But it's not great. It doesn't help that great is subjective.

Hello? Hello? Anyone There?

2009-09-17T16:53:00.003+01:00

Sorry it's been such a quiet week here at Creation and Play. Mainly due to a very busy week in the real world. Why so busy? A number of things, all conspiring together to rob you of my virtual company!

First up, I've received a promising prototype which I'm sending out for blind playtesting to a bunch of gamers from around the world. I've only been sent a single prototype, so this means I've got to knock up a bunch of copies to send out. To do this I've had to do several steps, to ensure that the copies I send out at least meet my submission guidelines for prototypes. I've ordered some greyboard (I think it's called chipboard in the US), and made some simple tray and lid boxes out of it. I've not bothered labelling them, but they are the right size - i,e. the size the game would be if I published it. I've ordered the wooden pieces from SpielMaterial.de, then counted them up and bagged them ready to go, I've been to the local toy shop to buy a metric ton of dice (my usual dice supplier Plastics for Games have a £50 minimum order. There's still a bunch of stuff left to do: I need to do the art for the board and the cards, and run my take on the rules by the designer (once I've added some of the prototype art into them for diagram purposes. This is a fairly expensive process (it'll end up costing over £100 once you include the materials and postage), but I need to do this for games before I sign them. I did it a bit late for Sumeria, I'd already signed the design, and had the feedback from blind playtesting been terrible (it wasn't fortunately!), I'd have been stuffed since the art and manufacturing was already in train. The advantage of doing it earlier is that you get longer for the feedback, and more time to respond it, plus if the game tanks, you're not signed up to anything and can cut your losses. The disadvantage is that you end up spending this money for more games, some of which you'll end up dropping and hence will never get a chance to recoup the cost of playtesting. With any luck I'll get the prototypes finished by the middle of next week, and then I can get them in the post.

One of the advantages of re-doing the prototypes is it gives me a chance to check out a few ideas. I get to put the game in a box that is the size I'm intending to use (the same size as Carpe Astra and Sumeria for the moment). I get to re-size components (e.g. boards, cards) to sizes that fit the box or that are ideal for production. In addition, I can to try some layout ideas: what happens if I put that here, or use that iconography? The art will be pretty rough, but you can still get an idea about things from a rough draft.

This time, I can pimp the prototypes a little, since I was sent a box of spares by the Sumeria manufacturers. They were limited in what they could assemble due to a shortfall in the wooden pieces. As a result they had spare punchboards, cloth bags, boards and inserts. As a result I've given each of the prototypes an insert and I'll use the spare Sumeria boards as a substrate for the prototype boards (I'll just glue the prototype art on top).

In addition to the prototypes, I've also been working on some stuff (and the furniture) for my Essen stand. And to top it all, it's a busy week for gaming :-)

Yesterday, Tim, one of my oldest friends (and co-incidently one half of the Best Man double act at my wedding), came round for a day of gaming. We christened my copy of the new version of Space Hulk, and played a few Eurogames, including Sumeria. I had a terrible day (I'm blaming waking up at 5:50am), winning only 2 games of Space Hulk out of eleven games in total. He even beat me twice at Sumeria (a rare event :-) ). The new Space Hulk is lavishly produced (if ever there was a good advert for the economies of scale -Space Hulk is rumoured to be a print run of 70,000+ copies), the board sections are embossed with details, the counters are prolific and on very thick stock (3mm?) and the minis are extremely detailed - if overdone in the posture department. Tim loved Sumeria too, which was cool. Tomorrow (and hopefully Monday) are playtesting days, and I'm at an all day games day on Saturday.

It feels great to be really busy again (the Summer was pretty quiet), but there's so much to do!

Demo Days In America

2009-09-09T08:50:00.004+01:00

As I mentioned last time, I've been doing a few demo days, where I go and spend the day in a games shop with demo copies of each of my games teaching them to regulars and random punters. The idea is that I introduce my games to a bunch of people who haven't played them, raising awareness of the games and hopefully boosting sales (both for me and the shop). In addition, I get to improve my relationship with the shop owners.

I've recently done demo days at Inner Sanctum Collectibles in Cambridge and Eclectic Games in Reading. I've also lined up two more: Patriot Games in Sheffield on 31st October and Spirit Games in Burton-on-Trent on 7th November. There are a couple more in the pipeline that I hope to arrange before the end of the year.

In the comments to the last post Todd suggested that I could get some reps to do demo days for me further afield, e.g. the US. It's an interesting idea, but one with some logistical issues.

Stock

When I do a demo day in the UK I take a bunch of stock along with me. If the demo day goes well and the shops sells a lot of games they can get those from me on the day, rather than having to order a lot in from a distributor in advance and having to pay for them whether they sell or not. Any stock they don't want I take home with me, so they are not left out of pocket.

Presentation

In addition, I know that when I turn up I'm presentable, reliable, on-time, I know the rules to each game correctly and I can demo the games enthusiastically.

Geography

I can also cover pretty much the whole of the UK by myself. Ok, Northern Scotland or Northern Ireland is a bit of a trek, but it's possible.

Recompense

This is my job, if I want it to continue to be my job I need to do everything in my power to make the company work. I'm perfectly willing to give up my weekends to achieve that.

America is the biggest market for my games, it has five times the population of UK, is an English-speaking country and as a result 50% of all my sales to distributors have gone to the US. Plus, some to Canada too.

Once the games arrive in the US, things get a little more difficult. My games arrive on the shelves of the store, but my 'small box, big game' strategy hurts me, because by comparison to the other games my games look very expensive (of course shipping the games to the US makes my games more expensive too!). A small, expensive-looking game tucked away on a shelf is unlikely to sell particularly well, especially when no-one locally has played it.

Demo days would really help me here. If I could do a demo day in the biggest store in every state (52 stores), that would significantly boost the sales of my games. I know that there are at least 2,500 hobby stores in the US, so I could really boost my sales if I got my games into a reasonable proportion of those, and then introduced the games to the clientele.

Stock

The aim of a demo day is two-fold, to raise awareness of my games and to sell some games. What would be ideal for the store is that on a demo day the store can get some games on sale-or-return. They can get plenty of stock in to ensure that they don't run out and hence miss sales due to running out of stock, but they don't have to invest a chunk of their capital on games that might take months to sell. How would I get around this in the US? I've got stock here, but it would be expensive to ship to the US. My US distributors have stock in the US, but won't lend it back to me.

Presentation

Reps demoing my games in a store are representing my company (hence 'rep'). When I do it, I know that I'll do a good job, because it's my livelihood that's on the line. I know I'm presentable: smart, polite, knowledgeable about the games and fragrant (in a good way!). How do I pick people that will do a good job and represent my company in a way I'd be delighted with, when those people live at least 3,500 miles away and I've never met them?

Georgraphy

America is huge. Really huge. There's no way someone could cover the whole of it unless it was their job (and possibly their life!). Which means multiple reps. Which means multiplying the presentation and recompense problems by the number of reps.

Recompense

It's still early days for Reiver Games. It seems to be going ok, but I don't have much cash on hand and when I do I want to invest that in more games. How do I make it worth a rep's while to give up their time demoing my games? Do I give them free games? Free T-shirts? Travel expenses? A wage? What are reasonable amounts for each of those things? What about US employment law? How do I prove that I got return on investment?

While it's a nice idea, I don't know how I'd go about solving these problems well enough to make it work for all involved. Any suggestions?

Demo Days

2009-09-06T10:18:00.003+01:00

Back in June, just after Sumeria came out, I did a demo day at Inner Sanctum Collectibles in Cambridge. I turned up with my demo copies of each game and a couple of cases of each game and sat and played my games throughout the day in the store. As I said at the time, the day was a great success, and I was definitely interested in doing more of these events.

What with moving house and starting a new treatment, things have been pretty hectic for the last couple of months, so I didn't get to do a second Demo Day until yesterday at Eclectic Games in Reading.

This time, I put a bit more effort into publicising my visit, mentioning it on Twitter and BoardGameGeek.

Although Eclectic Games have a massive games room at the back of the store with loads of tables for playing games, they had kindly set me up on a table in the main store, just behind the till, so I was much more prominent as a result. There was less interest than last time (at ISC a whole bunch of customers had come in specifically to see me and my games, whereas yesterday I think all the interest was from people who just happened to come in). I think next time I should get the store to publicise it as much as possible among their regular board games customers to help boost interest.

I still think the demo days are a good use of my time, and I've just contacted six games shop owners I know to see if they are interested in hosting a games day. I've also asked on BGG for recommendations for other stores that might be interested.

Newsletters

2009-09-03T10:11:00.004+01:00

Newsletters, when done right, are what Seth Godin calls permission marketing:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

I've asked everyone on my mailing list for their permission to send them a newsletter every quarter, and in every case they have signed up, saying they want to receive this information.

I offer people who meet me at conventions the chance to sign up and I offer people who email me the chance to sign up. Only those that want to get the emails. It's not spam.

In the newsletter, I always list the conventions I'll be attending over the next few months, how each of my games are doing and any information about new games in the pipeline. After Tuesday's discussion about a sale, I decided to offer the sale only to those people on my mailing list.

Pros

Only offering the sale prices to those people on my mailing list is a way of giving them something back for giving me permission to send them marketing information. It says that I appreciate their permission.

Although I am undercutting some retailers with my sale prices, it's a limited time offer, to a select group of people, so it shouldn't annoy my distributors and retailers.

Cons

Because it's going out to a limited number of people, lots of whom will already own my games, it won't boost my sales that much.

Because it's only mentioned to people on my mailing list, although it is a reward for being on my mailing list, it doesn't act as an incentive to join my mailing list as those people who aren't on it will never hear about it.

It's led to a few sales so far, not sure how many more to expect.

September Could Be Slow

2009-09-01T09:42:00.003+01:00

I'm expecting September sales to be fairly low, since I've no new games coming out, and I hope lots of people will be waiting to buy from me at Essen next month (and get the Sumeria 2-player expansion free with a purchase of Sumeria!).

So far, every month's sales this year has been better (sometimes a lot better) than the corresponding month last year. So far so good. But in fairness, last year I had a few hand-made copies of It's Alive! in April and May, then nothing until September when the professional re-print of It's Alive! arrived.

Last year's September was at the time my best month ever, more than twice the turnover than the previous June (which was the best I'd had so far). Of course it didn't keep the record long as October was when I went to Essen for the first time, and last October's sales were nearly five times September's, which remains my current record.

The It's Alive! re-print will have been out one year on Friday. Last September's figures were the result of the pre-orders and the initial stocking orders for It's Alive! With no corresponding new game launch this year I'm going to struggle to match last year's September figures this year. I've been considering doing a September sale to try to boost sales this month.

To make it worthwhile, the sale price has to be low enough to entice people to buy from me (not a local internet retailer), while still making me some money after I've paid the shipping and VAT. I figure I've got three options: free shipping, discounted games with full price shipping and discounted total (shipping and games). I'll consider these against example UK and US online pricing (I've used Games Lore and Board and Bits respectively as examples). I've used Carpe Astra as the example (it's in the middle of my game price range) and the middle price for Boards and Bits shipping ($8.50). Note that both online retailers offer discounted (or free) shipping if you place a large order, so me considering a purchase of just Carpe Astra is a little disingenuous.

Free shipping. My price for Carpe Astra: £22 (approx $36.30). Games Lore Price: £20.20. Boards and Bits price: $34.10. Makes the game more affordable for US customers (but still more expensive than buying from an online retailer in the US), and doesn't help UK customers at all (they can get it cheaper from a UK online store, or from a shop). I'd make a decent amount money on a UK sale (£22 - £3.14 shipping = 18.86 which is £16.40 ex VAT), less on a US sale (£22 - £8.30 shipping = £13.70 which is £11.91 ex VAT).

Discounted games, full price shipping. If I did 30% off: My UK price: £15.60 + £3.14 shipping = £18.74, My US price: £15.60 + £8.30 = £23.90 (approx $39.50 - almost full retail price!). Helps the UK customer, but doesn't help the US customer at all (since the shipping is not discounted and very expensive). I'd make a reasonably amount of money each sale (£13.56 ex VAT).

Discounted total. Say 40% off the total game and shipping price: My UK price: £25.14 * .6 = £15.08, my US price: £30.30 * .6 = £18.18 (approx $30). This would be a great deal for the UK customer, and a reasonable deal for the US customer. My ex Vat pricing would be £10.38 for a UK sale (more than a distributor sale, less than a shop sale), £8.59 for a US sale (in the same range).

So, I wonder. Would this work? Would I sell any copies as a result? Would I look desperate? If I decide to do it, then I can advertise it in my quarterly newsletter which is due soon, and on BoardGameGeek and Boardgame News.

A How To Guide to Submissions

2009-08-27T16:21:00.003+01:00

I've received over 150 submissions in the three years I've been running Reiver Games. I've published four games. Not many make the cut! But I'm on the lookout for more games all the time. I'd love to have a full pipeline, where I know the next 15 games I'm going to publish. I'm nowhere near that point yet.

I'm most interested in light- to medium-weight strategy, ideally language-independent games with a fun theme that play in an hour or less, like the games I've already published. In this post I give some advice to aspiring game designers on how to submit a game to me.

Obviously this information only applies to submitting a game to Reiver Games - other companies will have different procedures and preferences. But I would imagine a lot of the information is similar across the board among those publishers who accept submissions.

I run a three stage submissions procedure, with the first two stages designed to weed out things I'm really not interested in and the third being the real test of the games.

Stage 1: Overview

In the first instance I ask for a couple of paragraphs via email describing the components, theme and major mechanics. This stage is designed to quickly weed out broad categories of games I'm not interested in: trivia games, mass-market games, sports games and card games playable with a standard deck of cards. I can also rule out a few games based on other criteria: if I find the theme offensive or games featuring very expensive components (if it's got 1,200 plastic space ships I'm not going to be able to make a small print run affordably). I also like a brief description of the number of players, game length and age category.

Stage 2: Rules

The next thing I ask for is a copy of the rules. To be honest very few games fail at this stage, only those that I realise have too many components or actually sound more mass-market after reading the rules that they did during reading the overview.

For the rulebook, the following can definitely help:

Get it proof-read by someone with excellent English - the more readable it is, the easier it is to understand how the game works.
Get the game blind-playtested: get someone who hasn't playtested it yet to learn it from the rules. This is a great way to find out what is missing or unclear in the rulebook.
Add diagrams. They don't need to be works of art but they can help to clarify the more complicated bits of the game.
Read the rulebooks of a few of your favourite games. Try to copy the style and structure of a well-written rulebook for a published game.

Stage 3: Prototype

If I still like the sound of your game I'll ask you to send me a prototype to try out with my playtesters. This will ideally take several months but with some of the submissions I've received it's taken a lot longer than that. Here's what I look for in a prototype:

A box. Seriously. It doesn't have to be a nice tray-and-lid style board game box, a corrugated mailing box is fine, but it makes it easier to store, easier to cart around and easier to send back.
Include the rules. Again it sounds obvious, and I know you've already sent them to me via email, but if you don't I won't always check the box before I take it to a playtesting session and not having the rules in the box is very frustrating if I've just got all the bits out to play with.
Include all the bits required. They don't need to be wazzy plastic miniatures, custom wooden figures or little FIMO sculptures, generic wooden pieces is fine. Sure, I've got a spares box, but there's no guarantee I've got the three different sizes of pieces in eight different colours that you need.
Ensure cards are shufflable. If you can't print onto thick card, you can print onto paper and put them in card-sleeves with Magic: The Gathering commons for added rigidity.
If your game includes cardboard counters with labels attached use a decent glue. Label paper is good. Permanent spray adhesive is good. It's worth knowing that glues can fail as they age. It may seem fine at the beginning, but after a couple of weeks it might fall apart. Test it at home first.
Good art is not required. I'll be redoing the art anyway to ensure it fits with my company style. It's not worth paying a designer to do the art for you, or spending hours on it. I'll probably want to change a few things, and it's easier to do that on a simple home-made prototype than a professional-looking product. Prototype art doesn't affect my decision, it's the gameplay I'm testing not the aesthetics.
If your game has a board make sure it fits in the box. Making a quad- or six-folding board isn't straightforward, but it is possible to do at home (I've made a few, and several submissions I've received have got them). If it fits in the box it's easier to cart around and send back to you if necessary. I'll not necessarily keep the box you shipped it in for all of the (potentially several months of) time I'm testing it.

If at the end of all that I don't want to publish your game (the most likely outcome!) I'm happy to return the prototype at your expense, or I can dispose of it - your call.

Games Designer's Block

2009-08-26T13:29:00.003+01:00

It's just as well that I mostly publish other peoples' games designs because since I've started working on Reiver Games full time I've struggled to make progress on my own designs. I've had a few ideas for games, usually theme first, and then I've struggled to get anywhere thinking up mechanisms that mesh with the theme and yet sound even vaguely interesting.

Fortunately, I've received a lot of submissions, so my lack of inspiration isn't getting in the way too much.

When I receive a submission I have three possible outcomes in mind:

If I really like it then I want to publish it. This is the ideal outcome, I'd love to be in the position where I know what the next ten games I'm going to publish are.
If I'm not wowed by the game, then I want to reject it. I get lots of submissions that work fine, but I'm just not feeling the love for them. It's hard to give the designer a good reason why I turned these down, but at the end of the day I only want to publish games that I think are awesome. If I think it's pretty good, that's sadly not good enough.
The third outcome, is a trickier call. When I receive a submission that I think has the potential to be an excellent game but needs a lot of work in my view, then I offer to co-design it with the designer. This is what I did with Carpe Astra and Ted Cheatham.

The third option is not optimal for the same reason that I find it easier to publish someone else's game - a lack of perspective.

When you're designing a game it's hard to draw a line under it. You make a first version. It's awful. You tweak it. The second version is better. You tweak it again. That version is worse! You tweak it again. This process continues for months or years and you lose all perspective. It becomes your baby. You're desperate for it to succeed and as the game approaches complete it gets harder and harder to tell if your fine tweaks are making things better or worse. When is good enough? When is awesome? When do you stop fiddling with it?

When I receive a submission I miss out on all this, I get a game - I try the game. Either I love it and want to publish it or I don't. There's no attachment - it's just another prototype, probably from someone I've never met or never even heard of. I can be completely objective. Is it worth me risking thousands of pounds of my own money to playtest, manufacture and sell this game? Will it make me any money or will I be left holding lots of stock and a sizable debt?

Despite the disadvantages I still sometimes consider this. Only if I get a game that I think could become one I think is awesome, but that needs a whole bunch of work to get there. Is it a bad game as it stands? Not necessarily. It could have an awesome theme, or a brilliant mechanism, but it's just not a game that excites me or that I think would sell well as it stands.

In these circumstances I'm willing to work with the designer to make significant changes. I make the changes I think of and send it back to the designer for comments and more suggestions. The designer makes a bunch of changes of their own and sends them to me. I try them out, and so on. This process carries on until we're both happy with it.

Last week I received a prototype that sounded interesting. It was a sci-fi themed game and I got to try it out last Friday. As it stood I found the game too long and lacking interesting choices in a couple of areas. But I could see the potential and I had a bunch of ideas about how to move it towards the sort of game I want to publish. I approached the designer about co-designing and he's up for it.

I woke up at 4am this morning, my head buzzing with ideas about the game. I couldn't get back to sleep and at 6:30am I finally got up and went and started making a prototype with the ideas I'd been thinking about. I've just tried it out and it doesn't work. But I'm still excited about it, and I've a few ideas that might improve things. I'd like to get some changes that at least sort of work before sending them to the designer - I don't want to look like a total chump!

Playtesting

2009-08-24T14:47:00.004+01:00

I've moved house twice this year. Once from York to Bedfordshire (160 miles / 270 km) in January for The Wife's new job. Then again in June from the rented house in Bedfordshire to our own place in Northamptonshire (8 miles / 13 km).

While lots of things about the move have been awesome (nice new home, a garden, more space, meeting new people, swanky new office) one of the things I've really struggled with is getting gaming in. In York I used to go to Paul's games nights twice a week (about a mile away), and I tried to get to the Beyond Monopoly! club whenever I could (it was on twice a month so I missed lots but there were plenty of options). In addition, I held a playtesting night at mine once a week too.

Since moving down here I've found a group through BoardGameGeek that I play with on Tuesday evenings, and I've even managed to get along to one of their Sunday sessions yesterday. They're a great bunch of guys, but the 15 mile trek is a lot less convenient than Paul's games night was in York :-( In particular, if I can't drive due to MS there's no gaming for me :-(

I found a club on Thursday nights in Newport Pagnell, but since we moved the second time the 25 mile trip has got in the way of me actually attending. Last month I went along to another club in Leighton Buzzard, which was about 40 miles, but for a full day of Saturday gaming it was worth it :-)

Playtesting is even harder to arrange. There's no guarantee of the quality of a prototype (in terms of game play - the build quality doesn't bother me), so I feel uncomfortable asking people to potentially waste a good chunk of what might be their only games night for several weeks on a game that might be rubbish. So I'd much rather do a playtesting session, where everyone knows what they are letting themselves in for. I don't know anyone who lives locally, so I'm limited to people I find through my games nights, games clubs and BGG. Since all these people live at least 15 miles away (often significantly more than that), it's not so easy to arrange. I've started having sessions at Terry's house (again about 15 miles away - I've officially moved to the arse-end of nowhere!), and ideally I'd like to do them around once a week - I'll have to see how much I can impose on Terry's generosity!

Despite all the problems I had a really good week's gaming last week. I went along on Tuesday to Tony's, then with Tony off work I went over to his again on Thursday during the day for some proper games and a playtest. Friday was more playtesting at Terry's (six plays of four different games), and then on Sunday I got over to CJ's for another afternoon of gaming (including another playtest). This week is looking good too - Tuesday evening at Tony's, playtesting during the day on Wednesday or Thursday, I'm seeing Paul in York on Friday and then hopefully CJ's again on Sunday. Hopefully I'm getting things sorted down here now.

Essen Preparation

2009-08-19T12:03:00.003+01:00

I'm starting to sort out my Essen visit for this year. Last year I went to Essen for the first time, as an exhibitor and as an attendee.

Having never been before I had no idea what to expect, nor really how to prepare. I had released It's Alive! in September (about six weeks before Essen), but I had very little in the way of distribution and very little buzz about me. Carpe Astra, which I had hoped to release at Essen had been delayed and so I was just toting It's Alive! and a hand-made prototype of Carpe Astra.

I'd been approached by Peter Struijf of Geode Games to see if I'd be willing to share my stand with him and I was. Turns out it was a great idea, not only did Peter's Krakow 1325AD game draw lots of extra people to my stand, but Peter was a great guy and we had a lot of fun hanging out on the stand over the five days. Peter's boundless enthusiasm was infectious :-)

This year, with a year's experience of Essen and three games to sell (plus the Sumeria 2-player expansion promo) I hope to be able to build upon last year's experience and have an even more successful show.

To determine if the show is 'successful', I need some benchmarks, to gauge its success.

The simplest and most honest success criteria will be do I turn over more at this year's show than I did at last year's? This is easy to work out since I already know what last year's turnover was, and I have to work out what this year's is in order to pay it in to the bank :-). Cash sales are also good for my business, as the mark-up I get on each sale is much higher than I would get selling to a distributor. This boosts the average value of my sales, and reduces the number of games I need to sell to break even on a particular game (none of my games have broken even yet).

On top of the simple cash turnover, there's a more involved, but still financial criteria: October's turnover. This includes not just the cash turnover at the event, but invoiced sales to shops and distributors at the show. Last year's October turnover was awesome - it's still my best month ever by quite some way, since as well as the cash sales on the trade show floor I also sold a lot of games to new distributors. This year things will be very different, since most of my distributors already have stock (though I'm still waiting for most of my European distributors to pick up Sumeria).

Then there are the other less tangible criteria: raising awareness of my games and my company, attracting new distributors, finding new artists and designers, projecting a good image of my company, etc. How to judge success on those criteria is much harder.

Last year at Essen, I did very little in the way of preparation. I spent £50 on some glossy posters, which I hung from the back of my stand with simple poster frames. I bought some material to use as table-clothes and just piled my games along the back of my stand in their cartons - a warehouse-like wall of brown cardboard. I also got It's Alive! listed in the 'Spiel fuer Spiel 2009' handbook, a full colour handbook printed by Dagmar de Cassan of Spielen in Osterreich.

This year, I'd like to improve the pre-fair awareness of my company and my games to draw more people to my booth. I'll be listing in Spiel fuer Spiel 2010 again, and I'll be spending 100 Euro on an improved listing in the SpielBox preview which includes not just the basic info (number of players, title, designer, etc.) but photos and descriptions of the games.

I'd also like to put some more thought into the stand design to make it look a little more professional (without adding hugely to the cost).

If you've got any ideas or advice I'd be very glad to hear them :-)

Back - Sort Of

2009-08-17T10:24:00.003+01:00

Well, I've had a week off, mostly spent lying in bed and I have to tell you I'm exhausted!

The treatment I was receiving last week was five days of intravenous infusion with an experimental drug. The drug (originally used for treating Leukaemia) works by intentionally destroying your immune system. Since in MS your own immune system starts attacking the myelin sheaths that insulate your nerves in your brain and spinal cord, the study doctors figure that killing off your immune system and letting it regrow might fix the problem. The results of previous clinical trials have been very encouraging.

Of course, the downside is I've just spent a week being pumped full of very toxic chemicals and now I have no immune system, so I'm very vulnerable to infection and food poisoning. Also, I'm completely knackered, despite not having done anything for a week. I'm under Doctor's orders to take things very easy for a couple of weeks.

Much as I'd like to continue lying on the sofa watching telly (it was pretty much all I was capable of this weekend), I've got a swollen inbox now after a week off, and I need to get the art for the Sumeria 2-player expansion to the manufacturers by Friday, so I can't just totally slack off.

I'm also keen to make some progress on the Sumeria computer game which has been on hold for a few weeks. I'll have to see what I've got the energy for...

Off Topic: Week Off

2009-08-07T14:18:00.002+01:00

As many of you will know, I have MS.

Next week I'm starting treatment with a new drug and will be in hospital all week. As a result there won't be any posts here and any Tweets I make will be few and far between.

This means that the next version of the Sumeria computer game will be at least a few weeks away. When I get back I'll also have to finish off the Sumeria 2-player expansion, as that will need to go to the printers fairly quickly.

See you all on the flip-side :-)

Sumeria 2-Player Expansion

2009-08-05T09:17:00.003+01:00

Sumeria was originally submitted to me as a 2-4 player game. I played the 2-player version several times and really liked it.

During play-testing, one of my blind playtesters found a weakness in the two-player game that made the second city-state worth less than the third (and the choice of influence counters pretty meaningless). Since the 2-player version also added to the cost of the game (since it needed extra wooden pieces), Dirk and I decided to drop it so the game was only 3-4 player. Later in play-testing a slight change to the 2-player rules fixed these problems, but it stayed out of the game as released.

Until now! I've decided to release the 2-player version of Sumeria as a promo expansion at Essen. What's the deal? Buy Sumeria from me at Essen and you'll get the limited edition promo expansion free! It includes 6 extra trader pieces in each of the four player colours, a sticker to add to the board to show a fourth player turn per round and a rulesheet (in English and German again). All wrapped up in a plastic baggie.

If you've already got a copy of Sumeria (well done :-) ), the expansion will be available to pre-order from my website shortly, and if I have any left after Essen they will continue to be available there. To keep the cost to a minimum, I've decided on baggie packaging rather than a small box, this means it probably won't be available in shops ever, but I hope it will only cost £2 plus postage and packaging from my website.

This is my first time making both an expansion and a convention promo, it will be interesting to see how it goes...

Translation Woes

2009-07-31T16:43:00.003+01:00

A while ago I mentioned how I had created translation grids for the rules for all my games to make it easier for volunteers to translate the rules of my games into other languages. It seems to have worked. I've had a lot of translations done of my rules and this week I've received a couple more (Sumeria into Hungarian and Carpe Astra into Spanish).

So far all well and good. The translation grids work a treat, and make the layout of a new version pretty straightforward. Until everything goes wrong!

Several weeks ago I received a translation of Carpe Astra into Russian. Great! The same guy (thanks Yegor!) had done the other games too, and I'd already done Sumeria, so I started on Carpe Astra.

The translation grids make it really easy to just drop the translated text into the original Adobe InDesign document, using the same images and fonts. At least they do until you pick a stupid font. I'd used Agency FB Condensed, a narrow font that looked vaguely sci-fi, for the Carpe Astra rulebook and cards. Sadly this font did not support the cyrillic alphabet - when I pasted the translated text into the document all I got was little empty rectangular boxes where each character should have been. So I switched to Arial (it's not that important that the font is correct after all).

While this fixed the initial problem (Arial supports the cyrillic alphabet) it's a much wider font than Agency FB Condensed and the Russian translation was normally longer than the corresponding English text - so the translation no longer fits in the same number of pages. My first attempt at fixing this was to drop the font size from 12 point down to 11 (and fix all the layout problems this caused). But after a bit more cut-and-paste it was clear that 11pt wasn't small enough so I went down to 10pt (and fixed all the layout problems again). Guess what? Still not small enough. Running out of patience I shelved the translation and I admit it has been a few weeks since I last made any progress.

The arrival of the new translation grids forced me to go back to it however, and today I finally nailed it. The solution was finding out that InDesign allows you to change the width of a font - effectively allowing me to create an 'Arial Condensed' - a narrower version of Arial. This meant I could change the font size back to 11pt and nail it. It still took a bunch of work and a lot of fiddling to get the diagrams and their captions laid out correctly but the job is finished and off to the translator for proof-reading. This means I can concentrate on the other two translations over the weekend.

The moral of this tale? I'm not really sure, other than learn the abilities of InDesign so that I can fix this problem the right way first time!

Sumeria V0.1

2009-07-29T16:13:00.002+01:00

Well, the whole trying to run this through BoardGameGeek thing didn't work very well - it's down at the moment :-(

So I'll do it here instead. The first version of the Sumeria computer game is now available (ish!) on my website: Sumeria computer game with any luck if you download that MSI file and then run it, it will install Sumeria on your computer.

First a few provisos. This is a very early version to get some feedback about the user interface - very little actually works yet. What does work:

You can install it
You can start a new game from the Game menu
You can choose the number of players, their names and the colours they play.
You can highlight a state by moving the mouse over its tile
You can set up the game by seeding the board with the appropriate number of traders.

What doesn't work? Anything else! Most notably you can't play the game. There's no AI and you can't get the game to work across the internet with remote players - it's three or four humans around the one computer.

The next release will incorporate feedback on this one and allow you to play the game on a single machine with no AI.

I'd really appreciate any feedback you have on what I've done so far - in the comments here for until BGG is back up.

Sumeria Computer Game

2009-07-27T15:24:00.004+01:00

The first bit of work I did on the Sumeria computer game was a bottom up approach, write the code which kept track of the game mechanics and state. Though it was great to get it working there was very little to show for it, apart from a test suite that told me all my tests were passing - there was no UI at all.

The last couple of days I've been concentrating on getting some UI written so there's something to show for my efforts. There's not much, but enough to show you what I've achieved so far. Initially I've been working on getting the beginning of the game set up and displayed and the basic UI coded. The next step will be to get the game playable, but at least it visibly does something now!

Initially, the game shows an empty window (I'll put a splash screen there eventually), and allows you to read the rules (from the Help menu) and start a new game (from the Game menu):

Starting a game creates a game and shows the players position and the board and tiles as at the start of the game:

Although you can't do anything yet, I've included a couple of UI feedback mechanisms. When you move the mouse over one of the state tiles at the bottom of the board, that tile and state tile it corresponds to are highlighted:

Similarly, when you move the mouse over a settlement, that settlement, its state and state tile are all highlighted:

It's not much, but you can already see where I'm hoping to go with this.

I'm intending to run this as a semi-Agile development effort. I'll be releasing early versions for feedback from members of the game-playing public. I hope to post the first version (with basic UI but nothing working game-wise) on Wednesday. If you'd like to take part in the testing, or just look at what I've done, please subscribe to this BGG thread where I'll post release announcements and download instructions.

BoardGameGeek and Game Ownership

2009-07-24T09:06:00.003+01:00

BoardGameGeek allows people to keep track of which games they own. It's a useful feature that I use myself, and when meeting up with someone else you can always say 'Look at my BGG collection - is there anything of mine you fancy playing?' which is pretty cool too.

I know exactly how many games I've sold to distributors, but I don't know how many of those the distributors have sold to shops, nor how many of those the shops have sold to gamers. They same follows with direct sales to shops. A tiny fraction of my sales are direct to a gamer, so I know those have gone to gamers, but that's not much as a fraction of total sales.

Why am I interested? A game sold to a distributor that ends up sitting in their warehouse for months isn't doing me any favours at all. The distributor will be less inclined to buy more stock as it's costing them money (in the initial outlay to me and warehousing space) but not making them any. Similarly a game that ends up sitting on the shelf for a long time in a shop won't convince the shop to get more stock in. In the ideal world the game is in the hands of a gamer who loves it and plays it regularly with their friends.

It's hard to work out where the games are. I can ask my distributors how much stock they have left, but that still leaves me unsure whether the games are in the hands of shops or gamers. In the case of direct sales to shops things are a little better as I can ask them how many they've got left, but in that case again it's only a small proportion of the total sales at my end.

Here's where BGG's stats come in handy. The people listed as owning the game are gamers. So I can get some indication of how many of my sales to shops and distributors have reached actual gamers.

Of course, as with anything statistics they can't be relied on as a final number, but they are indicative. There will be people who've bought one of the games and don't have a BGG account, and others who do have BGG account but don't bother keeping track of the games they own. However, almost everyone who lists themselves as own a game will have it (some people might do it by accident or forget to remove it from their collection if they sell or trade it away).

Because I made a couple of small runs of Border Reivers and It's Alive! which almost entirely sold directly to gamers, I've got an idea about the ratio of gamers who list themselves as owning a game to the number of end customers I've sold it to.

If you look at the stats for Border Reivers (100 copies made) then it lists 42 people as owning it - 42% of the copies in circulation. Similarly, when I had sold out of the limited edition of It's Alive! about 110 people listed it as owned of the 300 copies made (37%). So I reckon I can extrapolate that about 40% of the copies in gamers' hands are listed as owned on BGG.

Assuming that 40% figure is evenly vaguely accurate, then approximately half the copies I've sold of the second edition of It's Alive! are in gamers' hands, and it's also about half for Carpe Astra. Sumeria (which is still fairly new) is around one third. Not sure what to do with this information, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Designing Again

2009-07-22T09:14:00.003+01:00

For the first time in ages I actually did some work on one of my own board game designs yesterday.

Yesterday was a weird day. I was up at 6am, and then on the road before seven for a hospital visit in Cambridge (about 60 miles away). It was a morning of strange neurological tests while they determine if I'm a suitable candidate for a new treatment. I then rushed back home as my friend Mal was stopping in on his way back home from the Latitude music festival down here in the South. I got a text from him upon my arrival home to say he was still about an hour away, so I rushed into town to pay in a cheque from a late paying distributor. It turns out my walking isn't so good at the moment, the 2 mile brisk walk left me very tired and I was really struggling by the time I got home. But I did make it back in plenty of time for Mal's arrival.

We spent the afternoon playtesting a few games including a couple of changes to Border Reivers - my first games design.

For those of you who don't know it, Border Reivers is a light civilisation/wargame themed around the border squabbles between the clans of Northern England and Southern Scotland in the 13th to 16th centuries. Each turn, you can plays cards, recruit more cards and armies (through gambling some of your funds on a die roll) perform an action with each of your armies and then claim income from your settlements. Armies can build fortifications, settle down to create new settlements, mine gold from a mine location or move.

Two of the biggest problems I find with the first edition are the recruitment die rolls and uneventful turns.

At the beginning of your turn, you get to roll a ten-sided die twice per city, once to recruit a new army and once to recruit a card. If the die result is less than the amount of money you gambled on that die roll (e.g. a result of 0 will always get you a reinforcement even if you spend 0, a spend of 9 will guarantee you a reinforcement and a spend of 4 will get you a 50% chance - 0, 1, 2, 3, 4), you get the army or the card of your choice from a deck of cards. You lose the money whether successful or not. Since you can have up to three cities, you could be doing up to six of these rolls at the beginning of each turn. But it gets worse! A couple of the cards give you an extra roll for armies and an extra roll for cards, so if you had all three cities and all six cards, you'd be getting a staggering 12 reinforcement rolls a turn. I can't ever see that happening, but certainly three cities was not uncommon in the games I played. Most of those rolls you wouldn't spend money on, so it would be a lot of die rolling, hoping for 0s.

The other big problem was uneventful turns. In the game you had very few armies (by design), so there were often turns when you didn't want to move them unless you got another army or a particular card. So you'd make your reinforcement rolls - fail, not do anything and then claim your income and that was your turn done. Not much fun :-(

I like the rest of the design of the game, but I think in hindsight (and based on the feedback I've received) these are the two biggest problems in the game.

I'd had a bunch of ideas that might help fix these problems, but I've not tried them out as yet, so when Mal came round for the afternoon we wanted to give it a try. Mal and I have played a lot of Border Reivers over the years, at first I always used to win, but recently Mal's started beating me :-(

Time to change the rules ;-)

In his scientific way, Mal had wisely suggested we try one of the changes at a time, rather than making sweeping changes to everything. So first of all we tried a fairly simple change:

Cities give you one roll for army reinforcements and a free card every turn.

What I had hoped was that this would reduce the number of turns in which you had nothing to do, as you would always be able to get a card each turn. Since cards allow you to attack your opponents indirectly (stealing their income, ambushing their armies in the field or causing their settlements to rise up against them) or aid with direct attacks (reducing the effectiveness of their fortifications) I had hoped the game would be more aggressive as a result.

Initially, things seemed to be going well, we used the cards a lot and did start attacking other other fairly early. The game see-sawed a bit, like it often does and there were lots of nail-biting fights.

However, after a promising early start the game didn't go anywhere. Fights in Border Reivers are brutal, the most likely conclusion is that everyone dies :-) As a result by the time you had broken through your opponent's outer defences you almost certainly didn't have enough troops remaining to attack his city. This was additionally hampered by the fact that he was getting a card (or more) each turn, and hence would almost certainly have a militia card ready to defend his city from attack. The game continued like a couple of punch-drunk boxers unable to land a blow on each other for way too long (maybe an hour and a half - usually our games lasted twenty to forty minutes). Eventually, we gave up, convinced it was never going to end :-(

Mal mentioned that this just went to show how well balanced the original version was.

I think the next thing to try is replacing the die rolls with a fixed cost for armies and cards - this will definitely fix problem A and might help to fix problem B if the cost is low enough, but clearly there is a point where the cost is too low!

More Advertising

2009-07-17T12:14:00.003+01:00

Until now my advertising has been limited to three places:

BoardGameGeek
Boardgame News
In the Greater Games Industry Catalog

Each of these has their pros and cons as you'd expect. BoardGameGeek has a huge number of hits each month and is mostly targeted at the customer. The downside is that one of their revenue streams is to get people to pay money to 'join' the site, and this allows them to block all adverts from the site (I do this!). Since the most hardcore users are likely to be the ones who join, they're the least likely to see my ads, but the most likely to buy games :-( Plus, it's expensive.

Boardgame News comes in a bit cheaper, and in previous campaigns I've had more enquiries from people who saw an ad there than those who saw the same ad on BGG. Again, it's mostly targeted at customers, and the more hardcore ones at that.

The Greater Games Industry Catalog is as you'd expect from the name targeted at industry - shops and distributors. It's pretty cheap to get a page ad in there and they give you a listing every quarter for free so that's good. I've no idea if advertising in there has helped at all though - I've not had anyone mention they've seen my ads in there.

Now that I've got a pretty good distribution network, my next aim is to get more shops stocking and customers buying my games. How to reach that audience? A good question.

A couple of my distributors offer services to their suppliers to market games to their customers (the shops). So customers of mine want me to be a customer of theirs too. Weird.

Alliance Game Distributors the largest distributor in the US have a monthly trade magazine, Games Trade Magazine which they send out to their customers - the US shops. I can give them a wad of cash to place an advert for one or more of my games in the magazine, which would hopefully lead to more sales to the shops and then more customers noticing the games in the stores. It's pretty expensive though.

ACD Distribution, another large US distributor are offering me the chance to place flyers in every order they ship for a few weeks. I can even make the flyers like posters so they serve a triple purpose: raising awareness of my games with the store staff, giving the store owners something to decorate their store with and raising awareness of my games with customers in the store. It's a bit cheaper than the Alliance option and it hits both the shops and the customers. Sounds good. But to be most effective the posters need to be put up in the stores and I've no control over whether or not they will.

Just to make things even more bewildering, I've no experience designing adverts or posters so I've no idea how to make them look good, or even what information to include. I've asked for a back issue of GTM to get a better idea.

Any suggestions of which route is the best to go down, or what information to include?

Market Research Results 2

2009-07-15T13:05:00.005+01:00

Back in April I ran an official BoardGameGeek competition. It cost me a bunch of money, in addition to the cost of seven games for the winners and postage.

Having never done anything like this before, I was wondered whether it would be a good way to spend my meagre marketing budget. At the time someone suggested that I do a questionnaire before and afterwards to judge the effect of the competition on awareness of my company and my games.

To encourage feedback, I ran the questionnaire as a mini competition, if you answer the questions I'd enter you in a competition to win a copy of the Reiver Games game of your choice and free worldwide postage. The first questionnaire ran several months ago and got 399 responses. For a description of the results you can see a previous post.

The second (post-competition) questionnaire I ran in the same way, and it finished at midnight on Monday. I spent pretty much all of yesterday collating the 291 results and figuring out who had won. Running two competitions allows me to remove some of the bias of the questionnaire as I hope similar people would have answered both.

In this post I'll be comparing the results of the two questionnaires and trying to interpret the results. Was the competition worth the cash?

Reiver Games

The first question was about awareness of my company/brand. The question was: Have you heard of Reiver Games?

A: Reiver what-know? Never heard of them
B: I've heard of them, but I've not played any of their games
C: I've played one or more of their games, but I don't own any of them
D: I own one or more of their games

For each question I'll show the two graphs - before and after the competition and then discuss what I think that means. As with anything statistical, there's multiple ways to intrepret the data - feel free to wade in in the comments if you disagree with my take on things.

The graphs will all show the results of the pre-competition survey in blue and the post-competition survey in red. Obviously, my ideal answer is D, then C, B and A in that order. Before the competition, 35% of respondents had never heard of my company, afterwards this was 11%. The remain three categories had all improved, but the most noticeable improvement was in the 'I've heard of but never played category. For this first question at least the competition seems to have been successful.

It's Alive!

The second question was about awareness of my first professionally manufactured game: It's Alive! The question was: Have you heard of It's Alive!?

A: Never heard of it
B: I've heard of it, but I've not played it
C: I've played it, but I don't own it
D: I own it

Before the competition It's Alive! was my best known game with only 23% of respondents unaware of it. After the competition this had dropped to 15%. The questions in the main competition required a little knowledge of It's Alive! and Carpe Astra - to stand a good chance of winning you needed to look up the answers in the rulebooks of both games so that makes sense. The remaining three categories all improved, with C showing the largest proportional increase. I've also noticed the the number of people who list themselves as owning It's Alive! has dramatically increased since the competition.

Carpe Astra

The third question was about awareness of what was at the time my newest game: Carpe Astra. The question was: Have you heard of Carpe Astra?

A: Never heard of it
B: I've heard of it, but I've not played it
C: I've played it, but I don't own it
D: I own it

Before the competition Carpe Astra was less well known game than It's Alive! with 42% of respondents unaware of it. After the competition this had dropped to 15% - same as It's Alive! The remaining three categories all improved, with B showing a massive jump.

Sumeria

The fourth question was about awareness of Sumeria, which was not yet released at the time of the first questionnaire, but had been released by the time of the second. The question was: Have you heard of Sumeria? The options differed between the two questionnaires due to the game's status.

A: Never heard of it
B: I've heard of it / I've heard of it, but I've not played it
C: I want to play it / I've played it, but I don't own it
D: I want to buy it / I own it

Before the competition most people hadn't heard of Sumeria - a whopping 72%. With the game still in development and little information available though, this wasn't that surprising. Looking at the second survey, Sumeria wasn't really mentioned in the competition either, just a throw-away line in Chad's introduction, so I expected awareness of this to still be lower. However, Sumeria has only just come out and is getting good feedback. 28% of respondents are still unaware of it. The remaining three categories all improved, with C showing the largest proportional increase.

Overall, 22% of people have either played or own It's Alive!, it's 9% for Carpe Astra and 8% for Sumeria. Ownership of the three games decreases in order of time available - fewer people own Sumeria (the newest game - still not available in many shops) than any of the others.

In terms of awareness-raising, this seems to have been a great success, the awareness of my games and company has jumped much higher after the competition than it was before. Unfortunately, most of the awareness is now in the 'I've heard of X, but not played it' category. I need to get more people playing (and hopefully buying!) my games if I'm going to be successful.

Official Competition

I wrapped up the second questionnaire with a new question: Did you see the Reiver Games Giveaway official BGG competition?

A: Yes, and I entered it
B: Yes, but I didn't enter it
C: Nope, that one passed me by

I didn't know what to expect here. The competition was entered by about 3900 of BGG's hundreds of thousands of registered users. It sat in the BGG News section of the front page (at the top of your screen by default) for two weeks so people who check BGG frequently should have seen it. People who joined in the couple of months since the competition obviously won't have seen it, and infrequent users may well have missed it.

The number of Bs and Cs surprised me. I thought more people would have at least noticed it, but 35% of respondents hadn't. As for the Bs, I wonder why they chose not to enter? Already got all my games (I wish!), not interested in the prizes (i.e. my games), questions too hard? I'll never know... Unless I ask them :-)

In summary, I'm pretty happy with the results of the two questionnaires and the competition. The big challenge now has to be to get people from category B in questions 1-4 into category C or D. I'm not sure how to do that.

Computer Versions of Board Games

2009-07-02T11:45:00.003+01:00

Last night I started working on a computerised version of Sumeria. Why invest the time and effort to make a computerised version of an existing board game? What's in it for the (potential) customer?

It allows people to quickly and easily see if it's a game they would like without the expense of a purchase.
It's a chance to learn the rules where they are constrained and don't rely on someone's interpretation of the rulebook.
It allows you to play when you can't get a group together.
Some allow you to play offline - i.e. each player takes his turn and then notifies the others it's ready for theirs - this requires much less player time in one go than a full face-to-face game.
In a thinky game, perceived downtime is reduced since you're not sat waiting for an opponent to have a go - you're just notified when he has.

Sounds good so far. So why don't all publishers make (or allow to be made) computerised versions of their games?

It might lead to fewer sales: why buy a game if you can play it online for free?
It's expensive in terms of time and effort. Programmers aren't cheap - I know - I used to be one.

You can do essentially three different type of computer-based board games:

Real-time against the computer (AI)
Real-time against human opponents
Offline against human opponents

Each has their pros and cons. Against the computer only means you don't have to worry about network programming or database interaction - the whole thing can be done more simply. In one sense - you need to come up with some AI that the computer players use, which is more difficult. Real-time against other people means you don't need to write any AI, but the downside is you need to write all the code necessary for client-server interaction. Interactive games are probably better for simpler, quicker games, where there is little downtime waiting for an opponent to have their go. You will probably need to provide some form of instant communication too - a chat window or voice communications. Finally, the offline method is like an old play-by-email game, but with a better interface. On your turn you get a notification (via email for example) that it's your turn. You get to see what has changed since you last looked and then you take your turn and the next player is notified. This method will turn a short, fun game into a very long experience, but for the more complicated games it might take the pressure off a bit, allowing players to concentrate more on their strategies without the pressure of the other players leaning over the board asking you to hurry up!

I'm thinking I'll try to get version for Sumeria against the computer working first, if that works ok I can always look at getting the offline version done afterwards. I'm working in C#.

Back to My Roots

2009-06-29T15:37:00.003+01:00

Recently, I've been having some more thoughts about a second edition of Border Reivers. Border Reivers was my first attempt at game design, and the 100-copy limited edition, entirely made by hand was the first step on the road to where I am today.

I started designing Border Reivers after a 36-hour marathon game of Mighty Empires in which the guy who was clearly in the lead suddenly got knobbled after 36-hours and went from comfortable first place to languishing at the rear. Had he made a huge tactical error that brought such a reverse in his fortunes? Nope, some random dragon event just hurt him. Surely I could make a similar game that plays quicker and doesn't have such huge swings in power.

My brief was to design a similar, civilisation-level, light wargame, with some development where random game happenings can't screw you completely. I wanted the game to play in 30-90 minutes too, not many people have 36 hours available for a single game.

How Did I Do?

I'm still proud of my achievement with Border Reivers. With no experience as a game designer or publisher I managed to design a working game, get it printed, assemble 100 copies and sell them all within eleven months all over the world. Is it the best game ever? Clearly not. But it's one that I still enjoy when I play and people still ask me to re-print and one that Mal wants to play almost every time we meet up.

Strengths

There are several things about Border Reivers that I really like. I like the double-sided triangular land tiles that get flipped and upgraded as the landscape changes. I did get the alignment wrong on the coastal ones though, so flipping them was counter intuitive. I liked the aesthetics of triangular tiles and the way that it made movement not quite as expected - I envisaged this was due to the highland terrain making travelling in a straight line difficult.

I also liked the brutal combat. The most likely outcome of a straight fight was everyone dies! However, there were substantial bonuses if you could get weight of numbers on your side. As a result, this led to either building large armies to crush your opponents, or risking everyone on a do-or-die attack. Of course, the cards spiced things up a bit too.

Which brings me on to the cards. The cards in Border Reivers come in two varieties: buildings and strategies. The building cards were played face up, and gave a development advantage to one of your cities - either more income or better chance of getting cards/armies in each future turn. The buildings were ok, but the hidden strategy cards were more fun. There were only a few types, so when you got one, your opponents had a pretty good idea what they were in for. There was a defence for each of them, but the defences were pretty expensive, so you couldn't afford to keep defences for all possible cards in place. I really liked the hidden cards, especially: Insurrection, Reiving Party and Ambush.

Weaknesses

At the beginning of each turn you rolled a ten-sided die for reinforcements. You rolled twice for each city: once for army reinforcements and once for cards. Since you could build up to three cities, you could theoretically roll the die six times at the beginning of your turn. In addition, to make things even worse, the reinforcement buildings cards (you could build one of each in each city) gave you an extra die roll. Up to twelve in all! While I liked that these gave you the opportunity to gamble victory points (cash) for possible gain, you could spend 8 cash (a fifth of that needed to win) and still get nothing (it gave you a 90% chance of getting something, but a bad die roll and you're stuffed). I've played many games where you just need one more army to give you enough to attack. Roll for reinforcements... fail. Do nothing this turn except get more money and try again next turn. This is no fun.

Border Reivers had two paths to victory, you could either kill all your opponents (player elimination) or save up enough cash. In two-player games it was about 50/50 over which path ended the game. In three- or four-player games it was almost always the cash route. Since the cash route could be achieved by building strong defences and then sitting back and raking in the cash the game was subject to turtling, where each player hid in their own little corner of the board and sat back trying to race to gain the most cash. This led to little player interaction. Mainly a problem with the three- and four-player games, but still doesn't make for a very fun game. I introduced the mine fairly late in development to try to encourage people out of their holes, but this was only a limited success.

While the mountain range pieces in my first FIMO prototype (see picture above) were really cool, the rubbish card ones in the limited edition were definitely not.

Ideas?

On and off I've been toying with a few ideas of things I could have done differently in Border Reivers:

Each player is a particular Border Reiver clan, with different starting resources or player powers.
Reinforcements are either free or fixed cost, limited only by the number of cities you control.
Replace the victory conditions with a victory point track that could reward development, riches and aggressive play.
Replace building cards with tokens or counters that show which city the building is in.

My aim would be to reduce the number of turns when you've got nothing to do (either because your reinforcement rolls didn't provide the required reinforcements or you don't have enough resources to mount an attack) and reduce the huge number of die rolls at the beginning of each turn while still capturing the feel of the first game.

Have you played the limited edition of Border Reivers? Would you like to get you hands on a copy? What do you think could be improved/changed? Answers on a postcard below please.

Growth

2009-06-26T13:25:00.003+01:00

One of the measures of business is sales growth. Especially with new start-up companies, where profit may be many years off, sales growth shows whether your business is working on a fundamental level - are you successfully selling your products/services and are you selling more than you did before?

One of the difficulties of starting a business is keeping track of how things are going. When you don't have years of experience to call on how do you keep track of things? I've had a quiet few months from February to May. Is that normal? Is it a time of year thing? I can't really compare it to last year because during that period last year I was selling hand-made games or completely out of stock.

Yesterday I tried to catch up with my books, which I've fallen a little behind on. At the same time, I thought I'd start tracking a bit more sensibly how my sales are going, both now and historically. I knocked up a quick spreadsheet in OpenOffice Spreadsheet and started pumping my sales figures into it.

It's hard to compare things, since I registered for VAT last year (previous my sales figures would have been all for me, now I have to just consider the non-tax part of it). In addition, I've decided to split the game sales from the shipping costs, starting this financial year, so although both are sales (one is a product, the other a service) from now on my sales figures as I keep track of them will be smaller. However things are looking pretty good. I've done all the figures for last year, and I've got two previous years to compare them to:

In the above graph blue is my first financial year (hand-made Border Reivers), Red is my second (hand-made It's Alive!) and yellow is my third (first full-time year, It's Alive! reprint and Carpe Astra).

It looks pretty good, but there are some things to take into account. For the first two years, I made games by hand, and sold mostly directly. These were short runs and so my sales were pretty small. Last year I started getting games made for me in larger numbers and selling mostly to distributors, hence the hike in sales numbers. My growth for the first quarter of last year was negative, seeing as I ran out of hand-made games to sell halfway through. The second quarter there was no growth, I had two months of nothing to sell, but It's Alive! turned up in September and that was as much sales (after tax) as I'd managed in the whole of the equivalent quarter the previous year. The next two quarters have a sales growth of 1100% and 1200%, but it's not a fair comparison, selling large volumes of professionally manufactured games to distributors as opposed to selling individual copies of hand-made games to gamers.

The first quarter of this year will probably have growth around 750%, but the real test will be the next two quarters. Last year I released It's Alive! in Q2, this year I'll just have the residual sales on the three products I've got out. Q3 last year had: Essen, my best month's sales ever, the release of Carpe Astra and initial stocking orders from most of my European distributors. I'll have to do well to top that, and there's no chance of doing ten times better!

Building Momentum

2009-06-24T16:20:00.004+01:00

We moved into our new house last Thursday. Thursday, Friday and the weekend were spent moving and trying to sort stuff out, Monday I was at the old house, cleaning and waiting in for three orders to be collected by the couriers.

The first was an initial stocking order for my first Canadian distributor - yeay! They were one of three new distributors who have contacted me since I ran the competition on BoardGameGeek. The second (a new US distributor) has placed an order which I'm going to ship on Friday (I've had to wait until I can go to York to get more It's Alive! stock - I've sold through the pile I was keeping at home) and the third has only recently enquired.

The second order shipping on Monday was a re-stock from one of my UK distributors. This was really gratifying, since they'd ordered less of Sumeria than they had initially ordered of It's Alive! and Carpe Astra, and three weeks later they had to ask for some more :-) I was expecting their sales to be slower since several of the larger UK shops had bought from me directly at or since the Expo, but this doesn't seem to have affected their sales much at all.

Yet another US distributor has also enquired in the last couple of weeks. This third new distributor is even better since a Danish/Norwegian distributor I've been talking to for months told me a while back that if I dealt with PHD they would buy my games from them, rather than me directly. So, if PHD also sign up, that will be two new distributors for the price of one :-). I don't know whether they will bite yet, but so far so good.

On top of all that I spoke to another distributor today on the phone. He's going to start soliciting my games. Hopefully this will lead to them picking them up, but it was effortless to get him to consider it.

I'm feeling pretty positive at the moment. The new house is lovely, and has a nice big office that I can store things in much more tidily than I could at either of our previous places. Feedback on Sumeria has been pretty good so far and June's sales will be my second-best ever (out-stripping January, the previous holder of that title, but not a patch on last October and Essen :-) ).

The only fly in the ointment is that most of my European distributors have yet to place a Sumeria order, so European availability is pretty patchy.

It's interesting to see how my mood varies. Entrepreneurship requires boundless enthusiasm and optimism. I try, but a dry spell like Feb-May gets me down, but a good month like June and I'm straight back up again :-)

Demo Days

2009-06-15T10:12:00.003+01:00

On Saturday, I did the first of what I hope will be many 'Demo Days' where I visit a store and spend the day teaching customers my games.

Preparation

I didn't do much in the way of preparation, obviously I arranged it a few weeks in advance and mentioned it in the 'Events' section of my website, but that was about it. In hindsight, I should have put in a bit more effort. The shop (Inner Sanctum Collectibles in Cambridge) had put up posters, and a window display and had been telling their regular customers about it, but I should have mentioned it here, on BoardGameGeek and Twitter to give it as much publicity as I could. In addition to leaving my personal copies with them for a week so the staff could learn the games I also brought along a couple of boxes of each game to ensure they didn't run out of stock.

On the Day

The shop's Saturday opening hours are 10-6, but they are usually pretty quiet at the end of the day so they had been advertising I'd be there 10-4. In the end I had to head off about 5 since The Wife and I were going out for dinner with some of her colleagues that evening. Cambridge is about an hour's drive so I headed off at 8:30am to ensure I wouldn't be late. I ended up getting there about 20 minutes early, which gave me a chance to set up before the shop opened at 10.

The first hour was pretty quiet, which gave me a chance to teach Carl, one of the staff, It's Alive! and Sumeria. There were some telephone enquiries about my visit (so someone was interested at least) and by about 11:15 the shop started filling up. Apparently it was a fairly quiet day for them, but my games were in use pretty much all day and were very well received. Several people wanted to play all three games, and several people wanted to play games twice (or more!).

The shop did a deal where customers got 10% off all of my games that day, and if they bought all three they got 15% off. I was surprised (but gratified!) at how many takers they had for the all-three deal, and at the end of the day, despite not having sold all their current stock (most of it had gone) they kept one case of each game, which I invoiced them for that evening.

Afterwards

The games well very popular (especially Carpe Astra and Sumeria), and lots of their customers bought them. I can only hope that they get played a lot and this leads to more sales for the store (and hence for me in the long run). I think the deal helped (I could inform people of the deal for today only, which led to more sales on the day I'm sure), and being there to teach people means they get the rules right first time, which is always a good thing. When I play a game for the first time I often get a rule wrong, and this can lead to a bad first impression.

Venue

Inner Sanctum was a great venue, not only do they have a great range of games (board, card, miniature and collectable) but they also have a lot of space for playing. I co-opted three tables (one for each of my games) and that still used up less than half of their table space. In addition to a light, airy well-lit space with plenty of room for the games, the staff are very friendly, and they plied me with food and drink throughout the day (including a run for doughnuts to celebrate one of the customer's birthdays!).

Verdict

After a weekend of decorating and then another at the Expo, I would have really liked to take Saturday off, but it was a very valuable use of my time. Not only did I cement my relationship with one of the biggest shops in the UK, but I got my games into the hands of a lot of gamers, who really enjoyed them. Getting your games onto shelves is one half of the battle won, but until you actually have happy customers playing the games and spreading good word of mouth, that's where the games will languish. Good relationships with shops really help, since the shop staff will suggest your games to people who aren't sure what they want. Definitely a good use of my time.

Critical Mass

2009-06-09T15:02:00.003+01:00

There's a point during the lifespan of any successful company when you go from initial struggles to comfortable success.

I'm not there yet, but there's some promising signs for the future. At the UK Games Expo I introduced myself to Zev Shlaslinger, the man behind Z-Man Games in the US. Z-Man have made it, they have critical mass. They have a large portfolio of games, including the English version of the extremely popular Agricola which is currently number one on BoardGameGeek. I introduced myself as Jackson Pope, of Reiver Games, expecting a polite 'who the hell is this nutter?' smile. Instead, Zev replies: "I know who you are - I read BoardGameGeek and your blog". Wow! That was unexpected (hi Zev!).

At the bank this morning, my business specialist was also very impressed with my progress in the six months she's known me. Apparently, at the moment most of the people she sees are really struggling, and while my company has yet to pay me a penny, things are going pretty well. I've sold a lot of games and I've got some money coming in every month.

At the moment the company is still in an early cycle. When I bring out a new game I expend a lot of money getting it produced and then it takes a long time to recoup. Doing print runs of a few thousand means my costs per game are pretty high, so I don't get quite as good margins as I should in an ideal world, and the games are slightly more expensive than the larger print run competition. When I've recouped enough money, instead of paying myself, that money is immediately re-invested in producing another game. While I'm at this stage if any of my games are a flop I'm stuffed, I won't get the money back to get another game done.

When will I have critical mass? It's hard to say. If I can get 6-12 games in my portfolio then the residual income from those should be enough to keep me going. A bad decision need not be fatal. Also, with more games I become a more attractive supplier for distributors. Being able to place a reasonably sized order to get shipping discounts is only achievable if they can guarantee to sell the games. Taking 500 copies of a single game (one pallet of Carpe Astra or Sumeria is 504 games) is a big risk, but taking 50 copies of 10 games is much less so.

So in essence all I need to do is keep picking games that turn out to be popular until I've got lots on my books.

Easier said than done...

Distribution

2009-06-05T10:49:00.002+01:00

I've got 18 distributors now, mostly in the US and Europe, but a couple of further flung ones too. I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll be picking up two more in the next couple of weeks, another one in the US and one in Canada too.

In my experience (which is still pretty limited to be fair), distributors seem to conduct their business in one of two ways:

By Product Line

The distributor treats each line as a completely separate item. When you release a new product they will place a 'standard' order of a certainly number of cases (in my experience 4-15) of the game. When they start to run low they'll reorder, with the volume of the second and subsequent orders based on the rate the first order sold at.

By Supplier

The distributor groups all of a supplier's lines together. They will place orders fairly regularly (maybe monthly) ordering a mixture of all your product lines, based on current stock levels of each game.

It's definitely better when a distributor orders a multiple of full shipping boxes. I use a 52 x 41 x 42cm box which will hold either:

8 boxes (48 games) of It's Alive!
4 boxes (24 games) of any mixture of Carpe Astra and Sumeria
4 boxes of It's Alive! and 2 boxes of Carpe Astra/Sumeria

Having games that are the same size like Sumeria and Carpe Astra is great as it makes filling shipping boxes that little bit easier for the second class of distributor.

The Interplay of Twitter and Blogger

2009-06-04T18:15:00.003+01:00

I can see that Twitter will be quite useful - I shouldn't have dragged my heels about opening an account for so long. It allows me to blog when I'm away from my computer - at conventions and trade shows for example. Also, I often end my Blogger posts with an 'In other news' a short bite of information that doesn't warrant a post on its own but that I hope will be of interest to someone. I figure I can also break the weaker 'this is what I did today' posts down into bite-sitzed chunks for Twitter.

In my mind this allows me to use Twitter as designed - to let you know what Reiver Games-related stuff I'm up to on a more frequent and more concise basis.

At the same time, I can strip out what I consider to be the weaker posts here, and instead stick to the meatier stuff: my thoughts and experiences of running a board games publishing company. So hopefully the posts will be more interesting and more useful to those of you in a similar boat, though as a result they may become slightly less frequent (since a 'this is what I'm doing' filler post is less likely to appear).

What are people's thoughts on this? Am I barking up the wrong tree or does this sound like a good idea?

I've Got a Twitter Account

2009-06-03T18:50:00.004+01:00

Ok, enough faffing, I've finally joined the Twitterati. If you think I might have something interesting to say you can follow me from the link to the right. If you think you have something interesting to say leave me a comment with your username on Twitter and I'll follow you.

I figure being able to send short updates from my phone might be useful, seeing as I'm away a lot at the moment. Also, tweeting from the Expo would be pretty cool if I remember...

Update: Because the link to the right only works if you're not using RSS (it's a link on the sidebar), my Twitter username is ReiverGames

Stocking Orders

2009-06-03T11:34:00.003+01:00

After a couple of days that have been spent mostly in the car in sweltering weather (for the UK, so about 23 degrees!) I'm now at home for the day. I've got most of my pre-orders shipped, except for those that are being collected at the UK Games Expo this weekend, and today is a stocking order day. Six of my eighteen distributors have placed orders already. Two are collecting at the Expo, three are going out today and one is amending their order so that it better fits in shipping boxes. This was something I didn't realise I could do. When they send me a purchase order telling me what they want to buy, I get back to them and tell them how to amend their order so that it fills shipping boxes. Since it's an American customer paying in USD, and I pay shipping this is quite important to me.

I'm going to chase my other distributors now the games have arrived to see if they want to order, hopefully I can get a few in time to ship early next week.

The stocking order process is fairly complex. First I send them some information to solicit with their customers and then hopefully they send me a purchase order, expressing an intent to buy a certain number of games. There's often a lot of chasing between those two steps though! In return, I draw up an invoice for the sale which I send back to them. I also need to keep a copy of the invoice for my records, and record the invoice in my VAT Account.

I then need to arrange a courier collection for a day that I'll be in. I use Interparcel Ltd. as a courier aggregator. Couriers are expensive. However, if you do a high volume of business with them (usually tens of parcels every month) then they will start to discount the rate you are charged for the shipments. I tend to go through periods when I send 10-15 parcels over a few days and then very little for the next several months until my next game comes out.

Courier aggregators like Interparcel work by dealing with lots of couriers and lots of customers. With lots of customers, they get a great rate from the couriers and can pass that discount on to their customers minus a small percentage for themselves. With lots of couriers they offer several options for each parcel and you can choose to send each parcel with whoever is cheapest (generally DHL for UK and Europe and UPS for everywhere else). The receipt needs printing out and adding to my records and my VAT account.

When I go to York to get games I also tend to get a few shipping boxes at the same time. These bigger boxes (51cm x 41cm x 42cm) can hold 8 boxes of It's Alive! (22 Kg!) or 4 boxes of Carpe Astra/Sumeria (15Kg). I get the boxes flat-packed from Zetland Boxes, so on shipping day I need to build the boxes, fill them, attach the labels and the wait for the courier - who is often early, so the preceding steps are generally done early in the morning to ensure I'm ready when they arrive.

Shipments going outside the UK also require me to provide proof that they are leaving the UK (for VAT purposes) so that I can zero-rate the purchases, which generally means keeping a copy of the courier's airway bill with the invoice. Shipments going outside the EU also need four copies of a customs invoice, detailing the contents and their value which all need to be signed and given to the courier when he arrives.

It's a complex process with lots of little steps, I have to be quite methodical to ensure I don't forget anything.

In other news, It's Alive! has finally sold just over half the print run, two days before it's nine-months old. That seems pretty good to me, but admittedly I don't really have any idea!

I Could Do With A Twitter Account

2009-06-01T08:45:00.001+01:00

I've just had confirmation that Sumeria arrived at the warehouse on Friday.

All systems go!

Pre-orders

2009-05-31T18:37:00.003+01:00

I've spent the last four days painting rooms in my new house with my parents who came up for a few days to help out (thanks Mum and Dad!). I've also been sorting out the Sumeria pre-orders briefly in the mornings and evenings.

Friday morning I posted the new version of the website as planned and sent the emails to all my pre-order customers. I don't feel comfortable taking their money up front, months in advance of the product arriving, so instead all I do is take a note of their name and email address and add them to the list. When the games are delivered I send an email to all the pre-order customers telling them how to pay or offering them the chance to pull out if they've changed their minds. Doing it this way makes it easier for people to pull out, which might be considered a bad thing, but I'd much rather that, than customers felt like I'd been sat on their money for ages, or they had to fight to get a refund if they'd decided to buy it through another channel or no longer wanted it. As it happens only one person has dropped out at this point, since they figure they can get it cheaper locally when it becomes available.

This time, with the imminent launch event at the UK Games Expo, a lot of my UK pre-order customers are electing to collect their copies at the Expo. This is better for everyone, since they don't have to pay postage and I don't have to go to the Post Office and paying cash means PayPal don't take a chunk out of my earnings :-)

I'm still waiting to hear from twelve of my pre-order customers who I'm expecting to post copies to. These will hopefully pay over the next few days (if they do it before 9am tomorrow I'll be able to ship their copies from York tomorrow afternoon). When I don't hear anything I'm never sure whether they've silently changed their minds and want to back out, haven't got around to it yet or my email hasn't got through. I usually send a chaser email after a week or so, just in case the first one didn't make it.

Tonight I'll be addressing all the packaging for those customers who've already paid. That way all I have to do in York tomorrow is slip a copy in the packaging and take it to the Post Office.

Tomorrow I'm setting off early and heading up to the warehouse (I'll phone them before I leave as I haven't had any confirmation that the games have arrived). In York I'll pick up enough copies for the pre-orders and then hand-deliver a few to friends before posting the rest. I'm staying the night at Paul's and going to his Monday night games night that I used to attend when I lived in York. Tuesday I'll fill the car to the gills and drive home. I should be home in time to check my email to see if any more pre-orders have paid while I've been away and get to the local Post Office.

Wednesday will be a slightly quieter day, I've got to wait in for a removals company survey and I'll also send off the first couple of stocking orders (US and Germany).

Busy, busy, busy :-)

Planning Ahead

2009-05-27T08:33:00.004+01:00

Quite a lot of my website refers to Sumeria as a forthcoming game. In addition, there is no way to buy Sumeria yet from my website, there's a bunch of information about signing up for the pre-order and the pre-order page that I create to allow pre-order customers to quickly and simply pay for for their pre-orders via PayPal doesn't exist yet.

The pre-order window, as always will close when the games arrive at my warehouse. This is to avoid undercutting the shops and online stores that I rely on for most of my business (either directly or through a distributor). On Friday, when the games arrive I've got to make all those changes to the website.

The only problem is that my parents arrive for a few days this afternoon, and I'm going to be decorating our new house with their help on Friday - so I can't take a few hours to overhaul my website.

I keep a copy of my website on my computer, in case a failure at my ISP leads to a loss of data. I can make the changes I need to my website on that copy, and then all I need to do on Friday is upload the new version, a matter of a few minutes work.

As part of these changes I need to create PayPal 'Pay now buttons' for Sumeria (pre-order price and full price with the three shipping prices). There's probably a better way to do this than creating six different buttons, but that works and I don't have a huge amount of time today.

Mental Couple of Weeks

2009-05-26T09:06:00.003+01:00

The next two weeks are going to be very busy. Fortunately, the last couple of weeks haven't been too taxing and we've just had a long weekend (yesterday was a public holiday in the UK).

We bought a house down here on Friday, so now we've got to get it ready and move in. It needs decorating throughout, and there are a couple of more major jobs we'd like to get done before we move in.

This week my parents are coming up from Bristol to help us decorate, so I'm taking Thursday and Friday off work to go over to the new house and decorate with them, and we'll be working on it on the weekend too. Friday is also the day that Sumeria arrives in York. On Saturday The Wife is off to Sweden for a week for work, so next week I'm home alone.

Having my games in York has saved me a lot of money. In York I'm paying £1 per pallet per week, with a minimum order of £10 a week. I'm down to 4 pallets now, so I'm paying £10 a week. Down here in the South I was quoted £2.75 per pallet per week. For those four pallets that's only £11 a week, but I used to have more, and on Friday another 6 pallets are arriving from Germany, in York that has no effect on the amount I pay (still within the minimum invoice charge, just!), but down here that would add £16.50 a week to my costs. The downside is when a new game arrives I need to get my hands on a lot of stock, that means several trips to York to load up a car-full of games and bring them down here. So next week I will be mostly on the road and fulfilling pre-orders and stocking orders. In addition, I've the UK Games Expo that weekend, so I'll need some more stock for that.

In addition to everything else, I need to get ready for the Expo: preparing my stand, working out how much stock I'm taking, getting new business cards made and getting some Point-of-Sale signs done.

Cashflow Crisis Averted

2009-05-21T09:22:00.003+01:00

When running a business one of the things you've got to keep a close eye in is cashflow - how much money you have on hand at any one time, and how you expect it to vary over time. This is especially true of a publishing business where you have to pay for the product up front, and don't get a return on your investment until you have sold at least half of your print run.

Things are better this time round. For It's Alive! and Carpe Astra it was the first time I had dealt with those manufacturers so they wanted half the money up front (before manufacture) and the other half upon delivery. Now, since I'm an established customer of Ludo Fact's they are willing to let me pay on delivery. Still, I have to pay before I get any return other than the pre-orders (which are done through PayPal, so I get the money within a week). My first sales to shops and distributors will be on NET30 (they have 30 days to pay) so I will have to pay the manufacturer before they pay me.

The last few months have been a bit quieter than I had hoped, so I've not got enough cash on hand to pay for Sumeria - there will be a small shortfall for a month or so. Where does this leave me?

Yesterday I dressed up smart and popped over to my bank to discuss the options. My business specialist, Helen, is very supportive and also quite excited by Reiver Games as a client, so it's not hard to get my hands on some ready cash if I need it, even in these credit-poor times. Helen's advice was to get an overdraft on my business account, that way I only pay interest on the debt while I need it - they sooner it's paid off the sooner I stop paying them interest (unlike a loan, which always generates interest). There's an arrangement fee, but that's the same with a loan too.

Cashflow is what sinks most businesses. Even a successful business that's in a good position and doing well will go into administration if it can afford to pay it's creditors - i.e. if it runs out of money. It doesn't matter how short this lack of funds is, if you can't pay your debts it's game over. Being on good terms will your bank really helps - a short term overdraft is enough to get Sumeria paid for, and cover the couple of weeks until I start getting paid by my distributors.

In other news, Sumeria has been assembled in Germany and will be shipping on Monday, it should arrive at my warehouse next Friday (29th) - last chance to get 40% off for a pre-order.

Postal Theft

2009-05-19T13:26:00.003+01:00

Yesterday was a very busy day. In addition to a bunch of business stuff I needed to do, I also needed to sort out a few things regarding the new house we're buying, which took much longer than necessary.

I did manage to get to the Post Office just in time to send the Sumeria prototype to the UK Games Expo guys to allow them to judge it for Game of the Year. I also had a few prototypes to send back to designers at the same time.

I've just heard from the UK Games Expo guys that the packaging for the Sumeria prototype arrived today as expected, sadly the contents are absent without leave. This was my only prototype, so now I have to quickly knock up another prototype to send off to them. Hopefully, this one won't go missing again.

In other news, the people who played Sumeria at the weekend have started to rate it on BoardGameGeek, so it's climbing nearer towards the 30 ratings it needs to get ranked, and I've been sent a Russian translation of the rules to Sumeria which I need to layout and post on my website. Things are moving on...

Beer and Pretzels

2009-05-18T09:59:00.004+01:00

I had a great weekend in Burton at the 20th Beer and Pretzels games convention. I delivered a box of Carpe Astra and a box of It's Alive! to Spirit Games the shop that runs the convention, as they had sold out of both in the weeks leading up to the convention. After that I set up on a table and proceeded to demo my games and do some playtesting. I did my usual thing 'working' during the days until about 5-6pm and then 'playing' during the evening. The only difference being that while I'm 'working' I only play my own games (and prototypes), in the evenings I have a beer and play whatever anyone else wants to play.

Sumeria was well-received, with a gratifying percentage of players pre-ordering after their game. It would have been higher, but several people didn't pre-order a copy as all their gaming buddies were already on the pre-order list :-). It's Alive! sold a few copies over the weekend, and Carpe Astra was popular too. In addition, I got several playtesting games of one of my prototypes in too.

I also spent some time gaming with Paul, who runs Games Lore one of the biggest UK online games stores. He's running low on stock of my games and says they was a large spike in the number of Carpe Astra sales after my competition on BoardGameGeek. Nice to get some confirmation that the competition worked!

All in all, a great weekend, and I returned to lots of emails including a few more email pre-orders of Sumeria. I've now more than doubled the number of pre-orders I've got for Sumeria since reducing the pre-order price. Everyone is getting the price reduction, including those who pre-ordered before I reduced the price, so I lost some money from those early pre-orders (£17.50 down to £15, so £2.50 per customer). Thankfully, the number of new pre-orders more than makes up for that!

Just before I left for Beer and Pretzels I heard from the German manufacturer that Sumeria is being assembled on Wednesday. All being well it will arrive at my warehouse before the end of next week.

Beer and Pretzels

2009-05-14T09:06:00.003+01:00

This weekend I'll be heading to the 20th Beer and Pretzels convention in Burton-on-Trent. It's my third time attending, and somehow this year feels very different.

Beer and Pretzels is run by Sally and Phil of Spirit Games, and is held in the Burton-on-Trent Town Hall. It's a fairly big convention (I'm guessing over 200 attendees) and has a really nice atmosphere, with a bar, food, lots of different types of games and a prize ceremony at the end for reviewers on the Spirit Games website.

I first went in 2007, getting the train down from York and staying in a local pub. I had a carrier bag full of hand-made copies of Border Reivers, and a prototype copy of It's Alive! The convention went well - despite the convention being run by a shop, Phil let me sell hand-made copies of Border Reivers, and I sold quite a few. I went for the second time last year, and although by then I was technically a pro game publisher, it felt very similar. I got the train down from York, stayed in the same pub round the corner and again I had a carrier bag full of hand-made games, this time the last few copies of the hand-made edition of It's Alive!, which I duly sold out of. Phil had even reserved me the same table in the corner by the bar :-).

This year everything feels very different. I'm driving up from Bedford, and instead of a carrier bag full of hand-made games to sell myself, I'm taking a couple of boxes of professionally manufactured games and an invoice for restocking the shop. I'll be demoing my games this time, but if anyone wants a copy I'm going to direct them to the shop instead, where Phil will have some available. I'll also have the Sumeria prototype which I'll be demoing and I'll be taking pre-orders for Sumeria at the new, reduced price. I'm going to leave the Sumeria prototype with the UK Games Expo guys (who will be attending to hand out flyers at some point), so that they can start playtesting it as a contender for the UK Game of the Year competition which I helped to judge last year. Since Sumeria is now only a couple of weeks away it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

If you're going along too, stop by and say hi. If you're not: change your plans - it's their 20th birthday!*

* "I live on another continent" is no excuse!

Good News / Bad News

2009-05-11T09:24:00.003+01:00

Which do you want first?

The increased discount has lead to a lot of extra pre-orders for Sumeria, which is great, I could do with some more, but every little helps :-). I've mentioned it here, on BoardGameGeek and in my newsletter, plus W. Eric Martin has tweeted about it on Boardgame News. Not sure where else I should mention it really. Maybe Facebook?

The bad news is that I've been blacklisted by Microsoft. Since my last email newsletter went out, all Microsoft email addresses are bouncing my emails. So that's: @hotmail.com, @live.com and @msn.com. This is really annoying. I've sent out the newsletter and they've received it, they then reply asking above the Sumeria deal and when I reply to them it bounces. At that point I have to resort to re-sending the email from my personal GMail account.

This is especially annoying since the wording of the bounce email seems to imply that the blacklisting is in response to a Microsoft customer complaint. Everyone on my list is on my list because they have asked to be there. At the bottom of each email there are 'unsubscribe' instructions. Now I've got to find out how to go about un-blacklisting myself.

Tomorrow I'll be doing some more sales visits to local-ish shops, so most of today will be spent preparing for that. I popped into a couple in Bristol (we were down there for the weekend visiting family) - one seemed quite interested in It's Alive! and Sumeria, the other had a very small stock of board games, including Carpe Astra :-)

Pre-Orders

2009-05-07T16:36:00.004+01:00

Pre-orders are a great way to cut out the middle man and help both the publisher and the customer. Publishers usually offer the pre-ordering customer a discount in return for either cash up front (helping to pay for the production) or a commitment to buy the game direct from the publisher.

Pre-ordering helps the publisher by providing them with more income that they would get selling the games through shops and distributors and also providing early return on investment. Normally, selling to distributors it's at least a month after delivery that the publisher will see any money, since the usual invoice terms are NET30 (payable 30 days after invoicing). In the case of cash up front (which I don't do!) it also allows the publisher to part-finance the production of the game using customers money - which reduces the risk. It also gets some copies of the games out in the hands of the playing public very quickly - which will hopefully lead to quicker referral sales where someone who has played someone else's copy wants one of their own.

Pre-ordering also helps the customer - it allows them to get the game cheaper than retail price, and sooner than they would be able to through the shops.

Sounds great so far - who doesn't it help? The shops and distributors that have been cut out as middlemen! Although, if the early copies that went to pre-orderers get played and lead to more sales then it will indirectly help them. Obviously, once the game has widespread distribution continuing to sell it at a crazy discount from the publishers website will really hurt the shops, since the publisher can definitely sell it cheaper than shops. For that reason, once the game is available most publishers close their pre-order offers, so as not to undercut the shops who are also their customers.

My pre-ordering process has always been: I offer a 30% discount to anyone who signs up before the game arrives at my warehouse. Once it has arrived, I email everyone who has signed up offering them the chance to pay (and get the cheap copy), or ignore it - no obligation to buy. It's all done using PayPal buttons and a hidden webpage (a page on my website with no links to it, other than the one in the emails I send out). I also offer free delivery to anyone who wants to collect the game at a forthcoming convention.

Seeing as there's a credit crunch on and everyone is feeling the pinch - I've decided to increase the pre-order discount on Sumeria to 40%! Yup, if you pre-order you get it for £15 instead of the usual £25 (plus postage and packing). I had hoped the exchange rate between the GBP and the Euro would enable me to reduce the retail price of Sumeria from £25 to £22 (same as Carpe Astra) but unfortunately nothing is doing on that front so I'm doing this offer instead to help out my most loyal customers. If you're interested just send me an email. If you've already pre-ordered, don't worry, you'll get the extra discount too.

Seeing Some Benefit

2009-05-06T10:14:00.003+01:00

Well, I've got both the consignment returns I was waiting for. It's hard to make a judgement on the US returns, since they haven't had Carpe Astra long, and they've just switched from biweekly to monthly billing. But there certainly isn't a large jump as a result of the BoardGameGeek competition and sales calls. In the UK though it's a different story. The UK returns show a large improvement over the previous month, though whether that's down to the sales visits I've been making or the BGG competition it's hard to tell.

I'm going to do some more sales visits next week (ahead of my attendance at the Beers and Pretzels convention next weekend. I also need to concentrate on picking a game for my Essen release. I've a couple of potentials, but nothing certain yet. Playtesting over the next couple of weeks should help to confirm things, if you're going to Beer and Pretzels, stop by my table and ask to play a prototype with me (and while you're at it, why not try Sumeria!).

I'm even considering a few sales trips a bit further afield. There are several shops up North that I could visit, but to do so would probably mean staying the night somewhere, so it's a bit more of a commitment than the local trips I've been doing so far.

Moment of Truth

2009-05-01T07:49:00.003+01:00

Today and again Tuesday I'll get some information about whether or not the BoardGameGeek competition lead to a boost in sales.

Most of my distributors place a stocking order of 30-90 games and then I don't hear from them again until they've run out and need some more. Since I competition I've had one of those re-orders but to be honest I've no idea whether that was related to the competition or not.

A couple of my distributors have my game on consignment. They place a large order, and then each month they tell me how many games they've sold. I invoice them for those games only, and then they pay me. This allows me to better track how sales are progressing as I have a monthly history with these distributors and I can see any peaks and troughs in their sales. I can charge more for games on consignment too - since by only paying for a game when they've sold it the distributor is getting an improvement to their cash flow and reduce their risk at the expense of my cash flow.

Will the competition have helped sales? I hope so, and judging by BGG ownership stats I think so, but the consignment returns over the next few days should either confirm or deny it.

Making Progress

2009-04-28T09:36:00.003+01:00

After a very busy couple of weeks I'm finally catching up on a few things. I've now received and approved all the proofs and plots for Sumeria and, thanks to a German reader who was paying attention, caught a mistake I made at the proof-reading stage in the German rules. Fortunately, it wasn't too late to get the problem fixed (I'd not yet received and approved the plots) so that didn't cause too much of a problem (though it did cause a bit of a fright!). Sumeria is now all go, all I have to do is approve the corrected German rules and the wooden pieces when I receive them, then sit back and wait for the games to arrive.

Today's first order of business is to meet Brett Gilbert (writer of the Brettspiel blog) in a local café this morning. He's passing through Bedford and wanted to show me one of his prototypes.

This afternoon the reality of running your own business is catching up with me. I've got to do my books for March and then submit a VAT return for the first three months of the year. It's boring, but it's a legal requirement so I've got to get it done.

I've also been going through some of the many submissions I received as a result of my piece for Boardgame News. I've rejected several of them at the second stage (reading the rules) as they were not the sort of games I was interested in, and a couple at the first stage (reading a overview), but a few have made it to the prototype stage, so hopefully I'll be getting a few more prototypes in a couple of weeks. I'm playtesting again tomorrow, so I'll get a chance to play some of the stash of prototypes I've managed to accumulate.

A Small Army

2009-04-27T13:28:00.003+01:00

I read Seth Godin's blog. I recommend it, he posts most days, short pithy posts that make you think. There's a definite marketing bent to his posts, but lots of the stuff he posts is applicable outside the marketing world.

In one of his recent posts he recommended Chris Guillebeau's '279 Days to Overnight Success' a free manifesto explaining what he had done to make it in the social media arena. I found the manifesto pretty interesting, so I popped over to Chris' site to find out more.

One of the things that Chris recommends is recruiting a 'Small Army' of willing volunteers who will help you achieve your goals.

It struck me that I've (without really trying) started to do that - there's a bunch of people out there who have helped me get Reiver Games off the ground, often for little or no compensation. Much of what I have achieved so far is in no small part due to them, so I thought now would be a good time to thank them (in no particular order):

The Wife: For her enthusiasm, support and art direction - I couldn't do it without you.
Mal: The website, the last minute proof-reading, Essen, the list is long!
Michael: Excellent German translations, often with very little notice, and three hours on the stand at Essen.
Dunk and Lucy: Essen - especially the driving and meals :-) and my first convention
My designers (Yehuda, Ted and Dirk): For trusting me with your games and choosing me from all the other publishers out there.
Paul and Lisa: The enthusiasm, proof-reading and playtesting
Tony: Sales repping in the US.
Dave: The UK Games Expo in 2007, plus lots of playtesting.
Everyone who has submitted a game to me.
Everyone who has translated the rules for one of my games into their language
All my playtesters and proof-readers, the games wouldn't be possible without you.
My true fans who buy all my games - I really appreciate all your support

If I've forgotten you from the list I apologise, say hi in the comments and I'll redress the balance.

Want to join my small army? I'd love the help :-) Things you can do:

Play my games
Rate my games on BoardGameGeek
Become a fan of my games on BGG or Facebook
Buy one of my games
Ask your local retailer to stock my games
Ask any contacts at a distributor to stock my games
Review my games on BGG
Translate the rules of one of my games into your language
Introduce my games to other people - take them to games nights, conventions or demo them at a local retailer

There are things that you can do that cost money, things that cost time, and things that are almost effortless - do as much or as little as you feel like - any help is appreciated.

A Year in the Boardgames Industry

2009-04-26T10:28:00.003+01:00

It's been just over a year since I quit my job as started Reiver Games as a full-time job. There have been some ups and some downs as I'm sure you're aware but if I'm to continue the most important thing is the bottom line: I need to make some money or the dream will die!

I've done a GeekList on BoardGameGeek sumarising this first year. The bottom line is the last entry.

Several things went right this year, but also several things went wrong. I'm really proud of the distribution network I've achieved in this first year, from nothing. Essen was a fantastic show for me, a huge success. But when push comes to shove, the company has had a mediocre first full-time year. With the delays getting It's Alive! manufactured I spent the first five months with only a handful of hand-made copies of It's Alive! to sell, which disappeared pretty quickly. From mid-May to the beginning of September I had absolutely nothing to sell. That I made any money at all those months is due to doing some contracting work for my previous employer. When the games did finally turn up it took me some time to get the distributors on board (several didn't sign up until January - five months after It's Alive! arrive in my warehouse). As a result my sales were a bit disappointing - especially in the last few months of the year.

I had to pay out for the games at (or before) the point of manufacture, so my expenditure has been pretty high. I still hope that I'll make a profit on those runs, but to do so I need to sell a large proportion of them, and that takes time. More time than I had between It's Alive! arriving in September and the end of the tax year in April. As such Reiver Games has made it's first loss this year after two years with a very small profit. Sales were up hugely, selling to distributors and shops rather than individual customers, but the bottom line is that this year I didn't make any money, and I'm going to have to start making some money soon if I'm to carry this on.

With Sumeria arriving shortly I'll have another opportunity to boost sales, but with it comes another huge expenditure on manufacturing. This year I'll have stock all year round, and with more games in my portfolio I'll hopefully be a more attractive prospect for other distributors as I'll look a little more professional. The three distributors who contacted me during the BGG competition will hopefully start stocking my games. I hope the BGG competition will boost awareness enough to lead to a bunch more sales. The bottom line is that I need to be selling more games, more quickly, I'm still not sure how to achieve that.

Case Study: Getting Sumeria to the Printers

2009-04-24T10:26:00.003+01:00

I thought it might be interesting/useful to see what is involved when sending a game to the printers.

I'm getting Sumeria manufactured in Germany by Ludo Fact, the same company that did such an excellent job on Carpe Astra. So what is the process?

The process begins many months before the game is ready, by requesting a quote from the manufacturers. I tend to ask for quotes for a few different sized runs so I can see how much cheaper per game a larger run would be, and how much more expensive in total it would be. For example I asked for quotes for 2,000, 3,000 and 4,000 copies of Sumeria. The quote comes back and Ludo Fact show a breakdown of where all the costs come from (e.g. the cost of the box, the board, the punchboards, the wooden pieces, etc.) so you can make a few changes if necessary in an attempt to reduce the price or improve the component quality. Ludo Fact show their quotes with the cost per 1,000 games so you can easily compare the prices, but they don't include the cost of proofs and tooling costs and obviously you need to consider additional costs such as bank charges, prototyping costs, art costs, etc.

Ludo Fact take about 8-10 weeks to manufacture a small run like one of mine, and they don't require everything up front. The first time you order they do want half payment up front, but for later runs they will accept payment on delivery. The 8-10 weeks is due to the time required to manufacture the wooden pieces, so in the first instance all they need is a signed order so they can go ahead and place the order for the wooden pieces from their supplier. They will send out a 'white sample' of the box and boards to show you how the various bits will fit together inside the box. The white sample is made from all the correct materials, just not printed, so it can be used to check the weight of the finished item as well.

The next stage for Sumeria was to FTP the artwork for the punchboards and the gameboard, and that wasn't required until two weeks after the order was placed. The artwork is checked over by their data quality department (who are very thorough and found several problems with the Carpe Astra art - but none with Sumeria :-) ), and if necessary new art is requested. Once the art has been approved you are sent a proof and a plot for each component. The proof is colour-accurate showing what the components will look like. If you've ever tried printing colour files you'll notice that each printer prints slightly different colours, which in turn are slightly different from how they appear on the screen - the proofs are guaranteed to be the same as the finished items. Since you pay extra from the proofs you can choose which components to have proofs of, and you can choose to have proofs that are slightly smaller than the finished item, or only cover some of them (e.g. a selection of cards from the deck - not all of them). Plots on the other hand are not colour accurate (and in fact are often hideously garish!), but they show all the components and any cut lines for you to check that things line up correctly. These need to be checked and approved in writing to the manufacture to allow them to proceed.

The last of the artwork for Sumeria (the box and rules art) was required a further two weeks after the boards art. Again, it gets FTPed to their server, their data quality department check it over and send out the proofs and plots for approval.

The final piece of the puzzle will be a production run sample of the wooden pieces (complete with a zip-loc bag which they'll send on to me when the wooden pieces arrive at their factory from the suppliers.

Once everything is ready at their factory they will assemble the games, box them, shrink-wrap them, put them in cases, put the cases on pallets and shrink-wrap the pallets. About a week later those will arrive at my warehouse, and I'll get an invoice to pay for the manufacturing.

Sumeria is about half-way through the process at the moment - I sent them the last of the artwork on Monday, and I've received the proofs and plots of the boards, with the box and rules due early next week. I'm due to receive the games in week 21, a week before the UK Games Expo where Sumeria is due to be launched.

Site Repping

2009-04-23T16:25:00.003+01:00

That's what my last two days effort is called according to The Wife.

Yesterday I was going into London to meet Philip duBarry (of Revolution fame) for dinner. Seeing as I was spending £25 on the train fair into London I figured I might as well make a day of it and visit a few board game shops hawking my wares. Today I've done something very similar in St. Neots and Cambridge - a bit nearer to home.

In preparation for my visits I first rang the shops to arrange a rough time for my visit and to make sure that they were interested in seeing me. With one exception they all seemed quite keen - I didn't feel too much like a cold-calling salesman, which was effectively what I was. I also got together a small pack of information for each store: a business card, and 'sellsheets' for each of my games (a sheet of A4 with information about the price, some art and the blurb from the back of the box). I stapled this information together so that I wouldn't have to be faffing around when I got there.

For each visit I got the name of the person I spoke to (or should speak to on the day) so that I could ask for them when I reached the shop. I hit five shops in London on Wednesday and three today. On arrival I went up to the desk, introduced myself and asked to speak to the person whose name I had got on the phone. I then handed over the information pack (so they've got something to check after I've left and remind them of the salient points) and then spent 15-20 minutes giving a brief overview of my three games: It's Alive!, Carpe Astra and Sumeria.

About half of the shops I visited already stocked one or more of my games, the others generally had never heard of them. As a result of the trips all of them were interested in stocking them, though admittedly some only if I acquiesced to their conditions (in some cases ridiculous). Three of the shops are going to pick them up as a result.

Even in the cases where they already carried my games it was often only one of the two (so it was worth it from an awareness raising point of view) and in most cases the staff had only seen the game box, never the contents and knew nothing about how to play the game that wasn't written on the box. Hopefully in these cases the extra information will lead to the staff recommending my games to some of their customers.

In addition, a couple of the shops wanted me to come in one Saturday and demo my games to their customers. This sounds like a great idea, so I'm going to be visiting them for the day to demo my games - like a mini-convention. The shops will advertise it in advance and get some stock in so that interested customers can buy the game there and then.

I consider these visits to be a great success and I'm now trying to work out which other shops are within range of another day trip.

The Saga of the Box Design

2009-04-20T15:56:00.005+01:00

When you get your copy of Sumeria (you are all going to buy one, aren't you?), take a minute to look at the back of the box, and consider briefly just how much of a bitch it was for me to do.

The saga begins on Friday with me (your sheepskin-clad, over-muscled hero - though I like to think with slightly more intelligence than your standard-issue barbarian hero) trying to get the box and rules artwork to the printers in Germany by the end of the day. I decided fairly early on that I wouldn't have time on Friday to get the box tray art done, so I checked that the box art could wait until Monday without delaying things too much. With that out of the way my plan was to finish the rest of the art, get it FTP-ed to the printers and then go to a local print shop to get a printout of the board done. I had two print-outs of the board with me, my home-made quad folded board with the final artwork but a bunch of printing errors from my printer and the colour-correct proof from the German manufacturers which they had folded in quarters to fit in an envelope - so I couldn't use either of those.

The trials began sending the rest of the artwork to the printers. My computer decided to inexplicably go very slow on-and-off during the afternoon (at one point it took half an hour to shutdown) so by the time I finally got everything sent off it was 4:30pm. Running a bit late. I thought I'd better check what time the print shop shut and they shut at 4:45pm. Damn, I'd missed them and would have to go Saturday morning.

Saturday morning, with visiting parents in tow, I went to the print shop and got the print out of the board done. We spent the rest of the day hanging out with my folks, and the next morning I got Dad to help me with setting up a photo of the game. When it came to make the mock-up board for the photo I realised the print shop had somehow managed to print it out 80% of the correct size, so it would no longer fit with all the other components. Grrrr. Still, I got Dad to help me set up the home-made board, and show me how to get a good photo of it. We could do the layout and tweaking with the photo of the home-made board and I could get a correct print out on Monday and drop that in instead. We took the photos, picked one, did the layout and then in the evening I did the associated stuff (barcodes, logos, descriptive text, etc.). I then got Michael (thanks!) to do a German translation of the box text and in the meantime I went back to the print shop, got a correct size print-out, came home, glued it onto some board (I just made a full-size open board, rather than faff around making a quad folding board that I can't do tidily) set the picture back up, took some more photos stripped out the background in the photos and added the new photo to the box.

Getting it done was far more complicated than it needed to be, but I'm very pleased with the end result:

You Know You've Been Neglecting Your Blog When...

2009-04-17T10:06:00.003+01:00

You get emails asking if you've died.

I've been busy. And not busy. Last weekend The Wife and I went to Newcastle for a couple of days break. It was great, we got to hang out with our friends up there and just chill out for a couple of days. On our return we've been busy sorting out stuff for the house we're buying and I had to make an unscheduled trip to York.

Wednesday I had to go to York to collect the white sample of Sumeria which had been sent to my old address (I'd forgotten to inform the German manufacturers that I'd moved house). The white sample is a box, insert, punchboards and gameboard all covered with the correct paper. The punchboards aren't punched and there's no printing done, but it gives you an example of the size, weight and finish of things. Sumeria will be in the same size box as Carpe Astra and the board and tiles will be on the same 2mm thick, linen-finished card as the Carpe Astra pieces. I was really impressed by how professional Carpe Astra felt - the Germans really do a great job.

To make the trip up to York worth the effort, (there's six hours driving involved) I spent the night at Paul's, got to hang out with him and Lisa, play some prototypes and then the next morning I popped in to Travelling Man (the comics and games shop in York) and went to their Leeds head office. I used the trip as a sales trip - introducing Carpe Astra (which neither store had picked up yet) and Sumeria and enquiring how It's Alive! was doing. In the York branch, It's Alive! is apparently a regular seller - they always re-order it if it's sold out and it sells out fairly often. Since moving from selling copies personally at conventions and through my website to selling to distributors I've no idea how well things are doing - so it was nice to get some positive feedback from the shop floor. It was also good to be able to tell them that Carpe Astra had spent most of the last two weeks at the top of the BoardGameGeek Hot Games list.

On my return an email from Ted informed me that Carpe Astra has been added to Bruno Faidutti's Ideal Game Library and got an honourable mention in Mike Siggin's Sumo Awards. Two more pieces of information that would have been good to be able to mention had I known about them one day earlier! Still, I'm planning to do some more sales trips early next week and I'll be able to use that information then.

Things are now very busy - I've got to send the box art and the rules for Sumeria to the printers today (though I'm not going to be able to send them all today - the box bottom will have to wait until Monday :-( ) and my parents are coming to stay for the weekend this evening - so I've some preparation to do for their visit too. My dad used to be an art teacher, so I'll be able to rope him into helping with the box bottom design and the photo of the game over the next couple of days.

Take The Blue Pill

2009-04-08T08:03:00.003+01:00

God alone know what the title's going to do to the Goggle ads. I've been receiving emails for some time with that advice and I've finally taken them up on it.

Yesterday morning I went over to the hospital at Cambridge about my gammy eye. Unlike the hospital in York (3 miles from our flat there), the Cambridge hospital is 45 miles away, so The Wife had to take the morning off work too to give me a lift there (since my gammy eye is stopping me from driving at the moment)- thanks! I was expecting them to say: 'You've had too many treatments recently to receive any more steroids', but they prescribed me some again. Yeay! Unfortunately, they've given me some little blue pills to take instead of the IV treatment I usually get. These pills taste foul, by some length the worst thing I've ever tasted, and I've got to have five a day for five days :-( Still, my vision is improving already, so it's not all bad.

Today I'll be making the final corrections to the Carpe Astra and Sumeria German rules and getting them both up on my website. The competition seems to be continuing well, I'm not yet sure whether it's having any affect on sales, but by the end of the month (even if I've not had any re-orders from my stocking distributors) the consignment returns should indicate whether there's been a spike in sales or not.

My games have gone off the boil on BoardGameGeek a bit, with Carpe Astra dropping to fourth in The Hotness list, Sumeria is still in seventh and It's Alive! now way down the list. Also, my company has dropped from first to second. I've been surprised how much higher Carpe Astra has been in the list than It's Alive! throughout the competition, I guess fewer people had heard of Carpe Astra, so it got more click-throughs.

In other news, when I asked about free publicity, W. Eric Martin from Boardgame News gave me a chance to write a piece for BGN about game submissions to publishers. That's going to run tomorrow, so I'd imagine I'll be getting a few submissions fairly soon.

Competition Collateral

2009-04-05T17:22:00.003+01:00

The competition is running as I've already mentioned. I was hoping that the competition would raise awareness of my games, and based on feedback in the announcement thread and the position of my games and company in BoardGameGeek's 'The Hotness' list of most viewed games and companies that is working pretty well.

There have also been a few other developments which I wasn't expecting. I got an email on Friday from a Canadian distributor asking for my distributor terms. I don't know whether anything will come of it, but the company serves over 300 games stores in Canada and I don't have a Canadian distributor as yet, so if they do sign up that will be awesome. I'm still hoping to get Australian distribution at some point, though when (if) that will happen is anyone's guess. I guess some Canadian's must have asked their local shop to order one of my games, and they asked the distributor, either that or the distributor is busy on BGG. Either way, I should hear their decision this week. Finger's crossed.

I've also received an Italian translation of the rules of Sumeria, two months before it is released. Usually the translations come through my distributors after there receive a game or from fans who have been playing the game with their friends. Admittedly, I've got the English rules and a translation grid up on my website, but I didn't expect any interest for quite a while yet.

This means I'll be pretty busy next week on Translation stuff. I've received the German translation of the Sumeria and Carpe Astra rules (thanks Michael!) and now the Italian Sumeria rules too. I've also got to get the Sumeria rules and box art layout finished and off to the manufacturer by the end of next week. I had to send off the board and punchboard art last week (it takes slightly longer to manufacture) so once that's done all I have to do is sit back and await the proofs and white samples. The white samples are important as they'll allow me to calculate the weight of a finished copy, and hence the postage for the pre-orders. The proofs are mainly for checking the colour balance, I've proof-read things several times before sending them off, so hopefully the manufacturer's data quality department will find fewer faults than they did with Carpe Astra.

I've also got a few more submissions this week. All in all, pretty busy.

Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot!

2009-04-03T09:47:00.005+01:00

Which was the jingle for an advert in the UK. No idea what it was an advert for though.

So the BoardGameGeek competition seems to be working. Yesterday several people commented how my games were near the top of the BGG Hot Games list, and Reiver Games was the hottest company. Today it's even better. Carpe Astra is the hottest game (with It's Alive! at number 3 and Sumeria at number 7), Yehuda, Dirk, R. H. Aidley and I are in the Hottest people list (though fairly near the bottom!) and Reiver Games is still the hottest games company (just ahead of Fantasy Flight!). As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I've been keeping track of the BGG statistics in the run-up to this competition, so I could see what a difference the competition makes. Probably the two most interesting statistics are Owners (i.e. people who have bought the game and can be bothered to record the fact on BGG) and Num. Views (the number of people who have looked at a game). Here's the average increases before and during the competition (though I've only got two days data for during!):

	It's Alive!		Carpe Astra		Sumeria
	Owners	Num. Views	Owners	Num. Views	Owners	Num. Views
Before	0.69	42.67	0.23	38.00	0.00	28.83
During	0.50	1167.00	2.00	2395.50	0.00	558.50

The number of daily views for each game has increased by between 19 and 63 times (1900% and 6300%). I wouldn't expect a spike in owners buying each day yet, as I imagine people will wait to see if they've won the competition first. Fingers crossed I'll notice a boost in sales within a month though.

A Spanner in the Works

2009-04-02T10:02:00.003+01:00

Things seemed to be going pretty well. The BoardGameGeek competition is finally up, the art for Sumeria is nearly done. I'm getting some good feedback on Sumeria and the other games I'm testing at the moment. This weekend I was going to a local(ish) convention to demo It's Alive!, Carpe Astra and Sumeria and get some more playtesting done.

Then the proverbial spanner. I'm having another MS attack. This time it doesn't affect my ability to walk (good) instead it affects my eyesight, and hence my ability to drive (bad!).

I've been going to a game group on Tuesdays (25 miles away), and a games club on Thursdays (15 miles away). I was hoping to go to convention on Saturday (45 miles away) and to go to a games shop in St. Neots (22 miles away) to show them my games. Obviously, until my eyesight is restored to a reasonable level I'm going to have to shelve all these plans. It could be several weeks.

Living in a small rural village sucks when you can't get out of it.

G20 Leaders Suggest IRGAW Ahead of Summit

2009-03-31T17:26:00.004+01:00

In a move that has surprised many in the mainstream media, the G20 group of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors from the world's leading economies have proposed "International Reiver Games Awareness Week (IRGAW)" as an ideal way to kick-start the world's economies and avoid a depression greater than that of the 1920s and 30s.

Said Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the UK: "By playing Reiver Games' games with your friends, families, co-workers and random strangers from the street you will be helping to cancel the UK trade deficit, boosting tax revenue and bringing much needed income to the impoverished Bedford area."

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke echoed: "Raising local interest in games such as the games that Reiver Games produce will help stimulate local economies, from the Friendly Local Games Stores (FLGS) and Online games stores (OLGS) through to the liquor stores where their employees spend their well-earned wages."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel added: "Through their purchasing of games made by games manufacturers in Germany, Reiver Games and their games will help to lift the whole of Europe out of recession."

Reiver Games President, CEO and Grand High Uber Vizier Games, Jackson Pope had this to say: "Huh?" On being pressed he added: "And the irony is I've quit the company due to lack of awareness and low sales."

To participate in IRGAW you can:

Play Reiver's games with your friends, family, co-workers and random strangers from the street this week
Ask your favourite games store to stock Reiver Games products
Demo Reiver games at your games club or a convention
Take out a full-page add in the New York Times espousing Reiver games as an ideal way to spend time
Buy 1,000 - 2,000 copies of Reiver games to give out as early Christmas presents
Take over the world in a Bond villain-esque coup and then force everyone to play Reiver games daily

Time Rich, Cash Poor

2009-03-31T10:02:00.003+01:00

Now that the layout for Sumeria is almost done, I've got some time on my hands. What to do with it?

What I need to do most of all is bring my games to the attention of more people. I've got the BoardGameGeek competition coming up, and I'm going to advertise on Spielbox, but advertising costs money and I can't afford to do a lot of that. I need to save up some money so that I've got enough cash to pay for Sumeria when it arrives. So what can I do that's free to raise awareness?

Seth Godin does a blog on marketing which I highly recommend. He covered this topic a few weeks ago. His first point was to improve yourself. I've got some reading about marketing to do, and the German course I bought last year in preparation for Essen, both will hopefully help me in the long run, and are free (since I've already paid for the German course). His second point was to build a following or a reputation. I like to think this blog is a step in the right direction (this will be my most read month ever), but how can I improve on that? I guess I can try to be more vocal on BGG, but vocal answering questions and providing advice, not spamming the forums with continual mentions of my games - that's the sort of thing that will just piss people off.

I'm also going to visit a few local games shops to introduce my wares and explain how to play them. Maybe even get some demo games in with the staff or some customers. There's a couple of games shops within sensible driving distance, with several more a short (but expensive) train ride away in London. I'm also hoping to get to more games clubs and small conventions to demo my games - helping to raise awareness. Of course this only helps in the South-East of England, it does nothing for my international sales.

Any other ideas?

Advertising In German

2009-03-30T10:18:00.003+01:00

Now that all my distributors have got stock, my sales have slowed down. I need to make sure that people are buying my games from shops/online stores, so that they re-stock from their distributors, who in turn re-stock from me.

The long-delayed BoardGameGeek competition will hopefully help, bring the games to more people's attention, and hopefully leading to some sales. Speaking to distributors in Europe, BGG is fairly popular there so hopefully that will help boost sales in Europe - not just North America and the UK.

One of the biggest markets for board games is in Germany though. Lots of modern eurogames are designed and made in Germany, where board games seem to be a very popular pastime. The Spiel games fair is held in Germany and I get my games made in Germany too.

I've a couple of German distributors, who both report that sales of my games have been fairly slow. How can I make better use of the opportunities available in the German market? Advertising on BGG is probably not the best way of going about it. Speaking to one of my German distributors, he recommended advertising on Spielbox one of the big German games websites. I've contacted Spielbox, and it looks like putting a banner on their forums for a month might be both affordable and worthwhile. So I've got to make some banners for my games in German. I've got the tag lines for It's Alive! and Carpe Astra in German already (Michael translated them for the Essen posters), but I'm not sure I'll have room for them on such a small banner (234 x 60) I might just have to go with the title and a background.

The next problem is what to target the ads at? Usually a website banner ad can be clicked, which takes you to a relevant site. I've always pointed the ads I've done on BGG and Boardgame News at the relevant page of my website. But that's in English. Do I do the same, and risk putting off German-speaking visitors? Do I make a German version of that page on my website? Do I point them at a page of Spielbox? That would work for It's Alive! (Michael did a review of it there) but not for Carpe Astra, for which there is no information on Spielbox.

Decisions, decisions. Anyone familiar with Spielbox care to weigh in?

BoardGameGeek Introduction

2009-03-26T16:06:00.002Z

In the end I decided to do the 'review' as a Press Release - you can read it here. Dirk - its got the photos I promised you ages ago - excuse the poor quality of the board print - my printer decided to go a bit mental!

Playtesting Again

2009-03-25T19:27:00.003Z

Things have been going pretty well from a forward planning point of view the last couple of weeks. Sales are very slow at the moment though, as all my distributors have decent stock levels so I've just got to sit back until they sell through and re-order.

Last week I played It's Alive! and Sumeria at my Tuesday games night (and took two pre-orders for Sumeria from three players) and then at my Thursday games club I played Sumeria and Carpe Astra (and took two Sumeria pre-orders from three players). All the games were well received and the interest in Sumeria was very encouraging. On top of that I'm starting to get a few more Sumeria pre-orders. I'm thinking of doing an 'Introduction to Sumeria' review on BoardGameGeek. It would include photos of the prototype, and an explanation of the rules and how the game plays. Usually BGG reviews also include a critique by the reviewer, but my obviously-biased position would preclude that. I would hope that the review would boost awareness of the game and build some hype, but the risk is it's seen as blatant shilling and leads to a backlash against me, my company and the game. I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not - what do you all think?

I've now sent all the prototypes of Wreck! (working title!) to the competition winners, and started to get some pretty positive feedback on that too. Of course the copies heading to North America won't arrive for several days - the early feedback is from the UK.

In addition, today I had my first playtesting session with some of my Tuesday night boys. A couple of them get a day or two off during the week, and they are very keen to help me playtest on those days. Since I'm keen to do playtesting during the day this works out really well for me. We played three games, a couple of games of Wreck!, one of a new card game that I hadn't yet played and a couple of another game which I'm seriously considering. All three games were well-received, but there are some theme issues around the new-to-me card game. We're going to meet up again during the day one day next week, hopefuly this will become a fairly regular thing.

Process

2009-03-24T09:16:00.003Z

I'm continually trying to improve my process for releasing a new game.

It's Alive! was a special case, as I'd already released a limited edition, so I had a lot of feedback already on the game. Still, I mentally fixed a price in my head (£15, the same as the limited edition) and then struggled to get the manufacturing price low enough to make it affordable. As a result, I need to sell a lot of copies to break even. Still, it seems to be doing pretty well at the moment and the upcoming BoardGameGeek competition will hopefully boost awareness and lead to a few more sales.

With Carpe Astra things improved a little further. I sent some blind playtesting copies to friends in Europe and America, and although the price ended up being more expensive than I expected due to the collapse of the pound, my margins are still better than I managed for It's Alive! I know that sounds money-grabbing, but if my margins aren't good enough to sustain me then I'm going to have to quit the company - I need money to eat!

Sumeria saw a further improvement in playtesting best practice, I sent more blind playtesting copies out, and to proper blind playtesters (people I'd had no contact with previously). The price is more expensive, but my margins will hopefully be better again - still not where it should be, but in the right direction. Of course, since I'm paying for this in Euros again, there's a few months worth of exchange rate shenanigans between now and when I pay for it which could go either way (though forecasts say it'll head in the right direction). I got everything in place a little earlier too, and so I've been able to send out solicitation information on the game, with some artwork 2.5 months before the game will be released. Hopefully this will help boost early sales from distributors to shops and hence from me to distributors. I've also started pimping it with local game groups, I took it to my game night last Tuesday, my games club last Thursday and I'll be taking it to a few conventions in the next few months, trying to build pre-orders and some buzz.

I also need a game or two for Essen release. I've been looking for games for a while now and have a few prototypes that I'm considering. One of these I'm quite excited about, so I'm trying to improve my process yet again. I've recruited more playtesters (I had two extra groups for Carpe Astra, six for Sumeria and now I've got twelve for this one), and I'm getting the game playtested before I sign it up. That way if the feedback is disappointing, I'm not tied into releasing the game. Feedback has been pretty positive so far though.

There are several processes I have to manage: game selection, testing/development, manufacturing and sales. I'm an expert at none of these, which is why I need to keep pushing myself to improve things, instituting what I think is best practice, what I've heard is best practice or what my customers request from me. I can't afford to sit still, making the same mistakes or missing the same opportunities time and time again. The company requires me to improve things continually, so that I can make the best of every situation and make the company successful.

BoardGameGeek Metrics

2009-03-21T11:05:00.003Z

One of the things I learnt as a computer programmer in my past life was that if you want to track progress keeping good metrics are the way to go.

At the moment I'm trying to improve awareness of my games, as the more people who know they exist, the more people might buy them. Most of my distributors are now pretty well stocked, so if I want to make any money I need to get people to buy my games, so that the shops re-order from the distributors and eventually the distributors re-order from me. I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of the game buying public (even among those people who regularly use BoardGameGeek and hence are much more in the know than the average Joe who just wanders into a games shops every now and again) have never heard of my games.

So, as you'll know if you're a regular follower of this blog, I'm intending to run a competition on BGG in a week or so's time. The competition is more expensive than advertising on BGG, but it has a couple of advantages over advertising: it's not hidden by AdBlock (which allows you to turn off adverts if you support BGG financially) and it occupies pride of place on the BGG front page for two weeks. I'm hoping that running this competition will boost people's awareness of my company and my games - but how can I tell?

Firstly, I ran a market research questionnaire competition on BGG a couple of weeks ago. I'll run the same competition a few weeks after the main competition and compare the two results - hopefully that will show a big boost in awareness. But as someone spotted in the competition comments, the respondents are skewed towards people who already know me, so the results aren't very accurate (but seeing as the two competitions have the same bias I should be able to compare the results). What I really need is a way of tracking people's interest in my games without relying on them to put any effort in.

That's where BGG statistics come in. BGG tracks and publishes a whole bunch of statistics on each game in it's database:

Most (if not all?) of these statistics are updated each day. The only one I'm not sure about is Views, which I think might be the total number of BGG users who have visited the page at least once. This doesn't seem to change very often, and I'm not entirely sure what it does.

For the last few days I've been recording the rank, average rating, number of ratings, views, people owning, people wanting and people trading for each of my games to build up a baseline of how things change normally. I'll continue doing so while the competition is running to see how these statistics change from the baseline when a competition is in progress. Should be quite interesting...

Need More Playtesters

2009-03-18T08:08:00.002Z

I'm looking for blind playtesters again, this time for a quick filler card game I'm considering publishing. It's a very short game with some similarities to 6 Nimmt!/Category 5, it will accommodate 3-6 players, probably 10+ and takes about ten minutes to play. I'm looking for six more playtesters, four in the US/Canada and two in Europe (the UK is already covered I'm afraid).

What's in it for you?

You get a prototype copy of the game
You get your name in the rules as a playtester
You're entitled to a 50% discount on the finished product, if I publish it

What do you have to do?

Play the game a lot with your game groups
Make a note of: who played, whether they've played before, who won, play time
Provide feedback on the game (including suggested rule changes)
Provide feedback on the rules - how can I improve the clarity and completeness
Suggest a name for the game and provide feedback on the theme

How do you sign up? Leave a note in the comments to this post stating which country you live in and why you'd make an excellent playtester. I'll pick the lucky recipients at the end of this week.

Another Curtailed Day

2009-03-17T17:14:00.004Z

I spent most of the afternoon on the way to a from hospital and in a big-ass magnetic tube. But the day wasn't a total write-off.

I've spent the last couple of days making a prototype of Sumeria with the finished artwork. First I had to do all the layout of the punchboards and gameboard (I've not got around to doing the box yet) done, then I had to get it printed. That's never a simple job with my printer (an HP Deskjet 9800 which is nothing but trouble). When that was finally finished the next stage was to glue the art onto greyboard and cut it out.

Because all the punchboards are double-sided, I had to make sure the artwork lined up front-to-back. When doing Border Reivers back in the day, I came up with a method for doing this. In the artwork, I printed a couple of lines at right-angles that were a specified distance from the art. On the front I put them in the top left corner, and on the back I put them in the top right corner. Then when I glue the art, I cut the art to those lines and glue it to the same corner of the board - front and back. It works really well - the line-up rarely leads to a noticeable error.

The manufacturer wanted me to provide the art on one layer, and the die-line on another. In addition to this, I've added a third layer with crop marks showing me where to cut the prototype without being visible in my finished article, which the die-line would be. So once I've printed and glued the art, I then cut it out using the crop marks to show me where to cut. The finished article looks really good - Harald did a fantastic job on the art. The only thing I've tweaked is that I've 'filled in' the outline font he used on the tiles and board, I thought the original font looked pretty cool, but I thought it was a little hard to read.

Making my own prototype with the finished art and layout is important - it lets me test things out before I send the art to the manufacturers for printing. I've already found one problem - I'd done some of the counters the wrong way round on the punchboard - so instead of all the counters having the same image front and back, four of them had one image on the front and another on the back breaking the whole game! I had to fix it, print out again, re-glue it and then cut them out again. Having said that, the printers would probably have caught it (their data quality department was awesome for Carpe Astra), but it's better to be safe than sorry!

Tonight I'm taking it round to my games night - I feel a powerful need to show it off!

Action Stations! Action Stations!

2009-03-16T08:50:00.004Z

Set condition one throughout the fleet!

Sorry for the lack of blogging in the last couple of weeks, I've been exceptionally busy. On the home front, we're buying a new house down South and I've been in discussions with my doctors about changing my MS treatment.

On the work front, I've been very busy with Sumeria and some playtesting. After complaining last week that I was suffering from a lack of playtesters down South I finally got around to asking some of my new gaming buddies if they'd be interested in doing some playtesting for me, and they are :-) Even better news is that a couple of them a free during the day on a Tuesday so I can get some playtesting done in 'work time' rather than giving up another evening during the week - time when I can hang out with The Wife. Unfortunately, this Tuesday is a no-go since I have to go into hospital for the MRI test I was promised a couple of weeks ago, along with some blood tests. But soon!

I've decided to step up my blind playtesting. Sumeria was the first time I did 'proper' blind playtesting where I got some random people who I had no previous contact with to play a game completely from the rules. I got five people (and their respective gaming buddies) involved, two in the US, two in the UK and one in Europe. All good so far. What I probably did wrong was leaving it so late. By the time the blind playtesting started, I was already signed up to publish the game and had only a couple of months to deal with any feedback. The feedback has been really good and very useful and I think the game has improved as a result of it.

I'm now looking for blind playtesters for another game. This is one I've not yet signed, so I'm using the blind playtesting to inform my signing decision, not just to improve the rulebook and tweak the rules. I'll post another thread asking for volunteers shortly. In the meantime, I've got the prototype copies printed, I just need to cut out the cards and round the corners, ready for sending off to the playtesters.

I've also started the Sumeria layout - constructing the art from the designer into a finished product. I really enjoy this work, but it's pretty time-consuming. The first thing I did was the rules. I had some rules that were written and had some rough diagrams in, the next step was to add the background image and get images of the components into the diagrams. The images needed to be cropped to remove the bleed around the components and then downsampled to an appropriate size. I added some simple effects (a dark outer glow) to the components so they stood out from the background of the rulebook. The 'finished' rulebook has been out to my playtesters for comments and I've made a few minor tweaks based upon their feedback. I hope to post the rules to my website and BoardGameGeek fairly shortly. Then I need to create a translation grid and send that off to Michael so he can start translating the rules into German (Sumeria, like It's Alive! will have English and German rules in the box).

After the rules, I laid out the art for the tiles and counters onto the punchboards. For this I need to combine the tile and counter art into three sheets (with a front and back for each). I need to ensure the front art and back art match and line up and that the distance between each component is sufficient for the cutting process. I've printed out my own copy too, which I'll glue onto board and cut out for my prototype copy. I want a prototype with finished art ready to take to games clubs and conventions so I can start building some buzz. I'll need this copy for sending to the 'UK Game of the Year' judges in May too.

All I've got left to do now is the game board and the box, despite having to place my order this week, the manufacturers don't need this artwork for six weeks or so, which makes it slightly less urgent!

It feels good to be really busy again :-).