Excited

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

Both created by designers at Newcastle Playtest.

Which is growing and gaining strength every month.

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

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

Ideas fizzing.

Working on naming.

Playing with art styles.

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

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

Which is fair - we’re tiny.

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

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

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

Newcastle Playtest is perfect - I’m there already.

Hopefully at some point we’ll get there.

Maybe even with one of these two…

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

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

Rollercoaster

We call ourselves a publisher.

But really we're a self-publisher.

Zombology.

FlickFleet and its billion expansions.

Three print at home roll and write games.

All designed by me, or me and Paul.

Nothing by a different designer.

Yet.

We've signed a contract for a FlickFleet-related game.

And there was another chance this week.

I went to my monthly playtesting session in Newcastle. In the pub.

Played one of the other designer's games.

Loved it.

Told him I'd be interested in publishing it.

Spent the week thinking about it.

How to make my own copy for playing with Paul and my other friends.

Then a few days later the designer said he'd rather pitch to a big publisher.

Disappointing.

But fair.

I'd told him he'd be better off doing that at the beginning!

Still disappointing though.

I loved it.

Gamble

Board game publishing, well any publishing really, is gambling.

You back a horse.

By choosing a game to publish.

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

You bet a stake.

By paying for marketing and artwork.

Kickstarter has improved things, since you no longer have to gamble the manufacturing and shipping costs upfront as well.

And then you find out how your bet did.

When you sell the print run, or run the crowdfunding campaign.

If you’re a big company, you hedge your bets.

Back many horses.

Hoping some of them win big enough to cover any losing bets.

We’re small.

One bet at a time.

Each one needs to cover the stake really.

Away Team Bingo is live on Gamefound now.

It finishes tomorrow.

And it’s tracking towards just covering its stake.

Preparation

Last week was preparation.

We’ve made the decision to publish Rocky ‘Roid.

My asteroid-mining roll and write.

I created a BGG page for it.

And a Gamefound campaign page.

And cracked on with the graphic design.

Lots of changes done for the low ink versions.

High ink sneak peak!

Then did the high ink versions.

And now working on proper rules. With diagrams.

This week I’m away almost all week.

It’s AireCon on the weekend, in Harrogate.

Our second convention.

And I’m going down a couple of days early to do a shift on the Gamefound fulfilment.

So that Paul can concentrate on laser-cutting.

Looking forward to spending the week with him.

Unique, Hand-Made Games

I've been thinking more and more about making games again and, in particular, returning to the glory days of Reiver Games when I made games by hand, selling out of print runs within a year.

The first couple of years of Reiver Games were very successful by any margin - my print runs sold out and I doubled my stake each year. With the sudden influx of cash from my life insurance I was able to reconsider my position so I quit my job and starting trying to run Reiver Games as a real publisher. I spent a couple of years doing that full-time, not drawing a salary and publishing games professionally. The games were manufactured by professional companies and I started selling through shops and distributors. In many ways I continued to be successful, getting my games picked up by twenty-one distributors on three continents, and selling thousands of games. But the sales were coming in too slowly and I hadn't invested enough capital to make two simultaneous print runs, so when the second edition of It's Alive! was delayed at the manufacturers I took out a bank loan to fund Carpe Astra. The bank loan fees, along with the costs of warehousing my games, were such a constant drain on my finances for the next few years that I eventually ran out of cash. In hindsight I should have delayed Carpe Astra, it needed more work and ended up being the least successful of my games.

The first couple of years of Reiver Games spanned July 2006-2008. Way before Kickstarter and the boom of social media. Many things have changed beyond recognition in the last eleven years. Not least my personal situation, I've gone from being a carefree young man to a father of one with another child on the way and from being a fit martial artist to having an incurable disease to being essentially healthy again thanks to a clinical trial of a new treatment.

Clearly I'm unable to just give up my job for a laugh these days - so that is not an option. With a baby on the way I'll have very limited time around my full-time job to spend on running a company - I'll certainly not be making games that take three hours to construct by hand like I did with Border Reivers - my first game.

I've learnt a lot about game design over that time, and I'm sure that both Zombology and the current version of Codename: Vacuum are better games than my other efforts (Border Reivers and Carpe Astra) and possibly even comparable to It's Alive!, the most successful game I published. I sold nearly 3,500 copies of that, so surely selling 100 copies of a hand-made run wouldn't be that difficult?

With all these changes, especially the changes in the marketplace that have occurred since Kickstarter overhauled the way games are made, I wonder whether there's still a market for small runs of hand-made games. The biggest problem I foresee would be how do I make people aware of my games? How do I be heard over the endless clamour of Kickstarter announcements? With a young family and a full-time job, I'll have very limited time for marketing activities and I'll not be shlepping round shops and cons like I did the first time round. What about me and my games will pique peoples' interest enough to get them to take an interest in (and possibly buy) my games?

That's the question I would need to answer before I set things in motion. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated!

Starting Another Games Publisher

A few months of lacklustre progress on anything except my German language Windows Phone app seems finally to be coming to a close. A few of you will remember my ill-fated days running Reiver Games (read the history of this blog for a lesson in how not to run a board games publishing company). Now I'm at it again.

At the beginning of the year I announced my intention to get back into board game publishing (but not via KickStarter!) but I've made next to bot-all progress on that so far. The recent re-imagining of Zombology into a true semi co-op game and the resulting good feedback that has elicited has got me fired up once again and ready to kick off Games Publisher II (a working title!).

I've chosen a company name (which will remain secret until I've claimed the web domain!) and need to start the process of starting another company (does this make me a serial entrepreneur?).

I also need to start work on the art of Zombology more seriously. I'm intending to do it myself, since a very small print run has almost no room for an art budget. I've got some skills, but they are pretty limited so I need to work out what I can do to an acceptable level and temper my vision accordingly.

I'm going to ask my dad (an artist and the cover artist for Border Reivers) to help me come up with a logo for my company, and at the same time I need to get a company bank account set up so that I've got an account with which to start paying for things. I'll need this in place before registering the web domain and getting some hosting organised. I'll be doing it all properly again, which means more hours of bookkeeping and tax returns: joy.

It's all getting very exciting. The current plan is a 50-100 copy print run of Zombology depending on the cost of the printing. I want a number that I'm fairly sure I can sell out in around a year. I've got 8 pre-orders already (before I'd even chosen a game to publish - they're keen!), and I hope to get a few more under my belt before I get the printing done.

I'll be doing some rudimentary marketing as time goes on via a combination of Twitter, Google+ and BoardGameGeek, which started with a poll on Google+ this week to choose the last two suits. I'm happy with Healing Crystals, Homeopathy, Vegan Diet and Psychotherapy, but was less pleased with Reiki and Acupuncture. I asked for suggestions here last week and got several good ideas and then put them up to the vote on Wednesday. Magnets was a clear winner with Aromatherapy a strong second. The suits are locked!

A Digital Digression

As I've discussed over the last couple of weeks, one of my goals for this year is to get back into hobby publishing, like I did in the early years of Reiver Games. I've got all year to do that though and there are more pressing things on my plate - like the NaGa DeMon Winners' copies of Dragon Dance (and bonus Zombology) to finish and get in the post.

I've made no progress on either of those things this week though. Not even taken any more pre-orders for the as yet unannounced game (still at 4/50!).

Instead I've been focusing on a couple of my Windows Phone apps. I'm technically a programmer by profession, but over the last few years I've been moving into more of a project management/team leadership role, so I don't get to do much actual coding anymore. I still enjoy it, but with little practice in the office my skills are atrophying, so I've been making a few apps for my Windows Phone (bought because I could make apps for it in the languages and tools I 'use' in my day job). Several of these apps have an audience of one (Codename: Vacuum randomiser and recorder anyone?), but a couple of them, while written for my use and as a coding exercise, potentially had a bigger audience, so I've uploaded them to the store.

The first of those, BGG Last Plays was an app version of the excellent Last Plays by BGG User Heroku App. I wanted this as I'd set myself a goal of playing every game I owned at least once last year, and I was using that webpage to keep track (but I wanted a few extras that were easier to implement in app format). One of my goals for this year is to make another version of this which makes it easier to keep track of this year's gaming goal: To have played every game in my collection at least ten times.

The most recent app I've added to the store (which is starting to get some downloads finally) was a pass-and-play version of the Martian Dice game by Scott Almes.

I had a trip away for work this week, so I had an evening to kill, plus five hours on trains, so I took my laptop and decided to work on my apps. The first priority was fixing a crash in Martian Dice that had been reported three times in a week (despite only 16 people owning it!). I had a stack trace showing me where it happened, but couldn't reproduce it myself. Still the stack trace was enough information to fix the problem. No soon had I done that, then my mate Mal pointed out a rather glaring bug in the undo functionality: if you rolled any tanks in a turn you could forget them by clicking undo! That totally broke the game :-( So I fixed these two problems (and made a couple of usability tweaks recommended by a user on BGG).

With the urgent things fixed, and still some time to spare, I moved onto making the Last Plays app support my new goal. I've added the ability to sort by the number of games played, and to select a number of plays below which a game is highlighted. 26 days into the year and I've already completed one of my goals for the year! I've also added a link to the game's BGG page if you press and hold its listing in the app.

On Saturday night I published both of these updates to the Windows Store - they should both be available now.

With these out of the way, I can now focus on the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Dragon Dance and Zombology. I've printed and made the games, it's just the rulebooks and box labels outstanding. I've got a few hours on Tuesday night while babysitting for some friends that I can apply to this task, plus if necessary a bunch of hours on trains on the weekend, while I go down to Bedford to see my mates down there for a games day.

Holding Forth

It's been a busy week with, thankfully, a boat load of gaming. During the week I got to playtest my secret game app with some friends, which gave me some great new ideas for improving the UI (plus revealed a bunch of bugs I'd not found by myself). Thursday lunchtime we played a couple of 3-player games of Zombology, and despite my fear that the new version (with the ability to hold over a card each round) was too easy we managed to lose both, so the 3-player win/loss ratio for this version stands at 1/2 which to my mind is about right! I still need to make some changes, but maybe not as sweeping ones as I first thought.

My November has also resolved itself. I had been hoping to do NaGa DeMon again, but with the major work being done on our house slipping back into November and my parents planning to visit for a week during November (both during the week of Newcastle Playtest, effectively ruling that out) it was looking like I'd really struggle to make enough progress to make it achievable. My parents have now delayed their visit to the start of December, so I think NaGa DeMon is go again :-) I've an idea for a game I'd like to try to make (Codename: Dragon that I mentioned at the end of last year), and I'll run TGWAG again.

To top the week off in style we drove down south to spend the weekend with my mate Tim and his family. Tim and I go way back, so it's always good to catch up and spend some time playing with our families, plus Tim and I get to game late into the night (or at least what I call late, so gone 10!). This weekend was no different we played lots of games during the day with Tim's son (I was whooped at a surprising number of games by a six-year old - clearly I'm not quite as bright as I like to think!), and then in the evening we played a game Tim is designing, then Thunderstone and finally Tim and I played Firefly until just gone one am. It was a great weekend and Firefly came in around 2.5 hours with the two of us, despite Tim not having played before.

Tim and I spent most of the weekend talking game publishing. Tim's game is coming on really nicely and he's considering KickStarting it. By day he writes computer games for a living so he's got a great understanding about what makes a good game and he know loads of great artists. (As an aside RH Aidley who did the art for It's Alive! and Carpe Astra for me and also Ice Flow for Ludorum Games is someone I met through Tim). Tim wanted to ask loads of questions about the process of publishing a game, so I got to hold forth, wittering on about my experiences with Reiver Games and what little I know about KickStarter. I wish Tim all the best with his game (and now have a copy for playtesting :-) ), but I'm still not sure if I'd want to go back into publishing if ever I consider one of my designs ready for the world. Still, it reminds me that I know a load of contacts and still have a bunch of knowledge about the process and finances of running a game company. I hope I can use that knowledge to help Tim out.

Once Bitten

I'm on holiday this week, so here's a blog post I wrote last week and tried to post automatically, while didn't work, hence a day late. It'll take me a few days to respond to comments, since there is apparently no mobile signal or broadband where we're staying...

As many of you know, several years ago I started Reiver Games to publish my first board game: Border Reivers. Over five years I published four games (one of them twice!), to limited success before shutting the company down in 2011 and writing off a loss of several thousand pounds.

Now I'm designing games again and, for the first time, thinking about submitting games to other publishers. I'm also hanging out with other designers more too. Most of the designers I knew in my Reiver Games days were self publishers and most of them had been doing it for years. Noticeably, they are still going now and I'm not, so they were clearly better at it than me. In contrast, most of the designers I hang out with nowadays are not intending to self-publish but want to get their games published by existing publishing companies.

Getting my current crop of designs published by an existing publisher is one of the routes I'm currently considering, yet it's a route I've got no experience of whatsoever. I've never pitched a game at a publisher, so I don't really know how to do it. I know what I wanted back in the day, but that may not be representative of what a more successful company wants.

If I'm going to self-publish, or print on demand publish, then the game needs to be absolutely awesome as I'm the final gate before publishing. There's no-one else to block publishing if they don't think the game is good enough or to do any development to get it up to scratch. I look back on the games I published and although I was happy with each one at the time, knowing what I do now about game sales I don't think they're good enough. They needed more development or a gate saying 'not ready yet' to prevent me wasting money publishing games that wouldn't recoup the costs I invested in their publishing.

If I'm considering another publishing company do I need to polish it so much, or will they want to do some development and polishing themselves? I just don't know. Will they accept a game with potential that still needs some work, or do they want a completely finished product? I've still got some games industry contacts from my Reiver Games days. Perhaps I should do some investigating...

Print on Demand

One of the questions I get asked a lot is what am I going to do about getting Zombology published. In this day and age most people assume I'll KickStart it, but as I've mentioned before I have some misgivings about KickStarter.

Another option would be to self-publish it, either as a short hand-made run, or as a full professional run using my own money - both of which I have previous for. It's a card game, so it would be less effort to make by hand or much cheaper to manufacture than the games I published as Reiver Games. But my life has changed beyond recognition since I started Reiver Games. I'm now a parent to a wonderful little girl who needs and deserves a lot of her daddy's time (plus I genuinely want to spend as much time with her as I can, especially since I spend so much of her waking life at work). As a parent, risking most of our savings on a venture that I've previously failed at to the tune of several thousand pounds is also pretty irresponsible. So both of those are looking unlikely too.

That left me with a third option: find a publisher. It's notoriously difficult to get a game picked up by a publisher - hence everyone turning to KickStarter with such gay abandon. I think I've a slight head start over a newbie designer in that I know a bunch of publishers personally from my Reiver Games days. But it will still be a struggle and I'll have to find one who has space in their publishing schedule and for whom Zombology would be a good fit. So that's been my thinking and what I've been aiming for.

This weekend we've been away for a long weekend (hence the late posting) but earlier in the week, before we left, I came across Daniel Solis' monthly sales report for the games he has manufactured through Print on Demand (POD) company DriveThruCards. Which got me thinking about POD as an alternative publishing method. It would effectively be self-published, so I wouldn't be at the mercy of another publisher's schedule, tastes or editing. I wouldn't need to devote hours of my free time to hand making copies and trips to the Post Office, since they handle manufacture and shipping. I wouldn't need a boat load of cash upfront since they print copies as and when they are ordered and they just give you your royalties out of the profit they make from the sales. You'd get some free marketing just by being listed in their marketplace (though nowhere near as much as being listed in KickStarter's). Daniel has an easier job of it since he's an artist by trade, so I'd need to either seriously up my game, splash out on a (cheap!) pro artist or release it ugly.

But it's now an option I'm seriously considering...

Codename: Monster Is Go!

I've been blogging for a while now about Codename: Monster a submission I received from another designer. Yesterday I received from that designer a signed copy of the contract I had sent him a couple of weeks ago, so now it's game on.

The designer is Yehuda Berlinger one of the most prolific board games bloggers, and the submission was The Menorah Game a set collection and auction game themed around collecting candles to light a menorah. While I liked the theme and loved the game I didn't think that the theme would help me sell the game in the UK (where most of my customers are), which is a largely secular country and where Jews are in a minority.

I played around with the game for a while and came up with a different theme which I thought would be more appealing to the UK market: It's Alive! - collecting body parts to build a monster that you are trying to bring to life. It's pretty macabre. After play-testing it quite a lot and getting Yehuda's permission to re-theme it we're now go for launch.

I'm hoping to have it ready for early June, but that may change as I have to do the graphic design, get the artwork done by the artist and gather a bit more cash from Border Reivers sales first. Anyway, it's available to pre-order now, from my website.

Those of you who have played it please rate it on the Geek, but as ever, please do it fairly - I'd rather have a mediocre rating than an obviously biased one than people will ignore.

This is a big step for me, from board games designer, self-publishing his own game to board games publisher, publishing on behalf of someone else. Exciting times - here's hoping it works out...

Codename: Monster Update

Here's a quick update on how things are going with Codename: Monster - my first submission from another designer.

Things have been very busy the last couple of weeks trying to get things organised for Monster. As I had said a while ago I was keen to have 'comic'-style artwork for the game (as it would suit the theme I had given the game perfectly). I contacted a local professional artist (Flameboy), and met him to show him the game. He was very helpful, and was keen to work on the project, but when push came to shove he needed to make a living doing this and was going to be a bit too expensive - more than my fledgling business could afford. However, The Wife (star that she is) suggested a friend of ours who is currently studying for a Illustration degree and used to be an artist for a computer games studio. He was also interested, and was significantly cheaper - plus the samples he sent me were fantastic. You can see some of his artwork at: www.RHAidley.com.

I've been aiming to release Monster at a forthcoming UK convention, and if I'm to do that I need to get cracking - trying to get everything ready in time. I can't start anything until I've got a contract in place - so I've been to-ing and fro-ing with the designer try to negotiate a contract we're both happy with.

We reached agreement last week, and on Saturday I posted two signed copies to the designer via airmail. Assuming nothing goes wrong, I should get one back in a couple of weeks time signed by him, and once that happens it's all systems go. I'll not make any official annoucements until then (mustn't count my chickens before they hatch), but hopefully you should hear something soon.

In other news, I'd like to thank everyone who has helped me play-test it so far, plus my parents placed the first order for it yesterday, as they were up visiting for the weekend. One down...