Launch

It's launch week.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Just over 24 hours until the Gal4Xeon Gamefound campaign goes live.

At this point the signs are encouraging.

More followers than any of our previous roll and write campaigns.

Three good reviews.

Some great pull quotes.

More add-ons and a larger bundle, so probably a higher average pledge.

Fingers crossed.

It's been a rough few months for Eurydice off the back of shipping the last FlickFleet campaign.

We could do with a boost to help us fix our cashflow challenges.

Not much left to do now but wait and see...

Help!

I've mentioned a few times recently that cash is tight at the moment.

We're owed thousands of pounds by the government. Tax refunds.

We've almost finished fulfilling the last crowdfunding campaign.

We're just making up the standard rewards now.

But we priced up the campaign in early February 2025.

Then came US tariffs.

Then the removal of the De Minimis rule in the US.

Then threats to Greenland and war in Iran.

Half of the rewards are for the US.

And we've paid twice what we were expecting to for US shipping, plus the tariffs - because we promised customs-friendly shipping.

US web sales have dropped off a cliff for all the reasons above too.

Paul and I have had to lend the company money again.

And we're still very low on cash.

We'd really appreciate it if you could recommend our games to friends/family/games groups.

Or rate/review them on BGG.

Or follow and comment on our Gal4Xeon Gamefound campaign.

The roll & writes in particular are cheap, tariff-free, and have no shipping.

We appreciate anything you can do to help spread the word!

Cashflow

Once again, cash is tight.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Because Gamefound fulfilment has been delayed, the tax man has temporarily taken £6,000.

We'll get in back in June.

And shipping has worked out much more expensive, because of the US tariffs and the tariffs paid up front shipping option.

Which is much more expensive.

I'm hoping Gal4Xeon will help, but that's still several months from paying out.

We need to get new ads up and working.

I need to get our monthly sales to cover our slowing growing overheads.

So we're not reliant on shows and crowdfunding to stay afloat.

A focus for my Mondays I think.

In other news, I'm on the organising committee for a convention in Gateshead.

We're planning for October this year.

It's slowly coming together!

Comparison

Is the thief of joy.

Apparently.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

I’ve seen a few people on the last week or two publishing their earnings in board games.

Or talking about it.

A few surprises.

A small publisher similar to us.

Who I’d assumed was doing much better than us.

Because they are in retail and distribution, unlike our hand-made-in-a-garage games.

They’d had their most profitable year yet.

Only a four-figure loss.

We’ve been profitable 5 out of 6 years!

Go us!

And a big name games designer who’d made over €150k in royalties this year! Which was worse than last year!

I had no idea that was even possible.

I assumed the full-time game designers were earning a small but comfortable salary.

That’s way more than I make in my day job as a manager of a team of programmers.

And way more than our revenue, let alone profit.

Another designer I’m aware of who had made $34k in royalties.

Again many times our profits.

I'd like to get to higher turnover.

And higher profits.

So we can fix our cashflow issues.

Have money to invest in new games.

Have enough cash left over for me to draw some of my dividends out.

Royalties

Box of Flicks 2 was largely designed by fans of the game.

A fan contributed to Box of Flicks 1.

There was lots of fan content in the Box of Pirate Flicks too.

We make a big thing about how we credit them and pay them royalties.

Their names on the boxes.

We've been meaning to pay the last lot for a while.

It includes the last year's reprint and this year's Box of Pirate Flicks.

So it's quite a lot of money.

Things started going wrong at the beginning of the year when we ran out of FlickFleet for a few months.

So web sales tanked as we had nothing to sell.

And overheads started eating into the profit from the Pirate Flicks campaign.

Website sales were pretty slow all summer.

The pot dwindled further.

When it came time in August to ship the Pirate Flicks games to the US we had three options.

We choose the fastest.

And most expensive.

Then VAT bit us.

The quotes were excluding VAT. I forgot that.

We had to pay them, and another £1,500 in VAT.

We'd get most of that back. In early December.

We've been almost out of cash for five months.

I've had to lend the company money a couple of times to pay the bills.

We've just got the VAT back!

And had our best ever week of website sales. And another really good one.

It's time to pay the royalties!

A weight off my mind. I hate owning people money.

I've spent most of the weekend trying to sort it out. 

The transfer to PayPal was blocked by the bank as a suspect transaction.

I'm hoping I'll have the money available to pay out this evening...

The Game Has Changed!

Our Kickstarter is now finished and raised a staggering £18,724. Ok, that’s nothing compared to the $10,000,000 Frosthaven raised, but for us it’s a game changer. 

I started Eurydice Games in Sept 2017 with £1,000 of our family savings. I promptly spent almost all of that on the materials to make 200 copies of Zombology by hand. 

Paul joined in August 2018 and we ran a Kickstarter which raised £12,127, which we promptly spent on a laser cutter and the raw materials for 400 copies of FlickFleet. The few thousand pounds left over only just covered the cost of shipping the rewards. 

Before running our second Kickstarter in late 2019 I had to lend the company another £500 to cover advertising the campaign (which raised £13,164). Again that money was ploughed into materials for another 400 copies of FlickFleet and 400 expansions. After the campaign was fulfilled we had a few hundred pounds left. 

This campaign was supposed to be a little thing, hence the crazy low target, little preparation and lack of planned advertising (when we saw it take off we did run some Facebook ads). It did way better than we expected. Way better. We ended up selling 112 games and 76 expansions through the campaign. Those are things we have already made and are currently sat in their boxes behind Paul’s sofa. We’ve already paid for them. 

Ready to go to a loving home!

We also had backers for 160 all add-ons pledges, which we need to buy materials for and obviously there’s a load of shipping to pay for too, but once the campaign is fulfilled we will have cash in the bank for the first time. Thousands of pounds of it. 

Until now we’ve been doing almost everything ourselves - because we couldn’t afford to do otherwise. I’ve done the books, the website, social media, marketing, advertising, run the Kickstarters, pledge manager and the graphic design/product development. Paul has spent countless (more than me!) hours cranking out games in his garage. 

We now have options. Is it worth paying a professional to do some of those things? They would certainly do a better job than me at many of them. Paul and I are making a shopping list to prioritise! :-)

As an aside, those of you who have been reading this blog for the last 14 years will know Eurydice Games is not my first publishing company. Reiver Games ran from 2006-2011 and for a couple of years I tried to do it professionally. My games were made in factories and were sold through 21 distributors on three different continents. 

Assuming we fulfill the latest Kickstarter fairly quickly, then Eurydice Games will have a higher turnover this year than Reiver Games ever managed!

It's The Cash That Is Gonna Kill You

When running a business there's two things you need to keep a close eye on: profit and cash. Profit is the money you make when you sell something, either before (gross profit) or after (net profit) taking account of overheads. Because we're doing Eurydice Games in our spare time and not drawing salaries from it, our overheads are very low, so despite a low gross profit (small print runs have few economies of scale) we have very good net profits. We're making money and this is, in it's current form, a viable business.

Cashflow is the money going into or out of the business and is what kills most companies apparently - including Reiver Games, my first games publishing company. Cashflow isn't as closely related to profit as you might think. For example, our cashflow was very positive in December (when Kickstarter released the funds) but has been negative since - we've bought a laser-cutter, all the raw materials for the print run and then being paying for postage and packaging materials every time we post a copy. Every time we sell (ship) a copy we make a small profit but our cash decreases.

At the beginning, just after the Kickstarter, we needed to make a decision about how many copies to make. We needed to make at least enough copies to fulfill the Kickstarter rewards, but we could make more. The more we made the better the profit per copy, thanks to economies of scale, but the worse the hit on cash flow as the total cost for the raw materials would be higher.

At that point we didn’t know exact shipping costs, how much Royal Mail would increase their prices in April and how much we would be spending on tape, bubble wrap, etc. I had to make an educated guess.

My guess was poor! Even with a number of post-Kickstarter deluxe upgrades and a decent number of Zombology sales during the year, money has run out. We’ll rebuild it as we fulfill pre-orders (which haven’t paid yet so will boost profit and cash simultaneously) and when Kickstarter releases the funds from the second Kickstarter, if we’re successful. But for now we have almost nothing in the bank (<£10!), so to support the second Kickstarter, Paul and I will need to lend the company some more money.

Cashflow Crisis Averted

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.