Board Games - Creation And Play: competition

Showing posts with label competition. Show all posts

Monday, January 19

Free Game!

At the end of last week I had an idea of how to make a taster version of Gal4Xeon.

Half a game.

That I can give away at the National Space Centre next weekend to drum up Gamefound followers.

And share with followers to build excitement.

We’re even running a little competition!

It’s an opportunity to get some more early feedback on the rules.

In preparation, I spent the weekend making a new sheet and rulebook.

And then editing the rules over and over again.

First pass was typos and punctuation.

Second was clarity and brevity.

Third was more of the same.

You want the fewest words possible.

But also to cover all eventualities and questions.

It’s a hard line to walk.

In other news, President Trump’s threats to Greenland include doubling the UK tariffs from next month.

And possibly another (trade) war.

So we’re looking to ship the Gamefound rewards sooner.

At greater expense.

But hopefully a bunch will get there before the tariffs double.

Fun times.

Monday, January 8

Culmination

I have two games nearing completion.

The Planets My Destination, my second roll and write.

And Coalescence, a dexterity game of solar-system building.

TPMD has frequently got great feedback.

I’m finalising the graphic design now.

I might just release it on the website.

Rather than crowdfunding.

Rocky ‘Roid made very little money after ad spend and Gamefound fees.

Coalescence has been 4 (5?) years in the making.

It’s worked for most of that time, but was missing the spark that makes it super fun. The highs and lows.

And it was nigh-impossible to manufacture.

I think I might have cracked both.

Needs a new prototype.

And more testing.

I’m working on both.

Might even enter Coalescence into the Cardboard Edison award…

Monday, May 23

Competition

We're running a competition at the UK Game Expo.

How many fighters can you destroy in 5 turns?

Each turn you can move and/or fire three times.

Move first or fire first. Your choice.

If your ship leaves the mat, your entry is over.

If a die leaves the mat it deals no damage.

If you collide with an asteroid or fighter that's the end of your turn. And you take damage from asteroids.

It'll be running for the first and last hour of every day.

Highest score at the end of the show wins all four deluxe boxes worth £220.

Ties will be broken by random number generator.

You're only allowed one entry per hour slot. First entries will be prioritised over repeat entrants.

It'll look like this!

Not going to the Expo? If you have the game and expansion 1 you can play along at home. You won't be able to enter the competition, but we'd love to see your scores!

Monday, December 21

Competition

Last week I mentioned the possibility of a new mini-Kickstarter like the one we ran during the summer.

We've had a load of cool ideas created by fans of the game and we'd like to include some of those.

But we're conscious of the fact we don't want to rip people off.

So we have an idea.

A competition of sorts.

If we do the mini-Kickstarter we'll include some of our ideas and some fan ideas.

If your fan idea is included (either as part of the main rewards, an unlocked stretch goal or offered afterwards in the pledge manager), you win:

A designer credit
A £65 royalty paid via PayPal
A free copy of your idea, professionally printed and laser-cut by us.

For each one of your ideas we include. (Ideas should be about the size of 1 or 2 add-ons from the previous Kickstarter).

Matt's gunboat concept (picture by Matt Yeager)

For the record, Matt Yeager who contributed the Gunboats idea to the summer's Kickstarter also got the reward retrospectively.

And the reason we picked £65 is because had we paid Matt a 5% royalty on sales of the Gunboats (fairly standard in the business), he would have got £66.50 or thereabouts.

Payments will be made when the Pledge Manager closes. We reserve the right to tweak the ideas when we playtest them.

Entries close at midnight UK time on 31st January 2021. Submit your ideas via email to jack at eurydicegames dot co dot uk.

Monday, May 25

Last week was a strange one. I went through all the books to double check everything and spotted a couple of people who were missing rewards, so Paul will be sending those tomorrow. He’s also started cutting more ships so he has stock for when I re-open the website in the next couple of days.

I think I’ve also found the last Kickstarter backer - who hasn’t yet provided a shipping address. But despite a conversation on Twitter I’ve still not got an address to post his rewards to.

The weirdest thing about this week was being contacted out of the blue by a publisher potentially interested in reprinting one of my old games. He’s had some ideas to improve it as well. Very early days, so it might well lead to nothing, but I was pleasantly surprised.

This week I also need to update the website to make the games available for sale again now Paul and I have a solution for the deluxes (we both sign the boxes for the deluxes, but with the lockdown I can’t get down to his house to sign them, so I’m sending him some signed labels instead).

I signed 350 labels for deluxe games and expansions!

There’s two other things to do too: I’m a judge in the Board Game Design Lab competition, so I have 10 games to judge this week and I’m hoping to submit Coalescence to the Board Game Workshop’s competition.

It’s going to be pretty hectic!

Monday, May 11

On The Up!

Things are starting to look up. Paul is recovering from suspected COVID-19, so much so that he's parcelled up all the Kickstarter rewards now for taking to the Post Office, so Kickstarter fulfillment is getting closer.

I've also managed to find some time for both making FlickFleet first edition copies (we've still got a few of those to sell) and playtesting Coalescence with Daughter the First. I'm also considering entering Coalescence in the Board Game Workshop's competition (deadline for submissions: 5th June) to force myself to make progress and get some feedback. Just thinking about entering has spurred me on a bit - I've written the rules down and started drafting a video script in my head. So it's working so far.

I entered FlickFleet in the Cardboard Edison competition in 2018, and although we didn't win (or get shortlisted) we got some really useful feedback and it spurred me on to get the rules written down and formatted, so well worth doing!

Monday, July 30

Let’s Get Limited

My first games company, Reiver Games, was legally a Sole Trader - the company didn’t exist as a legal entity, it was just me, using a trading name. Had anyone sued me back in the day it would have been my personal assets (house, car, etc.) that would have been at risk.

Eurydice has been exactly the same until now - while selling a small number of hand-crafted games I thought the risk was quite low, but with Kickstarter coming up in just over a month I’ve decided to do things properly. I’m going to form a limited company (a separate legal entity) and incorporate Eurydice Games Ltd. Paul, my FlickFleet co-designer and long time Reiver Games play tester is coming on board too as another Director.

I need to get the company founded and a bank account set up as well as get the Kickstarter page together and finish getting quotes for manufacturing and shipping the various different manufacturing options. Paul has done a first draft of the Kickstarter page, so that’s coming together nicely.

Time is progressing apace, I’ve lots to do, and a holiday to take, plus I need to get Zombology back in stock too (I keep running out :-) ). Must crack on...

P.S. Don’t forget we’re running a scenarios

Monday, July 23

Win a Deluxe Copy of FlickFleet!

FlickFleet, our new 2-player space battle dexterity game, has two modes of play: pre-defined scenarios and free play where both players design a fleet that has a particular points value.

A draft of the FlickFleet box

I really prefer the scenario play and one of the things Paul (my co-designer) and I would really like to see is a large body of community designed scenarios available to play.

In an effort to kickstart (see what I did there?) that collection of scenarios ahead of the September Kickstarter for the game, we’re running a competition - with a first prize of a deluxe copy of the game.

Now very few of you have a copy of the game, so we’re not expecting expertly crafted, perfectly balanced scenarios, instead, we’re looking for ideas. The game is set in humanity’s far future when a totalitarian Imperium of Earth bestrides the galaxy. Sick of the endless oppression an Uprising has formed and they are starting to wage a civil war in an attempt to free the citizens from the yoke of tyranny.

To enter the competition, read the rules and see the examples on pages 11-15, read the capabilities of the different types of ships and then submit an entry by emailing jack@eurydicegames.co.uk with your scenario in that format. You can write your scenario from the perspective of the Imperium or the Uprising and include as many of the ships that come in the game as you want.

Entries will be judged on:

The scenario setting
Interesting asymmetry or special rules
With bonus points available for using common household items as scenery.

You will not be marked down for an unbalanced scenario, as we will playtest, balance and publish the best ones (with attribution!).

Entries must be received by midnight (UK time) on 31st August 2018. Winners will be chosen by me and Paul (the game designers) and will be announced by the end of September. If you choose to back FlickFleet and are declared a winner we will refund your pledge. The winner will win a deluxe copy of FlickFleet including free worldwide delivery. If we are successfully funded, second and third places will win a standard copy of FlickFleet with free delivery.

We reserve the right to publish any of the scenarios to our website (attributed to the submitter) after playtesting and tweaking for balance.

Good luck!

Monday, May 22

Zombology AI Competition

There's been some interest in the AI competition, so I'm going ahead with it - thanks very much for your offers to help me test the balance of Zombology.

Purpose

I'm trying to test the balance of my card game Zombology after some rules changes in the second edition which I will be releasing later this year. To properly test the game I need to play it hundreds of times, which I'm struggling to do in the flesh around a full-time job, young family and imminent second child! So I've written a game harness that will play the game on a computer and I want to test it using reasonably realistic human-mimicking AIs. The aim is to write a AI to play Zombology, and have it be the best at winning the game across numbers of players. Your AI will not be used for any purpose other than the competition and the testing of the game's balance.

Rules

The test will be based on the Zombology second edition rules.

You will need to download the game solution and then implement a subclass of the Player class in the solution in C#. You can use the ConservativeSciencePlayer and RiskySciencePlayer examples for inspiration. Your class must obey the following rules:

You must implement all of the abstract methods on the Player class which describe your choices and return your chosen option.
You cannot change any game state (the base Player class will do this on your behalf).
You cannot share state between multiple instances of your player in a game (i.e. no static members).
You can only use information that would be available to a human player in your position (this should be enforced by the GameState and PlayerState classes - feel free to remember things from previous rounds, but no looking at cards you haven't seen, etc.).
All entrants must provide their Player-derived class to me by the end of 30th June 2017 BST (UTC+1), entrants received after this time will not be included.
In the event that a bug in your class results in the game harness crashing, I will give you as much information as I can about the crash and give you one week to fix it before re-running the test.

If you need to make any changes/fix bugs to my existing classes please detail them in the comments to this post and I'll incorporate them and re-share the solution so everyone has the same information. Please comment below and subscribe to the comments on this post if you are entering, so I know who you are, how many entrants there are and you get notified if I have to change anything. I will copy your player class (and any ancillary classes you've created) into my solution for the test, any changes you've made to the existing classes will not be preserved.

The Test

I will have the harness play 60,000 games, 10,000 each with 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 players. For each game the harness will pick a random player from my ConservativeSciencePlayer, my RiskySciencePlayer and all the entrant's players for each slot in the game. I will record each player class' total games played and games won stats and will sum these across all sizes of games. The class with the best win/play ratio across all games will be declared the winner. In the event that the top two or more entrants are within 0.01% of each other, I will repeat the test just using the 'tied' entrants - the winner of the second test will be declared the winner, even it if is still within 0.01%.

Remember it's a semi- co-op game: the best result is you are sole winner, the second best result is you are a shared winner, third best is everyone loses and the worst outcome is that you lose but others win.

Prize

The winning AI gets huge kudos, plus I'll give you a free, signed and numbered copy of the second edition of Zombology, including free postage worldwide.

Wednesday, July 15

Market Research Results 2

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.

Wednesday, April 8

Take The Blue Pill

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.

Sunday, April 5

Competition Collateral

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.

Wednesday, February 25

Market Research

Here's another area I'm not very good at. This blog is turning into one long 'I'm hopeless' rant! On Tao and Pinebars advice I'm conducting some Market Research on BoardGameGeek. I'm doing it in the form of a small competition, to give people an incentive to take part - there's a free game up for grabs.

I'll run a similar competition/questionnaire after the main BGG competition has run its course to see how effective it has been at boosting awareness of my brand.

Feel free to enter, it's open to everyone.

Update: I meant to post this first thing this morning, but experienced some user error! The competition has received over 75 entries, and it's generally getting good feedback ('Thanks for giving us this opportunity' not 'stop pimping your games already'). It looks like there's a lot of potential for the main competition, lots of people have never heard of me or my games, and several have heard of the games but not the company.

Monday, February 11

It's Alive! - Free Copy to be Won!

Sumbit your It's Alive! themed joke to this geeklist for a chance to win a free copy of It's Alive! including postage anywhere in the world. Submit your jokes before Saturday lunchtime UK time to enter.

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