More?

Paul and I have great plans for our next FlickFleet Kickstarter.

A stand-alone expansion that can be played on its own with two players, or together with the base game for up to four players.

Alien species with new weapons and abilities.

Investing some of our cash in a nicer video, advertising and graphic design.

But it’s not ready yet. And we can’t meet to test our ideas. Until COVID-19 starts to subside.

We’ve got a bunch of ideas for more human ships though. And mini-expansions with some new rules.

Revenge of the mini-Kickstarter?

We’re considering sneaking in another mini-Kickstarter, like the summer’s, with that content.

I wonder if there’s any interest.

I’ll ask in our next newsletter...

A Crazy Idea!

This week I've had a crazy idea: run a very small Kickstarter for extra FlickFleet ships. 

The motivation is that we had hoped to attend a convention or two to help us sell through our FlickFleet stock but all the conventions are cancelled, so we need some other way to bring FlickFleet to people's attention. 

 At this point (and I've only spoken to Paul very briefly about this!) I'm considering a small Kickstarter (KS Lite!) with a tiny goal and no advertising/video/little effort. The rewards would probably be a bunch of extra Kickstarter exclusive ships (FlickFleet: A Box of Space Fights? FlickFleet: Box of Tricks? FlickFleet: Box of Flicks?) that you would be able to pick and choose from and a pledge level for people who haven't got the game to get it. Control of exactly what you're after would be done through a pledge manager. 

What do you think? Crazy idea? Great idea? Let me know here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/J5GWDLT

Market Research

Is there still a market for lovingly hand-crafted short print run games in the age of KickStarter? That's the question I asked on BGG this week in an effort to help me choose whether or not to dive in to self-publishing again as I did back in the early days of Reiver Games.

It struck me that for all my prevaricating here on the blog what I really needed to answer was two questions:

1. Am I prepared and able to spend enough of my free time on it to make it successful, and,
2. Are there 150 people out there who would be willing to buy the game?

I need to answer question one myself, and that's what a lot of the soul-searching has been about this last month or so, but if the answer to question two is no then question one is a moot point. I can't answer question two myself, I can only have a guess at it. So asking the question on BGG is a way to get a better understanding of the changes in the market that have occurred since I stopped hobby publishing back in 2008.

I've had quite a few answers, lots of them pointing towards using KickStarter, even with the hand-made limited edition run that I'm planning. Assuming these respondents are right and the lack of stretch goals, pledge levels and professional manufacturing doesn't sink it on KickStarter, I might have to get over my dislike of KickStarter and look into that. There's definitely a lot to be said for the free marketing that comes from running a KickStarter campaign.

In other news I've been cracking on with writing my German language app on my phone again this week, moving towards getting the spaced repetition functionality in there.

I also made it along to Newcastle Gamers on Saturday and knocked a play of Hansa Teutonica off my 'play every game I own ten times' goal. I also got to try Zombie Dice and The Palaces of Carrara for the first time too.

This week it's Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday, but sadly I'm going to have to miss it again.

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.

BoardGameGeek Metrics

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...

Questionnaire Preliminary Results

I've started collating the results of the questionnaire I ran on BoardGameGeek yesterday. The competition still has 36 hours left to run, but I've already received well over 250 responses - it's been far more successful than I was expecting. I've collated the results for the first 10 pages of responses, and it's pretty interesting so far.

The questions were designed to be asked now and after the big BGG competition in a few weeks time to gauge how successful the competition was at raising awareness of my brand and my games. This was just the baseline.

Question 1: Are you aware of Reiver Games?

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

I expected that the answers would be A > B > C > D. There's obviously going to be some bias involved though - still not sure what.

Lots of people had heard of at least one of my games, but not my company. I guess that's to be expected, but it shows that the brand of my company is comparatively weak. Also, I was surprised at how few people had played one of my games but didn't own any. Especially in comparison to how many owned at least one of my games. Not sure why that is. It could be because there aren't many copies of my games in circulation so few people have played one, it could be that most people who play one of my games buy it (I wish!), or it could just be that people who own one of my games were more likely to respond.

Question 2: Are you aware of It's Alive!?

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

Again, I expected that the answers would be A > B > C > D. Since It's Alive! had been around the longest (several years if you include The Menorah Game incarnation) I expected more people in B, C or D than Carpe Astra or Sumeria.

This was more or less as I expected. Again the confusing ratio of C to D though. At least 35 people had heard of It's Alive! but not Reiver Games. Even with a game that's been out since June 2007, 20% of respondents had never heard of it. I've run an ad campaign on BGG and two on Boardgame News but they seem to have a limited reach.

Question 3: Are you aware of Carpe Astra?

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

Again, I expected that the answers would be A > B > C > D. I expected less awareness than It's Alive! since it's only been available for four months and there are less reviews available at the moment.

40% of people have never heard of it, and half as many respondents say they own it compared to It's Alive! According to the BGG ownership stats, one third of the number of people who own It's Alive! own Carpe Astra, so that might give some indication of the bias towards Reiver Games owners in the responses.

Question 4: Are you aware of Sumeria?

• A: Never heard of it.
• B: I've heard of it.
• C: I've want to play it.
• D: I want to buy it.

Again, I expected that the answers would be A > B > C > D. I expected less awareness than Carpe Astra even, since this has not been advertised yet. With no rules available, I was expecting very few people wanting to buy it.

Woohoo! I got this one right :-) Two-thirds of respondents have never heard of it (less than I was expecting) and several people are interested.

As several people noted, just by asking these questions I've raised awareness of the company and the games. Not one of the respondents could answer all As in a weeks time - they'd have to answer all Bs at least. Hopefully I've pushed a few into the C or D categories too :-) 82 new people are aware of my company, 47 new people are aware of It's Alive!, 95 new people are aware of Carpe Astra and 166 new people are aware of Sumeria. Reiver Games is number eight in the list of hot companies on BGG today. Plus I've got some really useful information to help me target marketing in future. Not bad for at most 13 quid.

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.