A Dichotomy

This has been a weird week. I've been in Paris Sunday, Monday and Tuesday for work, and then on Wednesday I got a day off to compensate me for travelling all day Sunday. I was in London today, and I'm down there again tomorrow and Sunday visiting my sister (who's made me an Uncle). Monday I'm off to Oslo for a few days. As a result I've only made six copies of It's Alive! this week, and I'll probably manage less next week.

This week I've experienced a strange duality in sales. I've actually sold thirteen copies (twelve to a shop in the UK) but only one of those is a new order. Last week I only had three new orders. It's all going a bit quiet. I need to boost my exposure or I'm never going to get through the first hand-made run. If that happens, there won't be a second run.

I tried sending out a press release to my local news contacts, but I've only had one response, so that's not worked very well either. Still, with any luck that one response will lead to some coverage to 86,000 households - so it may yet led to some sales.

A Busy Few Days

With The Wife out every night for her conference I've had plenty of time to make games. I've now made fourteen this week which is pretty good going, but I'm out tomorrow night (see - I do have a bit of a life) and all day Sunday I'm travelling to Paris for work. So I'm probably done for the week. Still fourteen is not bad. I've got eighteen stock which is great, but twelve of those are for a stocking order which I have to fulfill next week. Next week I hope to have a pretty good week for construction too. I've got a day off on Wednesday in lieu of working Sunday, so I'm going to try to make a ton of games that day. What I need to do is build up a decent stock of games as I'm getting towards the end of the professionally made boxes and I don't want to be scrabbling to make ordered copies once I've got to take longer making the boxes myself.

My geeklist hasn't been as popular as the last one. The last one has nearly two hundred recommendations, and earnt those very quickly. This one is languishing under fifty. I'm not sure what I did wrong. I think the title is not as snappy, and the content is more of a history than advice for those in a similar situation. It's been out two days and is already starting to drop off, I think it's done. Still it's attracted some attention, and made a couple of sales, so it's not all bad. I think where I went wrong may have been talking about a professional run too soon. Some potential customers (especially in the US where the exchange rate makes it quite expensive) are holding out for the professional edition in the hope they can get it cheaper. It probably will be available cheaper - online retailers discount - but it won't happen if I don't sell out of the hand-made edition. I think I need to do some more publicity in the UK where the price is very reasonable. Perhaps another newspaper/radio feature or try to get on the tele. What I need is a press release.

In other news, on the bus to work this morning I had some ideas about Codename: Jorvik. When Dave and I played the latest version the other night we considered a new endgame, and worried that the scoring was too maths-intensive. I thought of a new scoring method that simplfies things a lot. I've also cut out and lined a new set of cards. I'll finish them during my six hour train journey to Paris on Sunday and then I can try them out in my hotel room. I'll play around with the scoring too.

I'm Famous!

I got an email today from one of last year's Border Reivers customers approaching me to see if I'd be interested in speaking about game design at a convention in the UK next year. I used to do a fair bit of public speaking, presenting research papers at computer science conferences, and I used to really enjoy it - so I'm definitely up for that. I've replied to the guy suggesting a talk on 'So You Want To Be A Game Designer? : From pipe-dream to shop shelves'. It's obviously very early days at the moment, but it will be really cool if it does happen.

In other news, The Wife is hosting a conference in York this week, so she's going to be out entertaining visitors this week. I'm going to make use of this time alone at home to make a metric ton of games, build up some decent stock. In an attempt to get rid of some of that stock I've done another Geeklist on BoardGameGeek describing my efforts publishing Yehuda's game. I did one last year on self-publishing Border Reivers which was very well received. It also led to Border Reivers appearing on the Hot Games list, and several sales, so it's not an entirely selfish act :-) Here's hoping the publicity drums up some interest and sales.

Week Off

Last week I had a week off. Not off real work, but making games. The last ten weeks I've been frantically making games in my spare time. I've still managed something that resembles a social life, but the vast majority of my free time has been construction. Because I've been trying to clear my backlog of orders and I've got customers waiting, I've felt guilty when I've not been making games.

A couple of weeks ago I contacted the last people on my waiting list and since then I've been responding to new orders as soon as I get them from the stock in my flat. Having stock means the pressure is off a bit so I can take a break. As a result I made one copy last week. One! The previous weeks I'd done a little better (16, 10, 12, 14 and 26). This week I'm back in the saddle, and with one day down I've already made a couple, and I expect to get at least twelve made this week, possibly more.

I've also been thinking seriously about which game to do next. I'd love to do Jorvik if I can get it ready in time, and to that end I've had another idea. It builds on Dave's brilliant idea, taking it one step further. Of course it may make things worse rather than better, but there's only one way to find out. I'm going to make a prototype (and probably take it to Paris with me next week) and give it a shot.

Boardgame News Reviews It's Alive!

Larry Levy has just published a very complimentary review on Boardgame News. It's nice to be getting some positive reviews, especially considering I didn't send him a free review copy. It's already led to one sale :-)

Run Sizes

I've been thinking about the size of runs that I've been doing. I did one hundred copies of Border Reivers and three hundred of It's Alive! When I made Border Reivers I was fairly happy that I could sell fifty copies, but one hundred was a push - I had no idea whether I could sell that many. I did, in less than a year, but the construction was punishing. I spent three hundred hours making the games, plus probably another hundred or more on the artwork. It's Alive! was an easier game to sell and manufacture. Having to pay a designer royalties and an artist for the artwork, I needed to make more copies to amortise the cost across them. Due to the quicker construction time I felt that I could make more copies in a reasonable time, though until I got some of the boxes professionally made it was very slow going.

In terms of raw sale potential (if I sold every copy at full price), the Border Reivers run was £30 * 100 = £3,000. It turned out being considerably less than that once I'd paid PayPal fees, convention fees, given a few copies away, wasted a few copies through cocking up construction, and given play-testers a discount. Still, theoretically £3,000. It's Alive! has a raw sales potential of £4,500 (£15 * 300). I'm thinking that aiming for a run size of £5,000 for hand-made runs is a reasonable target. The bigger, more expensive games will have shorter runs, which is good due to the higher cost in terms of construction time. The small, cheaper games (which take a lot less time to manufacture) I can do more copies of. Until now I won't have had enough cash to fund a run of this size, but It's Alive! should leave me with enough funds to do it.

I'm seriously considering a professional run of It's Alive! for after I've sold out of the hand-made run of It's Alive! It's proved itself as a popular game (inside the top 1100 on BoardGameGeek now) so I'm more confident about investing a large sum of money in it. I'm thinking of a run of 3,000 copies (which I will mostly sell through shops and distributors with possibly a few more at Essen and BGGCon next year if all goes to plan). That would have a sales potential of £45,000, but I would only see a fraction of it as I'd have to sell at a significant discount to shops and distributors. It will cost me a lot of money to pay for up front though, and I'll have to work out ways to contact shops and distributors and interest them in the game, otherwise I'll be significantly out of pocket.

More Submissions

I'm still trying to work out which game to publish next. I reckon it's going to take me until at least Christmas to finish making this run of It's Alive!, so next year I'm going to need to come up with another game to publish.

I've several designs of my own in one state or another, but only two of them are anywhere near ready. One is a simple card game for two-players (Codename: Jorvik). It would be really easy to make (which is a big win when you're constructing games by hand in your spare time) and the low weight would mean that the cost and shipping would be lower than It's Alive! which would hopefully make it more appealing abroad, where the strong pound leads to exhorbitant prices for everyone else. The other is an abstract strategy game, which would require a bit more construction effort (Codename: Artist). Abstract games are a huge market, which I haven't tapped into at all up until now, so that's appealing too. I'm not sure either is ready yet though. Dave and I played Jorvik last night, and we had some more ideas which I think will add to the endgame, but the scoring is still a bit too complicated. I need to think on it more.

I've received another submission too. Excitingly the designer came to me out of the blue, so Reiver Games must be slowly making a name for itself. I need to read the rules for this new game to see whether it is something I might want to playtest.

Pre-numbered Orders

With both Border Reivers and It's Alive! I had a spreadsheet which tracked what the status of each numbered copy is: ordered, sold, shipped, etc. I've numbered the copies in the hope that it will make the games more appealing to collectors, though I don't know whether this is actually true.

Anyway, with Border Reivers I had only one hundred copies, and only ten pre-orders before the game was released at last year's The Cast Are Dice. Most of those were from friends and family who I knew would come through. As the game progressed if people enquired then I would offer to hold a numbered copy for them, e.g. I'll put number 37 aside for you. In some cases it took a couple of months for them to pay for the game, but that was no problem. However, in one case the customer hadn't realised just how shockingly bad the UK/US exchange rate was, and when he did he couldn't afford it. I was now left with a copy with a lower number that I had to allocate to someone else. No biggie.

It's Alive! is on a different scale however. I'm making three hundred copies, and I had fifty pre-orders before the game was released. Again I offered people numbered copies. This has been more troublesome. I've had difficulty contacting some of the customers to let them know their copies are ready, some people take longer to pay than others, and a few people have pulled out. I have to sort through the rulebooks (where the numbers are recorded) to find the right one when I make a sale, and I've a few low numbered copies that I'm holding for customers who might not come back.

There's a couple of things I don't like about this. Getting a low numbered copy is supposed to be the reward for ordering the game early, not the reward for being the first person to buy a copy after someone who ordered early pulls out. Also, even though the rulebooks are in numerical order and grouped in sensibly sized groups with a post-it note describing their range, it take time to find the right one. Not a long time, but probably getting on for a minute. And I've got to do this three hundred times. That's getting on for five hours hunting for the rulebook I promised someone. Life's too short. And I'm too busy.

For my next game I think I'll change the plan somewhat. As people pre-order the game they'll be added to a waiting list. When the games are ready I'll contact people on the waiting list in the order they contacted me, so early adopters have the chance to get low numbered copies. However, what I'll do is assign copies in the order that people pay me. That way the rulebook I'm looking for will always be the top one.

Not Such A Good Name After All

I was quite pleased when I came up with the name 'It's Alive!', it has been one of my catchphrases for ages, and it led to the theme for the game. Generally the theme, the name and getting to cry out 'It's Alive!' at the end have been well received. However, it's not been without its problems.

I've been working my way through my backlist of pre-orders, emailing the customers to let them know that their copies are ready and how they can pay for the copies. Fourteen of the customers I had notified had yet to respond, either paying me, or letting me know they no longer wanted their copies. Over the last week or two I've found out that several of my emails have been falling foul of spam traps. Even my follow-up emails have been disappearing.

I've been trying to work out how to contact those people to work out whether they have received my emails and whether they still want the copy they have ordered. I've managed to get in contact with a couple through BoardGameGeek, which has no spam filter, but I don't know the username for most of them.

The other day The Wife suggested the problem may be the use of 'It's Alive!' or the exclamation mark in the subject which is causing the problem. It seemed like a very good point (I get lots of similarly titled emails suggesting I invest in one stock or another). As a result, today I sent an email to everyone who I had yet to hear from with 'Your Boardgame Pre-order' as the subject. Three of them have paid already, none had received my earlier emails. I think I've finally got to the bottom of that.

Giving It Away

This time round I've given away a few copies of It's Alive! to reviewers in the hope it will lead to some positive buzz and extra sales.

I gave away a few copies of Border Reivers to people who had helped me in some way. I got one (obviously), I gave one to my Dad in return for the box illustration and Mal got one for doing the Reiver Games website. But I didn't give away any review copies. The combination of the high ticket price and the small run meant I stood to lose too high a percentage of the maximum total income for the run.

It's Alive! however is a cheaper game, with cheaper postage and the larger run means that giving away a few copies will hopefully be both affordable, and worthwhile in terms of greater sales. In addition to free copies for myself, two for Yehuda and one for the artist, I've given three copies away to three of the big name reviewers: Tom Vasel, Greg Schloesser and Skip Maloney. Tom has the most reviews on BoardGameGeek as well as posting on The Dice Tower. Greg writes for both Counter and Knucklebones, and Skip also writes for Knucklebones. Skip in particular comes highly recommended by Dean of Ludorum Games.

I've got some press already, and now that I've contacted everyone on the waiting list telling them that their copies are ready I can start making a small but concerted effort to attract attention. Eric Martin of Boardgame News did a short story which lead to three sales (so far), and Luke (sometime blogger here) apparently plugged it enough to lead to at least one sale.

I've just got back from a few days in Copenhagen for work, so there'll be no more pimping until I have bolstered my dwindling stock.

Archaeology - The Card Game released!

Well my second game is finally out!

Thread about it on BGG: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/205536

Order page on my website: http://www.adventurelandgames.com/

I am happy with this version of the game, and it has been excellent not having to work super hard just to produce a single copy! I have already got some sales happening which is great. Hopefully some feedback will start coming in soon.

Oh and Jack if you are still thinking about a solution for scoring card to make folds, I am using a butter knife to score the tuckboxes for the card game. It takes a bit of pressure and a few runs back and forth to get a deep enough groove, but it seems to be working ok.

It's Alive! - 5th Best Horror Game

There's a new GeekList on BoardGameGeek listing the highest rated horror games in the database. It's Alive! is at number 5, which is excellent!

In other news, I've now got a huge pile of copies of It's Alive! at home, all but a few people have been notified that their copies are ready, but there's a delay between notification and payment, hence the stockpile. I'm thinking of opening it up to the public soon now.

It's Alive! - 100 Sales

I've now sold (i.e. received the money for and shipped) the first one hundred copies of It's Alive! I've a bunch of customers that still haven't replied to my emails letting them know their copies are ready, but I know for a fact that some of my notification emails are being swallowed by spam filters. I'm still not sure how to get around that. I wonder how many haven't heard from me due to spam filters, how many are waiting for more cash to come in first and how many have gone silent because they've changed their minds?

I've another thirty-eight orders outstanding, but a bunch of those are for friends and family who will get them when I see them, and at least fifteen are waiting to hear back from the customer. So the waiting list is feeling a lot shorter. Once I've cleared the waiting list I can make the game properly available, with PayPal buttons on my website, and a listing in the BoardGameGeek marketplace. Once the game is available to buy I should have less of the customers who fail to respond, as I expect that the first thing I'll hear is that I've received the money.

In other news, I've started playtesting some of the submissions I've received. Whether I publish a game of my own or another submission I only really want to go with games that I think are excellent. When playtesting another designer's game I have the advantage that there is a critical review by someone who isn't invested in the game (i.e. me). The game has to convince me that it's worth gambling some of my hard earned cash and a lot of my precious free time on. Whereas when the game is my own that is lacking - I've invested a lot in the game already and I want to see my name in print again, so I've got to look at it really carefully to make sure I'm not favouring it and pushing it out before it is ready. My company is too small to suffer from publishing a game that is not good enough, that kind of thing could really harm my fledgling reputation.

I'm going to hold a six-way play-off between the games I'm considering in the next few weeks in a pub in York one evening. If you'd like to come along and help out let me know in the comments. In return for your time and effort you'll get your name in the credits and a 20% playtesters discount on any of the games you play that I publish.

Scoring Woes

I've been having some issues folding the player shields for It's Alive! Up until now I've been scoring the card with a craft knife, aiming to cut approximately halfway through the card and then folding it neatly along the scored line. Most of the time this is fine, sometimes I don't cut enough, which makes folding it a little harder, but at least the shields look pretty smart. Recently I've had a couple of problems. In the run-up to The Cast Are Dice, I over-cut a couple, actually cutting through the card, so the shield had a hole in it. I had to bin those ones, obviously. At TCAD, Luke (of this blog fame) spotted that I'd given him one of these over-cut shields in his game - I'd obviously not noticed that I'd done it. Damn. So I gave him a new shield, and he was happy, but I was beginning to think I needed a new technique. Yesterday I received an email from one of my customers, whose copy now had a couple of these broken shields after over one hundred plays! I'm going to ship him a couple of replacements (despite him living on another continent), because it's an artifact of the way I've made them, and customer service has to be important to any company, but especially one as small as mine.

This afternoon, in an attempt to fix the problem, I bought a specialist scoring tool from a craft shop. It's like a very small pizza cutter, with a rotary blunt metal blade. I've tried it out this evening, scoring both the inside and the outside of the shield, and neither work very well. Firstly they don't dent the card sufficiently to make it easy to fold, and secondly because the ink on the outside has to be stretched round the fold (rather than separated when I score with a knife) it tears and ends up looking really messy. Back to cutting with a knife, just a bit more carefully.

In other news I've now had ninety-nine people pay for their copies of It's Alive!, very nearly a third of the print run, I've 138 orders, which is nearly half the print run, and probably over half of the amount that will be for sale (once cocked up copies and freebies are discounted). Not bad for less than three months work. The number of orders has been helped by another stocking order, this time from a Bricks-and-Mortar store down South.

Pimping Border Reivers

Tuesday night I went to another designer's house to deliver copies of Border Reivers and It's Alive! which I had traded at cost for a copy of his latest game at cost. We'd spoken at the Expo, and I'd got the impression that they were looking for games, and were vaguely interested in Border Reivers.

So Tuesday night I went over to his house, took It's Alive! and Border Reivers and played both, explaining the rules. It was me, the other designer and a friend of his. We played Border Reivers first, then discussed ways to improve it for a second edition, and then It's Alive! After the game of Border Reivers we discussed the game. I'd been biting my tongue throughout the game, trying to resist mentioning changes while the others were learning the rules. It was a good game, really close and in the end the other designer won economically - though we would each have won on our turn had we been able to stop him. The others both said they enjoyed the game, and I described some ideas I'd had to improve it if it went to a second edition. They had some ideas too, and being far more experienced designers, they were good ones :-)

I dropped hints that I had no plans to do a second edition anytime soon as I didn't want to do anything that demanding by hand, and I didn't have enough cash to do a professional run. Nothing. By this point I realise that I had imagined a lot of stuff, in my excitement at the Expo. D'oh. Ah well.

The next day I emailed him asking whether he was interested in doing a second edition of Border Reivers. I figured I needed to ask him straight out, since it clearly wasn't his intention, so I needed to make mine clear. The worst he could do was say 'Hell, no. It's awful'. What did I have to lose?

His reply? He'd not thought of that. Now he is thinking about it. Result!

Archaeology gets ranked

Well, Archaeology finally got its 30th ranking on BoardGameGeek, and so is now the proud father of 2342nd spot. Not quite up to Jack & Yehuda's level, but it's on its way!

In other news, Archaeology - The Card Game is at the printers and should be released at the end of next week (unless anything goes horribly wrong). The print run is 125 copies, and the rules will be available on BGG any day now.

It's Alive! Climbs The Ratings

It's Alive! now has forty-four ratings, which due to the Bayesian nature of the BoardGameGeek rankings means that it has climbed the rankings quite quickly. It's now the 1276th Best Game in the world, which considering only thirty-nine people on the Geek own it is not bad. There are over 31,000 games listed on BGG, so to be near the top 1,000 is something I'm very proud of.

You can also nominate It's Alive! for an award in the Golden Geek Awards - BGG's equivalent of the Oscars.

In other news I went to another publisher's house last night to play Border Reivers and It's Alive! I'm hoping they will consider publishing a second edition of Border Reivers. They enjoyed both games, and we discussed a bunch of things that could be done to improve Border Reivers for a second edition. They had a bunch of ideas that I'm keen to try out. Now I just need to find the time.

What A Week!

Last week was a blinder of a week. The combination of shipping twelves copies to Games Lore and The Cast Are Dice convention lead to my highest weekly sales of It's Alive! so far. Thirty copies! Games Lore received the games today and apparently two have sold already :-)

The Cast Are Dice

This year's con was slightly bigger than last year as it starts to become established. Nick and Sue of Shire Games had 169 tickets pre-ordered plus a few on the day. Nick had reserved me a table right in the entrance that you pretty much had to walk past, so the location was perfect. I was right next to Dean of Ludorum Games who was demoing Fagin's Gang and a new prototype that was getting a lot of positive feedback. Dean and I chatted throughout the con and he gave me a lot of really useful advice about professional runs, having made 1,000 copies of Fagin's Gang last year in Germany.

After being stymied at the Expo by a lack of stock (both my printer's presses broke the week before so I didn't get any artwork until the Thursday morning, leaving me two days to make as many copies as possible), I was determined to take far more than I needed. I was donating a couple of copies to the raffle table, delivering four pre-orders and hoped to sell ten. So I reckoned I needed about sixteen copies. I took twenty-six. Anything I didn't sell would go to the next people on the waiting list.

Sales-wise I set myself the target of ten sales, to match the income I got from selling five copies of Border Reivers last year. By the end of Saturday I had six, and I got another six plus one order on Sunday, so I'm counting that as thirteen, a good result in my book.

As well as seventeen games of It's Alive! over the two days I also managed to get a game of Fire & Axe: A Viking Saga and fellow blogger Luke's Tour. Both were very enjoyable. I meant to play Luke's games last year but I didn't find him until a couple of minutes before he left, and even after a year's waiting the game definitely lived up to my expectations - great stuff. Rumour has it Border Reivers also hit the table somewhere, which is nice.

This Week

This week is already off to a good start, I've sold three copies already (in the last eighteen hours), and tomorrow after work I'm off to see another publisher to demo Border Reivers and It's Alive!

TCAD Construction Update

I've been frantically making copies in the run-up to The Cast Are Dice, to avoid running out of stock at the convention like I did at the Expo. Last week I managed seventeen copies, and so far this week I've managed fourteen. I'm off work tomorrow though, and The Wife is out in the evening so I'm hoping to get at least another twelve done. I've fourteen copies stacked up ready to go, so hopefully twenty-six in total as stock at the con. That should be more than enough.

In other news, Parcel Force are collecting my largest order tomorrow, twelve copies for a UK internet retailer. It's going to be really cool seeing one of Reiver Games' offerings for sale in a retail setting. One small step down the road towards being a real publisher...

Feeling The It's Alive! Love

Someone out there really likes it:

http://cooliosity.blogspot.com/2007/08/its-alive.html

They've never played it though.

In other news it's still doing well on BoardGameGeek, up to 34 ratings now and still well over 7. I reckon another couple of decent ratings should push it into the top 1,500. Hopefully after TCAD it will gain a handful of new ratings...