Translation Woes

A while ago I mentioned how I had created translation grids for the rules for all my games to make it easier for volunteers to translate the rules of my games into other languages. It seems to have worked. I've had a lot of translations done of my rules and this week I've received a couple more (Sumeria into Hungarian and Carpe Astra into Spanish).

So far all well and good. The translation grids work a treat, and make the layout of a new version pretty straightforward. Until everything goes wrong!

Several weeks ago I received a translation of Carpe Astra into Russian. Great! The same guy (thanks Yegor!) had done the other games too, and I'd already done Sumeria, so I started on Carpe Astra.

The translation grids make it really easy to just drop the translated text into the original Adobe InDesign document, using the same images and fonts. At least they do until you pick a stupid font. I'd used Agency FB Condensed, a narrow font that looked vaguely sci-fi, for the Carpe Astra rulebook and cards. Sadly this font did not support the cyrillic alphabet - when I pasted the translated text into the document all I got was little empty rectangular boxes where each character should have been. So I switched to Arial (it's not that important that the font is correct after all).

While this fixed the initial problem (Arial supports the cyrillic alphabet) it's a much wider font than Agency FB Condensed and the Russian translation was normally longer than the corresponding English text - so the translation no longer fits in the same number of pages. My first attempt at fixing this was to drop the font size from 12 point down to 11 (and fix all the layout problems this caused). But after a bit more cut-and-paste it was clear that 11pt wasn't small enough so I went down to 10pt (and fixed all the layout problems again). Guess what? Still not small enough. Running out of patience I shelved the translation and I admit it has been a few weeks since I last made any progress.

The arrival of the new translation grids forced me to go back to it however, and today I finally nailed it. The solution was finding out that InDesign allows you to change the width of a font - effectively allowing me to create an 'Arial Condensed' - a narrower version of Arial. This meant I could change the font size back to 11pt and nail it. It still took a bunch of work and a lot of fiddling to get the diagrams and their captions laid out correctly but the job is finished and off to the translator for proof-reading. This means I can concentrate on the other two translations over the weekend.

The moral of this tale? I'm not really sure, other than learn the abilities of InDesign so that I can fix this problem the right way first time!

Sumeria V0.1

Well, the whole trying to run this through BoardGameGeek thing didn't work very well - it's down at the moment :-(

So I'll do it here instead. The first version of the Sumeria computer game is now available (ish!) on my website: Sumeria computer game with any luck if you download that MSI file and then run it, it will install Sumeria on your computer.

First a few provisos. This is a very early version to get some feedback about the user interface - very little actually works yet. What does work:

• You can install it
• You can start a new game from the Game menu
• You can choose the number of players, their names and the colours they play.
• You can highlight a state by moving the mouse over its tile
• You can set up the game by seeding the board with the appropriate number of traders.

What doesn't work? Anything else! Most notably you can't play the game. There's no AI and you can't get the game to work across the internet with remote players - it's three or four humans around the one computer.

The next release will incorporate feedback on this one and allow you to play the game on a single machine with no AI.

I'd really appreciate any feedback you have on what I've done so far - in the comments here for until BGG is back up.

Sumeria Computer Game

The first bit of work I did on the Sumeria computer game was a bottom up approach, write the code which kept track of the game mechanics and state. Though it was great to get it working there was very little to show for it, apart from a test suite that told me all my tests were passing - there was no UI at all.

The last couple of days I've been concentrating on getting some UI written so there's something to show for my efforts. There's not much, but enough to show you what I've achieved so far. Initially I've been working on getting the beginning of the game set up and displayed and the basic UI coded. The next step will be to get the game playable, but at least it visibly does something now!

Initially, the game shows an empty window (I'll put a splash screen there eventually), and allows you to read the rules (from the Help menu) and start a new game (from the Game menu):

Starting a game creates a game and shows the players position and the board and tiles as at the start of the game:

Although you can't do anything yet, I've included a couple of UI feedback mechanisms. When you move the mouse over one of the state tiles at the bottom of the board, that tile and state tile it corresponds to are highlighted:

Similarly, when you move the mouse over a settlement, that settlement, its state and state tile are all highlighted:

It's not much, but you can already see where I'm hoping to go with this.

I'm intending to run this as a semi-Agile development effort. I'll be releasing early versions for feedback from members of the game-playing public. I hope to post the first version (with basic UI but nothing working game-wise) on Wednesday. If you'd like to take part in the testing, or just look at what I've done, please subscribe to this BGG thread where I'll post release announcements and download instructions.

BoardGameGeek and Game Ownership

BoardGameGeek allows people to keep track of which games they own. It's a useful feature that I use myself, and when meeting up with someone else you can always say 'Look at my BGG collection - is there anything of mine you fancy playing?' which is pretty cool too.

I know exactly how many games I've sold to distributors, but I don't know how many of those the distributors have sold to shops, nor how many of those the shops have sold to gamers. They same follows with direct sales to shops. A tiny fraction of my sales are direct to a gamer, so I know those have gone to gamers, but that's not much as a fraction of total sales.

Why am I interested? A game sold to a distributor that ends up sitting in their warehouse for months isn't doing me any favours at all. The distributor will be less inclined to buy more stock as it's costing them money (in the initial outlay to me and warehousing space) but not making them any. Similarly a game that ends up sitting on the shelf for a long time in a shop won't convince the shop to get more stock in. In the ideal world the game is in the hands of a gamer who loves it and plays it regularly with their friends.

It's hard to work out where the games are. I can ask my distributors how much stock they have left, but that still leaves me unsure whether the games are in the hands of shops or gamers. In the case of direct sales to shops things are a little better as I can ask them how many they've got left, but in that case again it's only a small proportion of the total sales at my end.

Here's where BGG's stats come in handy. The people listed as owning the game are gamers. So I can get some indication of how many of my sales to shops and distributors have reached actual gamers.

Of course, as with anything statistics they can't be relied on as a final number, but they are indicative. There will be people who've bought one of the games and don't have a BGG account, and others who do have BGG account but don't bother keeping track of the games they own. However, almost everyone who lists themselves as own a game will have it (some people might do it by accident or forget to remove it from their collection if they sell or trade it away).

Because I made a couple of small runs of Border Reivers and It's Alive! which almost entirely sold directly to gamers, I've got an idea about the ratio of gamers who list themselves as owning a game to the number of end customers I've sold it to.

If you look at the stats for Border Reivers (100 copies made) then it lists 42 people as owning it - 42% of the copies in circulation. Similarly, when I had sold out of the limited edition of It's Alive! about 110 people listed it as owned of the 300 copies made (37%). So I reckon I can extrapolate that about 40% of the copies in gamers' hands are listed as owned on BGG.

Assuming that 40% figure is evenly vaguely accurate, then approximately half the copies I've sold of the second edition of It's Alive! are in gamers' hands, and it's also about half for Carpe Astra. Sumeria (which is still fairly new) is around one third. Not sure what to do with this information, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Designing Again

For the first time in ages I actually did some work on one of my own board game designs yesterday.

Yesterday was a weird day. I was up at 6am, and then on the road before seven for a hospital visit in Cambridge (about 60 miles away). It was a morning of strange neurological tests while they determine if I'm a suitable candidate for a new treatment. I then rushed back home as my friend Mal was stopping in on his way back home from the Latitude music festival down here in the South. I got a text from him upon my arrival home to say he was still about an hour away, so I rushed into town to pay in a cheque from a late paying distributor. It turns out my walking isn't so good at the moment, the 2 mile brisk walk left me very tired and I was really struggling by the time I got home. But I did make it back in plenty of time for Mal's arrival.

We spent the afternoon playtesting a few games including a couple of changes to Border Reivers - my first games design.

For those of you who don't know it, Border Reivers is a light civilisation/wargame themed around the border squabbles between the clans of Northern England and Southern Scotland in the 13th to 16th centuries. Each turn, you can plays cards, recruit more cards and armies (through gambling some of your funds on a die roll) perform an action with each of your armies and then claim income from your settlements. Armies can build fortifications, settle down to create new settlements, mine gold from a mine location or move.

Two of the biggest problems I find with the first edition are the recruitment die rolls and uneventful turns.

At the beginning of your turn, you get to roll a ten-sided die twice per city, once to recruit a new army and once to recruit a card. If the die result is less than the amount of money you gambled on that die roll (e.g. a result of 0 will always get you a reinforcement even if you spend 0, a spend of 9 will guarantee you a reinforcement and a spend of 4 will get you a 50% chance - 0, 1, 2, 3, 4), you get the army or the card of your choice from a deck of cards. You lose the money whether successful or not. Since you can have up to three cities, you could be doing up to six of these rolls at the beginning of each turn. But it gets worse! A couple of the cards give you an extra roll for armies and an extra roll for cards, so if you had all three cities and all six cards, you'd be getting a staggering 12 reinforcement rolls a turn. I can't ever see that happening, but certainly three cities was not uncommon in the games I played. Most of those rolls you wouldn't spend money on, so it would be a lot of die rolling, hoping for 0s.

The other big problem was uneventful turns. In the game you had very few armies (by design), so there were often turns when you didn't want to move them unless you got another army or a particular card. So you'd make your reinforcement rolls - fail, not do anything and then claim your income and that was your turn done. Not much fun :-(

I like the rest of the design of the game, but I think in hindsight (and based on the feedback I've received) these are the two biggest problems in the game.

I'd had a bunch of ideas that might help fix these problems, but I've not tried them out as yet, so when Mal came round for the afternoon we wanted to give it a try. Mal and I have played a lot of Border Reivers over the years, at first I always used to win, but recently Mal's started beating me :-(

Time to change the rules ;-)

In his scientific way, Mal had wisely suggested we try one of the changes at a time, rather than making sweeping changes to everything. So first of all we tried a fairly simple change:

Cities give you one roll for army reinforcements and a free card every turn.

What I had hoped was that this would reduce the number of turns in which you had nothing to do, as you would always be able to get a card each turn. Since cards allow you to attack your opponents indirectly (stealing their income, ambushing their armies in the field or causing their settlements to rise up against them) or aid with direct attacks (reducing the effectiveness of their fortifications) I had hoped the game would be more aggressive as a result.

Initially, things seemed to be going well, we used the cards a lot and did start attacking other other fairly early. The game see-sawed a bit, like it often does and there were lots of nail-biting fights.

However, after a promising early start the game didn't go anywhere. Fights in Border Reivers are brutal, the most likely conclusion is that everyone dies :-) As a result by the time you had broken through your opponent's outer defences you almost certainly didn't have enough troops remaining to attack his city. This was additionally hampered by the fact that he was getting a card (or more) each turn, and hence would almost certainly have a militia card ready to defend his city from attack. The game continued like a couple of punch-drunk boxers unable to land a blow on each other for way too long (maybe an hour and a half - usually our games lasted twenty to forty minutes). Eventually, we gave up, convinced it was never going to end :-(

Mal mentioned that this just went to show how well balanced the original version was.

I think the next thing to try is replacing the die rolls with a fixed cost for armies and cards - this will definitely fix problem A and might help to fix problem B if the cost is low enough, but clearly there is a point where the cost is too low!

More Advertising

Until now my advertising has been limited to three places:

• BoardGameGeek
• Boardgame News
• In the Greater Games Industry Catalog

Each of these has their pros and cons as you'd expect. BoardGameGeek has a huge number of hits each month and is mostly targeted at the customer. The downside is that one of their revenue streams is to get people to pay money to 'join' the site, and this allows them to block all adverts from the site (I do this!). Since the most hardcore users are likely to be the ones who join, they're the least likely to see my ads, but the most likely to buy games :-( Plus, it's expensive.

Boardgame News comes in a bit cheaper, and in previous campaigns I've had more enquiries from people who saw an ad there than those who saw the same ad on BGG. Again, it's mostly targeted at customers, and the more hardcore ones at that.

The Greater Games Industry Catalog is as you'd expect from the name targeted at industry - shops and distributors. It's pretty cheap to get a page ad in there and they give you a listing every quarter for free so that's good. I've no idea if advertising in there has helped at all though - I've not had anyone mention they've seen my ads in there.

Now that I've got a pretty good distribution network, my next aim is to get more shops stocking and customers buying my games. How to reach that audience? A good question.

A couple of my distributors offer services to their suppliers to market games to their customers (the shops). So customers of mine want me to be a customer of theirs too. Weird.

Alliance Game Distributors the largest distributor in the US have a monthly trade magazine, Games Trade Magazine which they send out to their customers - the US shops. I can give them a wad of cash to place an advert for one or more of my games in the magazine, which would hopefully lead to more sales to the shops and then more customers noticing the games in the stores. It's pretty expensive though.

ACD Distribution, another large US distributor are offering me the chance to place flyers in every order they ship for a few weeks. I can even make the flyers like posters so they serve a triple purpose: raising awareness of my games with the store staff, giving the store owners something to decorate their store with and raising awareness of my games with customers in the store. It's a bit cheaper than the Alliance option and it hits both the shops and the customers. Sounds good. But to be most effective the posters need to be put up in the stores and I've no control over whether or not they will.

Just to make things even more bewildering, I've no experience designing adverts or posters so I've no idea how to make them look good, or even what information to include. I've asked for a back issue of GTM to get a better idea.

Any suggestions of which route is the best to go down, or what information to include?

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.

Computer Versions of Board Games

Last night I started working on a computerised version of Sumeria. Why invest the time and effort to make a computerised version of an existing board game? What's in it for the (potential) customer?

• It allows people to quickly and easily see if it's a game they would like without the expense of a purchase.
• It's a chance to learn the rules where they are constrained and don't rely on someone's interpretation of the rulebook.
• It allows you to play when you can't get a group together.
• Some allow you to play offline - i.e. each player takes his turn and then notifies the others it's ready for theirs - this requires much less player time in one go than a full face-to-face game.
• In a thinky game, perceived downtime is reduced since you're not sat waiting for an opponent to have a go - you're just notified when he has.

Sounds good so far. So why don't all publishers make (or allow to be made) computerised versions of their games?

• It might lead to fewer sales: why buy a game if you can play it online for free?
• It's expensive in terms of time and effort. Programmers aren't cheap - I know - I used to be one.

You can do essentially three different type of computer-based board games:

• Real-time against the computer (AI)
• Real-time against human opponents
• Offline against human opponents

Each has their pros and cons. Against the computer only means you don't have to worry about network programming or database interaction - the whole thing can be done more simply. In one sense - you need to come up with some AI that the computer players use, which is more difficult. Real-time against other people means you don't need to write any AI, but the downside is you need to write all the code necessary for client-server interaction. Interactive games are probably better for simpler, quicker games, where there is little downtime waiting for an opponent to have their go. You will probably need to provide some form of instant communication too - a chat window or voice communications. Finally, the offline method is like an old play-by-email game, but with a better interface. On your turn you get a notification (via email for example) that it's your turn. You get to see what has changed since you last looked and then you take your turn and the next player is notified. This method will turn a short, fun game into a very long experience, but for the more complicated games it might take the pressure off a bit, allowing players to concentrate more on their strategies without the pressure of the other players leaning over the board asking you to hurry up!

I'm thinking I'll try to get version for Sumeria against the computer working first, if that works ok I can always look at getting the offline version done afterwards. I'm working in C#.

Back to My Roots

Recently, I've been having some more thoughts about a second edition of Border Reivers. Border Reivers was my first attempt at game design, and the 100-copy limited edition, entirely made by hand was the first step on the road to where I am today.

I started designing Border Reivers after a 36-hour marathon game of Mighty Empires in which the guy who was clearly in the lead suddenly got knobbled after 36-hours and went from comfortable first place to languishing at the rear. Had he made a huge tactical error that brought such a reverse in his fortunes? Nope, some random dragon event just hurt him. Surely I could make a similar game that plays quicker and doesn't have such huge swings in power.

My brief was to design a similar, civilisation-level, light wargame, with some development where random game happenings can't screw you completely. I wanted the game to play in 30-90 minutes too, not many people have 36 hours available for a single game.

How Did I Do?

I'm still proud of my achievement with Border Reivers. With no experience as a game designer or publisher I managed to design a working game, get it printed, assemble 100 copies and sell them all within eleven months all over the world. Is it the best game ever? Clearly not. But it's one that I still enjoy when I play and people still ask me to re-print and one that Mal wants to play almost every time we meet up.

Strengths

There are several things about Border Reivers that I really like. I like the double-sided triangular land tiles that get flipped and upgraded as the landscape changes. I did get the alignment wrong on the coastal ones though, so flipping them was counter intuitive. I liked the aesthetics of triangular tiles and the way that it made movement not quite as expected - I envisaged this was due to the highland terrain making travelling in a straight line difficult.

I also liked the brutal combat. The most likely outcome of a straight fight was everyone dies! However, there were substantial bonuses if you could get weight of numbers on your side. As a result, this led to either building large armies to crush your opponents, or risking everyone on a do-or-die attack. Of course, the cards spiced things up a bit too.

Which brings me on to the cards. The cards in Border Reivers come in two varieties: buildings and strategies. The building cards were played face up, and gave a development advantage to one of your cities - either more income or better chance of getting cards/armies in each future turn. The buildings were ok, but the hidden strategy cards were more fun. There were only a few types, so when you got one, your opponents had a pretty good idea what they were in for. There was a defence for each of them, but the defences were pretty expensive, so you couldn't afford to keep defences for all possible cards in place. I really liked the hidden cards, especially: Insurrection, Reiving Party and Ambush.

Weaknesses

At the beginning of each turn you rolled a ten-sided die for reinforcements. You rolled twice for each city: once for army reinforcements and once for cards. Since you could build up to three cities, you could theoretically roll the die six times at the beginning of your turn. In addition, to make things even worse, the reinforcement buildings cards (you could build one of each in each city) gave you an extra die roll. Up to twelve in all! While I liked that these gave you the opportunity to gamble victory points (cash) for possible gain, you could spend 8 cash (a fifth of that needed to win) and still get nothing (it gave you a 90% chance of getting something, but a bad die roll and you're stuffed). I've played many games where you just need one more army to give you enough to attack. Roll for reinforcements... fail. Do nothing this turn except get more money and try again next turn. This is no fun.

Border Reivers had two paths to victory, you could either kill all your opponents (player elimination) or save up enough cash. In two-player games it was about 50/50 over which path ended the game. In three- or four-player games it was almost always the cash route. Since the cash route could be achieved by building strong defences and then sitting back and raking in the cash the game was subject to turtling, where each player hid in their own little corner of the board and sat back trying to race to gain the most cash. This led to little player interaction. Mainly a problem with the three- and four-player games, but still doesn't make for a very fun game. I introduced the mine fairly late in development to try to encourage people out of their holes, but this was only a limited success.

While the mountain range pieces in my first FIMO prototype (see picture above) were really cool, the rubbish card ones in the limited edition were definitely not.

Ideas?

On and off I've been toying with a few ideas of things I could have done differently in Border Reivers:

• Each player is a particular Border Reiver clan, with different starting resources or player powers.
• Reinforcements are either free or fixed cost, limited only by the number of cities you control.
• Replace the victory conditions with a victory point track that could reward development, riches and aggressive play.
• Replace building cards with tokens or counters that show which city the building is in.

My aim would be to reduce the number of turns when you've got nothing to do (either because your reinforcement rolls didn't provide the required reinforcements or you don't have enough resources to mount an attack) and reduce the huge number of die rolls at the beginning of each turn while still capturing the feel of the first game.

Have you played the limited edition of Border Reivers? Would you like to get you hands on a copy? What do you think could be improved/changed? Answers on a postcard below please.

Growth

One of the measures of business is sales growth. Especially with new start-up companies, where profit may be many years off, sales growth shows whether your business is working on a fundamental level - are you successfully selling your products/services and are you selling more than you did before?

One of the difficulties of starting a business is keeping track of how things are going. When you don't have years of experience to call on how do you keep track of things? I've had a quiet few months from February to May. Is that normal? Is it a time of year thing? I can't really compare it to last year because during that period last year I was selling hand-made games or completely out of stock.

Yesterday I tried to catch up with my books, which I've fallen a little behind on. At the same time, I thought I'd start tracking a bit more sensibly how my sales are going, both now and historically. I knocked up a quick spreadsheet in OpenOffice Spreadsheet and started pumping my sales figures into it.

It's hard to compare things, since I registered for VAT last year (previous my sales figures would have been all for me, now I have to just consider the non-tax part of it). In addition, I've decided to split the game sales from the shipping costs, starting this financial year, so although both are sales (one is a product, the other a service) from now on my sales figures as I keep track of them will be smaller. However things are looking pretty good. I've done all the figures for last year, and I've got two previous years to compare them to:

In the above graph blue is my first financial year (hand-made Border Reivers), Red is my second (hand-made It's Alive!) and yellow is my third (first full-time year, It's Alive! reprint and Carpe Astra).

It looks pretty good, but there are some things to take into account. For the first two years, I made games by hand, and sold mostly directly. These were short runs and so my sales were pretty small. Last year I started getting games made for me in larger numbers and selling mostly to distributors, hence the hike in sales numbers. My growth for the first quarter of last year was negative, seeing as I ran out of hand-made games to sell halfway through. The second quarter there was no growth, I had two months of nothing to sell, but It's Alive! turned up in September and that was as much sales (after tax) as I'd managed in the whole of the equivalent quarter the previous year. The next two quarters have a sales growth of 1100% and 1200%, but it's not a fair comparison, selling large volumes of professionally manufactured games to distributors as opposed to selling individual copies of hand-made games to gamers.

The first quarter of this year will probably have growth around 750%, but the real test will be the next two quarters. Last year I released It's Alive! in Q2, this year I'll just have the residual sales on the three products I've got out. Q3 last year had: Essen, my best month's sales ever, the release of Carpe Astra and initial stocking orders from most of my European distributors. I'll have to do well to top that, and there's no chance of doing ten times better!

Building Momentum

We moved into our new house last Thursday. Thursday, Friday and the weekend were spent moving and trying to sort stuff out, Monday I was at the old house, cleaning and waiting in for three orders to be collected by the couriers.

The first was an initial stocking order for my first Canadian distributor - yeay! They were one of three new distributors who have contacted me since I ran the competition on BoardGameGeek. The second (a new US distributor) has placed an order which I'm going to ship on Friday (I've had to wait until I can go to York to get more It's Alive! stock - I've sold through the pile I was keeping at home) and the third has only recently enquired.

The second order shipping on Monday was a re-stock from one of my UK distributors. This was really gratifying, since they'd ordered less of Sumeria than they had initially ordered of It's Alive! and Carpe Astra, and three weeks later they had to ask for some more :-) I was expecting their sales to be slower since several of the larger UK shops had bought from me directly at or since the Expo, but this doesn't seem to have affected their sales much at all.

Yet another US distributor has also enquired in the last couple of weeks. This third new distributor is even better since a Danish/Norwegian distributor I've been talking to for months told me a while back that if I dealt with PHD they would buy my games from them, rather than me directly. So, if PHD also sign up, that will be two new distributors for the price of one :-). I don't know whether they will bite yet, but so far so good.

On top of all that I spoke to another distributor today on the phone. He's going to start soliciting my games. Hopefully this will lead to them picking them up, but it was effortless to get him to consider it.

I'm feeling pretty positive at the moment. The new house is lovely, and has a nice big office that I can store things in much more tidily than I could at either of our previous places. Feedback on Sumeria has been pretty good so far and June's sales will be my second-best ever (out-stripping January, the previous holder of that title, but not a patch on last October and Essen :-) ).

The only fly in the ointment is that most of my European distributors have yet to place a Sumeria order, so European availability is pretty patchy.

It's interesting to see how my mood varies. Entrepreneurship requires boundless enthusiasm and optimism. I try, but a dry spell like Feb-May gets me down, but a good month like June and I'm straight back up again :-)

Demo Days

On Saturday, I did the first of what I hope will be many 'Demo Days' where I visit a store and spend the day teaching customers my games.

Preparation

I didn't do much in the way of preparation, obviously I arranged it a few weeks in advance and mentioned it in the 'Events' section of my website, but that was about it. In hindsight, I should have put in a bit more effort. The shop (Inner Sanctum Collectibles in Cambridge) had put up posters, and a window display and had been telling their regular customers about it, but I should have mentioned it here, on BoardGameGeek and Twitter to give it as much publicity as I could. In addition to leaving my personal copies with them for a week so the staff could learn the games I also brought along a couple of boxes of each game to ensure they didn't run out of stock.

On the Day

The shop's Saturday opening hours are 10-6, but they are usually pretty quiet at the end of the day so they had been advertising I'd be there 10-4. In the end I had to head off about 5 since The Wife and I were going out for dinner with some of her colleagues that evening. Cambridge is about an hour's drive so I headed off at 8:30am to ensure I wouldn't be late. I ended up getting there about 20 minutes early, which gave me a chance to set up before the shop opened at 10.

The first hour was pretty quiet, which gave me a chance to teach Carl, one of the staff, It's Alive! and Sumeria. There were some telephone enquiries about my visit (so someone was interested at least) and by about 11:15 the shop started filling up. Apparently it was a fairly quiet day for them, but my games were in use pretty much all day and were very well received. Several people wanted to play all three games, and several people wanted to play games twice (or more!).

The shop did a deal where customers got 10% off all of my games that day, and if they bought all three they got 15% off. I was surprised (but gratified!) at how many takers they had for the all-three deal, and at the end of the day, despite not having sold all their current stock (most of it had gone) they kept one case of each game, which I invoiced them for that evening.

Afterwards

The games well very popular (especially Carpe Astra and Sumeria), and lots of their customers bought them. I can only hope that they get played a lot and this leads to more sales for the store (and hence for me in the long run). I think the deal helped (I could inform people of the deal for today only, which led to more sales on the day I'm sure), and being there to teach people means they get the rules right first time, which is always a good thing. When I play a game for the first time I often get a rule wrong, and this can lead to a bad first impression.

Venue

Inner Sanctum was a great venue, not only do they have a great range of games (board, card, miniature and collectable) but they also have a lot of space for playing. I co-opted three tables (one for each of my games) and that still used up less than half of their table space. In addition to a light, airy well-lit space with plenty of room for the games, the staff are very friendly, and they plied me with food and drink throughout the day (including a run for doughnuts to celebrate one of the customer's birthdays!).

Verdict

After a weekend of decorating and then another at the Expo, I would have really liked to take Saturday off, but it was a very valuable use of my time. Not only did I cement my relationship with one of the biggest shops in the UK, but I got my games into the hands of a lot of gamers, who really enjoyed them. Getting your games onto shelves is one half of the battle won, but until you actually have happy customers playing the games and spreading good word of mouth, that's where the games will languish. Good relationships with shops really help, since the shop staff will suggest your games to people who aren't sure what they want. Definitely a good use of my time.

Critical Mass

There's a point during the lifespan of any successful company when you go from initial struggles to comfortable success.

I'm not there yet, but there's some promising signs for the future. At the UK Games Expo I introduced myself to Zev Shlaslinger, the man behind Z-Man Games in the US. Z-Man have made it, they have critical mass. They have a large portfolio of games, including the English version of the extremely popular Agricola which is currently number one on BoardGameGeek. I introduced myself as Jackson Pope, of Reiver Games, expecting a polite 'who the hell is this nutter?' smile. Instead, Zev replies: "I know who you are - I read BoardGameGeek and your blog". Wow! That was unexpected (hi Zev!).

At the bank this morning, my business specialist was also very impressed with my progress in the six months she's known me. Apparently, at the moment most of the people she sees are really struggling, and while my company has yet to pay me a penny, things are going pretty well. I've sold a lot of games and I've got some money coming in every month.

At the moment the company is still in an early cycle. When I bring out a new game I expend a lot of money getting it produced and then it takes a long time to recoup. Doing print runs of a few thousand means my costs per game are pretty high, so I don't get quite as good margins as I should in an ideal world, and the games are slightly more expensive than the larger print run competition. When I've recouped enough money, instead of paying myself, that money is immediately re-invested in producing another game. While I'm at this stage if any of my games are a flop I'm stuffed, I won't get the money back to get another game done.

When will I have critical mass? It's hard to say. If I can get 6-12 games in my portfolio then the residual income from those should be enough to keep me going. A bad decision need not be fatal. Also, with more games I become a more attractive supplier for distributors. Being able to place a reasonably sized order to get shipping discounts is only achievable if they can guarantee to sell the games. Taking 500 copies of a single game (one pallet of Carpe Astra or Sumeria is 504 games) is a big risk, but taking 50 copies of 10 games is much less so.

So in essence all I need to do is keep picking games that turn out to be popular until I've got lots on my books.

Easier said than done...

Distribution

I've got 18 distributors now, mostly in the US and Europe, but a couple of further flung ones too. I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll be picking up two more in the next couple of weeks, another one in the US and one in Canada too.

In my experience (which is still pretty limited to be fair), distributors seem to conduct their business in one of two ways:

By Product Line

The distributor treats each line as a completely separate item. When you release a new product they will place a 'standard' order of a certainly number of cases (in my experience 4-15) of the game. When they start to run low they'll reorder, with the volume of the second and subsequent orders based on the rate the first order sold at.

By Supplier

The distributor groups all of a supplier's lines together. They will place orders fairly regularly (maybe monthly) ordering a mixture of all your product lines, based on current stock levels of each game.

It's definitely better when a distributor orders a multiple of full shipping boxes. I use a 52 x 41 x 42cm box which will hold either:

• 8 boxes (48 games) of It's Alive!
• 4 boxes (24 games) of any mixture of Carpe Astra and Sumeria
• 4 boxes of It's Alive! and 2 boxes of Carpe Astra/Sumeria

Having games that are the same size like Sumeria and Carpe Astra is great as it makes filling shipping boxes that little bit easier for the second class of distributor.

The Interplay of Twitter and Blogger

I can see that Twitter will be quite useful - I shouldn't have dragged my heels about opening an account for so long. It allows me to blog when I'm away from my computer - at conventions and trade shows for example. Also, I often end my Blogger posts with an 'In other news' a short bite of information that doesn't warrant a post on its own but that I hope will be of interest to someone. I figure I can also break the weaker 'this is what I did today' posts down into bite-sitzed chunks for Twitter.

In my mind this allows me to use Twitter as designed - to let you know what Reiver Games-related stuff I'm up to on a more frequent and more concise basis.

At the same time, I can strip out what I consider to be the weaker posts here, and instead stick to the meatier stuff: my thoughts and experiences of running a board games publishing company. So hopefully the posts will be more interesting and more useful to those of you in a similar boat, though as a result they may become slightly less frequent (since a 'this is what I'm doing' filler post is less likely to appear).

What are people's thoughts on this? Am I barking up the wrong tree or does this sound like a good idea?

I've Got a Twitter Account

Ok, enough faffing, I've finally joined the Twitterati. If you think I might have something interesting to say you can follow me from the link to the right. If you think you have something interesting to say leave me a comment with your username on Twitter and I'll follow you.

I figure being able to send short updates from my phone might be useful, seeing as I'm away a lot at the moment. Also, tweeting from the Expo would be pretty cool if I remember...

Update: Because the link to the right only works if you're not using RSS (it's a link on the sidebar), my Twitter username is ReiverGames

Stocking Orders

After a couple of days that have been spent mostly in the car in sweltering weather (for the UK, so about 23 degrees!) I'm now at home for the day. I've got most of my pre-orders shipped, except for those that are being collected at the UK Games Expo this weekend, and today is a stocking order day. Six of my eighteen distributors have placed orders already. Two are collecting at the Expo, three are going out today and one is amending their order so that it better fits in shipping boxes. This was something I didn't realise I could do. When they send me a purchase order telling me what they want to buy, I get back to them and tell them how to amend their order so that it fills shipping boxes. Since it's an American customer paying in USD, and I pay shipping this is quite important to me.

I'm going to chase my other distributors now the games have arrived to see if they want to order, hopefully I can get a few in time to ship early next week.

The stocking order process is fairly complex. First I send them some information to solicit with their customers and then hopefully they send me a purchase order, expressing an intent to buy a certain number of games. There's often a lot of chasing between those two steps though! In return, I draw up an invoice for the sale which I send back to them. I also need to keep a copy of the invoice for my records, and record the invoice in my VAT Account.

I then need to arrange a courier collection for a day that I'll be in. I use Interparcel Ltd. as a courier aggregator. Couriers are expensive. However, if you do a high volume of business with them (usually tens of parcels every month) then they will start to discount the rate you are charged for the shipments. I tend to go through periods when I send 10-15 parcels over a few days and then very little for the next several months until my next game comes out.

Courier aggregators like Interparcel work by dealing with lots of couriers and lots of customers. With lots of customers, they get a great rate from the couriers and can pass that discount on to their customers minus a small percentage for themselves. With lots of couriers they offer several options for each parcel and you can choose to send each parcel with whoever is cheapest (generally DHL for UK and Europe and UPS for everywhere else). The receipt needs printing out and adding to my records and my VAT account.

When I go to York to get games I also tend to get a few shipping boxes at the same time. These bigger boxes (51cm x 41cm x 42cm) can hold 8 boxes of It's Alive! (22 Kg!) or 4 boxes of Carpe Astra/Sumeria (15Kg). I get the boxes flat-packed from Zetland Boxes, so on shipping day I need to build the boxes, fill them, attach the labels and the wait for the courier - who is often early, so the preceding steps are generally done early in the morning to ensure I'm ready when they arrive.

Shipments going outside the UK also require me to provide proof that they are leaving the UK (for VAT purposes) so that I can zero-rate the purchases, which generally means keeping a copy of the courier's airway bill with the invoice. Shipments going outside the EU also need four copies of a customs invoice, detailing the contents and their value which all need to be signed and given to the courier when he arrives.

It's a complex process with lots of little steps, I have to be quite methodical to ensure I don't forget anything.

In other news, It's Alive! has finally sold just over half the print run, two days before it's nine-months old. That seems pretty good to me, but admittedly I don't really have any idea!

I Could Do With A Twitter Account

I've just had confirmation that Sumeria arrived at the warehouse on Friday.

All systems go!

Pre-orders

I've spent the last four days painting rooms in my new house with my parents who came up for a few days to help out (thanks Mum and Dad!). I've also been sorting out the Sumeria pre-orders briefly in the mornings and evenings.

Friday morning I posted the new version of the website as planned and sent the emails to all my pre-order customers. I don't feel comfortable taking their money up front, months in advance of the product arriving, so instead all I do is take a note of their name and email address and add them to the list. When the games are delivered I send an email to all the pre-order customers telling them how to pay or offering them the chance to pull out if they've changed their minds. Doing it this way makes it easier for people to pull out, which might be considered a bad thing, but I'd much rather that, than customers felt like I'd been sat on their money for ages, or they had to fight to get a refund if they'd decided to buy it through another channel or no longer wanted it. As it happens only one person has dropped out at this point, since they figure they can get it cheaper locally when it becomes available.

This time, with the imminent launch event at the UK Games Expo, a lot of my UK pre-order customers are electing to collect their copies at the Expo. This is better for everyone, since they don't have to pay postage and I don't have to go to the Post Office and paying cash means PayPal don't take a chunk out of my earnings :-)

I'm still waiting to hear from twelve of my pre-order customers who I'm expecting to post copies to. These will hopefully pay over the next few days (if they do it before 9am tomorrow I'll be able to ship their copies from York tomorrow afternoon). When I don't hear anything I'm never sure whether they've silently changed their minds and want to back out, haven't got around to it yet or my email hasn't got through. I usually send a chaser email after a week or so, just in case the first one didn't make it.

Tonight I'll be addressing all the packaging for those customers who've already paid. That way all I have to do in York tomorrow is slip a copy in the packaging and take it to the Post Office.

Tomorrow I'm setting off early and heading up to the warehouse (I'll phone them before I leave as I haven't had any confirmation that the games have arrived). In York I'll pick up enough copies for the pre-orders and then hand-deliver a few to friends before posting the rest. I'm staying the night at Paul's and going to his Monday night games night that I used to attend when I lived in York. Tuesday I'll fill the car to the gills and drive home. I should be home in time to check my email to see if any more pre-orders have paid while I've been away and get to the local Post Office.

Wednesday will be a slightly quieter day, I've got to wait in for a removals company survey and I'll also send off the first couple of stocking orders (US and Germany).

Busy, busy, busy :-)

Planning Ahead

Quite a lot of my website refers to Sumeria as a forthcoming game. In addition, there is no way to buy Sumeria yet from my website, there's a bunch of information about signing up for the pre-order and the pre-order page that I create to allow pre-order customers to quickly and simply pay for for their pre-orders via PayPal doesn't exist yet.

The pre-order window, as always will close when the games arrive at my warehouse. This is to avoid undercutting the shops and online stores that I rely on for most of my business (either directly or through a distributor). On Friday, when the games arrive I've got to make all those changes to the website.

The only problem is that my parents arrive for a few days this afternoon, and I'm going to be decorating our new house with their help on Friday - so I can't take a few hours to overhaul my website.

I keep a copy of my website on my computer, in case a failure at my ISP leads to a loss of data. I can make the changes I need to my website on that copy, and then all I need to do on Friday is upload the new version, a matter of a few minutes work.

As part of these changes I need to create PayPal 'Pay now buttons' for Sumeria (pre-order price and full price with the three shipping prices). There's probably a better way to do this than creating six different buttons, but that works and I don't have a huge amount of time today.

Mental Couple of Weeks

The next two weeks are going to be very busy. Fortunately, the last couple of weeks haven't been too taxing and we've just had a long weekend (yesterday was a public holiday in the UK).

We bought a house down here on Friday, so now we've got to get it ready and move in. It needs decorating throughout, and there are a couple of more major jobs we'd like to get done before we move in.

This week my parents are coming up from Bristol to help us decorate, so I'm taking Thursday and Friday off work to go over to the new house and decorate with them, and we'll be working on it on the weekend too. Friday is also the day that Sumeria arrives in York. On Saturday The Wife is off to Sweden for a week for work, so next week I'm home alone.

Having my games in York has saved me a lot of money. In York I'm paying £1 per pallet per week, with a minimum order of £10 a week. I'm down to 4 pallets now, so I'm paying £10 a week. Down here in the South I was quoted £2.75 per pallet per week. For those four pallets that's only £11 a week, but I used to have more, and on Friday another 6 pallets are arriving from Germany, in York that has no effect on the amount I pay (still within the minimum invoice charge, just!), but down here that would add £16.50 a week to my costs. The downside is when a new game arrives I need to get my hands on a lot of stock, that means several trips to York to load up a car-full of games and bring them down here. So next week I will be mostly on the road and fulfilling pre-orders and stocking orders. In addition, I've the UK Games Expo that weekend, so I'll need some more stock for that.

In addition to everything else, I need to get ready for the Expo: preparing my stand, working out how much stock I'm taking, getting new business cards made and getting some Point-of-Sale signs done.

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.

Postal Theft

Yesterday was a very busy day. In addition to a bunch of business stuff I needed to do, I also needed to sort out a few things regarding the new house we're buying, which took much longer than necessary.

I did manage to get to the Post Office just in time to send the Sumeria prototype to the UK Games Expo guys to allow them to judge it for Game of the Year. I also had a few prototypes to send back to designers at the same time.

I've just heard from the UK Games Expo guys that the packaging for the Sumeria prototype arrived today as expected, sadly the contents are absent without leave. This was my only prototype, so now I have to quickly knock up another prototype to send off to them. Hopefully, this one won't go missing again.

In other news, the people who played Sumeria at the weekend have started to rate it on BoardGameGeek, so it's climbing nearer towards the 30 ratings it needs to get ranked, and I've been sent a Russian translation of the rules to Sumeria which I need to layout and post on my website. Things are moving on...

Beer and Pretzels

I had a great weekend in Burton at the 20th Beer and Pretzels games convention. I delivered a box of Carpe Astra and a box of It's Alive! to Spirit Games the shop that runs the convention, as they had sold out of both in the weeks leading up to the convention. After that I set up on a table and proceeded to demo my games and do some playtesting. I did my usual thing 'working' during the days until about 5-6pm and then 'playing' during the evening. The only difference being that while I'm 'working' I only play my own games (and prototypes), in the evenings I have a beer and play whatever anyone else wants to play.

Sumeria was well-received, with a gratifying percentage of players pre-ordering after their game. It would have been higher, but several people didn't pre-order a copy as all their gaming buddies were already on the pre-order list :-). It's Alive! sold a few copies over the weekend, and Carpe Astra was popular too. In addition, I got several playtesting games of one of my prototypes in too.

I also spent some time gaming with Paul, who runs Games Lore one of the biggest UK online games stores. He's running low on stock of my games and says they was a large spike in the number of Carpe Astra sales after my competition on BoardGameGeek. Nice to get some confirmation that the competition worked!

All in all, a great weekend, and I returned to lots of emails including a few more email pre-orders of Sumeria. I've now more than doubled the number of pre-orders I've got for Sumeria since reducing the pre-order price. Everyone is getting the price reduction, including those who pre-ordered before I reduced the price, so I lost some money from those early pre-orders (£17.50 down to £15, so £2.50 per customer). Thankfully, the number of new pre-orders more than makes up for that!

Just before I left for Beer and Pretzels I heard from the German manufacturer that Sumeria is being assembled on Wednesday. All being well it will arrive at my warehouse before the end of next week.

Beer and Pretzels

This weekend I'll be heading to the 20th Beer and Pretzels convention in Burton-on-Trent. It's my third time attending, and somehow this year feels very different.

Beer and Pretzels is run by Sally and Phil of Spirit Games, and is held in the Burton-on-Trent Town Hall. It's a fairly big convention (I'm guessing over 200 attendees) and has a really nice atmosphere, with a bar, food, lots of different types of games and a prize ceremony at the end for reviewers on the Spirit Games website.

I first went in 2007, getting the train down from York and staying in a local pub. I had a carrier bag full of hand-made copies of Border Reivers, and a prototype copy of It's Alive! The convention went well - despite the convention being run by a shop, Phil let me sell hand-made copies of Border Reivers, and I sold quite a few. I went for the second time last year, and although by then I was technically a pro game publisher, it felt very similar. I got the train down from York, stayed in the same pub round the corner and again I had a carrier bag full of hand-made games, this time the last few copies of the hand-made edition of It's Alive!, which I duly sold out of. Phil had even reserved me the same table in the corner by the bar :-).

This year everything feels very different. I'm driving up from Bedford, and instead of a carrier bag full of hand-made games to sell myself, I'm taking a couple of boxes of professionally manufactured games and an invoice for restocking the shop. I'll be demoing my games this time, but if anyone wants a copy I'm going to direct them to the shop instead, where Phil will have some available. I'll also have the Sumeria prototype which I'll be demoing and I'll be taking pre-orders for Sumeria at the new, reduced price. I'm going to leave the Sumeria prototype with the UK Games Expo guys (who will be attending to hand out flyers at some point), so that they can start playtesting it as a contender for the UK Game of the Year competition which I helped to judge last year. Since Sumeria is now only a couple of weeks away it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

If you're going along too, stop by and say hi. If you're not: change your plans - it's their 20th birthday!*

* "I live on another continent" is no excuse!

Good News / Bad News

Which do you want first?

The increased discount has lead to a lot of extra pre-orders for Sumeria, which is great, I could do with some more, but every little helps :-). I've mentioned it here, on BoardGameGeek and in my newsletter, plus W. Eric Martin has tweeted about it on Boardgame News. Not sure where else I should mention it really. Maybe Facebook?

The bad news is that I've been blacklisted by Microsoft. Since my last email newsletter went out, all Microsoft email addresses are bouncing my emails. So that's: @hotmail.com, @live.com and @msn.com. This is really annoying. I've sent out the newsletter and they've received it, they then reply asking above the Sumeria deal and when I reply to them it bounces. At that point I have to resort to re-sending the email from my personal GMail account.

This is especially annoying since the wording of the bounce email seems to imply that the blacklisting is in response to a Microsoft customer complaint. Everyone on my list is on my list because they have asked to be there. At the bottom of each email there are 'unsubscribe' instructions. Now I've got to find out how to go about un-blacklisting myself.

Tomorrow I'll be doing some more sales visits to local-ish shops, so most of today will be spent preparing for that. I popped into a couple in Bristol (we were down there for the weekend visiting family) - one seemed quite interested in It's Alive! and Sumeria, the other had a very small stock of board games, including Carpe Astra :-)

Pre-Orders

Pre-orders are a great way to cut out the middle man and help both the publisher and the customer. Publishers usually offer the pre-ordering customer a discount in return for either cash up front (helping to pay for the production) or a commitment to buy the game direct from the publisher.

Pre-ordering helps the publisher by providing them with more income that they would get selling the games through shops and distributors and also providing early return on investment. Normally, selling to distributors it's at least a month after delivery that the publisher will see any money, since the usual invoice terms are NET30 (payable 30 days after invoicing). In the case of cash up front (which I don't do!) it also allows the publisher to part-finance the production of the game using customers money - which reduces the risk. It also gets some copies of the games out in the hands of the playing public very quickly - which will hopefully lead to quicker referral sales where someone who has played someone else's copy wants one of their own.

Pre-ordering also helps the customer - it allows them to get the game cheaper than retail price, and sooner than they would be able to through the shops.

Sounds great so far - who doesn't it help? The shops and distributors that have been cut out as middlemen! Although, if the early copies that went to pre-orderers get played and lead to more sales then it will indirectly help them. Obviously, once the game has widespread distribution continuing to sell it at a crazy discount from the publishers website will really hurt the shops, since the publisher can definitely sell it cheaper than shops. For that reason, once the game is available most publishers close their pre-order offers, so as not to undercut the shops who are also their customers.

My pre-ordering process has always been: I offer a 30% discount to anyone who signs up before the game arrives at my warehouse. Once it has arrived, I email everyone who has signed up offering them the chance to pay (and get the cheap copy), or ignore it - no obligation to buy. It's all done using PayPal buttons and a hidden webpage (a page on my website with no links to it, other than the one in the emails I send out). I also offer free delivery to anyone who wants to collect the game at a forthcoming convention.

Seeing as there's a credit crunch on and everyone is feeling the pinch - I've decided to increase the pre-order discount on Sumeria to 40%! Yup, if you pre-order you get it for £15 instead of the usual £25 (plus postage and packing). I had hoped the exchange rate between the GBP and the Euro would enable me to reduce the retail price of Sumeria from £25 to £22 (same as Carpe Astra) but unfortunately nothing is doing on that front so I'm doing this offer instead to help out my most loyal customers. If you're interested just send me an email. If you've already pre-ordered, don't worry, you'll get the extra discount too.

Seeing Some Benefit

Well, I've got both the consignment returns I was waiting for. It's hard to make a judgement on the US returns, since they haven't had Carpe Astra long, and they've just switched from biweekly to monthly billing. But there certainly isn't a large jump as a result of the BoardGameGeek competition and sales calls. In the UK though it's a different story. The UK returns show a large improvement over the previous month, though whether that's down to the sales visits I've been making or the BGG competition it's hard to tell.

I'm going to do some more sales visits next week (ahead of my attendance at the Beers and Pretzels convention next weekend. I also need to concentrate on picking a game for my Essen release. I've a couple of potentials, but nothing certain yet. Playtesting over the next couple of weeks should help to confirm things, if you're going to Beer and Pretzels, stop by my table and ask to play a prototype with me (and while you're at it, why not try Sumeria!).

I'm even considering a few sales trips a bit further afield. There are several shops up North that I could visit, but to do so would probably mean staying the night somewhere, so it's a bit more of a commitment than the local trips I've been doing so far.

Moment of Truth

Today and again Tuesday I'll get some information about whether or not the BoardGameGeek competition lead to a boost in sales.

Most of my distributors place a stocking order of 30-90 games and then I don't hear from them again until they've run out and need some more. Since I competition I've had one of those re-orders but to be honest I've no idea whether that was related to the competition or not.

A couple of my distributors have my game on consignment. They place a large order, and then each month they tell me how many games they've sold. I invoice them for those games only, and then they pay me. This allows me to better track how sales are progressing as I have a monthly history with these distributors and I can see any peaks and troughs in their sales. I can charge more for games on consignment too - since by only paying for a game when they've sold it the distributor is getting an improvement to their cash flow and reduce their risk at the expense of my cash flow.

Will the competition have helped sales? I hope so, and judging by BGG ownership stats I think so, but the consignment returns over the next few days should either confirm or deny it.

Making Progress

After a very busy couple of weeks I'm finally catching up on a few things. I've now received and approved all the proofs and plots for Sumeria and, thanks to a German reader who was paying attention, caught a mistake I made at the proof-reading stage in the German rules. Fortunately, it wasn't too late to get the problem fixed (I'd not yet received and approved the plots) so that didn't cause too much of a problem (though it did cause a bit of a fright!). Sumeria is now all go, all I have to do is approve the corrected German rules and the wooden pieces when I receive them, then sit back and wait for the games to arrive.

Today's first order of business is to meet Brett Gilbert (writer of the Brettspiel blog) in a local café this morning. He's passing through Bedford and wanted to show me one of his prototypes.

This afternoon the reality of running your own business is catching up with me. I've got to do my books for March and then submit a VAT return for the first three months of the year. It's boring, but it's a legal requirement so I've got to get it done.

I've also been going through some of the many submissions I received as a result of my piece for Boardgame News. I've rejected several of them at the second stage (reading the rules) as they were not the sort of games I was interested in, and a couple at the first stage (reading a overview), but a few have made it to the prototype stage, so hopefully I'll be getting a few more prototypes in a couple of weeks. I'm playtesting again tomorrow, so I'll get a chance to play some of the stash of prototypes I've managed to accumulate.

A Small Army

I read Seth Godin's blog. I recommend it, he posts most days, short pithy posts that make you think. There's a definite marketing bent to his posts, but lots of the stuff he posts is applicable outside the marketing world.

In one of his recent posts he recommended Chris Guillebeau's '279 Days to Overnight Success' a free manifesto explaining what he had done to make it in the social media arena. I found the manifesto pretty interesting, so I popped over to Chris' site to find out more.

One of the things that Chris recommends is recruiting a 'Small Army' of willing volunteers who will help you achieve your goals.

It struck me that I've (without really trying) started to do that - there's a bunch of people out there who have helped me get Reiver Games off the ground, often for little or no compensation. Much of what I have achieved so far is in no small part due to them, so I thought now would be a good time to thank them (in no particular order):

• The Wife: For her enthusiasm, support and art direction - I couldn't do it without you.
• Mal: The website, the last minute proof-reading, Essen, the list is long!
• Michael: Excellent German translations, often with very little notice, and three hours on the stand at Essen.
• Dunk and Lucy: Essen - especially the driving and meals :-) and my first convention
• My designers (Yehuda, Ted and Dirk): For trusting me with your games and choosing me from all the other publishers out there.
• Paul and Lisa: The enthusiasm, proof-reading and playtesting
• Tony: Sales repping in the US.
• Dave: The UK Games Expo in 2007, plus lots of playtesting.
• Everyone who has submitted a game to me.
• Everyone who has translated the rules for one of my games into their language
• All my playtesters and proof-readers, the games wouldn't be possible without you.
• My true fans who buy all my games - I really appreciate all your support

If I've forgotten you from the list I apologise, say hi in the comments and I'll redress the balance.

Want to join my small army? I'd love the help :-) Things you can do:

• Play my games
• Rate my games on BoardGameGeek
• Become a fan of my games on BGG or Facebook
• Buy one of my games
• Ask your local retailer to stock my games
• Ask any contacts at a distributor to stock my games
• Review my games on BGG
• Translate the rules of one of my games into your language
• Introduce my games to other people - take them to games nights, conventions or demo them at a local retailer

There are things that you can do that cost money, things that cost time, and things that are almost effortless - do as much or as little as you feel like - any help is appreciated.

A Year in the Boardgames Industry

It's been just over a year since I quit my job as started Reiver Games as a full-time job. There have been some ups and some downs as I'm sure you're aware but if I'm to continue the most important thing is the bottom line: I need to make some money or the dream will die!

I've done a GeekList on BoardGameGeek sumarising this first year. The bottom line is the last entry.

Several things went right this year, but also several things went wrong. I'm really proud of the distribution network I've achieved in this first year, from nothing. Essen was a fantastic show for me, a huge success. But when push comes to shove, the company has had a mediocre first full-time year. With the delays getting It's Alive! manufactured I spent the first five months with only a handful of hand-made copies of It's Alive! to sell, which disappeared pretty quickly. From mid-May to the beginning of September I had absolutely nothing to sell. That I made any money at all those months is due to doing some contracting work for my previous employer. When the games did finally turn up it took me some time to get the distributors on board (several didn't sign up until January - five months after It's Alive! arrive in my warehouse). As a result my sales were a bit disappointing - especially in the last few months of the year.

I had to pay out for the games at (or before) the point of manufacture, so my expenditure has been pretty high. I still hope that I'll make a profit on those runs, but to do so I need to sell a large proportion of them, and that takes time. More time than I had between It's Alive! arriving in September and the end of the tax year in April. As such Reiver Games has made it's first loss this year after two years with a very small profit. Sales were up hugely, selling to distributors and shops rather than individual customers, but the bottom line is that this year I didn't make any money, and I'm going to have to start making some money soon if I'm to carry this on.

With Sumeria arriving shortly I'll have another opportunity to boost sales, but with it comes another huge expenditure on manufacturing. This year I'll have stock all year round, and with more games in my portfolio I'll hopefully be a more attractive prospect for other distributors as I'll look a little more professional. The three distributors who contacted me during the BGG competition will hopefully start stocking my games. I hope the BGG competition will boost awareness enough to lead to a bunch more sales. The bottom line is that I need to be selling more games, more quickly, I'm still not sure how to achieve that.

Case Study: Getting Sumeria to the Printers

I thought it might be interesting/useful to see what is involved when sending a game to the printers.

I'm getting Sumeria manufactured in Germany by Ludo Fact, the same company that did such an excellent job on Carpe Astra. So what is the process?

The process begins many months before the game is ready, by requesting a quote from the manufacturers. I tend to ask for quotes for a few different sized runs so I can see how much cheaper per game a larger run would be, and how much more expensive in total it would be. For example I asked for quotes for 2,000, 3,000 and 4,000 copies of Sumeria. The quote comes back and Ludo Fact show a breakdown of where all the costs come from (e.g. the cost of the box, the board, the punchboards, the wooden pieces, etc.) so you can make a few changes if necessary in an attempt to reduce the price or improve the component quality. Ludo Fact show their quotes with the cost per 1,000 games so you can easily compare the prices, but they don't include the cost of proofs and tooling costs and obviously you need to consider additional costs such as bank charges, prototyping costs, art costs, etc.

Ludo Fact take about 8-10 weeks to manufacture a small run like one of mine, and they don't require everything up front. The first time you order they do want half payment up front, but for later runs they will accept payment on delivery. The 8-10 weeks is due to the time required to manufacture the wooden pieces, so in the first instance all they need is a signed order so they can go ahead and place the order for the wooden pieces from their supplier. They will send out a 'white sample' of the box and boards to show you how the various bits will fit together inside the box. The white sample is made from all the correct materials, just not printed, so it can be used to check the weight of the finished item as well.

The next stage for Sumeria was to FTP the artwork for the punchboards and the gameboard, and that wasn't required until two weeks after the order was placed. The artwork is checked over by their data quality department (who are very thorough and found several problems with the Carpe Astra art - but none with Sumeria :-) ), and if necessary new art is requested. Once the art has been approved you are sent a proof and a plot for each component. The proof is colour-accurate showing what the components will look like. If you've ever tried printing colour files you'll notice that each printer prints slightly different colours, which in turn are slightly different from how they appear on the screen - the proofs are guaranteed to be the same as the finished items. Since you pay extra from the proofs you can choose which components to have proofs of, and you can choose to have proofs that are slightly smaller than the finished item, or only cover some of them (e.g. a selection of cards from the deck - not all of them). Plots on the other hand are not colour accurate (and in fact are often hideously garish!), but they show all the components and any cut lines for you to check that things line up correctly. These need to be checked and approved in writing to the manufacture to allow them to proceed.

The last of the artwork for Sumeria (the box and rules art) was required a further two weeks after the boards art. Again, it gets FTPed to their server, their data quality department check it over and send out the proofs and plots for approval.

The final piece of the puzzle will be a production run sample of the wooden pieces (complete with a zip-loc bag which they'll send on to me when the wooden pieces arrive at their factory from the suppliers.

Once everything is ready at their factory they will assemble the games, box them, shrink-wrap them, put them in cases, put the cases on pallets and shrink-wrap the pallets. About a week later those will arrive at my warehouse, and I'll get an invoice to pay for the manufacturing.

Sumeria is about half-way through the process at the moment - I sent them the last of the artwork on Monday, and I've received the proofs and plots of the boards, with the box and rules due early next week. I'm due to receive the games in week 21, a week before the UK Games Expo where Sumeria is due to be launched.

Site Repping

That's what my last two days effort is called according to The Wife.

Yesterday I was going into London to meet Philip duBarry (of Revolution fame) for dinner. Seeing as I was spending £25 on the train fair into London I figured I might as well make a day of it and visit a few board game shops hawking my wares. Today I've done something very similar in St. Neots and Cambridge - a bit nearer to home.

In preparation for my visits I first rang the shops to arrange a rough time for my visit and to make sure that they were interested in seeing me. With one exception they all seemed quite keen - I didn't feel too much like a cold-calling salesman, which was effectively what I was. I also got together a small pack of information for each store: a business card, and 'sellsheets' for each of my games (a sheet of A4 with information about the price, some art and the blurb from the back of the box). I stapled this information together so that I wouldn't have to be faffing around when I got there.

For each visit I got the name of the person I spoke to (or should speak to on the day) so that I could ask for them when I reached the shop. I hit five shops in London on Wednesday and three today. On arrival I went up to the desk, introduced myself and asked to speak to the person whose name I had got on the phone. I then handed over the information pack (so they've got something to check after I've left and remind them of the salient points) and then spent 15-20 minutes giving a brief overview of my three games: It's Alive!, Carpe Astra and Sumeria.

About half of the shops I visited already stocked one or more of my games, the others generally had never heard of them. As a result of the trips all of them were interested in stocking them, though admittedly some only if I acquiesced to their conditions (in some cases ridiculous). Three of the shops are going to pick them up as a result.

Even in the cases where they already carried my games it was often only one of the two (so it was worth it from an awareness raising point of view) and in most cases the staff had only seen the game box, never the contents and knew nothing about how to play the game that wasn't written on the box. Hopefully in these cases the extra information will lead to the staff recommending my games to some of their customers.

In addition, a couple of the shops wanted me to come in one Saturday and demo my games to their customers. This sounds like a great idea, so I'm going to be visiting them for the day to demo my games - like a mini-convention. The shops will advertise it in advance and get some stock in so that interested customers can buy the game there and then.

I consider these visits to be a great success and I'm now trying to work out which other shops are within range of another day trip.

The Saga of the Box Design

When you get your copy of Sumeria (you are all going to buy one, aren't you?), take a minute to look at the back of the box, and consider briefly just how much of a bitch it was for me to do.

The saga begins on Friday with me (your sheepskin-clad, over-muscled hero - though I like to think with slightly more intelligence than your standard-issue barbarian hero) trying to get the box and rules artwork to the printers in Germany by the end of the day. I decided fairly early on that I wouldn't have time on Friday to get the box tray art done, so I checked that the box art could wait until Monday without delaying things too much. With that out of the way my plan was to finish the rest of the art, get it FTP-ed to the printers and then go to a local print shop to get a printout of the board done. I had two print-outs of the board with me, my home-made quad folded board with the final artwork but a bunch of printing errors from my printer and the colour-correct proof from the German manufacturers which they had folded in quarters to fit in an envelope - so I couldn't use either of those.

The trials began sending the rest of the artwork to the printers. My computer decided to inexplicably go very slow on-and-off during the afternoon (at one point it took half an hour to shutdown) so by the time I finally got everything sent off it was 4:30pm. Running a bit late. I thought I'd better check what time the print shop shut and they shut at 4:45pm. Damn, I'd missed them and would have to go Saturday morning.

Saturday morning, with visiting parents in tow, I went to the print shop and got the print out of the board done. We spent the rest of the day hanging out with my folks, and the next morning I got Dad to help me with setting up a photo of the game. When it came to make the mock-up board for the photo I realised the print shop had somehow managed to print it out 80% of the correct size, so it would no longer fit with all the other components. Grrrr. Still, I got Dad to help me set up the home-made board, and show me how to get a good photo of it. We could do the layout and tweaking with the photo of the home-made board and I could get a correct print out on Monday and drop that in instead. We took the photos, picked one, did the layout and then in the evening I did the associated stuff (barcodes, logos, descriptive text, etc.). I then got Michael (thanks!) to do a German translation of the box text and in the meantime I went back to the print shop, got a correct size print-out, came home, glued it onto some board (I just made a full-size open board, rather than faff around making a quad folding board that I can't do tidily) set the picture back up, took some more photos stripped out the background in the photos and added the new photo to the box.

Getting it done was far more complicated than it needed to be, but I'm very pleased with the end result:

You Know You've Been Neglecting Your Blog When...

You get emails asking if you've died.

I've been busy. And not busy. Last weekend The Wife and I went to Newcastle for a couple of days break. It was great, we got to hang out with our friends up there and just chill out for a couple of days. On our return we've been busy sorting out stuff for the house we're buying and I had to make an unscheduled trip to York.

Wednesday I had to go to York to collect the white sample of Sumeria which had been sent to my old address (I'd forgotten to inform the German manufacturers that I'd moved house). The white sample is a box, insert, punchboards and gameboard all covered with the correct paper. The punchboards aren't punched and there's no printing done, but it gives you an example of the size, weight and finish of things. Sumeria will be in the same size box as Carpe Astra and the board and tiles will be on the same 2mm thick, linen-finished card as the Carpe Astra pieces. I was really impressed by how professional Carpe Astra felt - the Germans really do a great job.

To make the trip up to York worth the effort, (there's six hours driving involved) I spent the night at Paul's, got to hang out with him and Lisa, play some prototypes and then the next morning I popped in to Travelling Man (the comics and games shop in York) and went to their Leeds head office. I used the trip as a sales trip - introducing Carpe Astra (which neither store had picked up yet) and Sumeria and enquiring how It's Alive! was doing. In the York branch, It's Alive! is apparently a regular seller - they always re-order it if it's sold out and it sells out fairly often. Since moving from selling copies personally at conventions and through my website to selling to distributors I've no idea how well things are doing - so it was nice to get some positive feedback from the shop floor. It was also good to be able to tell them that Carpe Astra had spent most of the last two weeks at the top of the BoardGameGeek Hot Games list.

On my return an email from Ted informed me that Carpe Astra has been added to Bruno Faidutti's Ideal Game Library and got an honourable mention in Mike Siggin's Sumo Awards. Two more pieces of information that would have been good to be able to mention had I known about them one day earlier! Still, I'm planning to do some more sales trips early next week and I'll be able to use that information then.

Things are now very busy - I've got to send the box art and the rules for Sumeria to the printers today (though I'm not going to be able to send them all today - the box bottom will have to wait until Monday :-( ) and my parents are coming to stay for the weekend this evening - so I've some preparation to do for their visit too. My dad used to be an art teacher, so I'll be able to rope him into helping with the box bottom design and the photo of the game over the next couple of days.

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.