Late!

I've been away for the weekend for a short family holiday, followed by friends round for dinner and then an earlier morning trip to London for work (I'm writing this from my hotel room, before breakfast). So needless to say, not much progress and the blog post is a couple of days late.

I did manage to get a Games Night in last week, and we played a couple of games towards my ten plays goal (The Bridges of Shangri-La and Village), but sadly that was the only Games Night in five weeks, I'd missed the last two due to trip to Manchester for work and I'll miss this week's and next week's due to trips to London for work!

I'm hoping to get a bit more done on the Zombology artwork this week though, taking advantage of InDesign Creative Cloud and being about to use my decent laptop. I'm aiming for a November launch of Zombology, once the art is complete.

The Only Constant Is Change

Regular readers will know I've been prevaricating for the last two or three months about whether or not to go through with my plan to do a limited edition hand-made run of Zombology this year.

One of the reasons for this has been a secret up until Friday, but now the cat is finally out of the bag I can admit to it! I've been in the running for the last few months for a promotion at work. Seeing as several of my colleagues (and friends) read this blog, I didn't really want to be discussing it here until a decision was made and they found out through official channels. On Friday I received the job offer and accepted it, so it's all go, starting next month.

The new job is a big step up and will require a load of new skills, learning on the job and responsibility, plus more travel, i.e. less time for games design. For the last couple of months I've already been travelling around once a week, which often clashes with Games Night or Newcastle Playtest, further complicating making progress on games design.

The majority of my mates in Newcastle are also colleagues and have helped me with the lion's share of my Zombology, Codename: Dragon and Codename: Vacuum playtesting. These mates will now all be reporting to me. Which is going to be really weird, and also probably not conducive to playtesting.

So everything is changing. What I don't need on top of that is a huge commitment of my spare time and additional stress around marketing and trying to recoup an investment. So I'm ditching the plan to hand make 150 copies of Zombology and instead going with Print on Demand, which requires no effort from me other than the graphic design.

As I mentioned in my review, there's a few downsides to this, not least the cost of shipping to the UK. Most of my 17 pre-orders are from the UK, almost all friends or family. I don't want them to have to pay silly money to a company in the states for a copy of the game so in addition to the print on demand edition, so there will be a Super Limited True Fans Edition™ of the game, featuring a hand-made tray and lid box and laminated cards. I'll make 20 of these: one for me, one each for the 17 family, friends or true fans who've pre-ordered a copy and 2 spares. These will be selling at the original £9 plus shipping price quoted earlier, so I'll not make any money on them - I'm just doing it because I enjoy it and to support those who've supported me.

There's two spares... Just sayin'.

In other news, I made it to Newcastle Playtest this week for the first time in ages and got to play both Codename: Dragon and Border Reivers Second Edition and got some good ideas for both of them.

I've also invested in Adobe Creative Cloud as a little 'promotion present' to myself. It means I'll be able to work on the Zombology graphic design without having to wait a week for my old laptop to boot up and then continually fight with its glacial slowness. W00t! I've already started on the changes I want to make to Zombology before release.

Hiatus

It's been both a very busy and a very unproductive week. My parents came up last weekend, just in time to help out with The Daughter's third birthday party and then stayed with us all week (they left yesterday morning). So we've been entertaining them (badly - I've been knackered all week!).

With mum and dad here I've made no progress on anything, just a little discussion with dad about my company logo one evening after work. There was no Games Night last week (travelling for work and mum and dad here) and there's none this week either (travelling for work again - scheduling FAIL!). So I haven't even made any progress on my play every game ten times goal. The one redeeming feature of travelling for work is that it's often with Ian, a Games Night regular and I take my iPad full of games with me...

This weekend just gone The Wife was away too, so after mum and dad left on Sunday morning I was sole parent in charge of The Daughter until The Wife returned at eight this morning. Lots of fun, but surprisingly hard work - I'm knackered again!

This week I'm hoping to make it to Newcastle Playtest tomorrow night, so fingers crossed I'll at least get a chance to get some playtesting in and go through the feedback I got from the other Playtest UK groups re. Zombology.

Hopefully, things will pick up next week!

Print on Demand: A Review

After considering the prolific Daniel Solis' Kigi for a while, I happened to catch a note of his on Google+ a couple of weeks ago stating that it was the final day of the sale he runs every summer. So I decided to jump in an order a copy of Kigi from Drive Thru Cards.

Kigi is a beautiful game (that much is clear from all the pictures I've seen of it) and it struck me as a good opportunity to check out how Print on Demand (POD) works from a customer's perspective while considering it as a publisher (since it's another option I've been considering for publishing Zombology).

The process
I ordered the game one Saturday night from the Drive Thru Cards website. Pretty standard stuff, it was easy to use and all went very smoothly. I bought Kigi ($9 sale price) and a plastic deck box ($1) which all seemed very reasonable. Shipping to the UK was $14.70 which was a bit galling, that's more than the game! Still with the exchange rate the whole thing came to about £16, which doesn't seem to bad for a small print run game.

I got an email on Tuesday telling me they had shipped the game, which is not bad considering they had to print it and cut it out first. Shipping took eight days - arriving on the following Wednesday in a little box which protected it nicely during transit.

Pros

• The biggest advantage of POD from publisher's point of view is the lack of associated hassle and cost. If I make a hand-made game and sell it through my website there's a lot of time and effort required, plus a lot of upfront cost if I don't KickStart it. With POD all I'd have to do is upload the files and choose a retail price, no cost or effort involved.
• The cards were very well made, better than I could manage by hand.
• Shipping to the US/Canada will be quicker and cheaper than from me in the UK.
• Cross-selling opportunities - people going there to by one of Daniel's or another designer's games might see an ad for Zombology and add it to their order.

Cons

• Shipping to the UK (where a lot of my friends & family customers are) is exorbitant.
• I prefer card games in tray and lid boxes with large format rules - I broke the plastic deck box the day I got it and having the rules on half a dozen cards is a bit fiddly, it's easy to get them muddled up.

Summary
If the shipping to the UK wasn't so high, I'd be very tempted by Drive Thru Cards. There are other options (e.g. The Gamecrafter) that might have more affordable shipping and different packaging options. I need to investigate those too.

In other news, I'm making decent progress on my German app, it's coming along very nicely. What I really need to do now is get a load of vocabulary into it. I need to start reading the data from a file, rather than hard-coding it in.

Produce / Consume

As I'm sure most of you are aware, the title is a reference to Race for the Galaxy, one of my favourite games and one which I've played exactly 150 times according to BoardGameGeek.

There's a sliding scale of producery-consumerness (a technical term, check out the Big Five personality traits) on which, I'm assuming, most people sit slightly nearer the Consumer end than the Producer end. Some people are happiest reading a great book, or watching a great film or shopping for new clothes. Some people however are happiest when making things, whether knitting cardigans for babies (thanks Mum!), writing novels or painting.

It turns out I'm definitely towards the producer end of that scale. By day I'm a computer programmer, and I love that I can type words and bend a computer to my will, creating programs and apps that are useful, interesting, attractive or just fun. By night, I'm just as bad. Historically it's been writing (bits of!) computer games, painting miniatures, designing worlds and stories as a DM and obviously designing board games.

It struck me this week that probably the bit I enjoy most about game designing is actually the graphic design. Working with a very limited set of artistic skills to make prototypes or hand-made games that are attractive, or at least functionally well designed. Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy trying to wrestle in my head with the game design to design something that's fun to play and there's something zen-like about cranking out well-made hand-made games, each one lovingly hand-crafted but done well. And the end result is satisfying too, when you hear from a gamer who has played one of your games and really enjoys it. I'm not a great game designer, so it's rare enough that I hear from a gamer who loves one of my games, but when it does it brings a smile to my face every time - I've brought pleasure to another human being, often someone I've never met (and probably never will). That's pretty cool.

Why this philosophical train of thought? I've been agonising over whether or not to do a hand-made run of Zombology for a couple of months now, after bravely/foolishly committing to doing it at the beginning of the year. The concerns that have given me most trouble are not having enough time to get to the conventions I need to attend to drum up sales and whether there's still a market for hand-made games now that everyone can make a professional run of a game they've thought of through KickStarter.

I've asked the question in a couple of places and the advice seems to be that I should embrace KickStarter and do what I plan through there. Assuming I was successful on KickStarter, most or all of the games would be pre-sold so convention attendance would be less critical, so that could be a plus point to going that way. Anyway, Im not leaning toward KickStarter, despite my earlier antipathy towards it. I'm flighty like that.

In other news, I've got some feedback from a couple of playtest groups. Both of them only played it three player (the weakest I think). The other Playtest UK group played it a couple of times, and didn't seem overly enamoured. In the second game they tried changing a couple of rules. They did however provide really good feedback which I need to go through and learn from. The other group had played it before (about a year ago) and really liked this new version, playing it eight times (though still only three player). They suggested a rules clarification that I'll have to make shortly.

This week is mostly about trains. I hope to make some good progress on the Zombology art upgrades on my way to and from my quarterly hospital visit to Sheffield on Wednesday.

Digital Leaps and Conceptual Bounds

I've been working on a couple of things this week, making good progress on one, and working out in my head what to do with the other.

The first is my learning German app that I'm writing for my phone. This week I've made loads of progress on in. The first half of the week was refactoring the crap out of it, removing a load of duplication, specialist classes and generics and just making the whole thing far, far simpler behind the scenes.

That set me up well for the second half of the week where I added staged repetition and improved the styling quite a lot. There's still very little vocabulary in there, but I figure once I've got it working how I want I can start adding vocabulary wholesale. For the moment just getting it to the point where it's a useful tool for myself will be great. I'm really pleased with the progress I've made this week, it feels like it's developing rapidly despite working on it in my free time around work and a family.

The second thing alluded to in the title is the Zombology graphic design. I've got a moderately attractive (if very simple and hobby-esque) prototype that has been slowly improving over the last year or so. I'm fairly happy with a lot of it now, it's simple, but it's ok for a hand-made print run. The weakest links now are the zombie overrun card, the pay rise card and the round marker cards (which also feature zombies). If I'm honest the weakness is my piss-poor attempt at drawing a zombie. It's bad. It's also not really in keeping with the rest of the graphic design, so it's letting the side down and standing out as well.

I've had an idea this week about how I can come up with something that's more in keeping and within my limited art skills. So the next thing to do is break out my abysmal old, slow laptop and crack on in InDesign/Illustrator. I've got four hours of train journeys in a couple of weeks for my clinical trial hospital visit, but I hope to make a start on this stuff before then. Hopefully, I'll also have some feedback from the other Playtest UK groups soon too, which will give me a more unbiased view of the quality of the game.

In other news, I've crossed Hansa Teutonica off my ten plays list with a game at Games Night last Wednesday and I'm leaning more towards a hand-made, stretch goal/pledge level free run on KickStarter (despite my KickStarter misgivings). Need to do some more market research still, but the idea is taking root in my head.

Market Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Digital Digression II

So I've made a bit of progress on Zombology this week, posting blind playtesting copies to the Leeds and London Playtest UK groups, I'm hoping to get initial feedback from those groups in a week or two, once they've met and had a chance to get a game or two in. I also got a few games in at Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday, my first attendance there in a while.

I still haven't decided what I want to do re. board game publishing, so in the meantime I've been doing some work on my German learning app instead. I loved Duolingo, which I've spent a lot of time on, but I've finished the course now. I still practice every now and again when things show up as needing refreshing but certainly not every day any more. The main thing I didn't like about Duolingo was the lack of structure. You seemed to learn words in a haphazard fashion, and it was hard to see things that were related at the same time. I learn well when I can tabulate things in my head, so I've been writing another app for my phone to provide a more structured learning experience for myself.

I started it months ago, and then in the Zombology publishing related excitement I shelved it for a while. Last week I went to Manchester on the train again for work on my own (which is unusual). I had my laptop with me to use in a demo once I got there, which gave me an opportunity to do some development on the train, and since then I've been cracking on, making some decent progress. At the moment I'm focusing on getting the basic functionality in there, rather than lots of vocabulary. That can always come later once it works. Hopefully I'll find it useful as my language learning journey continues.

I think I'm now waiting for the Zombology feedback before I make any decision on the publishing side of things. There are still three options I'm considering:

• Self publishing a run of 150 hand-made copies
• Print on demand, e.g. Drive Thru Cards or The Game Crafter
• Hawking to an established publisher

I had an established publisher who was vaguely interested, but he wanted to see blind playtesting feedback, which at the time I didn't really have. So getting the feedback from the Playtest UK network is useful for that route and will hopefully lead to a better game regardless of which route I take.

Harnessing the Power of the Network

The Newcastle Playtest group of which I'm (theoretically at least) an assistant organiser is part of a larger network of playtest groups across the UK. Playtest UK started in London and then spread to Cambridge before we became its northern-most offshoot. Since our creation, groups in Cardiff, Brighton, Leeds and Enfield have also joined, further strengthening the network. The group runs playtesting sessions at a number of UK conventions and members have published several games including Elysium, Relic Runners and Pocket Imperium. Brett J. Gilbert one of the co-organisers in Cambridge, who submitted a great game to me in my Reiver Games days, has since had great success being nominated for the Spiel des Jahres in 2013 and the Kennerspiel des Jahres this year.

Since my appeal for blind playtesters last week on my blog garnered a grand total of zero applicants, I've decided to harness the power of the Playtest UK group by sending copies of Zombology to a few of the other groups for testing and feedback. Leeds and London have already volunteered (thanks!) and I've agreed to playtest a game for the London group in return. Hopefully this can be an ongoing arrangement where we harness the power of the wider group to gain access to willing (and knowledgable) playtesters who we don't have a close friendship with to gain the honest, critical feedback that you need as part of your game development. Blind playtesting is important for just that reason: to get people to test the rules without you there to clear up any inconsistencies and also to get honest feedback that isn't tempered by friendship. Honest feedback is critical to get a better understanding of how your game will be received outside of the group of friends you usually play it with.

I spent Sunday evening printing and assembling their copies and will pop them in the post today. I look forward to getting an outsider's view of Zombology and using that information to help me plan my next steps.

In other news, Newcastle Playtest had to rearrange our last meeting, since very few of us could make it a couple of weeks ago. It's now tomorrow. I'm in Manchester for the day for work again but fortunately we meet near the train station, so I can amble straight over on my return, I'll just arrive a little later than usual. I'm hoping to get some feedback from the guys on the new version, which is still yet to be played!

If you'd like to try the latest version it's not too late to apply in the comments below.

A Little Encouragement

I've been quite busy with work again this week, including another long day's trip to our corporate UK head office in Manchester. But regardless I bravely soldiered on and got loads of gaming in. It's a hard job but someone's got to do it and, selfless man that I am, I took one for the team. You guys owe me.

Wednesday's Games Night suffered extreme attrition and ended up just being Ian and me. We played Lost Cities, Firefly (one towards my ten plays goal!) with the Pirates and Bounty Hunters expansion (for the first time) and Carcassonne: The Castle (one towards play every game I own once this year). Firefly was done and dusted in only 65 minutes! That's about half the length of my shortest game to date. Ian and I have both played it a few times so we knew what we were doing and that made a big difference. I liked the new story card from the expansion, but we didn't really play and of the expansion PvP rules, just by being good space citizens rather than any determined effort not to.

Thursday's trip to Manchester was with DJ and Mal, two Games Night regulars who had cried off on Wednesday. As usual, we ended up playing a bunch of board games on the iPad during the journeys, mostly Carcassonne and Hey! That's My Fish! We also played a few games of my Martian Dice app on my phone :-)

Then Saturday I finally made it to Newcastle Gamers for the first time in what feels like centuries. It was a great evening, I only played a couple of games, but it was great to catch up with everyone there and the games were good ones that helped towards my ten plays goal (Homesteaders and Aqua Romana - which is now ticked off the list).

Finally, as I was leaving I spoke briefly to a few Newcastle Playtest regulars. Last time I went to Newcastle Playtest (also some time around 1530, I'm pretty sure Henry VIII was still on the throne), I'd left a copy of Zombology with Dan for him to take to the UK Games Expo playtest event. I've not seen Dan since, so I don't know if he got a chance to try it out, or what the feedback was, but I hope to see him next week. Olly said it felt like he hadn't seen me in ages, and I said that I'd missed the last couple of sessions due to travelling for work. I jokingly said it must have been weird having a session that didn't start with a couple of games of Zombology (it's our staple opening game while we wait for people to arrive). But it did! Dan took it along and they all played it without me! A good sign.

That and another event during the week are starting to restore my confidence. On Tuesday I was out of the office at a networking event where I bumped into a friend of a friend who recognised my name and company name from my badge. She asked if I was the game designer and we chatted about that for a bit. I told her about Zombology (She started it! I didn't pounce on her like a lion that hadn't been fed in months! Well actually I did, but in the sort of genteel way that's acceptable at a work conference). I happened to have the prototype on me (it was in my bag for Wednesday's train trip where it didn't see any action), so I showed it to her and explained the premise. The combination of zombies, wacky science and a £9 price point combined into enough excitement for her to pre-order a copy there and then. Maybe selling 150 won't be so hard after all...

In Flux and In Corporeal Form

Finally, after a few weeks of fannying on, I've finally printed out and constructed the new version of Zombology incorporating changes suggested during my trip to St. Louis at the beginning of June. I had the evening to myself last night as The Wife was out with friends, so after getting The Daughter to sleep I printed it out and made it all up. Excellent! Took long enough. I've been wanting to try this version out before sending it out for playtesting, but I have to miss this week's Newcastle Playtest because of travelling for work again, and I've not managed to fit a playtest in at work for a while either, so screw it, it's going out untested! It could be awful! It could be genius! Only one way to find out.

I've contacted a few friends who have done playtesting for me before to see if they'll try it out and give me some feedback, but what I really need is blind playtesters who aren't friends of mine and are willing to try it a few times and give me some honest, critical feedback. Fancy helping out? Let me know in the comments.

That's the 'Corporeal' part of this week's title. The 'In Flux' part refers to the fact that I'm still deciding what I want to do about Zombology. I've got three options as I see it:

1. Give up on publishing myself and either make it freely available (print and play) or try to get a publisher to pick it up.
2. Publish it in a time-light fashion, e.g. print on demand through a company like The Game Crafter or Drive Thru Cards.
3. Or the original plan of a small, hand-made print run that I'll sell through my own website.

If you'd asked me two weeks ago, I was utterly convinced that option 3 was the way I wanted to go, now I'm in the middle of a crisis of indecision. I'll give myself a couple of weeks to discuss it with The Wife and think things through, but then I'm going to have to make a decision and start acting on it.

Still, at least with the finished prototype I've actually made some concrete progress this week.

A Moment of Reflection

Not much progress again this week :-( I was babysitting for a friend on Tuesday and used the evening to finish the graphic design (and add some further improvements) of the next version of Zombology, but then was too busy for the rest of the week to either print them out or playtest them.

I was hoping to get the printing done on Friday night while The Wife was at the cinema, but after a bad night's sleep The Wife cancelled, and my cousin popped in on a visit from Bath while showing her son local universities he's considering attending. I was also hoping to make it to Newcastle Gamers for the first time in months on Saturday, but instead we went on an impromptu camping trip to the wilds of the North Pennines (which were lovely!).

I missed the last Newcastle Playtest too due to a work trip, and I'm going to have to miss the next one for the same reason - I'm travelling a bit more for work now. Newcastle Playtest is only monthly, so I'm going to go three months without attending one, which is pretty pants for a supposed co-organiser.

All this has got me thinking. Am I really set up for another self-publishing company? I did pretty well last time around, but I had no kids at that point and The Wife was really busy with work so I had plenty of time in the evenings for making games and marketing. A weekend away at a convention was an easy sell at home because The Wife was busy and often worked some or all of the weekend anyway. Now I'm travelling more with work and have a family, do I really want to be going away from them on the weekends that I'm not away for work to demo and sell games at conventions?

Last time round I sold a good chunk of games at conventions. I went to The Cast Are Dice, Beer and Pretzels, The UK Games Expo and a few smaller ones. It was a good opportunity to promote my games because when you're running a small company with no marketing budget the vast majority of your intended audience have not heard of you, your company or your products. When I'm going on regular trips away for work, some of which eat up a weekend it's much harder to justify giving up another weekend away from The Wife and The Daughter for selling games. The Daughter's growing up so quickly at the moment that every missed moment counts. The work trips are also getting in the way of playtesting, my Games Nights and attending Newcastle Gamers. In addition to time for developing, manufacturing and selling the games, I also need time to test them, and at the moment it feels like I haven't got that time available.

I've got 13 pre-orders already, which is good, but that's less than 10% of the print run I'm planning. Can I sell the other 90-odd percent through free web marketing and the odd convention attendance? I don't know.

Anyway, I'm going to take a couple of weeks before I commit any money to the effort to check whether I'm sure I'll have the time to commit to making this successful, or whether I think I can make this successful with the time available to me. I'll also consider other paths to publishing one final time: print on demand, or selling to another publisher.

While I think about it, I'll get this next prototype printed out and tested, so at least I'm making some progress...

Like a Glacier

Moving forwards, only very slowly.

The good news is that my company bank account is set up and ready to use, the bad news is that I don't yet have online access to it, and I want to make sure it's all up and running correctly and there's cash in it before I start spending from it.

In other progress this week, I've tweaked some art for Zombology, done a first draft of a company logo (now with my dad, a graphic designer and artist, for review) and I've selected a web hosting company for the company website. But still, slower going than I was hoping for. I need to get the holding web page ready to put up on the website once it's ordered and print out the new version with its rules tweaks this week too. Once it is physically realised, I can start testing this new version to check I've not broken anything with these minor rules changes.

I must do these things this week. Must. It's almost halfway through the year and I'm still a way off publishing the game.

Concrete Progress At Last

As I mentioned last week, one of the things I had to do this week was an appointment at the bank to open a bank account for my new hobby board games publishing company. This is an important step in my journey to being a publisher again: before I can sell games I need to get them manufactured and I need a website and a PayPal account, all of which require a bank account to fund.

The business adviser that I spoke to in the bank was impressed that I'd taken along all the games I'd (self-) published as Reiver Games. I wanted to give him an idea what I was talking about, but also to show him that this wasn't a crackpot idea, it was something I had some experience and knowledge about.

As it was it was unnecessary, he'd played Settlers of Catan with some friends a few weeks ago, so he knew exactly what I was talking about. Disappointingly, unlike when I created the Reiver Games account back in 2006, he didn't place an order!

The account was ordered on Thursday, there's some legal things they have to sort out, so it should be set up properly on Tuesday, then it's game on.

In the meantime, I've some tweaks to try out from my playtesting in the States and I'd like to give a few key playtesters access to the latest version to get their feedback while I start improving the art. I had great ideas initially about trying to do some comic style art myself, but I think it's more realistic to do some simple iconic art (more like 6 Nimmt!) rather than wait until I've improved my art skills to the point where they are good enough.

We've got a very busy week at work this week, so I doubt I'll be able to test it one lunchtime, but maybe it can get some action at Games Night on Wednesday.

Anyway, there's plenty to be getting on with now!

Jack: 3 - US Axe Murderers: 0

As I mentioned last week, I've spent the most of the last week in St. Louis, MO at a conference for work. It was a long and busy week, but I managed to get a night off on Wednesday and that meant I could get over to the St. Louis Board Gamers Meetup at The Wizard's Wagon in University City.

I've been to this conference four times in a row now. The first time in Vancouver I met up with Tao who runs Starlit Citadel (who had been a supporter of me in my Reiver Games days). The second time in Minneapolis I got to go to the Fantasy Flight Event Center twice on two consecutive nights with gamers who collected me from my hotel, drove me to a restaurant for dinner, then to the Center for gaming and then finally back to my hotel (thanks Alfredo, Jay and Fred!). Last year in Baltimore I got nothing, but this year I struck gold again.

Dan posted on the Meetup page that he could meet me at a coffee shop opposite a Metro station and then drive me over to The Wizard's Wagon. Which he did after first recommending a take out place and something good from the menu. We played seven games (variously with Dan, Patrick, Rebecca, Chris, Jim and Kit) including a couple of playtests of six-player Zombology (from which I got some new ideas to try out). At the end of the night Kit also introduced me to Medina by Stefan Dorra which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was a great game, coupled with very attractive city construction during play. There's apparently a re-print coming fairly soon. Finally Dan drove me back to my hotel in time to meet up with my colleagues for a final couple of drinks on our last night in St. Louis. Thanks Dan for a great evening!

That's now three times I've agreed to meet a random American whom I've only met on the internet, get in his car and get driven to an out of town location, and not once have I been axe-murdered. Board gamers are awesome!

I'm back now, and The Wife is away for a couple of days with work tonight and tomorrow. I'll be using my free evenings to make a new version of Zombology to try out some of the ideas generated in America, and to prepare for Thursday morning's meeting with the Bank Manager. We're almost off to the races!

Hello From Sunny St. Louis

I'm writing this at 3:30am in my hotel room listening to Mongolian Folk Metal, clearly not yet on US time :-( And St. Louis isn't very sunny either.

The last week has been a bit of a blur. I drove to Bristol, then Devon, then went to Plymouth for a few hours to see Dave, one of my old friends from York who had the temerity to move four hundred miles away. It was great to catch up again, Dave had been around during the founding of Reiver Games and even came to the UK Games Expo with me back in 2007 to help out on my stand. But since he moved down south we've seen very little of him, 400 miles is a long way to travel with a two year old!

After that we had a few days in a rented farm 'cottage' with eleven other members of my family - 14 of us in total! It was a lovely week, and we even played a few games - gaming is not something I generally do with my family (usually the in-laws), by my sister, brothers-in-law and even my mum got involved. We played five back to back games of Zombology one night and I've taken a few more orders off the back of that!

The day after driving back from Devon I was collected at 6:30am for my trip to St. Louis, MO. I'm out here for a week for work, but I spent a chunk of the flight time playing board games on my iPad with my boss Ian and I'm hoping to make it along to the St. Louis Board Gamers MeetUp on Wednesday evening at a Wizard's Wagon. We'll see! 

I'm back on Friday, when I hope to start making progress on publishing Zombology again...

The Elephant In The Room

This post is being posted automagically while I'm on holiday in deepest, darkest Devon with the entirety of my fairly large family (14 of us! In one house!). It might take me a few days to respond to comments as I'm not sure if they have the internets in Devon yet.

So I'm getting back into hobby board game publishing as I'm sure you're all aware. I've got a game to publish (Zombology) and some startup funds and a business plan. Go me!

I've bravely decided to eschew KickStarter and just make a small hand-made run like I did in the early days of Reiver Games. I keep harping on about how I've done this before, and I know what I'm getting myself into, yadda, yadda. I've run the numbers and I think I can sell 150 copies at a reasonable price and yet still make enough money to cover my (non-time) costs and the overheads and hopefully have enough left to invest in potential future projects. I made 100 copies of Border Reivers (my first game) by hand and sold them all within a year and then 300 copies of It's Alive! by hand and sold those all within a year too. So 150 sounds pretty achievable, right?

The only thing is that I made Border Reivers in 2006 and It's Alive! in 2007. That's years ago. Literally. Since then, everything's changed. Back in the day there were only a few of us hobby publishers hand-crafting games in our basements/garages/living rooms. If you were a rabid collector of board games with a ton of money you'd won at the casino there weren't that many options to get your hobby publisher fix so by just being there and talking on BGG occasionally, I made a surprising number of sales.

KickStarter changed all that. Now everyone can pitch their hobby game to a room full of people who've just splashed out on something similar. If you want to support the independent hobby publisher which of the 1,500 KickStarter projects you've heard about in the last month are you going to back? All of them? Probably not.

When you've got KickStarter projects up the wazoo all of which have funded on day 3 of 30 and hit the stretch goals that means the components are linen-finished and the artwork was done by Banksy and the game pieces are made of real gold and stone and steel and wood and it comes with miniatures and expansions and the moon on a stick, why would you spend more money on yet another game?Especially one that's been hand-crafted by an idiot and illustrated by the same and the components are cut out by hand and made of paper and card and not even gold inlaid, linen finished card?

There's the question. Is there still a market for my handmade games? Is it big enough for a print run of 150 copies? We'll soon find out...

Marching Forward

It's been a week of steady progress this week. I've been working on a logo for my new games publishing company with my dad (a retired art teacher, artist and graphic designer). I don't really want to announce anything about the company until I've got all its accounts set up, and that's waiting on having a bank account to pay for them. I've an appointment with the bank when I get back from the U.S., so that should all get moving then. I'm going to use last week's blog post as my business plan when I go to the bank, that and my previous experience running a board game publisher should carry me through I hope. That blog post also led to a couple more pre-orders, so I'm slowly climbing towards break even point already.

Before then, the main things to work on are the Zombology graphic design and a draft website, plus any Zombology art I feel capable of making. I've got a bunch of time this week before I go on holiday - I'm babysitting for a friend on Monday night and then have four hours on trains on Wednesday as I head down to Sheffield for my quarterly hospital visit. I'm hoping to get next week's blog post written as well as make some progress on Zombology during that time.

One of the other things I'm working on is trying to streamline the rules around the Gurus a bit. Gurus represent an expert in each of the six suits in the game and they provide their owner with an in game benefit in their suit. Initially they all start out neutral, but during the game players can recruit them (or steal them from an opponent). Functionally they work pretty well, but it's a bit clunky and hard to explain, so it will be good if I can come up with something similar enough to still work well, but simpler to explain and smoother to play. We tried something on Thursday lunchtime, but it seemed like a step backwards, so that's fallen by the wayside.

In other news, I had a second consecutive Games Night last week (I've only managed four in the last nine weeks!), but sadly it's the last for another three weeks as I have a week's holiday immediately followed by a trip to St. Louis for work. While in the States I'm going to try to make it to a St. Louis Board Gamers MeetUp on the Wednesday, like I did a couple of years ago in Minneapolis, should be fun!

At Games Night I managed to tick another game off my ten plays list, King of Tokyo is safe too now. But I'm starting to think about another purge (not using anti-aircraft guns!). There's seven or eight games that are great games, but we just don't play them at Games Night, so I'm thinking quite seriously of getting rid of them to free up some more shelf space...

The Economics of a Small Print Run

This week I've been making some real progress on my second incarnation as a hobby publisher of small print run games. I've booked an appointment at the bank to set up a business account and I've been getting quotes for printing Zombology too.

When doing a small print run, just as with a large print run, there are three variables you need to balance against each other: total cost, cost per game and quality.

The three are tightly linked: better quality increases both total cost and cost per game; a bigger print run increases total cost but decreases cost per game due to economies of scale; reducing cost per game lets you increase quality or decrease total cost.

As a hobby publisher who has publicly eschewed KickStarter, all three of these are very important:

• Total cost: this plus some money for the overheads is my stake in the gamble of running a company. It's coming out of our family's savings, so I don't want this to be too high or I'd be being very irresponsible. First time round there was just The Wife and I in full time employment, and we had some money from an unexpected windfall to invest, but it's different once you've got a kid - priorities change. So low total cost is important to me.
• Cost per game: in addition to the manufacturing cost I need to pay for: a website, advertising, PayPal fees, convention attendance and many other things. I've previously stated that I want to keep cost per game around 50% of retail so that the sales will cover the other things and hopefully make a small profit. I'm not going to take a salary (again!) but I want the company to at least pay for itself, and if I make a profit I'll have more money to invest in potential future games. Keeping the game price low is also important for boosting sales, especially in other countries. I'm aiming to make the game retail at around £10, which is in the same ballpark as 6 Nimmt! and other similar games in the UK. But that's $15.50 at today's exchange rate in America or 13,80€ in Europe both or which are quite high for that type of game, plus there's shipping on top to make it more expensive still for people outside the UK. Clearly with a small print run I'll be selling directly - there's not enough margin for shops or distributors to take a cut.
• Quality: I'm aiming for a similar quality to Border Reivers, the first game I self-published back in my Reiver Games days. The cards were on decent card stock and professionally laminated to protect the ink, the box was a tray and lid one with wrap-around artwork, that looked similar to, if not quite up to spec of, a professional game. With a small print run you don't have enough copies to amortise the cost of an artist, so I'm doing it myself (an obvious weakness in the quality). The cards will be cut out by hand but at least the corners will be rounded, so again, it looks of reasonable quality.

Bearing all this in mind I've priced up the cost of box card and printing for 50, 100, 150, 200 and 300 copies. I made 100 copies of Border Reivers by hand and then 300 copies of the first print run of It's Alive! again by hand, so these numbers aren't ridiculous. I've used the same print company as for those two games so I know what quality to expect. I reckon I could sell 50 copies pretty effortlessly - I've already got 8 pre-orders from people who didn't know which game I was going to make or what price I was going to charge! When my friends and family find out I'm sure I can get a few more sales and then a minimal amount of advertising on BGG would wrap up the rest. 100 is a bit more of a stretch, I managed it with Border Reivers, but I had more time to devote to it back then and went to several conventions to raise awareness, which will be a trickier now that I've got a kid. 150 or 200 would be hard work this time round I think and 300 really hard. I managed it with It's Alive! But at that point I'd been doing it for a year or so and had a decent following and a mailing list and everything, none of which I have any more. So it's all down to the numbers:

50: £7.84 per copy, total price £392, profit (if I sell them all at full price and before expenses mentioned above) £108
100: £5.28 per copy, total price £528, profit £472
150: £4.44 per copy, total price £666, profit £834
200: £4.11 per copy, total price £822, profit £1,178
300: £3.66 per copy, total price £1,097, profit £1,903

50 copies is not going to break even once the overheads are accounted for, they'll almost certainly come to more than £108. 100 copies is much better, but at 150 it gets interesting. I'm willing to invest/risk £1,000 in this venture (plus a bot-load of my time for free!), and 150 copies falls well within that. So that's a tick (check for Americans). £4.44 is less than half of £10, but also actually less than half of £9. £9 retail would reduce the cost for Americans by $1.55 and Europeans by 1,38€. It would also shave £150 off my potential profits, but £684 is still plenty for the overheads I'm expecting and should leave some money behind so that I've got more money to invest in another game if I want to in the future. Tick!

We have a plan! Now I've just got to get the artwork done and get all the company stuff set up...

P.S. Anyone want a lovingly hand-crafted, limited edition copy of Zombology for only £9 plus postage and packing? ;-)

Feeling Like A Publisher Again

In 2004 I was a hobby games designer. In 2006 I became a hobby board game publisher. In 2008 I became a (bad!) professional board game publisher. In 2011 I was a failed entrepreneur and really didn't feel like designing games any more.

When I had the idea of Codename: Vacuum at the end of 2012 I started my second incarnation as  a hobby games designer. And that's where I stayed for nearly three years.

My Reiver Games failure hung over me, so I've been in no rush to get back into publishing. I know just how much hard work goes into hobby publishing (hand-made Border Reivers-stylee) and how many copies you've got to make and sell to be successful in the professional arena. Also, my confidence took a bad knock: games I thought would sell really well didn't sell and the game I had designed personally was the weakest of the games I published as Reiver Games.

So for the last two and a half years I've been a hobby games designer and nothing more. That's been fun, and I've now got a great support network in the form of Newcastle Playtest. All this time my games have been slowly developing. I've been keen not to rush into publishing again with a sub-par game.

This year's goal of hobby publishing a game is finally starting to take shape and once again I'm starting to feel like a publisher (albeit a hobby self-publisher). Rather than designing the games or doing the basic graphic design required for a prototype, I'm starting to think in terms of production.

This weekend I've made a new prototype of Zombology, trialing a net for a wrap around box label (currently just a white sheet - no art at all).

I'm also working out how best to arrange things on sheets of paper to minimise printing costs. I've got a quality bar that I want to stick to (as good as Border Reivers), and depending on cost I'm going to have to choose a print-run size based on where the economies of scale make it affordable.

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again!