Launch Week

Our latest FlickFleet campaign goes live on Gamefound tomorrrow. 

The rollercoaster begins. 

We use crowdfunding to raise the funds to reprint most of the expansions at once. 

Amortising costs. 

Some small economies of scale. 

Because of that, we need a to raise a lot. 

Not millions.

Not hundreds of thousands.

But certainly tens of thousands. 

All but one of our FlickFleet campaigns have been the best ever (at the time). 

The last one was second best. 

We’re now in the lull, before the launch. 

Will it do well? 

Best ever? 

Enough to fund the print runs and shipping?

Not enough? 

Soon we’ll know. 

There are some encouraging signs. 

We already have our second best number of pre-launch followers. 

And we’re not far off best ever pre-launch follower count. 

Will it be enough? 

Soon find out…

Ticking

I've finally finished the campaign page for the sixth FlickFleet expansion: Box of Xeno Flicks 1.

It's been a long time coming.

Once again, real life got in the way.

It's been a hectic month or so in the day job, which has eaten into my Eurydice Games time.

But it's done now.

And sent for approval.

With just over a week to spare.

If you're interested in FlickFleet it's a great way to get the base game and/or Xeno Wars.

With discounts.

And subsidised shipping.

If you're already a fan of the game it introduces 14 all-new ships to the Xeno Wars factions.

Ten are already included in the box.

The remaining four can be unlocked as stretch goals.

The more backers we get, the more you all get in the box.

As two guys making a game in a garage we have very little capital.

The only way the company works is by using crowdfunding campaigns to combine our several small print runs into one larger one, getting us some small economies of scale.

Making the game affordable for us.

We really appreciate your help with that!

Thank you in advance if you're considering backing the campaign.

And please share it with any friends or family you think would enjoy FlickFleet.

Bleed Through

I have a full-time day job.

And a family with youngish kids.

And I run Eurydice Games in my spare time.

I try to keep them all separate.

Focusing on my day job during work hours.

Focusing on my family when I'm with them.

I'm very lucky that I work hybridly.

I can work from home or go into the office, which is only a 2 mile walk from my house.

I like going into the office. 

I enjoy the company.

We have a lunchtime games club.

I like working from home too.

I get to spend my lunch breaks with The Wife.

Get chores out of the way during the day so I have more time in the evenings for Eurydice Games.

For the last month I've been in the office every day because of a late-running project.

It's been stressful.

And it's eaten into my time.

Then Friday we had some issues too.

I was working until late.

And a bit on the weekend.

I don't like the bleed-through.

I'll be working from home again more next week.

And with The Wife travelling for work I'll be able to spend lunchbreaks catching up on Eurydice Games stuff.

Like the Gamefound campaign.

It's not all bad though. 

I played a lot of games in February.

Mostly at almost daily lunchtime games club.

Colds

Paul and I have both been feeling rough this week.

But we've managed to eek out some progress.

Paul continuing to churn out ships from the laser-cutter.

To fulfil our website orders.

Me, inching towards the completion of the crowdfunding page.

And, while feeling particularly rough this weekend, cranking out a first cut of the high-ink page for Exodus:

My fourth print at home roll and write.

Community

I love the feeling of community.

I’m stuck in the office all month for February.

So I’m playing games every day in lunchtime games club.

We’re a small community of gamers at work.

I design games.

So we started a community of board game designers in and around Newcastle.

It’s doing the best it ever has.

My sister-in-law and her husband have been visiting this weekend.

We’ve been hanging out and playing games all weekend.

I love that feeling.

Being amongst my people.

One of the reasons I love conventions.

The sense of belonging.

We have a FlickFleet Facebook group.

This week we were asked for a FlickFleet Discord.

I don’t really use Discord.

But I’ve set one up.

If you’re looking for a FlickFleet community.

Rollercoaster

We call ourselves a publisher.

But really we're a self-publisher.

Zombology.

FlickFleet and its billion expansions.

Three print at home roll and write games.

All designed by me, or me and Paul.

Nothing by a different designer.

Yet.

We've signed a contract for a FlickFleet-related game.

And there was another chance this week.

I went to my monthly playtesting session in Newcastle. In the pub.

Played one of the other designer's games.

Loved it.

Told him I'd be interested in publishing it.

Spent the week thinking about it.

How to make my own copy for playing with Paul and my other friends.

Then a few days later the designer said he'd rather pitch to a big publisher.

Disappointing.

But fair.

I'd told him he'd be better off doing that at the beginning!

Still disappointing though.

I loved it.

Stealth

I’m working on the next FlickFleet Gamefound campaign.

Beavering away behind the scenes.

But there’s not much to show for it.

The draft has hardly changed in a couple of months.

I’d hoped to make really good progress this week.

The Wife was away for work for three and a half days.

But solo-parenting is time-intensive.

Didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped.

I think I need to push the campaign back a bit.

I have made progress this week though.

Getting prototype ship outlines designed.

Then Paul added etching.

And cut them.

Need these for the page design work.

It’s getting there.

Stealthily. Behind the scenes.

Together

Paul and I run Eurydice Games.

He does all the manufacturing and most of the shipping.

I do finances, marketing, and graphic design.

And we both do the FlickFleet game design.

Which is slightly awkward.

Because I live in Newcastle upon Tyne.

And he lives in York.

100 miles away.

Our families are friends, so we try to meet up in Newcastle or York several times a year.

To catch up and hang out.

We play games with each other and the kids.

Chat, eat, hang out.

And don't make a heap of progress on Eurydice things.

Like FlickFleet game design.

I've just spent the weekend in Leicester with Paul.

Due to a storm disrupting my travel, I had to change my travel plans last minute and travel to York on Thursday evening (no Games Night 😢).

So I got to hang out with Paul and his wife on Thursday evening.

Then Paul drove me to Leicester.

And we spent 72 hours together.

At the end, rather than getting my train in Leicester, Paul gave me a lift back to York and I boarded it there, as it went through.

Another 2.5 hours in the car together.

We got so much done.

A very productive weekend.

Plus we sold some games.

In a space museum.

How cool is that?

Space!

I’m really interested in space.

In sci-fi.

Obsessed maybe?

I’ve published 7 or 8 games I’ve designed.

Border Reivers, set near where I live in the 1500s.

Then Carpe Astra (with Ted Cheatham) set in space.

Then Zombology about curing a disease with crazy things (not ivermectin or bleach though).

Then FlickFleet and Xeno Wars (with Paul), both set in space.

And three print and play roll and writes: Rocky ‘Roid, The Planets My Destination, and Away Team Bingo.

All set in space.

I’m working on another print at home roll and write too.

It’s set in space.

So you can imagine how excited I was when we were invited to demo and sell FlickFleet at the National Space Centre in Leicester last January. 

At their To Boldly Game event.

It was amazing! 

I’d been meaning to go there for years.

Plus, we sold way more games than I was expecting too.

They’ve invited us back for this year’s event.

It’s this weekend.

I’m so excited!

Comparison

Is the thief of joy.

Apparently.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

I’ve seen a few people on the last week or two publishing their earnings in board games.

Or talking about it.

A few surprises.

A small publisher similar to us.

Who I’d assumed was doing much better than us.

Because they are in retail and distribution, unlike our hand-made-in-a-garage games.

They’d had their most profitable year yet.

Only a four-figure loss.

We’ve been profitable 5 out of 6 years!

Go us!

And a big name games designer who’d made over €150k in royalties this year! Which was worse than last year!

I had no idea that was even possible.

I assumed the full-time game designers were earning a small but comfortable salary.

That’s way more than I make in my day job as a manager of a team of programmers.

And way more than our revenue, let alone profit.

Another designer I’m aware of who had made $34k in royalties.

Again many times our profits.

I'd like to get to higher turnover.

And higher profits.

So we can fix our cashflow issues.

Have money to invest in new games.

Have enough cash left over for me to draw some of my dividends out.

Back!

I'm back!

Happy New Year all.

After a week or two of Christmas preparation and then visiting Paul, Christmas itself, then visiting my family and then the in-laws.

I'm back.

Cracking on with the Gamefound campaign for Box of Xeno Flicks 1.

Finally making good progress.

I'm loving their new import/export feature for rewards and add-ons.

It's saved me a ton of time.

I could export the rewards and add-ons from the last campaign.

Tweak them.

Then load them back in :)

Next up is the graphic design for the rewards/Box of Xeno Flicks/Shipping sections.

And getting some details up about the new ships you can vote on :)

2025

Not much to say this week.

I’ve been celebrating Christmas.

First with my family.

Then with The Wife’s.

Lots of time in the car.

But also eating, drinking and hanging out.

Plus a little gaming too.

Just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support in 2024.

Paul and I really appreciate it.

And to wish you all a happy, healthy, and fun 2025!

Fauxmas

We've spent the weekend in York.

Visiting Paul and his family.

For Fauxmas, our fake Christmas.

Complete with Fauxmas Eve, Fauxmas Day (including presents and Fauxmas Dinner) and Foxing Day.

It was a lovely weekend.

A great chance to catch up.

Play games.

Drink.

Eat.

And be merry.

We played lots of games. Mostly including at least one of my kids.

So lighter games.

Lots of Apples to Apples, Codenames, Just One, A Fake Artist in New York and UNO.

But also Las Vegas.

And I got to try the latest version of Jotunsaga with Paul.

Get his feedback.

Discuss some new ideas.

I've got a new version to try now :)

Plus some weeding of the many ideas for FlickFleet: A Box of Xeno Flicks 1.

A great weekend :)

Hasty

I've spent the last week fighting with my bank.

Mano-a-telephone.

Toe-to-handset.

I lost.

Despite last week's blog about how we would pay royalties that week I'm still in limbo.

Eventually I pulled the money from PayPal, rather than pushed from the bank.

It's left the bank.

And now it's in the ether.

The bank says they have fond memories of it.

PayPal say we await it patiently.

It'll arrive in a week or two.

Where the hell is it?

The ether.

So the royalties are still pending. Until the money is in the warm embrace of my PayPal balance.

Which could be another week or two.

I can only assume someone is carrying it on foot.

In the meantime, I've been working on my third print at home roll and write again.

And the troll game.

And planning 2025.

This weekend we're going to York to spend 'Fauxmas' with Paul and his family.

There will be food and presents and games and playtesting.

And more work on the next FlickFleet campaign.

Royalties

Box of Flicks 2 was largely designed by fans of the game.

A fan contributed to Box of Flicks 1.

There was lots of fan content in the Box of Pirate Flicks too.

We make a big thing about how we credit them and pay them royalties.

Their names on the boxes.

We've been meaning to pay the last lot for a while.

It includes the last year's reprint and this year's Box of Pirate Flicks.

So it's quite a lot of money.

Things started going wrong at the beginning of the year when we ran out of FlickFleet for a few months.

So web sales tanked as we had nothing to sell.

And overheads started eating into the profit from the Pirate Flicks campaign.

Website sales were pretty slow all summer.

The pot dwindled further.

When it came time in August to ship the Pirate Flicks games to the US we had three options.

We choose the fastest.

And most expensive.

Then VAT bit us.

The quotes were excluding VAT. I forgot that.

We had to pay them, and another £1,500 in VAT.

We'd get most of that back. In early December.

We've been almost out of cash for five months.

I've had to lend the company money a couple of times to pay the bills.

We've just got the VAT back!

And had our best ever week of website sales. And another really good one.

It's time to pay the royalties!

A weight off my mind. I hate owning people money.

I've spent most of the weekend trying to sort it out. 

The transfer to PayPal was blocked by the bank as a suspect transaction.

I'm hoping I'll have the money available to pay out this evening...

Seven

This week has been bizarrely good for website sales.

Last three weeks have been within 50p of each other.

This week was more than double them!

And I’ve no idea why!

Not complaining though.

That’s eased our ongoing cashflow issues.

And it’s, in combination with the VAT rebate that’s coming shortly, means we can make some long over due payments :)

But that’s an aside.

The main focus of this week has been…

FlickFleet SEVEN.

Our seventh FlickFleet campaign.

The campaign is created.

There’s a very basic holding page.

Which already has over 100 followers!

In addition to starting work on the campaign, I’ve been reviewing the fan submissions.

Starting to shortlist them.

Playtesting is next :)

Sirens

This week has been all about sirens.

The Ancient Greek kind.

I had an idea for a Siren themed game a couple of years ago.

I wanted it to feel like Guillotine and 6 Nimmt.

Funny. Chaotic. Sweary.

I made a first version.

Tried it.

It was bad.

Made a second after chatting with Casey at work.

Better, but the cards were way off.

Then it languished for a year or two.

At Newcastle Gamers a couple of weeks ago there were six of us and that second version was the only six player game anyone had brought.

So we played it.

The cards were still way off.

So I started on a new version.

Got that ready last weekend.

Played it at work on Tuesday.

It went better.

New ideas for cards.

Made a new version Friday.

Soloed it Saturday.

Made a new version Saturday night.

Very quick turnaround.

Hopefully I can play this one at work tomorrow…

Despondent/Enthused

It’s been a weird week.

I’m still trying to get to the point where web sales cover overheads and we have a viable business that doesn’t rely on Crowdfunding to keep us afloat.

I’ve upped the ad spend, hoping to boost sales.

Now sales are just covering ad spend instead.

And with Trump on the horizon our games are about to get 20% more expensive for Americans.

That’s half of our customers.

Could have been worse: at least we don’t make them in China.

I’m feeling a bit despondent about it.

On the plus side, I finally joined Bluesky.

Come find me!

I moved from Twitter to Threads a while back.

It’s been fine.

But I missed my gaming chums.

The vast majority of the #CraftWednesday crew weren’t there.

Within hours of joining Bluesky, it felt like I’d found most of them again.

I’m feeling enthused.

I’ve found my team again.

Roots

I started computer programming when I was ten.

Both my degrees are in it.

Almost all of my day jobs have been doing it.

For the second time in my life I'm now a manager of a team of programmers.

I don't program at work any more.

I've been doing some for Eurydice Games this week though.

I had to get the books completed up to the end of October so our accountants can do our VAT return.

That included 102 Gamefound orders for Away Team Bingo.

I can download them from Gamefound as a spreadsheet.

I need to get them into our accounting software.

I can import them to it as a spreadsheet.

A different spreadsheet.

Over the last few years I've written a few programs to move orders between the various spreadsheet formats we use.

This week I've been tweaking them to support the latest changes.

And then getting those orders into the books.

Around that I've been tweaking my Sirens game.

We played it at Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday.

There were six of us, and it was the only game present that went to six players.

I knew it needed work.

So we played it.

Needs some work!

Now I have some ideas of how to work out the kinks...

YorCon

I’ve spent the weekend in the middle of nowhere.

Playing games with an awesome bunch of people.

Lots of new games.

My favourites were Lord of the Rings Duel and Space Base.

We went for a couple of walks in the countryside.

I played a couple of games of Jotunsaga.

Gaming designing in progress

With other designers.

It got really good feedback.

And spawned a bunch of new ideas.

I took a Sharpie, a pen, and some blank cards.

So I could make a new version.

And try that too.

And there’s Newcastle Playtest tomorrow.

It’s coming on nicely…