Proteome: A Designer for Hire?

As I've mentioned recently, I've started designing a second game: Proteome: The Drug Discovery Card Game. I've mentioned before that I got the idea after a joke from the marketing department at work. We were discussing my games designing past and Beth mentioned that I should make a game for our company to giveaway at scientific conferences that we attend. We all had a laugh about it, but it sparked an idea in my head.

To make a game professionally, you need to make 500 copies at a bare minimum - 1,000 is a more realistic number. Making a board game, with several components, a board, cards wooden pieces, etc. is not cheap. A small run - 1,000 copies or so could be very expensive - £15 or more a copy, which would mean a £15,000 outlay. Clearly a lot to be spending on conference giveaways. The next morning, in the shower I had an idea for a card game that fit the bill. A card game is that much cheaper to manufacture - plus easier to pocket as you wander the convention trade show.

If the game is to be given away at conferences the audience is not going to be hardcore gamers, there might be a few gamers in attendance, but it'll be almost entirely people who've played nothing but Monopoly and Cluedo. The audience will be smart, but not into complicated games. Of course, being me I don't want to produce something rubbish that I'd be ashamed of if a hardcore gamer saw it - I'm looking for a fairly simple filler that is engaging and appropriately themed. Appropriately themed in this case means collecting and publishing data on proteins that could be a target for a new drug, while robustly refuting the discoveries of your competition.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be a good idea - both the game concept and the giveaway idea. So over the last couple of weeks I knocked up a prototype for my game idea, and took it to work (where I dropped it on the desk of Paddy, a vocal encourager, and said 'Done!'). We played it this week and it's not there yet, but the basic idea works. It's too complicated (a perennial problem with early prototypes of mine!) and could do with simplification, but there's something there. It gathered quite a lot of interest while we were playing it during lunch in the office :).

Marketing seem to be taking the idea of a game as a giveaway quite seriously. Who'd have thought that I'd stop working in games, go back to work and then still get to do games design as part of my day job? Of course, even if I can get the game finished there's no guarantee that management will go for the idea, so it may all come to naught. But it's fun while the idea is still a possibility.

My Juices Are Flowing...

Creative juices that is, before you get any ideas.

Reiver Games, my previous games publishing effort was formed after I got into games design. After years writing tiny bits of computer games I was in the mood for doing something that I could start, work through and finish. I'd played Mighty Empires with some friends for a weekend (and I mean a weekend - we played for 36 hours over three days!). I thought I could create something similar that was a bit less random (I'd been wiped out in a dragon attack after 24 hours of play!) and that played a bit quicker. Border Reivers was the game I created in that vein. On the back of Border Reivers and the perceived success of it (I sold out of the 100 hand-made copies within a year) I was in the designing mood, I started probably five or ten new games ideas, all sorts: an abstract game, an empire game, a beach-combing game and card game about the development of York.

After a year or so, I had another game out, designed by another designer and it was selling much better than Border Reivers had. With a little distance I'd realised that Border Reivers wasn't as good as I'd originally thought. In fact, I was beginning to think it was pretty weak. I'd played it with a lot of people by that point, and some loved it, some liked it and some were distinctly unimpressed. I could see there were flaws in the design, but as both the designer and the publisher I had no distance. I'd not played many games by the time I'd finished Border Reivers: Carcassonne, The Settlers of Catan and Citadels, maybe a couple of others. As I played a wider range of games I got a better grip on what a good game was. At this point I was trying to position Reiver Games as an independent publisher, and I was receiving more and more submissions to publish. The quality of those submissions varied enormously and it was clear that some designers really struggled to understand just how unfinished their designs were. As an independent adjudicator, I could clearly see these games were weak, but as the designer they were too close, too invested in their designs to see the flaws.

Seeing this from the other side made me re-think my own designing. I was that designer too, too invested in my own games to see their weaknesses and flaws. I start to be much harsher on my games, equivocating, second-guessing myself and struggling to make any decisions. Aware of the flaws of Border Reivers and the problems a lack of impartially brought I stopped designing my own games, afraid I'd publish games of my own design, after blinding myself to their flaws. After It's Alive! I published Carpe Astra (with some design input from myself) and Sumeria, neither of which sold very well. As Reiver Games slowly crawled towards the grave I lost confidence in myself, even to choose other designers' games.

Needless to say, designing was far from my mind for all this time. Now, a year and a bit after I went back to work I'm in the mood again. I've got two different prototypes ready to go: Codename Vacuum a Steampunk/Sci-Fi deck-building and tableau driven game, and Proteome: The Drug Discovery Card Game, an idea that sprang into my head after a joke from one of the marketing team at work. What's next? I've a tile-laying game knocking around in my head too, themed around Lewis & Clark's exploration of the American west.

What I really need to do now is get playing them, so I can start the improvement/design/development process. I've a weekly games night that I don't really want to become all about the playtesting (as the games will be broken a lot of the time and not much fun to play), and there's a bi-weekly games club in Newcastle which I don't make it to very often. I'll be going to Beers and Pretzels in May, but before then I could do with a few playtesting nights to get the games into some sort of shape before showing them to the discerning public. I need to find some time in my busy schedule.

Codename Vacuum Gets an Overhaul

As I've mentioned in my last few posts, I've started designing games again. It's been a long time (for most of the time I ran Reiver Games I wasn't designing myself, just developing other people's submissions), but I've really caught the bug again.

I'm investing pretty much all of my games design free-time in Codename: Vacuum a tableau-driven, deck-building steampunk space opera (trying saying that ten time quickly!). The first playable prototype was finished a couple of weeks ago and saw action at one of my weekly games nights. It kind of worked how I'd intended but was too complicated and way too long (around two hours!). I'm aiming for the under-an-hour sweet spot that lots of games I really like (and a few I don't) hit. I'm thinking: Race for the Galaxy, 7 Wonders, Eminent Domain, Dominion.

It turns out that my design principles are to start off with something way too complicated and then simplify over time - which reminds me of something Grant Rodiek designer of Farmageddon tweeted last week:

If my rules don't get shorter after I incorporate my changes from a playtest, I immediately assume I took the wrong path.

It starts off well in my head: Steampunk!, Space Opera, with spaceships, and combat and trading ..., and then gets a little bloaty: ... and locations, and science, and tech trees and pirates and the passage of time ... and then gets ridiculous: ... and you can choose what weapons your ships have, and what clothes your admiral is wearing and and whether you are going to trade bauxite or Martian elephant leather.

In the carefully controlled environment inside my head the game works like a charm - fast paced, fun with just the right amount of player interaction and decision making.

Then you play it with real people and you realise that the world in your head has no connection to reality at all. The game is slow, there's too many options, too many rules, whole chunks are non-intuitive, overly clunky or just pointless.

So you try to take what you've learnt and start again. You simplify things, take bits out, reduce the options, streamline this and cleanse that. Make a new prototype and try again.

That's where I am now with Codename: Vacuum. I've spent a good chunk of this week redoing all the cards on the computer, ready to be printed out again. Pretty much every card has changed, whether removing options, stripping out unnecessary complexity, trying to get things to make sense or have a purpose or just trying to improve the balance between all the various options. I hope to have the second prototype ready for testing towards the end of the week, either at my games night on Thursday, or at Beyond Monopoly! a games club in York that I used to attend when I lived there and will be visiting again for a first time in several years on Saturday.

Fingers crossed I'll find time in this hectic week to get it finished, printed and cut out. Then get it to the table (I've already had a few people requesting a chance to playtest it for me :-) ). At which point I'll find out that this new, streamlined, balanced version incorporating everything I learnt from playing the last hideously-broken version is way too complicated, too slow and hideously broken. At which point I'll have to start all over again!

Playtesting and developing a game is a long hard slog, at the beginning it's a case of four steps forward and three steps back. But, hopefully, over time you make progress and get to the point where it still mostly fits that vision you had all those months or years ago, but is slick, interesting, fun to play and you have people clamouring to play it when they see you. Will Codename: Vacuum make the grade eventually? I hope so, but only time will tell.

A First Look at Codename: Vacuum

As I've mentioned over the last few blog posts, I'm working on a new board game design, under the moniker: Codename - Vacuum. It's been a slow process, I first had the idea back in December, but finally, the game has seen the light of day as a finished first prototype:

This is a very early prototype, the first one to be played properly (though I did start a game of an earlier version made out of torn paper!). This one will hopefully get a run out at Games Night on Thursday and this weekend when I'm down south seeing several of my gaming buddies and previous playtesters.

The first idea I had about the game was a deck-building game with a Race for the Galaxy-esque player tableau set in a classical space setting. About a week later, once I'd had a chance to think things over, I realised there were too many of those floating around at the moment (I'm thinking Core Worlds and Eminent Domain which I got for Christmas "for research" ;-) ) and other big name sci-fi games (Eclipse I'm looking at you [... on my shelf ;-)]). So it was time for a slight theme-tweak. Instead of sci-fi, I was thinking Steampunk Space Opera. Sounds great doesn't it? I have my mate Ben to thank for that one. He asked me what it was about. My answer?

[long pause] Um. I don't really have an elevator pitch for it. It's steampunk. In space. Forming an empire in our solar system.

Ben's "Steampunk Space Opera" is a lot punchier!

The original idea was typical space opera, locations spanning multiple star systems, large scale battles. This one is a little different - the locations are real/fictional places within (and just outside!) our solar system, and with all the funkiness that steampunk brings: brass! gears! monocles! cavorite! The idea is that you take one of the great powers of the world in an alternative 1900 (set in a world where all those cool things in fiction are real: Martians! Men in the Moon! Cavorite! Dinosaurs! - I've been raiding Conan Doyle, Burroughs, Wells and Verne for ideas :-) ). Unlike most steampunk games I'm aware of, there will be a progression: early techs are pure steampunk then things will evolve during the game to modern and then futuristic technologies.

Again, in addition to the theme changes there have been changes to the mechanics as well. These changes have happened more recently. Like this week, while printing the prototype! Initially I was thinking a pretty standard deck building game, but with a tableau in front of you where you kept the locations you had captured.

I'm now thinking a combination of hand-management of your tableau and deck building. I'm thinking four types of cards: locations, units, population and technologies. Cards can be played into your tableau or into your deck. Cards in your tableau can be used every round, those in your deck will be available some rounds and not in others. The tableau is of a limited size so you need to choose which cards to keep there. There are some restrictions of course: locations can only go in your tableau, population in your deck or attached to a location, only one of each type of technology can be used in each turn.

This is of course a very early prototype. It will be unbalanced and probably broken. The cards might not make sense, definitely have typos and the rules are way too complex and will need simplifying. The reason I've not invested much effort in the card art yet is that I expect these cards to be changed frequently. New titles, new rules, new mechanics, the version I have in a few months is likely to be completely different from this one, so I don't want to invest too much effort in it. After a few plays it may turn out the whole game is a write-off. Only time will tell...

Here's a little teaser for you until I've played it a few times and got something to report:

Gaming Buddies

I've not made a huge amount of progress on Codename: Vacuum the last few weeks - it has been fairly hectic for a number of reasons. In the meantime, a trip to York made me think of something.

In the last seven years I've lived in five houses in three towns over 250 miles apart. During that time I've made a bunch of really good friends - the sort of guys you stay in touch with despite living hundreds of miles apart and try (not as much as I'd like!) to make the effort to visit them despite the distance. And I've made all these friends through gaming.

This weekend we had to pop to York (90 miles away from our new home in Newcastle upon Tyne). While there we popped in to see my friend Paul. Paul responded to a request for Border Reivers playtesters back in 2006, and I then joined his twice weekly games night and he became one of my best mates and Reiver Games playtesters. While in York I also met Dave through the local games group Beyond Monopoly!. Dave and I shared an interest in gaming (I think it was Space Hulk that first drew us together, but we liked very similar games, and liked the same things - except the Star Wars prequels!). Sadly, after a couple of years Dave moved to Plymouth (350 miles from York) and I haven't seen much of him since (though it's definitely my turn to visit (now 410 miles away!).

Then we moved again, 160 miles further south to near Bedford, and I joined a new game group. Terry, Graham and Andrew were available during the day on occasion, so we formed a playtesting group. As Reiver Games slowly withered and died our group changed from a playtesting group to a regular gaming night.

In a couple of weeks we're going down south to spend a weekend playing games with Terry, Graham and Andrew. We saw Paul and his family yesterday, and have agreed to see them on the way down south for another catch up and some gaming. I'm hoping to arrange an epic trip down to Plymouth to see Dave in the next few months (which will probably involve, you've guessed it, some gaming).

We moved back to Newcastle at the end of last year, where we still have some really good friends (several of whom come to my games night), but through the local games club (which I've hardly made it to yet) and a games night at the local games shop: Travelling Man I'm hoping I'll make some more excellent friends.

I'm really glad I have gaming as a way to meet new people, and that the people I meet share my interests and often turn into some of my best mates. Who have you met through gaming?

The Beginning: First Steps in Crafting a New Game

My games design process starts with a spark of an idea, either theme, mechanics or a combination of the two. This usual sets my head to buzzing with a whole raft of ideas, from mechanics, artwork, market segments, and the inevitable riches that will follow from the million copies sales it is bound to achieve. At this stage I have to ride the wave of unrealistic optimism and get as many of the ideas down as possible before I forget them all. In the past this means getting to a notebook as fast as possible and just dumping all my thoughts onto paper. These thoughts will mostly be theme and mechanics ideas, with maybe a mission statement for the game describing which sector of the market I'm aiming for, target play time, etc.

Recently I've started using a draft email to myself as a virtual notebook that I can access from anywhere I've got internet access, without having to remember to cart the notebook around with me. I've found this really useful, but it has it's strengths and weaknesses like anything else. It's quick to use, and very portable, and also allows editing as your ideas change over time. The downside is that sketching images of design ideas, card layouts, tile distributions, etc. is much slower than scribbling something quickly with a pencil.

The ideas keep coming and the game will evolve pretty quickly at that stage with everything potentially open to change. Over a few days I get enough down (and have enough ideas) to begin the prototyping journey. I've a lot more ideas down on paper than prototypes - lots of these ideas fail at the first hurdle as I come to the conclusion that they won't work, won't be fun or just lose interest in them. After the first year or so of running Reiver Games I went off games design, aiming instead to position the company as an independent publisher of games by other designers. For some reason, I'm back in the designing mood.

If the game keeps my interest enough to make it off the paper of my notebook, the next stage is to make a paper prototype. The early prototypes are just something that you can play (probably by yourself) to work out the worst of the kinks. There will be loads of them and at this early stage everything is still changing constantly, so you want to make something that's playable but doesn't require too much effort to construct. Normally I do this all with pencil and paper. I take sheets of A4 paper (similar in size to US letter I think) and literally tear them down to size. Cards are a sheet folded into 16ths or 32nds, player boards might be a sheet folded in half (i.e. A5), a game board might be two sheets taped together (or a sheet of A3). There's no artwork, just enough text/iconography drawn on with a pencil to be playable. I use pencil rather than pen as I fully expect to be rubbing things out and then re-drawing/writing them after every test game. Using paper for cards is definitely sub-optimal from a play point of view (they are very hard to shuffle!) but this version isn't really intended to be played by anyone other than me, and rather than spending tens of hours cutting out and making pretty card ones, it's more important at this stage to make sure this early game idea actually works enough to play with other people (which is when the real playtesting begins).

The game I'm working on at the moment (Codename: Vacuum) is a card game in the Dominion vein, i.e. it has hundreds of cards. I started making a starter set of cards a few weeks ago and got to just about enough to start testing it to see if the basic premise works before I came down with a filthy cold and then we had Christmas. I'm back home again and I'm already thinking of changing up my process for this game.

Folding and tearing all the cards, then drawing on them the basic layout is a lot of work when you do it hundreds of times. To add the fact that this version is almost unplayable in terms of shuffling is making me think of cutting to the chase and making the Phase II prototype straight away. Or at least Phase 1.5. This would be made out of craft card (about 220 gsm) and be partially printed with a basic card layout to reduce some of the drawing drudgery. I'd still leave the game without any artwork and write the game text in pencil to make it easy to change as I work out the strengths and weaknesses of the various cards.

I still have the Adobe InDesign software I bought for Reiver Games, so I can use that to quickly knock up the card outlines and cutting guides, print those out and then fill in the text with pencil afterwards. I also got an A3 inkjet printer that was capable of printing on card - specifically for printing prototypes - so I'll be able to print them at home too. I've got three days before I have to go back to work - time to get cracking!

What is your process? What steps do your designs go through? What tools do you recommend?

Which Came First? The Mechanics or the Theme?

With my earlier games: Border Reivers and Carpe Astra the mechanics definitely came first, and the same is true of It's Alive! one of the games I published on behalf of someone else. With Border Reivers I started trying to make a game like Mighty Empires that played faster and less randomly; I really liked the networking mechanic in the submission by Ted Cheatham that became Carpe Astra, though the theme changed quite dramatically. It's Alive! had been through several themes before I changed it to building Frankenstein's monster. So in my experience, mechanics first seems to work ok.

To further reinforce this, most of the many games I've started designing but failed to finish/lost interest in/couldn't get working started out with a theme first, which I tried to find mechanics that fit after the initial idea.

The theme acts as a hook for the game to interest people, hopefully enough that they want to play or buy the game. It's often possible to re-theme a game by picking something that roughly fits the mechanics and then tweaking the mechanics, action names or card wording to get the game to make sense with the new theme. In my experience it's often possible with very few changes to the game.

As I mentioned earlier this week after a conversation with The Wife a new game idea sprang into my mind almost fully formed. Theme and mechanics combined. Since then I've tweaked the theme slightly to distance it from a couple of similar new games (which I've added to my Christmas list so I can play them and ensure my game develops differently) and the mechanics have begun the long road of changes that will hopefully lead to a great game.

For me personally, I think the mechanics-first approach is the way to go. What are your experiences? Are you a theme-first or mechanics-first designer? How will my new game idea develop: theme and mechanics in lock-step, or will the theme change as time goes on? Stay tuned to find out!

Hello? Hello? Anyone here?

Well, it's been nearly six months since Reiver Games officially shut down. The email addresses and website will be disappearing this week probably, the bank accounts are shut and the only time my games are mentioned on BGG is people trying to offload their copies in trades or auctions.

It's Alive! is now available on the iPad (a version which the designer arranged, I gave him the rights to the game and let them use the artwork for free, but otherwise had nothing to do with it).

I've moved back to Newcastle upon Tyne, where I lived when I first designed Border Reivers (hence the northeast theme), and I'm back working for the company I worked for at that time again too. I'm still into games, hosting a regular weekly gaming night at our house and trying to get along to Newcastle Gamers when my busy schedule allows.

Games design-wise I've done almost nothing for a while now, I've had a couple of ideas over the last few months, but it's been hard to drum up any enthusiasm for anything with the spectre of Reiver Games hanging over me, reminding me how bad I was at it. In the meantime, I've been moping around the house clearly bored: "In need of a hobby".

Until yesterday. Yesterday was a day of driving, at the end of a weekend of driving. The Wife and I were coming back from Bristol where we'd been visiting family and we had a five and a half hour drive on which to amuse ourselves (I was supposed to be driving, but driving-schmiving). We got to talking about Reiver Games and The Wife asked how sad I was about it. I admitted that I was disappointed that I couldn't make it work, and that every now and again I thought about how I could have done it differently: smaller print runs, not make the leap from hobby self-publisher to selling to distributors and trying to make a living from it in one go, etc. And then something weird happened.

You could do it again, you know. As a hobby. I'd help.

Wow. In the (para-phrased) words of Wash from Firefly: "Good wife". I'd tried. I'd failed. Miserably. To the tune of several thousand pounds of (almost) our money. And The Wife was willing to let me try again!

We got talking about the sorts of games I'd make if I had a chance to do it again differently. We talked about the sorts of games I think sell really well and the sorts of games she likes. And then I had an idea. It sprung from something she said and suddenly my mind was whirring with game ideas, I had a fairly well-formed concept in my head and I was fleshing out mechanics and card examples in my head instead of the things I should have been doing (like sticking to my lane and avoiding HGVs). It's Codename: Vacuum by the way, more to come on that front hopefully (especially if anyone is listening!).

So where now? I'm designing again, and I've got a load of enthusiasm back. I'm making notes and hoping to do some prototyping in the next couple of days. Will I have another go at a publishing company? Probably not. But the possibility is there and you never know. I'd certainly do things differently this time round and I know so much more than I did when I started Reiver Games, so it would definitely be less of an uphill struggle.

Reboots seem popular these days (Star Trek, X-Men: First Class, the new Spiderman), maybe I should hop on the bandwagon...

The End

It's been almost exactly a year since my last post here, but I'm back for a one-time only update on the state of Reiver Games, me and a brief retrospective on the five years of Reiver Games.

A Year! What's Happened?

Since I last posted here I've been trying (successfully :) ) to get back into paid employment. After a brief spell of work experience working for a previous employer in Newcastle, I found a full-time role in software development (my official trade) near home and I've been doing that for the last seven and a half months. I'm nearly back to full steam, relearning those skills I'd learnt in the eight years before I quit coding to try Reiver Games as a full-time concern. The job is going well, they seem to like me and the work I'm doing, and I've got to say I'm loving getting a pay-check every month. It's awesome :)

Bored Now. What About Reiver Games?

Reiver Games has been very slowly ticking along in the intervening twelve months. I cut the prices of the games I had on consignment at distributors in the UK and the US in an attempt to get rid of them so all my stock was in one place. It worked, I sold the last games on consignment at the beginning of this year.

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That left me with just over three thousand games left in my warehouse (and my office): predominantly Sumeria, but with a decent chunk of It's Alive! and Carpe Astra too. Plus about 600 copies of the 2-player expansion of Sumeria. I've been trying to sell these to liquidators over the last few months and getting little traction.

About a month ago all that changed, Tanga.com got back to me (I'd assumed at that point that I'd heard the last from them) and agreed to take 300 of each game (and 300 expansions) to sell in the US (so if you're in the US they should be arriving in about two weeks...) and with that sale I could afford to sell the rest to a UK liquidator for a laughable amount. Between the two they should just about pay off my bank loan, so I can close the company down and pay off my creditors without having to dip into our personal funds.

I've got about a dozen games left at home (the loose ones I couldn't sell to a liquidator) that I'm selling on my website at pretty much cost plus shipping. Once those are gone it's just the final 300 copies of the Sumeria expansion, and then I'm done. I'm thinking of sending the remaining expansions to BoardGameGeek, so that at least they should find loving homes :)

You Rich Enough To Retire?

Sadly no. I don't have the exact figures, but I reckon I lost about £13,000 ($19,000) on Reiver Games. Dear God, that sounds awful. The one slight redeeming feature is that the vast majority of that was some money we came into unexpectedly (which was the only reason I could afford to invest in the company and not earn anything for two years). I say again: Earning a wage again is awesome.

What Went Wrong?

Clearly I screwed things up. How? Can I at least provide some pointers to the intrepid among you to help you avoid my mistakes?

Firstly, I made the jump from hobby publisher to professional publisher too soon and too quickly. The games I made by hand were very successful - I sold out of both print runs within a year and pretty much doubled the investment both times. 100% ROI is pretty good going. But that was selling a few hundred games mostly direct to gamers, not selling thousands predominantly to distributors and shops. Rather than rushing into things, I should have continued to make the games by hand and sell them to gamers at conventions, while building up my reputation and stable of games. Once I had a strong reputation and 5-10 games under my belt, I should have moved to a half-way house, where I got the games professionally manufactured in much smaller print runs (500 - 1,500) but still sold directly to gamers - that way I could afford the high costs of small print runs, since there were no middle men taking their cut. The fully professional model could come later, once I had a bunch of awesome games with a proven track record and a wider reputation. This is similar to the model Martin Wallace has taken with such success (though clearly it helps that his games are extremely popular).

My second mistake was around print run sizes and manufacturer choices. I decided to get the games manufactured in Europe for three reasons: it would be easier to liaise with the manufacturers, the environmental cost of shipping the games to me would be less than from China, and I knew that working conditions and materials would be of a known high standard. I was very happy with the second manufacturer I used: LudoFact in Germany. Their customer service was excellent. The production quality was excellent. They delivered on time and as budgeted. Sadly, getting the games manufactured in the EU cost me, as the unit cost was significantly higher, which both raised my retail price and squeezed my margins. In an attempt to overcome this problem, I increased the size of my print runs to reduce the unit costs. This left me with me with more games than I, as a new relatively unknown publisher, could sell. As a result, the capital I needed to invest in new games was instead sat in my warehouse as unsold stock, and even worse, it was costing me money to warehouse it there.

Mistake number three was related to mistake number two. In an attempt to get retail prices to an affordable level, while still selling at 40% of retail to distributors I squeezed my margins too far, to the point where I was making nowhere near enough money on each game, and yet still the games were expensive, especially in Germany (where they had to compete with local manufacturers doing vast print runs) and the US (where they had to compete with local manufacturers doing much larger print runs and getting the games made in China). With high prices people were less likely to take a punt and see if they liked it, so sales were lower than they needed to be. Making the games in the smallest box I could fit them in, while popular with collectors with huge collections and saving money on shipping, also made the games look even more expensive when compared similar sized games in the shops.

Finally, there was the bank loan. The bank were very happy to lend me £10,000 to get Carpe Astra manufactered, just after It's Alive! was released. It's Alive! was several months late, due to problems at the manufacturer, and with my pitiful margins had hardly recouped any of its investment when I wanted to release Carpe Astra. It turns out that the bank made a good decision: I'm going to re-pay the loan in full a few months early. Sadly, it was a terrible idea for me. I was paying £330 a month servicing the loan, which meant the money I was making month in, month out was quite rapidly disappearing from my account, leaving me little to invest in new games. In hindsight, I should have gone more slowly as discussed above, without having to rely on a loan. If I really wanted to jump straight in at the deep end of selling to distributors, then I needed a much larger initial investment, probably on the order of £50,000 - £100,000 - enough to fund five or ten games without relying on external finance.

It probably shouldn't be the last point, but I also needed a much better understanding of marketing and a solid marketing strategy. Considering how little I knew, it's a wonder that I managed to sell 5,500 games worldwide before the end.

Final Thoughts

I'm proud of what I achieved during the last five years with Reiver Games. From a pipe dream of making a board game in Newcastle eight or nine years ago, I sold four games (8,500 copies in total including the liquidators), to five of the world's continents. I got my products into 21 distributors in North America, the UK and throughout Europe.

I really enjoyed the graphic design and learning new skills in sales and marketing and dealing with manufacturers, distributors, shops and logistics. I loved going to trade shows and conventions and introducing gamers to my games.

I'm really glad that I decided to go for it, and that The Wife gave me her unconditional support. Had I not done it, I'd be financially better off, but I would not have learnt everything I did over the last five years, nor would I have met so many gamers who share my passion for board games.

I'd like my last words here to be a huge thank you to all my customers (thanks again for your support), all the gamers I've met (thanks for your enthusiasm), the designers (including those who sent me games I didn't publish) and my friends and family (especially The Awesome Wife) for your support, encouragement, advice and for not treating me like the lunatic I clearly am. I'll leave this blog up, hopefully the information contained herein will provide information, advice, a cautionary tale and entertainment(?) for other wannabe designers, publishers and entrepreneurs.

Rollcoaster Finally Falls Off Tracks

So I hinted that there might be some exciting news coming soon on my blog. Sadly this isn't it.

After I announced that I was closing the company I had several enquiries from people interested in acquiring either some or all my stock or even a share in the company. Despite being obviously very disappointed to be closing down the company after three and a half years, this interest in buying bits from me was a silver lining as it meant I might be able to pay off my debts and even possibly re-coup a small chunk of my initial investment.

Then, just over a week ago I went to a meeting with another UK publisher: Spiral Galaxy Games to discuss the possibility of a co-publishing deal for Braggart, the fun card game I've been alluding to on my blog for many, many months. It was a productive meeting, we came up with an agreement we were both happy with and it looked like Reiver Games was going to rise from the ashes and continue publishing games. I contacted the designer and the artist I had lined up, everything looked good, everything was go. We were going to try to get everything ready for Essen in the hope I could get a stand booked at the last minute (it was already past the booking deadline).

The designer had already seen the contract (though not yet signed it) and was up for it, but he wanted to finalise the game before signing the contract. The artist needed to get working immediately, and wanted me to sign a contract with her. I was a little wary about signing the artist's contract before the designer's one was signed as I didn't want to be left carrying the can if the designer dropped out.

After a chance meeting with the designer at the UK Games Expo it became clear to me that the designer wanted to finalise the game before signing the contract so that he could negotiate a new contract where I didn't have the right to change anything - he wanted complete control over the game design (which I can understand - it is after all his baby). Sadly, that meant that he was not interested in signing my standard contract (which give me the right as the publisher to make changes to the game as necessary after seeking input from him). With the designer pulling out, I'm left owing the artist a couple of hundred quid for the early artwork she's done (which was fantastic).

With no hope of publishing that game, and nowhere near enough cash in the company to publish anything else any time soon I'm back to shutting the company down. I've sold a bunch of stock to a UK distributor and now I'm trying to close a deal to get rid of the rest of the stock to a publisher in the US.

The last couple of weeks have been very intense. First very down, then very up then down again. Fortunately, on another front things are looking up as I've got a chance to work with a former employer in Newcastle on a short-term contract. It'll give me a chance to refresh my IT skills and add some recent experience and a recent reference to my CV.

An Update

Just a quick update to let you all know where things stand with Reiver Games.

Firstly, I'd like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has got in contact to commiserate or show their support - thanks also to everyone who has ordered games from me since the announcement :)

So, where do things stand? At the moment Reiver Games is continuing as it always has, shipping direct orders and dealing with distributors as before. I've received several enquiries from people or companies interested in helping me close out. I've no firm offers yet, but one indicative offer and several expressions of interest.

As far as I can tell from the early information I've received these range from 'I would like to buy all you stock' to 'I would like to buy Reiver Games as a going concern complete with website, licences and possibly even your continued involvement'. I've also had some interest in re-printing my games in other languages.

Obviously, there's many a slip betwixt cup and lip, so none of these may materialise into a confirmed offer. But at this point I'm quietly hopeful.

Au Revoir

As you will all know I've been finding things hard the last few months. Privately I've been agonising about what to do with the company. I had a game that was very nearly ready to go, but to go with it I would have needed another £15,000 or so in the company (in liquid asset form - i.e. cash). I've been leaning towards going back into IT work (full-time or part-time, contract or permanent) to earn some money not only to fund my personal life, but also to generate enough cash to fund my next game.

The other option that was floating round in my head was just to jack it all in and shut Reiver Games down. I've invested £13,290 of my own money in Reiver Games, and as things stand although my stock is worth more than that (at the price I paid, let alone an 'average' sale price), with all my money tied up in stock the company is not going anywhere. I've tried a whole bunch of things to try to drive sales but without cash to advertise heavily the sales have been pretty slow. Is it really worth throwing another huge wad of cash at the company and hoping I do things better with my next game?

I've decided: No, it's not. So I'm now officially winding Reiver Games down. As you can imagine I'm pretty gutted about this, but it's a hard market to succeed in, it's been a lousy couple of years economy-wise and I have to accept some responsibility and admit I'm not the guy who can make this happen.

What's next? I'm not sure. I've a lot of stock left (which I'm still paying to warehouse), and a bank loan to service. Some options are:

• Sell the company on to someone with more business nous and a bigger wad of cash who can afford to advertise the games to drive sales and fund more products. I can't see this being that likely.
• Sell a large amount of stock to a distributor/competitor and dispose of the rest.
• Sell off what I can and bin the rest
• Fire-sell what I've got

What to do? I really don't want to fire-sell the stock - the designers have entrusted me with their games and I want to them earn the rewards they deserve for their brilliant designs. Also, I really don't want to hurt those distributors and retailers who took a chance on buying my stock and have done a huge amount to support me. Undercutting them just to turn a quick buck feels like a really crappy thing to do. I'm going to be speaking to a few people in coming weeks to explore the options I have.

On a personal note I'm spending most of my time looking for paid work now, but I hope to post a few retrospective posts about what I feel went right and what went wrong. Consider them cautionary tales for those of you who would love to get into the gaming business.

I'd just like to take this moment to thank everyone who has supported Reiver Games over the last three and a half years - I definitely couldn't have done what I did without you. Thanks. Also, special thanks to my designers: Yehuda, Ted and Dirk. Thanks you trusting me with your designs - I'm sorry I couldn't make them as successful as they deserve to be.

On a final note, if you'd like to commiserate in person (or point and laugh) I'll be attending Beer and Pretzels in Burton on Trent in a few weeks.

Crowdsourcing Support

Since I announced the sad news that I'm going to have to go back into IT to pay the bills (Reiver Games hasn't reached that point yet, and doesn't look like it will any time soon), I've had lots of contact from gamers, friends and customers wishing me well and even offering support/help.

This got me thinking. If there's people out there who are interested in helping what could they do that would actually help Reiver Games get off the ground? The obvious answer is to buy one of my games, either from a local or web retailer (which will probably be cheaper for you and encourage them to buy more stock from their distributor) or take advantage of free shipping and a bundle deal when buying from my website. However, money is tight in the current economic climate, and many of the people offering support already own my games, so here are a few more ideas I came up with:

Already got my games and want to help?

• Play them with friends you think might like them
• Take them to conventions/games nights and get them to the table
• Offer to demo them in a local shop
• Get one as a Christmas/birthday present for a friend or family member you think would like it
• Write a review or a session report of one of my games on BoardGameGeek

Don't yet have any of my games?

• Ask a friend to bring a copy to games night/a convention
• Ask your local store to carry my games
• Read the rules to It's Alive!, Carpe Astra or Sumeria on my website - anything take your fancy?
• Recommend one of my games to a friend who you think might like it

Once again, thanks to everyone who has supported Reiver Games over the last three and a half years, and for your recent messages of support - they help!

If you've got any more ideas please let me know in the comments.

The Goodwill Of Others

Yesterday I posted a Geeklist on BoardGameGeek describing my two years trying to get Reiver Games to the the point where it could support me as a full-time employee who draws a reasonable salary.

I've had to admit in the last couple of weeks that Reiver Games is still a long way from that point and that I need to bring in some money way before Reiver Games reaches that point. So I need to take some form of gainful employment and run Reiver Games in the background. I've really enjoyed running Reiver Games and I want to continue to do so.

What stood out on the Geeklist was the goodwill of several of the commenters. Several people were disappointed that it hadn't worked out for me, several offered their sympathy.

A couple of guys who had visited my stand at Essen felt bad for not buying a copy of Sumeria, despite it not being their sort of game! While that sentiment is nice, I don't want to do well because people feel sorry for me, or because they want me to live my dream. I want people to buy my games of course. But I want them to buy my games because they think the game will provide enough enjoyment to make it worth the cost. I want them to be bought and played until they fall apart, not sit on a collector's shelf as another unplayed game in their collection.

What also stood out was the comment by my friend and playtester Paul:

I'll keep supporting you and sending good wishes your way whatever shape Reiver Games takes - I still believe that if anyone can make it in this industry it's you! And I promise, in public, that I will purchase at least one copy of every Reiver Games publication to do my part to keep you in biccies! Maybe others could do the same ?!? If your next project is the one we've playtested then I AM OFFICIALLY VERY EXCITED!!!! It is an awesome game of much awsomeness! With extra awesome on the side! It will be perfect present material for friends (both gamers and non I think) and has been enjoyed by all the York fraternity who have tried it so far. Good luck! Don't give up!

Paul's pledge is incredibly generous. It's in no small part due to his generosity, his compulsive collecting of games and his friendship and wish for me to succeed. But I like to think it's also because we have a similar taste in games and he figures anything I publish will be to his tastes. Paul is a True Fan.

With 3,000 true fans I'd have sold out of all my games. But that's one in every 2,200,000 people in the world population. Considering most of the world population will never hear of me or my company, and of the proportion that might have a slight chance of stumbling across me most have no interest in board games it's a pretty tall order.

What I need to work out is how to reach those potential true fans and convert them. The games I like are pretty popular - there must be more people out there who would like It's Alive!, Carpe Astra and Sumeria if they played them. How do I get the games in front of them?

Sumeria Computer Game v0.2

As promised last week, there's a new version of the Sumeria computer game available for download and testing.

This version is a big step up from the last version in that you can actually play the game! However, there's still some functionality missing: noticeably, there's no AI (all human players) and you have to play on a single machine (no play by email/online functionality).

The setup file will run on a windows computer, and requires version 3.5 of the .Net Framework. Please feel free to download and play it and post any feature requests, feedback or bug reports in the comments below.

Comes a Time

I've been running Reiver Games for three and a half years now. For the first year and a half I was running it as a hobby - making the games by hand in my spare time around a full time job in IT. Two years ago, I decided to give it a go running Reiver Games as a full-time career.

After two years I'm now in a position to determine whether or not I've been successful. For the first three years Reiver Games was both profitable and growing (both turnover and profit growing). This year the turnover will be slightly down on last year and I probably won't be profitable. It's clear that even in the good years I'm earning nowhere near enough money to invest in new games and make a living. My games just aren't selling quickly enough.

I've been in the enviable position of not needing to earn a decent wage for a couple of years, but sooner or later I need to start bringing home the bacon. It's clear the Reiver Games is a long way from doing that at the moment.

So now what? I've got a few options, thanks to my IT training, which can earn a decent wage, and the fact that Reiver Games is not really enough work to keep me busy full-time. My options in preference order are:

1. Do some part-time work as an IT consultant through Reiver Games. I keep the company running, continue making games and yet still earn a decent wad of cash.
2. Get a full-time job in IT, working for a company that will let me continue Reiver Games in my spare time. Games production will probably decrease but at least it's still going.
3. Find a business angel who will invest enough cash in Reiver Games that I can draw a salary from the company.
4. Shut Reiver Games down, fire-sell the remaining inventory and get a proper job.

I really want to continue running Reiver Games, so Option 4 is a last ditch that I really don't want to do. Furthermore, to get an IT job I'd need more recent programming experience which I don't have.

Interestingly, I've recently been approached by a former employer to see if I want to do Option 1 with them; and a very famous, very successful web company who were wondering whether I'd like to work with them (Option 2 or 4 - not sure which yet). This company is notoriously difficult to get a job with, so I was flattered to be approached by them, and now have a second interview next week.

To get back into the swing of things I've been doing some online coding exercises at TopCoder and making some progress on the Sumeria computer game. It's almost at the point that you can play it on a single computer (only against human opponents). I'll post when the next version is ready.

Which option will I choose? That depends largely on what opportunities I'm provided with - I'm hoping that one of these two developments comes to fruition, and I can choose Option 1 or 2. Either way I'm going to have to sort something out fairly soon.

If you're disappointed that this sounds like the end of Reiver Games, I certainly hope it won't be - and I hope to be announcing my next game within a month or so.

Promotion Response

Three weeks ago I mentioned that I was trying to set up a promotion to encourage US shops to stock my games, and to help those that already stock my games to sell more.

The deal was that Alliance one of my US distributors, who have my games on consignment would offer my games at a discount price to their retailers. The games would be offered at 25% of US MSRP to shops that buy from Alliance. The restriction was that each shop could only buy at most one copy of each game, for demo purposes only - this wasn't a way for the shops to get cheap copies for resale.

The way my consignment deal works with Alliance is that at the beginning of each month they email me purchase orders for all the copies they've sold during the previous month, and then I invoice them for those sales.

This means I've got a very good idea of how well the deal is going, since I'm told at the end of the month how many copies they've sold. Sales last month were up on January's sales, and I know that in the first two and a half weeks of the deal they've sold 28 copies of It's Alive!, 32 copies of Carpe Astra and 25 copies of Sumeria through the deal. Since I know that each shop can only buy a single copy of each game I know that at least 32 shops have taken advantage of the offer already.

I arranged to offer the promotion for a month, and then we'd check how it was going and work out whether it was worth continuing it. I'll be checking in with my buyer at Alliance in a week or so to work out whether it's worth continuing the promotion.

In the meantime, I'll be able to track over the coming months whether sales seem to have increased (remembering the seasonal dip in sales at this time of year).

One thing I'm still not sure about. Why the differences in sales of the promotional copies? Why has Carpe Astra sold more than the others (considering it's my slowest selling game overall). I'm also wondering whether the total is more than 32 (i.e. did every retailer than bought a cheap copy of It's Alive! and Sumeria also buy Carpe Astra, or are there more than 32 takers?

New Website Feedback

My friend Dunk is trying to get into web design, and as a portfolio project he's giving my website an overhaul. If you've got some spare time I'd appreciate it if you could compare the current website with this version of a new homepage (with no working links) and let me know in the comments what you think.

I'm also interested in what you think the current website is missing, or what cool new stuff you'd like to see.

Hit-Driven Industry

Recently I had some friends round for a day's gaming, and one of them happened to mention that board games must be a hit driven industry, like computer games (one of them works in computer games). He mentioned that most games probably don't make much money, or even make a loss, but this is covered by the hit, which is so wildly successful, that it pays the bills for years to come, and provides plenty of income which can then be risked on another batch of contenders, one of which may also be a hit (but most of which won't).

In the three and a half years that I've been publishing board games, I've read a bunch of things that make me think my friend was correct in his description of the market:

• Wired report that over 15M copies of Settlers of Catan have been sold.
• In 2008, 75% of Steve Jackson Games' nearly $3M turnover came from Munchkin products (7 years after the original Munchkin release).
• Bruno Faidutti, designer of over 50 games was making more money from Citadels than the rest put together in 2004 (several years after Citadels first came out).

If you're going to start a company publishing original games there's two likely ways to succeed doing it:

1. Start with a massive hit, that funds the rest of your product line for a while, until you're established.
2. Start with a massive wad of cash, that allows you to establish yourself with a reasonable product line and gives you time to find your first hit.

Success or failure will rely on a few things: ability to manage your finances, ability to market your games, ability to keep costs down and not least ability to choose successful games.

There's no way to guarantee a game will be a hit. Playtesting helps, but that's not the be all and end all - your playtesters might love it, but be unrepresentative of the market. Gut feel combined with a good knowledge of the market and what's successful helps, so does excellent marketing that makes everyone want a copy before it's released.

It is at least six months since the release of all my games, with none of them selling like hot cakes I realise they are not going to become massive hits. I still hold out hope for them being successful (i.e. profitable), but it's not going to happen overnight. I need a real breakout hit, something that is hugely popular and sells extremely quickly. But how do I convince the designer of such a game to bring it to me rather than the established publishing companies, and will I recognise it if I see it?

Liquid Assets

In the publishing business you want to do two things: make stuff (in my case board games) and make money. If you're honest you're doing thing A to do thing B.

But the whole process is cyclical. You can't make games without some money to buy them (and pay for the artwork and marketing), and you can't make money without games to sell.

Publishing is one of those businesses where you have to shell out a lot of cash up front. I pay my artists before the game has been manufactured. I pay my manufacturer before I've sold more than a handful of copies.

For the last three years my company has been profitable, i.e. it's worth more now than it was last year, and so on. All sounds fantastic doesn't it? The problem is that my assets are mostly stock. Stock is not a liquid asset. What's a liquid asset? According to Wikipedia:

A liquid asset has some or more of the following features. It can be sold rapidly, with minimal loss of value, any time within market hours. The essential characteristic of a liquid market is that there are ready and willing buyers and sellers at all times.

Clearly I can't just sell all my stock instantly at full price, it takes time to sell stock, so stock is not very liquid. Why is this a problem? If I receive an excellent prototype tomorrow that I want to make immediately I need to be able to pay for it. The manufacturer will only accept cash, so I need lots of cash on hand to fund the manufacture of my next game. If all my assets are stock then I can't make another game until I've sold enough to fund the next game.

Of course, the other problem with stock is you don't know how much it's worth. You know what you paid for it. You know what it could be worth if you sold it all at full price, whole sale price or even the average price of your sales to date. But you don't know how many you can sell. You might have sold the last game you will ever sell yesterday and all your stock is all firewood. Or worse: firewood you are paying to warehouse.

What can you do to avoid this problem? Probably the easiest thing is not over-produce. If you order 5,000 games and only sell 1,500 then you're in trouble. If you produce 1,500 and sell 1,500 you're on to a winner. The problem there of course is that the more copies you make the better your profit margins or the cheaper the final product - which could lead to more sales.

Another thing you can do is try to drive sales early. The faster you sell your games the sooner you turn them into cash that can be re-invested into new games. It's probably worth making less money sooner than more money later.