Like A Phoenix From The Ashes

I've spent half of this week in Germany for work, on a flying visit which left me with little time to see anything of Berlin. I did however get to see Konrad, one of my core playtesters and a friend who's supported me since the earliest Reiver Games days, who just happens to live in Berlin. Convenient.

I knew that Konrad was interested in Codename: Vacuum, and I'd promised him a copy of it after he was so helpful during my NaGa DeMon 2013 competition. It wasn't quite ready to send then, so I tweaked it a little and then got completely distracted by Zombology and later Dragon Dance.

It's been over a year since I'd played Vacuum, and until recently I hadn't even really thought about it at all either. About a month or two ago I had some ideas to streamline some of the clunkier bits and simplify a few things (I was also intending to complicate some others!). I started work on those changes on a recent train journey, but then I've run out of time to finish them off.

Seeing as Vacuum comes in a box the size of Race for the Galaxy, shipping it to Germany wouldn't be cheap, so it made sense to take Konrad a copy while I was over. Konrad kindly invited me to his flat one evening and offered to cook me dinner, so we had a plan.

Like all the best-laid ones, it all went to pot. I had little time before the trip to finish off making the changes I had in mind for Vacuum (and what little time I did have I spent programming my new German language app), so I didn't have a finished copy to take with me. Instead I crammed my personal copy (with the cards from Feb 2014 and the rules from August 2013!) in my suitcase, and told Konrad I'd leave it with him and send him updated cards when I'd finally got around to finishing them.

We had a great evening, a lovely meal followed by a game (and great discussion) of Vacuum and then a couple of games of Alchemy, one of Konrad's designs, which I really enjoyed. Konrad was even kind enough to give me a copy of that (which thanks to a smaller box than Vacuum meant that I had room in my suitcase for a little souvenir for The Wife and The Daughter). The game of Vacuum was a little embarrassing (it had been so long since I'd last played that I'd forgotten a number of rules until halfway through the game), but really useful, refreshing my memory of what works and what doesn't. Afterwards we had a lengthy chat about what Konrad liked and didn't like and my ideas for the next version, which Konrad's input has already simplified further.

A great trip all in all, and it's good to get back into Vacuum, the game that started my second wind of games design, post Reiver Games debacle.

Ich Bin Ein Berliner

And I don't mean a jam doughnut.

Actually, I'm not a Berliner at all. But I am in Berlin. My fourth trip to Germany (after a couple of trips to Spiel in Essen in 2008 and 2009 with Reiver Games, and a trip to Tübingen last year for work) is my first visit to Berlin.

Sadly, as with so many work trips, I'll get to see almost none of it: just the airport, the hotel and the conference centre (in this case the Technical University of Berlin). It is not however a total washout (like last week was, my only progress in anything was a play of Eclipse towards my ten plays goal thanks to a very busy week at work).

Tonight I am meeting Konrad, a Reiver Games customer of old who has become one of my best playtesters in recent years (he's won both of the last two NaGa DeMon competitions I've run). I've brought along my current copy of Vacuum which he's keen to play and I intend to leave it with him and then post him just the new cards when they are ready. I'm hoping to Playtest some of his games too. Once tonight is over I'm entering a bit of a gaming drought as I'll be going three weeks without a Games Night due to this trip and then having our bathroom replaced. I'm hoping to get some gaming in over Easter though, we'll be down in York seeing two lots of gaming friends...

Impromptu Holiday

The good news is that on Thursday evening, after Games Night, The Wife and I decided to take a long weekend away, so we were in a little cottage in rural Northumberland enjoying an impromptu short break for the last few days - hence the late blog post. We had a lovely time and even got some gaming in (it's been ages since The Wife and I have played games together, the sleep disruption caused by The Daughter has left us too tired in the evenings to do much other than slump).

The bad news is that I'm not making any progress on anything this week due to the holiday and work commitments so I'm not going to have Vacuum ready to take to Germany next weekend. I'll have to post a copy to Konrad on completion after my trip to Germany :-(

Still, I'm on holiday! Yay!

They Tried and Failed?

... They tried and died. That quote seems somehow appropriate this week.

It's been another busy week. Monday I was travelling for work with Ian again, so there was iPad gaming on the train (complete with another game of Galaxy Trucker, towards my ten plays goal) and then Tuesday was Newcastle Playtest.

I was pretty knackered though, so I left about nine o'clock after three games of Zombology and one of Dan's Ming Voyages. It was a really good turn out with eight of us including two new people and it was good to get some games of Zombology in with more players than the usual three or four we manage in my work lunchtime sessions. We played two games with six players and then when the new members arrived we played an eight player game. Because I'd missed the session last month it was the first time these guys had seen the most recent (and fairly large) changes. They liked some aspects of it, but weren't so keen on others, especially the reduction in control. The previous version let you keep a card between rounds. This gave you a lot more control as you could prevent a card going to an opponent, and could keep a card that would potentially let you complete one of the suits, thereby controlling which suits were scored at the end of the game. The downside was that all the good cards were being kept by players, completely knackering the drafting element.

I'm ok with it not being a very strategic game, it's supposed to be a 10-15 minute filler like 6 Nimmt! which also has very little control. I also like the way the drafting gives you increasing information about which cures are possible as the game plays out.

Between us we had a few new ideas to try out, and on Thursday lunchtime I got to try out one of those - dealing all the cards up front. This was a spectacular failure. It tried, and died! With only three players and all the cards dealt at the beginning of the game you know by the end of the third turn which suits can be cured (in our case: none!), which sucks a lot of the fun out of it.

I've some other ideas from Tuesday to try out, but they need new components, so will take a little longer to organise.

Thursday was Games Night which included a couple more games of King of Tokyo (which is fast becoming a favourite) towards my ten plays goal. Both our games were six player and we found there was very little incentive to stay in Tokyo till the start of your next turn for the two points. The winners of both games never went in to Tokyo at all! We're considering trying a house rule next time to encourage Tokyo hogging ...

Finally, on the weekend I did a bit more work on my German app. A bit of refactoring and adding some new functionality. It's slowly coming together.

This week I really need to crack on with Vacuum so I can try it once before I go to Germany. Ideally, I need to get it printed and playtested during the week...

Good progress on my goals for the year this week, but not on my more pressing aims regarding Vacuum and Germany. I need to sort myself out!

Back to App Development

Not much to report this week. I've not made any more progress on Codename: Vacuum ahead of tomorrow's Newcastle Playtest and my trip to Germany at the end of the month. Nor any progress on launching my company and getting back into Games publishing.

It's not been a total washout though. I've played three games towards my ten plays goal (Galaxy Trucker on the iPad with Ian on the way to Manchester on Tuesday and then Chinatown and King of Tokyo on Games Night on Thursday).

I've also started in earnest on my next Windows Phone app. Again it's a personal app that I'm going to make available to others, this time for helping me to learn German.

I learnt German for a couple of years at school and then again via evening classes while I was running Reiver Games. Since getting a smart phone I've tried (and got very frustrated with) a few apps for learning German. Then I got Duolingo which is absolutely awesome. I've been recommending it to everyone it's so good. But it's not perfect.

I learn best when I can visualise data in tables. Things like verb conjugation and adjective declension just make sense to me in tabular form rather than introduced piecemeal through an array of real sentences. So I'm making an app for that so I can help myself learn German in the way I find easiest. Hopefully as it develops and becomes more functional I can make it available and help others too.

Stay On Target!

If you've been following this blog for a couple of years you'll know that Codename: Vacuum was the first game I started designing when I got back into Games Design, a couple of years after I wound up Reiver Games, having lost a ton of money in the process. Reiver Games had been a great experience and a lot of fun and I'd met some fantastic people through it that I still consider good friends, but watching your company slowly wither and die kinda sucks the fun out of things and I'd gone off games design for a bit. As the highs and lows of Reiver Games faded from my legendarily poor memory, I started thinking about games design again, and Vacuum was the first of those ideas to be realised in actual cardboard.

I started working on it back in November 2011, and after a couple of years of frequent changes and regular playtests it took a back seat as I focused on Zombology in 2014. I've not really touched it since February last year and despite a couple of ideas during the year, I've done nothing. So much so that this year it didn't make an appearance in my goals at all. Had I not even thought about it once all year, that wouldn't get in the way of my goals at all.

With the NaGa DeMon winners' copies all posted I'm finally in a position to crack on with achieving this year's goals, the largest of which is to become a hobby publisher again.

But instead, I've spent the week working on Vacuum again. I had another four hours of train journeys on Wednesday, this time down to Sheffield and back for my quarterly hospital check-up. I spent that time designing in my head and then starting the graphic design for a new version of Vacuum. The last version was alright, but a couple of the strategies were quite dull and the game took up too much space for what it was.

I've started on a new version which I hope to finish in a week or two so that I can make a copy to take with me to Germany at the end of March. I'm off to Berlin for a conference with work, and I hope to meet up with Konrad, my NaGa DeMon winner two years on the trot and a keen supporter of Reiver Games from back in the day. Konrad has expressed an interest in Vacuum and his feedback on Zombology and Dragon Dance has been really helpful, so it'll be great for both of us If I can get it done in time!

But, I also need to stay focused on my goals, with two months down already, I'm going to have to crack on. In the words of Gold Five: Stay on target!

In other news, Robin David is interviewing me via email for his blog. I'm famous again! ;-p

New Games Company Checklist

So, as I'm sure you're aware by now, I'm aiming to get back into games publishing this year. It'll be small scale, just a small number (50 or 100) of hand-made, signed copies of a simple card game (Zombology or Dragon Dance). There's a bot-load of things I need to do before the game is ready to sell, so I need to spell those out and then start working through them. This list is not necessarily in order, but some of the later things depend on earlier ones. I'm not going to do a Gantt chart though, that would be too much like work.

1. Choose a company name. Reiver Games is gone, I need something different. I'd quite like something that alludes to a cautionary tale as Reiver Games went too far too fast and crashed and burned as a result. I was thinking Daedalus Games, but there's something very similar already. Jack in the Box Games was another idea, for obvious reasons.
2. Register the company with HMRC. Fun.
3. Set up a company bank account with some cash in it. I'll need this before registering a website or buying any materials.
4. Choose which game. Almost certainly Zombology, but I'm not quite ready to commit just yet.
5. Website and PayPal account. Need to do 1 and 3 before this.
6. Price up the components. I'm aiming to sell the game for £10, which means I want to spend about £5 per copy on components and printing, so I've got money left over for marketing, website costs, etc. I'll need to get quotes for the raw materials and printing, and then work out how many copies I need to make to make it affordable. More copies make each individual one cheaper, but require more of my time to make, market and sell, plus more cash outlay at the beginning.
7. Finish designing the game. Relies on 4, naturally.
8. Do the art and graphic design. I can't finish this until I've finished 7, but I can definitely make a start as the games aren't going to change dramatically between now and release. Doing the art and graphic design is both a challenge to get myself to learn new skills and also a way to save money. The art on Sumeria cost a few thousand Euros, I can't afford that if I'm making 50 copies that I want to sell at £10 each.
9. Buy the raw materials. For Zombology this is just the box card (I'm making the boxes myself, these are going to be lovingly hand-crafted games!). For Dragon Dance there's the box card, dice and wooden counters, plus some plastic baggies.
10. Get the printing done. Obviously this relies on 8. I'll try StressFreePrint first as they were who I used for Border Reivers and the first hand-made edition of It's Alive!
11. Start assembling the boxes, which relies on 9. Boxes are pretty easy to make and I can make these up ahead of time to save time once the artwork arrives.
12. Start cutting out and assembling the games.
13. Start taking cash, relies on 5. Unlike KickStarter, I don't want to start taking cash until I've got the games pretty much ready to ship.
14. Start shipping finished games.
15. Marketing. It sounds a bit late in the day to start marketing a product, but unlike KickStarter where the aim is to get people all hyped up before you've got anything concrete to give them, I will be aiming to stay ahead of my orders once i've cleared the initial pre-order backlog. With each game taking an hour to make and free time at a premium I'll want to drum up some trade after I've sent all the pre-orders and built up a small stock. I'll still be blogging throughout (which also counts as marketing!) and I might get lucky and get another blog post picked up by BoardGameGeek News or reddit which would be a bonus in terms of exposure.
16. Fame and fortune! (As if!)

My goal is to get a decent chunk of the way through this list before all the copies are pre-ordered! I've now got seven pre-orders and I still haven't confirmed which game it will be! Bizarre.

In other news, I made it along to Newcastle Gamers again this week which was great and had a second Games Night in a row! Things are picking up.

A Glorious Week of Gaming

After the long drought and then last weekend's gaming trip down to Bedford to see Terry and Andrew, who I used to game with weekly when I lived in the south, I've had another week of decent gaming.

The gaming didn't start until Thursday - the beginning of the week was games-free since I missed Tuesday's Newcastle Playtest session. But Wednesday night I finally made the January 2015 edition of Zombology and Thursday lunchtime we got to play it. Three times!

There were loads of changes from the December version (which I sent to Spain and Germany last week to my NaGa DeMon winners - Derek, your copy is ready to go, but I need to get to a Post Office for a customs label). The Boffins have become Gurus and are now treatment specific, the Fatal Mistake cards have gone along with some of the more complex rules. The new rulebook is actually significantly shorter (a good thing to my mind). I've also taken out the play a card, keep a card rule that knackered the drafting aspect.

With only three plays it's hard to tell if it's better or worse, but I tweaked a copy of things during the games and I've another idea I'd like to try out this week (that doesn't require any new components or printing - yay!). It's easier than I was expecting, I don't know it that's just luck of the draw from a small number of samples or a genuine effect, it should become clearer after more plays...

Then Thursday evening it was back to my weekly Games Night for the first time in a month, which was a great evening despite finishing unusually early. We played six games (mostly fillers) and somehow I managed to win four and tie another one. An unusually high win ratio!

Finally, we rounded the week out in style when Paul (who I used to game weekly with when I lived in York) and his family came up to stay for the weekend. Paul and I played games late into the night on Saturday (or what counts for late in my house: nearly 1am!) and then snuck another game in on Sunday afternoon during The Daughter's nap.

It was a great week of gaming, I've played two more games on my need to play this year list (Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia and Homesteaders), plus a couple of new to me ones: Bang: The Dice Game (much better than the card original) and Coal Barons. Plus it was great to catch up with old friends, guys who I used to game with every week and now see far too infrequently.

After The Drought, The Deluge

Believe it or not it had been several weeks since I last played a board game against a human opponent. I've had to cancel the last three of my regular Thursday Games Nights for various reasons and I've been putting off playtesting at lunchtime as I've had a bunch of ideas in my head for Zombology that I've not gotten around to doing the graphic design on, let alone printing out.

The gaming drought ended on Tuesday with a trip to Manchester for work with my boss Ian, a regular Games Night attendee. I always take my iPad which is stacked with board game conversions so we played a bunch of those - I think ten all told!

That evening I was babysitting for some friends and I put the hours to good use, doing the graphic design for the box labels and the rule books for the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Dragon Dance and their bonus copies of Zombology. With that finally done I could print them out on Wednesday and finish the copies off ready for posting:

There was no Games Night again on Thursday, but only because I was off to Bedford on Friday night for a Games Day with Terry and Andrew, two of my gaming buddies from my time in the south.

I spent Friday and Saturday nights' train journeys doing the graphic design for the next version of Zombology which has some sweeping changes from the December version. As yet I don't know if it will make things better or worse, but it will be interesting to see how it pans out, once I've printed it out and got it to the table. I'm trying to address a few things: one is some issues with the graphic design, another is a few things to add theme. I've also got some concerns about how easy it is for one of the players to win (as opposed to everyone lose).

In addition, a recent change allowing players to keep a card between rounds, which has been almost universally popular, is disappearing. The change was introduced to give the players more control and to make the game more strategic but, to be honest, a ten minute drafting game needs to be fun more than strategic. Allowing players to keep a card meant that the good cards were retained so the drafting aspect was knackered - it was only the dross going round.

As with any large changes to a game, I'm expecting that some bits of it will be an improvement and some bits a step backwards. I'll have to play it a few times to work out which are which and then start honing the game again.

Or the new version might just be dreadful and I'll have to roll back to the previous version!

Saturday's games day was a great day. It was great to catch up with Terry and Andrew and we played seven games, of which I'd only played Fresco, Firefly and Las Vegas before. The games I was introduced to: Machi Koro, Orleans, Red7 and Roll for the Galaxy were all entertaining, with Roll for the Galaxy being my favourite of the day. Roll is similar to Race and clearly of the same theme and feel, but it's different enough to have made it high up on my wish list. Race is a favourite with my Games Night crowd and I think Roll will be too.

Plus a game of Firefly is a step towards having played every game I own at least ten times :-)

This week Games Night is back and then my friend Paul is up from York on Saturday. The deluge continues!

A Digital Digression

As I've discussed over the last couple of weeks, one of my goals for this year is to get back into hobby publishing, like I did in the early years of Reiver Games. I've got all year to do that though and there are more pressing things on my plate - like the NaGa DeMon Winners' copies of Dragon Dance (and bonus Zombology) to finish and get in the post.

I've made no progress on either of those things this week though. Not even taken any more pre-orders for the as yet unannounced game (still at 4/50!).

Instead I've been focusing on a couple of my Windows Phone apps. I'm technically a programmer by profession, but over the last few years I've been moving into more of a project management/team leadership role, so I don't get to do much actual coding anymore. I still enjoy it, but with little practice in the office my skills are atrophying, so I've been making a few apps for my Windows Phone (bought because I could make apps for it in the languages and tools I 'use' in my day job). Several of these apps have an audience of one (Codename: Vacuum randomiser and recorder anyone?), but a couple of them, while written for my use and as a coding exercise, potentially had a bigger audience, so I've uploaded them to the store.

The first of those, BGG Last Plays was an app version of the excellent Last Plays by BGG User Heroku App. I wanted this as I'd set myself a goal of playing every game I owned at least once last year, and I was using that webpage to keep track (but I wanted a few extras that were easier to implement in app format). One of my goals for this year is to make another version of this which makes it easier to keep track of this year's gaming goal: To have played every game in my collection at least ten times.

The most recent app I've added to the store (which is starting to get some downloads finally) was a pass-and-play version of the Martian Dice game by Scott Almes.

I had a trip away for work this week, so I had an evening to kill, plus five hours on trains, so I took my laptop and decided to work on my apps. The first priority was fixing a crash in Martian Dice that had been reported three times in a week (despite only 16 people owning it!). I had a stack trace showing me where it happened, but couldn't reproduce it myself. Still the stack trace was enough information to fix the problem. No soon had I done that, then my mate Mal pointed out a rather glaring bug in the undo functionality: if you rolled any tanks in a turn you could forget them by clicking undo! That totally broke the game :-( So I fixed these two problems (and made a couple of usability tweaks recommended by a user on BGG).

With the urgent things fixed, and still some time to spare, I moved onto making the Last Plays app support my new goal. I've added the ability to sort by the number of games played, and to select a number of plays below which a game is highlighted. 26 days into the year and I've already completed one of my goals for the year! I've also added a link to the game's BGG page if you press and hold its listing in the app.

On Saturday night I published both of these updates to the Windows Store - they should both be available now.

With these out of the way, I can now focus on the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Dragon Dance and Zombology. I've printed and made the games, it's just the rulebooks and box labels outstanding. I've got a few hours on Tuesday night while babysitting for some friends that I can apply to this task, plus if necessary a bunch of hours on trains on the weekend, while I go down to Bedford to see my mates down there for a games day.

Self-Published Run: Specification

It's been a great week on the blog here, thanks largely to W. Eric Martin of BoardGameGeek covering last week's blog post - thanks Eric!

I've not yet decided whether it'll be Zombology or Dragon Dance that I try to self publish this year (currently leaning towards Zombology) but either way there a bunch of things that are the same for both.

Printing

I'll get all the artwork printed professionally (but digitally, not litho - for a small print run the litho set up costs are prohibitive). The box and cards will also be laminated, which makes them more durable and the print more hard-wearing. Professional laminating is nothing like the lamination pouches that you can get done in most offices, it's almost unnoticeable. The cards and box for Border Reivers were both laminated in this way and I was very happy with the results. For Border Reivers and the first edition of It's Alive!, I used a digital print company who have since changed their name to StressFreePrint. They'll be my first port of call as I was very happy with their service and products in the past.

Box

I'm going to hand-make tray and lid boxes and then wrap them in printed labels. The boxes will be 123 x 95 x 20mm, the same as most two deck card games (think 6 Nimmt! or No Thanks!). This means they will be small and pretty cheap to post.

Cards

The cards will be laminated as described above and have their corners rounded, very similarly to Border Reivers.

Other Bits

Zombology is 108 cards and a rule book. Dragon Dance has some other components: eight dice and a number of wooden bits. The wooden bits would be published game quality (I'd get them from SpielMaterial.de again) but generic, I'm thinking yellow wooden discs for the dragon's life tokens and red wooden hearts for the knight's. I've got my eye on some nice Chessex dice, but I'm not sure my budget would stretch to it.

Price Point

I'm aiming for £10 per copy as the retail price for both games which is about what you'd pay in a store (not online) for that sort of game in the UK. That's $15 or 13€, both of which are a bit expensive for what it is, but I'm expected most of my orders to come from the UK (friends and family will probably feature heavily!). Seeing as it's a very short run I'm not looking to get it into shops or distributors, so all of that (minus PayPal fees for online sales) will be going to me. I want to charge twice what it costs for the components so I've some money left over for website, playtest materials and potentially I'll can make a profit toward making a bigger game next year if it goes well. So my budget is £5 per copy for the materials and the printing. I've no idea yet whether this is feasible, but that's my goal at this point. So that's £250 for 50 copies or £500 for 100 copies.

In other news, I've not much to report this week. The Daughter's been sleeping badly again, so early nights all round and The Father-in-Law made an impromptu visit on his way back from Scotland for the last half of the week. Next week I'm away for a couple of nights for work, so I'm hoping to start making some progress on finishing of the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Dragon Dance. And, despite the fact that I've not settled on a choice of game, I've already got 4 pre-orders!

Why Aren't I KickStarting?

Since announcing my intention to get back into board publishing as part of my 2015 goals post last week, the question I've been asked the most is:

So, why aren't you KickStarting the (yet to be decided!) game?

It was the first question the guys at Newcastle Playtest asked and the first question that came up on twitter too. I've spoken at length before about my concerns with KickStarter for board game publishing, but to be honest that wasn't really the deciding factor.

When I started Reiver Games back in 2006 my family consisted of myself and The Wife. The Wife was in the middle of a PhD and fairly busy so I had some time to kill in the evenings. I was quite happy to commit to 300 hours of Border Reivers assembly plus the numerous hours I spent posting copies and on promotion and half-arsed marketing.

These days things have changed. I'm now a dad and I want to spend my free time with The Wife and The Daughter doing family things and enjoying these fleeting moments of The Daughter's childhood. When The Daughter goes to bed, I want to spend time with The Wife. My priorities are totally different. So I can't commit to a massive expenditure of time. Which makes making the games by hand sound even more ridiculous, but it's not. There's method to my madness (I hope).

With a small run there's less monetary investment and much less worrying about stock clearance. I don't need to market to shops and distributors (which took a lot of effort) to get widespread availability and I don't have to worry about ongoing warehousing costs. Plus, I've done this all before, so I've got experience and knowledge, plus (I hope) some potential customers from my Reiver Games days.

But probably the biggest benefit is a known budget in terms of both time and cost. With KickStarter, people expect you to offer stretch goals and different pledge levels. Until the KickStarter is complete and you know exactly how much money you've raised and how many people you've got at each level you've no idea what you're letting yourself in for. I've got a full time job and a family, the last thing I need on top of that is an unspecified amount of work I have to do in my spare time that I'm contractually (and morally) obliged to.

With a run of 50 or a hundred copies, where each copy takes about an hour to construct, I know exactly what I'm letting myself in for. Plus, I don't expect to have sold out of the print run before I start it, so initially there will be less that than amount of work and then just a trickling amount from then on as the last of the stock slowly sells through.

This is something I can prepare for and plan for, and something I can do in my evenings after The Daughter goes to sleep. It's achievable around my job and my family, both of which I consider higher priorities.

This time round I'm not in it to make a fortune, or to try and go full time, I'm just in it to make games and hopefully bring some gaming joy to some of my customers.

Oh, and I've already got two pre-orders, despite the fact that they don't know which game it is yet!

In other news, this week I managed to make it to Newcastle Gamers for the first time since October! It was a great evening and I managed to get in three games, two of which contribute towards my goal of having played every game I own at least ten times. Both the games I played on Games Night helped as well! Off to a good start...

2015 Goals

The last couple of years I've set myself some goals for blogging and playing and designing games (see: 2013, 2014). I want the goals to be achievable, but also a stretch, so they encourage me to push myself and learn new things. This year, in addition to the usual three categories, I'm adding a fourth: app development :-)

Blogging

Last year I wanted a 10% growth in page views, to blog every week, to take part in NaGa DeMon and to gain ten new followers. I hit most of those, except the followers one which, to be honest, I don't really care about, so this year's goals are:

• 45,500 page views (taking me to 183K in total), another 10% growth
• Blog every Monday
• Do something for NaGa DeMon (I've enough games on the go, so it might not be starting a new one...)

Playing games

Last year I wanted to play every game in my collection at least once and play at least 365 games in total. I'm going to mix it up a bit this year:

• Play at least 365 games during 2015
• Have played every game in my collection (with the usual exceptions) at least ten times.

I'll use this second goal to hone my collection a bit again, and give me a chance to gain a better understanding of some of the longer games in my collection. Games bought during 2015 are excluded.

Designing Games

I'll keep it simple here, yet excitingly different. This year I want to release a self-published, self-illustrated board game in a limited edition, like the good old days of Reiver Games.

Only one goal? Yes, but it's a biggy. The Wife bought me a graphics tablet for Christmas, so I'm going to use that to hone my illustration skills and along with Adobe Creative Cloud (which is damned expensive, but I get a discount as a CS3 owner and I'm putting Christmas present money towards it). I'm already tinkering with some Bayeux Tapestry inspired art for Dragon Dance!

This is a real challenge. It'll probably be either Zombology or Dragon Dance, whichever is the better game (and most sensibly priced) in a run of maybe 50 copies, or one hundred if there's a surprisingly high demand. I'll be blogging artwork and sketches for feedback throughout the year. Why a limited, handmade run you ask? Despite the lure of KickStarter, I'm still uncomfortable with it and it was the large print runs that I couldn't get working with Reiver Games. The two handmade limited editions I did: Border Reivers and the first edition of It's Alive! both sold out quickly and made me money (excluding time spent!). A short print run is a known quantity that I can manage around my family and work commitments and I know exactly what I'm getting into, having done it successfully before.

The exciting and challenging bit will be doing the art myself - this will require learning lots of new skills.

App Development

I'm learning German again, using the excellent Duolingo. In many ways it's superb, but I'm the sort of person who likes to learn from structure, so being able to visualise tables of pronouns and verb declensions really helps me. In the vein of my current selfish app development, I want to make an app to help with that. I also want to release a new version of BGG Last Plays that helps me track this year's different plays goal.

There, that's enough to be getting on with! Wish me luck...

2014: The Year in Review

2014 has been a pretty good, if slightly strange, year. It started on New Year's Eve in the house on my own. Thanks to radiotherapy for my overactive thyroid I had to keep my distance from The Daughter for three weeks. With her only 16 months old it was going to be very unfair for me to always be around but never come near her or give her a cuddle, so The Wife and The Daughter stayed in Bristol after Christmas and I came home on my own and got nuked. I got the dose on New Year's Eve in the afternoon, that evening I was at my most radioactive - so I didn't even go out and see friends. Definitely the second crappiest New Year's Eve of my life.

The next three weeks I was home alone, so I got to live the bachelor life style: eating like a student and playing games all the time - I even got a game of Twilight Imperium III in! On the way to rescue The Wife and The Daughter I stopped in at Terry's and had a day's gaming with my old Bedford group. I used to see them for games every week, but since moving to Newcastle (about 250 miles away) I don't get to see much of them at all. The rest of the year was busy but good fun, with a trip to Baltimore for work (but no impromptu gaming this time!), a convention (Beer and Pretzels in Burton again with Terry). But in November we had some bad news which derailed my NaGa DeMon efforts a bit.

Games Design

I'd set myself a few goals in 2014 for games design:

• Make four more versions of Vacuum
• Get Zombology ready to submit to a publisher
• Do NaGa DeMon again

I had mixed success. I made new versions of Vacuum in January (during the exile period) and February, but then didn't really touch it for the rest of the year. Goal 1: Failed. My main focus was Zombology instead. I was making a new version almost every month and playing it a lot. Towards the end of the year I was getting pretty happy with it, so much so that when Dan from Newcastle Playtest saw a publisher asking on BGG for that sort of game, I sent it off. It wasn't really ready, but I sent it off anyway. The result? It's not really ready - could have seen that coming! I've now got another version together that I'm hoping to find playtesters for shortly. The publisher is still interested, once it's ready, so I need to crack on really. Goal 2: I submitted it, so I'm going to call that a pass! I did NaGa DeMon again, designing Dragon Dance: Fire v Lance. It's very early days, but I think it's got some legs, so I'll continue working on it next year. NaGa DeMon on the blog was less successful than last year, but it's still my second best month on the blog ever. Goal 3: Passed. In other news, I dusted off Border Reivers and started trying out some ideas for a second edition, taking everything I've learnt in the ten years since I initially designed it and trying to fix some of the flaws.

General Gaming

My goals for gaming in 2014 were:

• Play at least as many games as there are days in 2014
• Play every game I own at least once*

Now that I count playtest games and iPad games against humans towards my totals, goal 1 was pretty easy. The Daughter is older and sleeping better than last year and I've been doing a reasonable amount of travel for work with my iPad and some colleagues/victims, so I've aced it. When I wrote this last week I'd played 514 games. Goal 1: Passed. Like a Boss. You'll note the asterisk next to goal two. That's important. According to BoardGameGeek I currently own 71 games (excluding expansions) but six of those are games I own for sentimental reasons, and those I excluded. So I own 65 games. At this point I've played 64 of them, and I'm pretty sure the last one will get played in the next week or so, so that's a provisional: Goal 2: Passed. I've also used this goal to hone my collection, those games that I've been struggling to drum up the enthusiasm to play left the house this year as gifts to friends or Newcastle Gamers. Those that left: Qwirkle, Meuterer, Snow Tails, Pirates of the Spanish Main, Citadels, Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, Tigris and Euphrates and Clans.

My five and dimes for this year were:

• 63: Zombology - the joy of designing a short game is that you can test it quickly, over and over again
• 28: Ra - mostly on the iPad on the train
• 27: Martian Dice - including testing my Windows Phone app with friends
• 26: Coup - a Games Night staple
• 25: Hey! That's My Fish! - on the train
• 23: Dragon Dance - all since the beginning of November!
• 23: Carcassonne - on the train again
• 18: Love Letter - at Games Night
• 16: Rumis - great fun
• 16: Race for the Galaxy - mostly with the Alien Artifacts expansion (sans orb bit)
• 13: 6 Nimmt! - at Games Night
• 12: Stone Age - on the iPad
• 11: X-Wing Minis - with Dave mostly
• 10: Lords of Waterdeep - on the iPad and in the flesh
• 10: Pandemic - on the iPad mostly
• 10: Stormy Seas - all on Christmas Day! This is straight onto my wishlist
• 9: 7 Wonders - still popular at Games Night
• 7: Hive - no idea when I played this!
• 6: Codename: Vacuum - early on, before I focussed on Zombology
• 6: Coloretto - Games Night filler
• 6: No Thanks! - Games Night filler
• 6: Hol's der Geier - Games Night filler
• 6: Die Speicherstadt - Games Night
• 5: Firefly - Love this, just wish it was shorter, so it fit comfortably in a Games Night
• 5: Puerto Rico - on the iPad
• 5: Forbidden Island - iPad, I don't own the cardboard version

Blogging

My goals for blogging this year were:

• Write a blog post every Monday
• Get 40,000 page views
• Gain 10 new followers

Again, mixed success! I blogged every Monday in 2014 except one, when an automatic scheduling error during my holiday in the wilds meant it didn't go live until Tuesday when I wandered into some mobile signal and checked. I'm gonna call that Goal 1: Passed. During 2014 I got 41,500 page views. Goal 2: Passed. But only three new followers, Goal 3: Failed.

My most popular posts of the year were:

• A discussion of timing in games
• What are your favourite playtestion questions
• Picking up Border Reivers again and launching my Firefly: The Board Game app 
• (Some of) the Zombology NaGa DeMon winners' copies arrived
• My iPad gaming 

Windows Phone Apps

In addition to playing, designing and writing about board games, this year I started developing board game-related apps for my Windows Phone, a few of them are personal apps for helping me design or test my games, but three of them seemed of interest to others, so I made them freely available this year. Between them they've only had 60 downloads, so they're not wildly successful, but I did them for my own interest and as programming exercises, so if they are useful to anyone else at all that's an added bonus. I'd like to keep up the app designing next year too.

That's enough wittering for now, so until next week's Goals for 2015 blog post; I hope you all had good years too, and here's hoping next year will be even better!

Progress, At Last!

It's been a funny old week. It was meant to be my last week of work before I had two weeks off for Christmas. But it didn't quite go to plan. In a bad way. And then a good way!

Monday morning I'd booked off to go to a Christmas show with The Daughter and The Wife. So we had a lie in, I came round gradually, slowly achieved consciousness and then sprinted for the toilet. Where I spent the rest of the day. The Wife and The Daughter went to the show without me, only to find out on arrival that it was cancelled, as the cast too were stricken with a stomach bug.

Tuesday I managed to get up and get dressed and didn't have to sprint anywhere thankfully, then Wednesday I was back at work, if still not 100%. I say work, but it was the day of our Christmas party, so after spending the morning trawling through a couple of days worth of emails, we went on a team building trip in the afternoon and then out for the night. Clearly I still wasn't right - I had a couple of small beers and left at 9:15!

I'd kept some holiday back in case of having to take some to look after The Daughter if The Wife got sick, which meant I could finish for the year on Thursday at lunchtime. I promptly spent the afternoon doing all my chores so that on Friday I could finally make some progress on the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Dragon Dance.

I finished off the boxes and printed and cut out the cards, so all that remains to be done is design, print and attach the box labels and write, print and fold the rules. I've also decided to give the three winners a copy of the latest version of Zombology, so I printed out four copies of that too. The only copy I cut out and boxed of that was mine though, so I've got it in time for the Christmas holidays, in case anyone in my family or The Wife's family fancies playing it.

After a couple of weeks of nothing to report it's nice to be making progress again!

All that remains is for me to wish you a Merry Christmas and thank you all for reading my blog this year. I hope you all have a great break.

Too Busy!

Last week I thought I was going to be busy, but in the end I was too busy and ended up getting very little done indeed. I managed to finish the boxes for the NaGa DeMon winners' copies, but sadly that was it.

This week was supposed to be even busier. I had a work night out lined up for Monday and our Christmas party on Wednesday. We've got lots of corporate visitors at work and lots of meetings and we've got to get ready for our trip to Bristol to visit my in-laws and my family for Christmas.

Sadly, I'm not going to get much done for a different reason, I woke up this morning racked with another stomach bug. I'll be spending most of the next couple of days in 'the littlest room' I fear. Joy.

So, I doubt I'll get much done this week either. I do have a chance on Friday night to make some progress I think, but as feared it's going to be January before the NaGa DeMon winners' copies are winging their way to the winners. Sorry for the delay!

Busy, Busy

With NaGa DeMon done you'd expect things to be calming down, but not so much - this week has been one of lots of little things that needed attending to.

I've promised copies of Dragon Dance to the three most helpful TGWAG competitors, so I've started making those copies. I'd bought or scavenged the wooden pieces and dice before the start of November, but there's plenty still to do: boxes, cards and rules. On Saturday I started getting the boxes made and will finish them off tonight. The cards and rules require getting the printer down from the box room, which is a bit of a faff, so I'm put that off until all my printing is ready. So I've also done the graphic design for another version of Zombology - that's ready for printing.

I've also been working on my Martian Dice Windows Phone app which is nearing completion. I made a candidate for the final build at the beginning of the week and that's now being tested by a bunch of friends. I'm hoping that this will be my most popular app so far (I've got 50 downloads so far across all three apps put together!), so I've been putting some work into a web page for it and getting some mild publicity ready.

Once Martian Dice is out there my next focus will probably be Christmas, but then after that I've another idea for an app to work on next year (in addition to Vacuum, Zombology, Dragon Dance, Border Reivers second edition and maintaining all my existing apps!).

First up though, Dragon Dance NaGa DeMon winners' copies...

NaGa DeMon 13: Finito

Well, it's December, so NaGa DeMon is done. And what a weird one it was. For the first half of the month I was kind of stuck. My first version of Dragon Dance was far better than I was expecting, reasonably well balanced and it played more or less how I was thought it would. That's unheard of for a first prototype of mine. I was playing it loads during lunchtime at work, alternating between it and By Election - my friend Sam's NaGa DeMon game. After about fifteen plays (including some from Konrad) I finally pushed the boat out and made a second version, incorporating some of the detailed feedback from Konrad and some ideas I'd had or that had been suggested by my playtesters.

That version, while a bit more interested, sucked. It was hideously broken, so heavily weighted in favour of the dragon that there was little point in playing it. So I had an idea of how to change things to fix it up, which I wrote up ready to post once I'd tried it.

Then I got sick (after it had swept through the family) then we had some bad news that put everything else on the back burner. My parents came up a week earlier than planned to help babysit The Daughter and my spare time ended up being spent entertaining guests rather than printing, designing or playing Dragon Dance. Also, after making big promises that I would get more involved with other people's NaGa DeMon efforts (including the aforementioned Konrad, who played my NaGa DeMon game one night in preference to his own) I did nothing. About which I feel quite bad - sorry Konrad!

With little time to practice the new fixed up v2, I posted it anyway and then finally another tweak right at the end of the month. The first hardly tested by me, the other completely untested. A very disappointing end to the month.

Page views were way down on last year as a result (though still my second best month in the eight year history of Creation and Play). However, I still managed to make four different versions and played it nearly twenty times. Plus, TGWAG was another huge success with nine participants, at least two people printing it out and Konrad playing it and given some excellent feedback. Thanks everyone, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. The final league table is as follows:

Name	PIPs	PIAL	Free game?
Sir Konrad/@pidaysock	33	Knight Sergeant	Yes
Derek Hohls/@gamesbook	16	Squire	Yes
Eblasco/@7isprime	15	Squire	Yes
Roberto	8	Footman	No
@MTTJ_Patrick	5	Footman	No
@kimacus	4	Serf	No
Mal	3	Serf	No
@toddderscheid	2	Serf	No
@thefrugalgamer	2	Serf	No

So the free copies will be winging their way to Konrad, Enrique and Derek early in the new year. Thanks again!

NaGa DeMon 12: One Final Version

With two days left to go I've got one final version for you. I've now played the new version six times and it is I think too strongly weighted in the dragon's favour. I'd been hoping to try these new ideas before posting them (to check they weren't rubbish like an earlier version of the rules!) but I've been unable to get a game in, so these are untested - play at your own risk! This is your last chance to get some PIPs before NaGa DeMon comes to a close at the end of November.

The good news is that there's no card changes since the last version (so if you've already printed those out you're good to go). The rules are pretty similar, there's only one change (to the Discard card and die section, highlighted in blue below) which now reads:

Discard card and die
At the end of the round both players discard the card they played (face up where they are visible to both players) and any die they used with it. If there were already two cards discarded, you may now return one of these two discarded cards to your hand (not the one you just played). Discarded cards and dice are unavailable to the player and cannot be chosen during the Choose a card or Choose a die sections described above.

The Recuperate card allows you to reclaim all discarded dice and cards, returning all the discarded cards to your hand. Once you have reclaimed the dice all your dice are re-rolled.

Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

NaGa DeMon 11: Back for a Final Push

Things are beginning to settle down and I'm back at work now. We've only got four days left in November and my parents are still here visiting, but I'm hoping to try to get one final version done before the end of the month.

Of course to do that, I need to know what changes I need to make, and for that I need data. I'm hoping to be able to play Dragon Dance at least a couple of times during either Thursday or Friday lunchtimes, and my dad (who's really not a gamer) was so intrigued by my description of the game that he'd like to play it too. My copy has been at work for a week or so (I left it with Sam after he volunteered to take it to the extra Newcastle Playtest session that I had to miss due to illness, despite having organised it!). So I've not had a chance to play it, or even think about it much.

So, what I need is to get it played, get some information about the weaknesses (probably too strong dragon?), get some ideas about how to fix it, fix it and make the fix available all within the next four days, all while my parents are here.

Challenging! Any help much appreciated...