I've mentioned before that my graphic design skills are weak.
They are.
Our first Kickstarter looked terrible.
The second looked bad.
The third looked poor.
I'm working on number four now.
Coming next month.
It's an improvement.
Not earth-shattering, but better.
Baby steps.
Small steps forward compound over time.
Or so I hope...
I’ve spent most of this week trawling the web, updating all instances of our logo with the new one:
After back and forth with the designer, we settled on “Fast, fun Craft Games” as what we do.
It sums us up perfectly: Craft Games, like Craft Beer is indie, small runs, made by hand.
The logo captures the fun nature of our games and the support of our community.
It can be white or dark.
And the community hands can be swapped out for other things, allowing us to tweak it for particular themes, holidays or other reasons.
While keeping something recognisable.
It also leans in to the way most people pronounce Eurydice (Eury-Dice).
When it was suggested here as a name long ago I liked that it incorporated Dice and something a bit like Euro.
Both strong gaming words.
Paul and I are really happy with it.
Marketing is not my forte.
I’m still learning a lot.
Doing things for the first time.
Badly.
But I learn.
And slowly, I hope to get better.
We’re running ads ahead of our next Kickstarter for the first time.
Pointing to our first ever dedicated landing page.
Needs work
It’s not very good.
So I’ll improve it.
Expectations are low for this Kickstarter again.
So we can use it as a learning opportunity.
And hopefully get better.
For the next one...
Towards the end of last year I lost my way.
Went off the boil a bit.
Slowed down.
Missed things.
I used to use Trello and Evernote to organise myself. Then I switched to Notion. Then I kind of gave up on that.
If you follow me on twitter you'll know I loathe everything about Brexit.
From the nationalist lies that sold it to the voters to the terrible effect it's had on my European friends in the UK.
It'll make us culturally and financially poorer as a country.
It limits my daughters' rights to experience other countries.
And now it's biting Eurydice Games.
We buy our wooden pieces from a supplier in Germany.
They are no longer shipping to the UK.
Will they in future? I hope so. I don't know of an equivalent in the UK.
It's also harder for us to ship to European customers. They may end up getting charged VAT or import fees.
Everything about it sucks.
I only hope that we get to rejoin before too much damage is done.
I fear I'm hopelessly optimistic.
I worry about overheads.
Those costs you pay every month regardless of sales.
They sank my first company, Reiver Games, as the bank loan repayments and warehousing costs were bigger than sales most months.
So I worry about them.
Ours have increased.
We're lucky that we don't pay salary or rent.
So ours are very low.
But still.
If we're not actively fulfilling a Kickstarter, our overheads are now often larger than profits, and sometimes even sales.
There are two types, those that affect profits only (like depreciation and homeworking allowances) and those that affect profits and cash (like bank account fees and software subscriptions).
The latter are the worst.
We need to keep them down.
Or increase sales.
We sincerely wish you all a far better 2021 than 2020, and hope you get to return to something like normal fairly soon.
I'm taking a couple of weeks off to relax with my family, normal service will return next week!
Last week I mentioned the possibility of a new mini-Kickstarter like the one we ran during the summer.
We've had a load of cool ideas created by fans of the game and we'd like to include some of those.
But we're conscious of the fact we don't want to rip people off.
So we have an idea.
A competition of sorts.
If we do the mini-Kickstarter we'll include some of our ideas and some fan ideas.
If your fan idea is included (either as part of the main rewards, an unlocked stretch goal or offered afterwards in the pledge manager), you win:
For each one of your ideas we include. (Ideas should be about the size of 1 or 2 add-ons from the previous Kickstarter).
Matt's gunboat concept (picture by Matt Yeager)
For the record, Matt Yeager who contributed the Gunboats idea to the summer's Kickstarter also got the reward retrospectively.
And the reason we picked £65 is because had we paid Matt a 5% royalty on sales of the Gunboats (fairly standard in the business), he would have got £66.50 or thereabouts.
Payments will be made when the Pledge Manager closes. We reserve the right to tweak the ideas when we playtest them.
Entries close at midnight UK time on 31st January 2021. Submit your ideas via email to jack at eurydicegames dot co dot uk.
Paul and I have great plans for our next FlickFleet Kickstarter.
A stand-alone expansion that can be played on its own with two players, or together with the base game for up to four players.
Alien species with new weapons and abilities.
Investing some of our cash in a nicer video, advertising and graphic design.
But it’s not ready yet. And we can’t meet to test our ideas. Until COVID-19 starts to subside.
We’ve got a bunch of ideas for more human ships though. And mini-expansions with some new rules.
We’re considering sneaking in another mini-Kickstarter, like the summer’s, with that content.
I wonder if there’s any interest.
I’ll ask in our next newsletter...
I love games. Playing them. Designing them. Playtesting them. Doing their graphic design.
But I hate playing them on my own. I very rarely play game apps against the AI. I don’t solo games in my collection. And I hate playtesting games pretending to be multiple players.
For me the fun comes from testing yourself against other humans within the framework of the rules, and the social aspect of a shared experience.
So COVID-19 enforced social distancing has been really tough on my game design productivity.
The publisher of my signed game wants a solo mode added to it. Seeing as I can’t test the multiplayer improvements, it seems only fair that I work on the solo mode.
This is a first for me. Something I have no experience of as a player either.
Surprisingly, I’ve been quite enjoying it. Trying to make it feel like the multiplayer game. Get the same experience, despite the lack of human/human interactions.
It’s getting there...
My first board publishing company started strong, but ended up a financial disaster.
I lost my initial ‘investment’ and 1/3 of the Life Insurance money I put in when I tried to go pro.
I started another. Some people never learn.
This one is going much better.
Thanks to Kickstarter and the popularity of FlickFleet, Eurydice is doing much better than Reiver Games ever did.
After the last Kickstarter we had enough cash in the company that I could withdraw my initial investment.
And now Paul and I are taking a small dividend.
We’re profitable because we don’t pay ourselves salaries for the many hours we work in our evenings and weekends.
We’ve earned a modest payout.
This one is doing much better.
Maybe I have learned something...
Paul shipped the final rewards for our third Kickstarter on Friday.
One month early.
Paul and his family have their living room back.
Some of it shipped late due to COVID-19 related acrylic shortages.
But it's done now.
Now we can focus on what comes next.
We've a few games in the pipeline.
None of them ready yet.
They need playtesting.
But I can't meet anyone. And I hate solo-ing games.
This is the hard bit. I've been keeping busy until now with the books. And the accountants. And Kickstarter. And the website. And the marketing.
Now I need to focus.
And do the thing I hate.
I can't wait to be able to playtest in the flesh again.
If I had to describe Eurydice Games in a word it would be Independent. Not in the Indie sense. Though we're that too.
Independent in the sense we do everything ourselves.
Not because I'm a control freak (though I probably am). But because it's free. In money, if not in time. And we started with very little money.
It opens doors.
We design the games ourselves. No royalties.
Paul makes the games by hand in his garage. It means we can do small runs: 200-400 copies. Which costs a lot less than the 1,000 minimum order of your standard Chinese factory.
And ships them himself. So no freight and fulfilment charges.
I do the website. And the graphic design. And the marketing. And the social media. And the bookkeeping. So no contractor fees.
But things are getting missed.
Due to lack of time. We have jobs. And families.
And now we have some money.
Independent doesn't scale.
Time to lose control.
I'm a tolerable graphic designer. Or passable maybe. Adequate.
I really enjoy doing it, but I don't have a flair for it.
Until now, to keep costs down, I've done it all myself.
The game boxes. The rules. The cards.
But it's homemade. And it looks it.
Thanks to the success of our last kickstarter we've finally got some cash in the bank.
We're thinking of investing it in some professional graphic design.
Make the website and the games look much better.
They really need it.
I'll miss it though.
We need to up our game to be more successful.
One part of that is more website sales.
Our website is largely based on my previous game company’s one. It’s pretty dated.
I’ve created it by hand using HTML and a little bit of JavaScript.
Like the last one it had PayPal buttons for payment. Again pretty dated.
As part of a larger effort to create a better website, I’ve integrated card-based payment using Stripe as the (default) option. And done some re-design.
It’s still using a button per product though - no shopping cart. But it looks much nicer.
And the processing fees are cheaper.
We had our first Stripe sale last week. It works!
It’s a first step.
Next we need to completely overhaul our website so it doesn't look so homemade. And dated.
For the last two years the vast majority of our sales have been through our three FlickFleet Kickstarters. And the subsequent pledge managers.
Like over 95%.
Our Kickstarters have been huge. And getting huger. For us.
But they are still small fry in the Kickstarter tabletop games space (£18,000 versus $10,000,000).
We have only one retail stockist as our small hand-made runs have too little margin to sell to retailers, let alone distributors.
We sell some through the website, but only a little.
If we want to continue growing, and I'm convinced FlickFleet has great potential, we need to do better in all of these channels.
How can we get more website sales? Get the cost down enough to sell into retail? Have Kickstarters that are 10 times more successful?
I'm thinking about these questions a lot.
I started Reiver Games in 2006 with £1,000 of our family savings. That's a lot of money. I was lucky that we were able to gamble it - but it’s not enough. I turned it into £4,800 in two years. That wasn't enough.
I 'invested' £12,000 of my life insurance in Reiver Games. That wasn't enough.
I got a bank loan to cover Carpe Astra, another £13,000 I think. That wasn't enough,
The bank loan repayments killed Reiver Games. That and a lack of sales. I lost most of my 'investment'.
£30,000 in total. Not enough.
So I did it again.
I started Eurydice Games three years ago with £1,000 of our family savings again. But it's not enough.
Kickstarter is a game changer. We've been able to slowly change that initial £1,000 into tens of thousands of pounds of assets. Without the major commitment. Without the bank loan.
In our first year we sold £1,217 of Zombology. In our second we sold £12,857 of (mostly) FlickFleet and Zombology. This year our orders have more than tripled.
Though due to supplier woes we've not been able to 'sell' half of that.
3,167% growth in three years. Happy with that.
Want to make a small fortune in board games? Start with a large one.
That's the joke.
But I've done that. I got MS. My life insurance paid out. I wanted to go pro. I paid off most of our mortgage (on a tiny 1-bed flat), put some aside to live on and 'invested' £12,000 in Reiver Games. And I threw away two years' salary and pension contributions. To end up with £4,000.
We don't do it for the money. It's not going to make us rich.
I don't want to be rich anyway. There are way too many people in poverty to make coveting personal wealth something I'd be ok with.
I want to make things. Things that make other people happy.
I want people to share moments of joy using the things I've made.
Parents and their kids. Friends. Families. Sharing a moment of joy. Our creation the catalyst.
That sounds pretentious doesn't it?
We get messages from our backers and customers. About how much they love the game. Them and their kids. Them and their mates at Games Night.
That’s worth a fortune.
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