Paul and I have both been feeling rough this week.
But we've managed to eek out some progress.
Paul continuing to churn out ships from the laser-cutter.
To fulfil our website orders.
Me, inching towards the completion of the crowdfunding page.
And, while feeling particularly rough this weekend, cranking out a first cut of the high-ink page for Exodus:
I love the feeling of community.
I’m stuck in the office all month for February.
So I’m playing games every day in lunchtime games club.
We’re a small community of gamers at work.
I design games.
So we started a community of board game designers in and around Newcastle.
It’s doing the best it ever has.
My sister-in-law and her husband have been visiting this weekend.
We’ve been hanging out and playing games all weekend.
I love that feeling.
Being amongst my people.
One of the reasons I love conventions.
The sense of belonging.
I don’t really use Discord.
But I’ve set one up.
If you’re looking for a FlickFleet community.
We call ourselves a publisher.
But really we're a self-publisher.
Zombology.
FlickFleet and its billion expansions.
Three print at home roll and write games.
All designed by me, or me and Paul.
Nothing by a different designer.
Yet.
We've signed a contract for a FlickFleet-related game.
And there was another chance this week.
I went to my monthly playtesting session in Newcastle. In the pub.
Played one of the other designer's games.
Told him I'd be interested in publishing it.
Spent the week thinking about it.
How to make my own copy for playing with Paul and my other friends.
Then a few days later the designer said he'd rather pitch to a big publisher.
Disappointing.
But fair.
I'd told him he'd be better off doing that at the beginning!
Still disappointing though.
I loved it.
I’m working on the next FlickFleet Gamefound campaign.
Beavering away behind the scenes.
But there’s not much to show for it.
The draft has hardly changed in a couple of months.
I’d hoped to make really good progress this week.
The Wife was away for work for three and a half days.
But solo-parenting is time-intensive.
Didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped.
I think I need to push the campaign back a bit.
I have made progress this week though.
Getting prototype ship outlines designed.
Then Paul added etching.
Need these for the page design work.
It’s getting there.
Stealthily. Behind the scenes.
Paul and I run Eurydice Games.
He does all the manufacturing and most of the shipping.
I do finances, marketing, and graphic design.
And we both do the FlickFleet game design.
Which is slightly awkward.
Because I live in Newcastle upon Tyne.
And he lives in York.
100 miles away.
Our families are friends, so we try to meet up in Newcastle or York several times a year.
To catch up and hang out.
We play games with each other and the kids.
Chat, eat, hang out.
And don't make a heap of progress on Eurydice things.
Like FlickFleet game design.
I've just spent the weekend in Leicester with Paul.
Due to a storm disrupting my travel, I had to change my travel plans last minute and travel to York on Thursday evening (no Games Night 😢).
So I got to hang out with Paul and his wife on Thursday evening.
Then Paul drove me to Leicester.
And we spent 72 hours together.
At the end, rather than getting my train in Leicester, Paul gave me a lift back to York and I boarded it there, as it went through.
Another 2.5 hours in the car together.
We got so much done.
A very productive weekend.
Plus we sold some games.
How cool is that?
I’m really interested in space.
In sci-fi.
Obsessed maybe?
I’ve published 7 or 8 games I’ve designed.
Border Reivers, set near where I live in the 1500s.
Then Carpe Astra (with Ted Cheatham) set in space.
Then Zombology about curing a disease with crazy things (not ivermectin or bleach though).
Then FlickFleet and Xeno Wars (with Paul), both set in space.
And three print and play roll and writes: Rocky ‘Roid, The Planets My Destination, and Away Team Bingo.
All set in space.
I’m working on another print at home roll and write too.
It’s set in space.
So you can imagine how excited I was when we were invited to demo and sell FlickFleet at the National Space Centre in Leicester last January.
At their To Boldly Game event.
I’d been meaning to go there for years.
Plus, we sold way more games than I was expecting too.
They’ve invited us back for this year’s event.
It’s this weekend.
I’m so excited!
Is the thief of joy.
Apparently.
I’ve seen a few people on the last week or two publishing their earnings in board games.
Or talking about it.
A few surprises.
A small publisher similar to us.
Who I’d assumed was doing much better than us.
Because they are in retail and distribution, unlike our hand-made-in-a-garage games.
They’d had their most profitable year yet.
Only a four-figure loss.
We’ve been profitable 5 out of 6 years!
Go us!
And a big name games designer who’d made over €150k in royalties this year! Which was worse than last year!
I had no idea that was even possible.
I assumed the full-time game designers were earning a small but comfortable salary.
That’s way more than I make in my day job as a manager of a team of programmers.
And way more than our revenue, let alone profit.
Another designer I’m aware of who had made $34k in royalties.
Again many times our profits.
I'd like to get to higher turnover.
And higher profits.
So we can fix our cashflow issues.
Have money to invest in new games.
Have enough cash left over for me to draw some of my dividends out.
Happy New Year all.
After a week or two of Christmas preparation and then visiting Paul, Christmas itself, then visiting my family and then the in-laws.
I'm back.
Cracking on with the Gamefound campaign for Box of Xeno Flicks 1.
Finally making good progress.
I'm loving their new import/export feature for rewards and add-ons.
It's saved me a ton of time.
I could export the rewards and add-ons from the last campaign.
Tweak them.
Then load them back in :)
Next up is the graphic design for the rewards/Box of Xeno Flicks/Shipping sections.
And getting some details up about the new ships you can vote on :)
Not much to say this week.
First with my family.
Then with The Wife’s.
Lots of time in the car.
But also eating, drinking and hanging out.
Plus a little gaming too.
Just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support in 2024.
Paul and I really appreciate it.
And to wish you all a happy, healthy, and fun 2025!
We've spent the weekend in York.
Visiting Paul and his family.
For Fauxmas, our fake Christmas.
Complete with Fauxmas Eve, Fauxmas Day (including presents and Fauxmas Dinner) and Foxing Day.
It was a lovely weekend.
A great chance to catch up.
Play games.
Drink.
Eat.
And be merry.
We played lots of games. Mostly including at least one of my kids.
So lighter games.
Lots of Apples to Apples, Codenames, Just One, A Fake Artist in New York and UNO.
But also Las Vegas.
Get his feedback.
Discuss some new ideas.
I've got a new version to try now :)
Plus some weeding of the many ideas for FlickFleet: A Box of Xeno Flicks 1.
A great weekend :)
I've spent the last week fighting with my bank.
Mano-a-telephone.
Toe-to-handset.
I lost.
Despite last week's blog about how we would pay royalties that week I'm still in limbo.
Eventually I pulled the money from PayPal, rather than pushed from the bank.
It's left the bank.
And now it's in the ether.
The bank says they have fond memories of it.
PayPal say we await it patiently.
It'll arrive in a week or two.
Where the hell is it?
The ether.
So the royalties are still pending. Until the money is in the warm embrace of my PayPal balance.
Which could be another week or two.
I can only assume someone is carrying it on foot.
In the meantime, I've been working on my third print at home roll and write again.
And planning 2025.
This weekend we're going to York to spend 'Fauxmas' with Paul and his family.
There will be food and presents and games and playtesting.
And more work on the next FlickFleet campaign.
Box of Flicks 2 was largely designed by fans of the game.
A fan contributed to Box of Flicks 1.
There was lots of fan content in the Box of Pirate Flicks too.
We make a big thing about how we credit them and pay them royalties.
We've been meaning to pay the last lot for a while.
It includes the last year's reprint and this year's Box of Pirate Flicks.
So it's quite a lot of money.
Things started going wrong at the beginning of the year when we ran out of FlickFleet for a few months.
So web sales tanked as we had nothing to sell.
And overheads started eating into the profit from the Pirate Flicks campaign.
Website sales were pretty slow all summer.
The pot dwindled further.
When it came time in August to ship the Pirate Flicks games to the US we had three options.
We choose the fastest.
And most expensive.
Then VAT bit us.
The quotes were excluding VAT. I forgot that.
We had to pay them, and another £1,500 in VAT.
We'd get most of that back. In early December.
We've been almost out of cash for five months.
I've had to lend the company money a couple of times to pay the bills.
We've just got the VAT back!
And had our best ever week of website sales. And another really good one.
It's time to pay the royalties!
A weight off my mind. I hate owning people money.
I've spent most of the weekend trying to sort it out.
The transfer to PayPal was blocked by the bank as a suspect transaction.
I'm hoping I'll have the money available to pay out this evening...
This week has been bizarrely good for website sales.
Last three weeks have been within 50p of each other.
This week was more than double them!
And I’ve no idea why!
Not complaining though.
That’s eased our ongoing cashflow issues.
And it’s, in combination with the VAT rebate that’s coming shortly, means we can make some long over due payments :)
But that’s an aside.
The main focus of this week has been…
Our seventh FlickFleet campaign.
The campaign is created.
There’s a very basic holding page.
Which already has over 100 followers!
In addition to starting work on the campaign, I’ve been reviewing the fan submissions.
Starting to shortlist them.
Playtesting is next :)
This week has been all about sirens.
The Ancient Greek kind.
I had an idea for a Siren themed game a couple of years ago.
I wanted it to feel like Guillotine and 6 Nimmt.
Funny. Chaotic. Sweary.
I made a first version.
Tried it.
It was bad.
Made a second after chatting with Casey at work.
Better, but the cards were way off.
Then it languished for a year or two.
At Newcastle Gamers a couple of weeks ago there were six of us and that second version was the only six player game anyone had brought.
So we played it.
The cards were still way off.
So I started on a new version.
Got that ready last weekend.
Played it at work on Tuesday.
It went better.
New ideas for cards.
Made a new version Friday.
Soloed it Saturday.
Very quick turnaround.
Hopefully I can play this one at work tomorrow…
I started computer programming when I was ten.
Both my degrees are in it.
Almost all of my day jobs have been doing it.
For the second time in my life I'm now a manager of a team of programmers.
I don't program at work any more.
I've been doing some for Eurydice Games this week though.
I had to get the books completed up to the end of October so our accountants can do our VAT return.
That included 102 Gamefound orders for Away Team Bingo.
I can download them from Gamefound as a spreadsheet.
I need to get them into our accounting software.
I can import them to it as a spreadsheet.
A different spreadsheet.
Over the last few years I've written a few programs to move orders between the various spreadsheet formats we use.
This week I've been tweaking them to support the latest changes.
And then getting those orders into the books.
Around that I've been tweaking my Sirens game.
We played it at Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday.
There were six of us, and it was the only game present that went to six players.
I knew it needed work.
So we played it.
Now I have some ideas of how to work out the kinks...
I’ve spent the weekend in the middle of nowhere.
Playing games with an awesome bunch of people.
Lots of new games.
My favourites were Lord of the Rings Duel and Space Base.
We went for a couple of walks in the countryside.
I played a couple of games of Jotunsaga.
With other designers.
It got really good feedback.
And spawned a bunch of new ideas.
I took a Sharpie, a pen, and some blank cards.
So I could make a new version.
And try that too.
And there’s Newcastle Playtest tomorrow.
It’s coming on nicely…
My focus has been split this week.
Partly trying to fix the issues with the ads.
Partly preparing for next weekend.
For the third year running Paul has booked a remote lodge for a long weekend of gaming.
It's in the arse end of West Yorkshire.
Surrounded by the Yorkshire Three Peaks.
It sleeps about 40 people in bunks.
There's no mobile signal, and the first year there was no WiFi either.
Just gaming.
With great people.
All friends of Paul's.
I'll be there for 48 hours.
Driving down after work on Friday, coming home on Sunday night.
I'm really looking forward to a weekend of gaming with great people.
Some walking in the wilds.
And maybe even some playtesting.
When not focused on fixing the ads, I've been trying to get a new version of my troll game ready.
For the weekend.
Fingers crossed!
Businesses live or die on their cashflow.
We're lucky that we've been profitable for five of our six years.
We had to replace a laser-cutter in the other one.
But cashflow is a continual problem.
We go from feast, after a crowdfunding payout.
To famine.
Most years Paul and I have had to lend the company money to stay afloat.
Or fund crowdfunding advertising.
The last few months have been hard.
Larger than expected bills.
Getting used to paying VAT.
I've had to cover bills from our savings a few times.
And we owe people money.
It's stressful.
My goal this year is to get the website sales to cover the overheads and make a little positive cash every month.
I ran the numbers.
Worked out what we'd need to spend on ads to hit that point.
I started slowly increased the ad spent so we didn't drop back into the learning phase.
It dropped back into the learning phase :(
Ad performance has tanked.
I've had to lend the company money to cover the ad spend.
Really hoping it gets out of the learning phase soon.
Board game publishing, well any publishing really, is gambling.
You back a horse.
By choosing a game to publish.
You bet a stake.
By paying for marketing and artwork.
Kickstarter has improved things, since you no longer have to gamble the manufacturing and shipping costs upfront as well.
And then you find out how your bet did.
When you sell the print run, or run the crowdfunding campaign.
If you’re a big company, you hedge your bets.
Back many horses.
Hoping some of them win big enough to cover any losing bets.
We’re small.
One bet at a time.
Each one needs to cover the stake really.
Away Team Bingo is live on Gamefound now.
It finishes tomorrow.
And it’s tracking towards just covering its stake.
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