Die Speicherstadt is a board game I’ve owned for probably 15 years.
By Stefan Feld.
The art is by Harald Lieske, who I got to do the amazing art for Sumeria.
And today I’m in it.
It’s the old warehouse quarter of Hamburg in Germany.
We’re spending the day here on our train holiday around Europe.
In November I went down to four days a week in my day job.
I’m incredibly lucky that we can afford it.
It’s allowed me one day a week to focus on Eurydice and Tyneside Games Expo.
Previously they were consuming all my spare time around a full time job and a family.
Now I have some free time.
And I can work on the companies when I’m awake, not after a full day’s work and family responsibilities are done.
They’ve been amazing.
Then crack on until it’s time to collect my youngest from school.
We’re now into the holidays.
So Mondays are family time now.
Today I’ll do my walk with the girls.
And play games with the youngest while the eldest goes shopping with friends.
Progress will be slower for the next six weeks!
But it's time well spent.
I've spent the last week or so working on our next quarterly newsletter.
This one is focused around all the cool stuff fans of FlickFleet have done.
From scenarios to ships.
Guides to ...
Translations to holistic rulebooks.
So much cool stuff.
Done by fans of the game.
We're so grateful for all their contributions.
As usual there's a recommendation for something cool I've come across in their too.
If you're interested, scroll to the bottom of this page and subscribe here in the next few hours to get it!
One of my daily habits is now business development.
Every day I try to do something to drive Eurydice Games forward.
Some days it's tiny.
Some days it's big.
But progress. Every. Single. Day.
I group it into three categories:
We're still not at the point where we're sustainable outside of crowdfunding or conventions.
An ordinary month's web sales don't cover our overheads.
Last year I tried to fix that with ads.
It fixed the cashflow, but broke the profitability.
We spent way too much on ads.
This year I'm trying something different.
I've scaled the ads right back.
I'm trying to do more social media.
More reaching out to press.
Longer campaign previews.
I've even started a Tiktok.
It's pushing me out of my comfort zone.
But I'm giving it a try.
It's a low effort thing that might pay off given time.
A few weeks ago I had a new game idea.
Flip and write game using an ordinary deck of cards.
Inspired by War of the Worlds.
With a schlock 50's sci-fi vibe.
So far I've hand-sketched a few sheets and tried the first quarter of the game.
That bit kinda works now.
For the next bit I wanted to get something on the computer so I could crank out sheets.
That's done now.
Let the playtesting begin!
We've spent a lot of money on Meta ads over the years.
Slowly upping the ad spent on each FlickFleet campaign.
Even spending a little on the roll and writes.
It's brought in pledges, I'm sure of it.
Last year we tried something different.
Tried to run the company more traditionally.
Using (more) ads year-round to bring in enough sales to cover overheads.
It worked.
Sort of.
The overheads were covered.
Cashflow was mostly stable.
But the ads didn't perform well.
The ad spend was so high we made a massive loss.
This year is much better because we've recognised the sales from last year's campaign.
And all the costs hit last year.
And we're spending a lot less on ads.
The small amount we are running is performing pretty well.
... according to Meta.
In my experience, that doesn't scale well.
Our last crowdfunding campaign for Gal4Xeon was our best roll and write by a factor of more than 2.
And we spent nothing on ads.
Not a penny.
We're not quite covering our overheads.
Except for events and good weeks of web sales.
But we're not burning cash.
I'm considering not advertising the next FlickFleet campaign.
I'll need to do something else to bring in followers and backers though.
I've got a few months to think on that...
I'm working on a couple of new products at the moment.
Not new games, just new formats.
It's at the fun 'what are the possibilities' stage.
One is a printed version of Gal4Xeon.
I'm trying to price up a tiny run.
Not sure of the demand at this point.
Or what it will include.
I've asked for input from our Discord and Facebook followers.
Not what I would have expected.
Wondering if we can get something together for Tabletop Scotland in September.
At the moment our lowest priced product at conventions is the standard FlickFleet at £35.
Money's tight for a lot of people at the moment.
If we had a game for less than £20 it might be a good option.
And Gal4Xeon did well.
Got great reviews.
Worth a shot I think.
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