Thursday, September 20

A Busy Few Days

With The Wife out every night for her conference I've had plenty of time to make games. I've now made fourteen this week which is pretty good going, but I'm out tomorrow night (see - I do have a bit of a life) and all day Sunday I'm travelling to Paris for work. So I'm probably done for the week. Still fourteen is not bad. I've got eighteen stock which is great, but twelve of those are for a stocking order which I have to fulfill next week. Next week I hope to have a pretty good week for construction too. I've got a day off on Wednesday in lieu of working Sunday, so I'm going to try to make a ton of games that day. What I need to do is build up a decent stock of games as I'm getting towards the end of the professionally made boxes and I don't want to be scrabbling to make ordered copies once I've got to take longer making the boxes myself.

My geeklist hasn't been as popular as the last one. The last one has nearly two hundred recommendations, and earnt those very quickly. This one is languishing under fifty. I'm not sure what I did wrong. I think the title is not as snappy, and the content is more of a history than advice for those in a similar situation. It's been out two days and is already starting to drop off, I think it's done. Still it's attracted some attention, and made a couple of sales, so it's not all bad. I think where I went wrong may have been talking about a professional run too soon. Some potential customers (especially in the US where the exchange rate makes it quite expensive) are holding out for the professional edition in the hope they can get it cheaper. It probably will be available cheaper - online retailers discount - but it won't happen if I don't sell out of the hand-made edition. I think I need to do some more publicity in the UK where the price is very reasonable. Perhaps another newspaper/radio feature or try to get on the tele. What I need is a press release.

In other news, on the bus to work this morning I had some ideas about Codename: Jorvik. When Dave and I played the latest version the other night we considered a new endgame, and worried that the scoring was too maths-intensive. I thought of a new scoring method that simplfies things a lot. I've also cut out and lined a new set of cards. I'll finish them during my six hour train journey to Paris on Sunday and then I can try them out in my hotel room. I'll play around with the scoring too.

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