What's in a Name?

For many years I've been referring to new games by a codename that stands as a working title while the game is in development. It's Alive! was Codename: Monster, Carpe Astra was Codename: Network and Sumeria was Codename: Ancient before their official names were chosen or announced. And now I'm working on Codename: Vacuum.

If I decide to hawk it to publishers, job done, I can send it with the codename, since the publisher will almost certainly want to chose the name (and the artist and tweak the rules) themselves. However, if I decide I self publish again I'll need a real name for it at some point.

I've been toying with a couple of ideas (one of which I posited here to a conspicuous silence!), and it got me thinking about what makes a good game name.

Lots of euro games go for the place name option, e.g.: Goa, Macao, Cuba, Santiago, Puerto Rico; while more themed games chose something a bit more involved: e.g.: Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition, Race for the Galaxy, Space Hulk.

I would want something that gives you a flavour of the game, but it also needs to meet certain criteria:

• There can't be an existing game with the same or a similar name
• It's got to Google well
• Ideally there's not a book/film/computer game with the same name
• It's got to sound enticing
• It ought to evoke the gameplay or setting

So Race for the Galaxy is out (taken) and Race for the Solar System is out (too similar). Sol is out (taken by a 2011 game, a forthcoming film plus brings back hundreds of BGG hits). Empire of the Sun is a film and book, Solar Empire is a 2012 game. So you can see there's a lot of competition!

Making up a word works in a lot of ways (it should be unique in the BGG database and should Google well), but it be awkward for searchers to guess the 'correct' spelling, plus it's difficult to evoke the theme, concept or mechanics of a game with a word that by definition doesn't mean anything.

I've been thinking about 'Full Steam to the Stars' or 'Steam to the Stars' for Codename: Vacuum. They both have a few things going for them:

• No competition: a BGG search of 'steam stars' brings back no hits and Google doesn't find anything with that phrase in the first page
• They both evoke the Steampunk initial setting of the game and the sci-fi finish with a sense of the transition in between
• Full Steam gives a hint of the race to ensure that your target victory conditions are ones that get scored

Of course, the downside is that I'm too close to them so I've no idea whether they sound rubbish or not. The name has to be interesting enough that if you saw it on a shelf you'd pick up the box or if you saw it in the BGG Hotness you'd click the link. I'm not sure either of those have that kind of appeal.

For Carpe Astra I ran a BGG competition to choose a name (the winner got a mention in the rules and, I think, a free copy of the game). I could do the same thing here, but it's a bit of a wasted effort if I hawk it to publishers and they call it something else.

What do you all think of (Full) Steam to the Stars? Got any better ideas?

I'm Back!

Both at home and at work :-)

While I was away I received the signed contract from Dirk Liekens so I can now confirm that Sumeria (formerly known as Codename: Ancient) will be released in time for Essen next year under the Reiver Games banner. I've a brief comment on my website, but with no artwork yet it will be a while before the game is properly listed. I now need something to slot in early next year (potentially a UK Games Expo release), something cheap to make (like a card game) is the order of the day.

I've spent most of today overhauling the Carpe Astra rules based on feedback from Ted's blind playtesting held in the States last week. It seems to have been well received and the rules feedback is invaluable - writing rules has got to be one of the hardest parts of games design.

In other news, I sent the last of the proofs back to Cartamundi yesterday, they should have it finished in three weeks time. I'm going to close the pre-order list when I receive the sample back from them, from then on I'll only be shipping to shops and distributors. It looks like the US distributors want to see a finished copy before they order any, so it's going to be a couple of months at least before it reaches widespread US distribution. Boards and Bits seem interested though, so if they order directly from me, it might be available over there sooner. Yesterday I also uploaded the artwork to another publisher who is interested in making It's Alive! available in another language, hopefully I'll hear back from them fairly soon.

I've got to decide on a pricing structure for Essen too. I'm getting a couple of press enquiries, which include a request for my prices at the fair. It's a difficult line to walk, I want to offer a discount, to draw people in, but at the same time I need to be careful not to step on the toes of my other stockists. It's Alive! will retail at 19.95 EUR and be available in shops before the show, so I think I'd better be especially careful with this one. Carpe Astra is likely to be £20 / 25 EUR and won't be available before the show. I'm thinking full price for It's Alive! and 5 EUR discount for Carpe Astra (down to 20 EUR), with maybe a further 5 EUR discount if you buy both. If you've been to Essen, how does this sound? Too tight? Too generous? Likely to get me in trouble?

Carpe Astra Prototyping

The last couple of days have felt a bit like returning to my roots. I finished by last copy of Border Reivers well over a year ago, that was the last time I had to glue artwork onto thick board and then cut it out with craft knife and steel ruler. Until today.

I spent Monday and Tuesday getting some artwork together for new Carpe Astra prototypes and a new version of the board for Codename: Ancient. Wednesday I went round to Paul's for playtesting in the afternoon as usual but I availed myself of his garage first to do the gluing (it needs to be done in a dry, well ventilated space). Today I've spent most of the day cutting out the bits for three prototypes, one for me, one for Ted and one for another playtesting group in the States.

I though I'd show you what I've got so far. Bear in mind that as yet I have no artwork from the artist, so this is all placeholder stuff I've done myself. Still, both Paul and The Wife like it!

First up a network card. These are used to form positive connections between your character and some of the guilds in the game. As usual, click on the image for a bigger version. I've used a thumbs up icon in the top corners so you can quickly look at your hand and work out whether the cards are positive or negative.

Next up is a slander card, used to form a negative connection between another character and the groups. Note the red thumbs down icon in the top corners.

The final type of card is an event card, used to describe events happening in the Empire during the game that boost the power of one of more guilds temporarily. This is one of three types of event, and displays the 'Immediate Event' warning sign symbol to show that something unexpected has happened:

The final image shows a few of the thick card components: the character and Imperial Senate single hexes, a few double hexes showing the symbols for The Military, Priests, Settlers (which don't look so hideously cyan in real life), Traders, Engineers and Politicians (placeholder art!). At the top there is also example 1 credit and 5 credit coins and in the both right are some scoring tokens.

I'd appreciate some comments on the card layouts, bearing in mind all the art will change.

Belated June Report

I've been so busy over the last week or so that I've not had time to report on my progress in June. There was lots, plus a lot of game playing too. As usual I'll start with my game playing first.

Play

June was a busy month for playing games. The Expo finished on the 1st of June, I managed to get to both Beyond Monopoly! and Hugo's GarforTTGamers, and I had Mal and Linz down one weekend, saw Mal, Linz & Robin another and finally Mal again for a Monday afternoon on his way home from Manchester. It saw Race for the Galaxy return to the top of my most played list, and a whole bunch of first plays:

• Race for the Galaxy - 13 plays
• Mix-Match - 6 plays
• Carcassonne - 4 plays
• Carpe Astra - 3 plays
• Carcassonne: The City - 2 plays
• Hive - 2 plays
• Lord of the Rings - 2 plays

It was good to get out Lord of the Rings again, though we were crushed both times. Carcassonne: The City was a present from Dunk for being Best Man at his wedding, as well as coming in a neat wooden box, it is also a pretty good game.

I also had a lot of single plays: Ave Caesar, Canal Mania, Cartagena, Confucius, Diamant, Dominion, Galaxy Trucker, Guillotine, It's Alive!, Mr. Jack, Pandemic, PitchCar, Puerto Rico, Star Wars PocketModel and TransEuropa. Of those Ave Caesar, Carcassonne: The City, Confucius, Dominion, Galaxy Trucker, Mr. Jack, Pandemic and Star Wars PocketModel were new to me. Best new game of the month is probably a toss up between Dominion and Pandemic. Dominion was just a prototype but it was a nice original game (very hyped at the moment). Pandemic is a co-op game (like Lord of the Rings) which is also very popular at the moment. I think Pandemic for the win, but more plays of a published Dominion might well up it's rating. It was great to get so much gaming in, especially with people I rarely see.

Creation

It was a good month for game design/publishing too. I got to play Carpe Astra with Eric Martin of Boardgame News, almost got It's Alive! to the printers and finally got around to playtesting a lot of my submissions.

It's Alive!

I got the last of the It's Alive! artwork back from the designer, and after some negative feedback here, got him to make a few changes to the box design. It's still less popular among Geeks than the old one, but I prefer it and I think it'll stand out on the shelf better. I got a quote I was happy with for manufacturing It's Alive! and almost sent it off to the printers (that slipped to early July). I also had a decent amount of interest from shops and distributors, still only a small fraction of the print run are spoken for, but I'm hoping that once a few shops start stocking it, word of mouth will do the rest.

Carpe Astra

I continued the never ending tale of tinkering with the Carpe Astra scoring, and at the end of the month came up with something that I think I'm happy with. I'm now making some more representative prototypes to send to a couple of playtest groups in the US. The new prototypes have been done of the computer so they look more professional than the hand-drawn effort I've been using, and they also have the flavour text on, which should help improve the immersion.

Codename: Ancient

I've finally dusted off this prototype (which didn't look like anything special) and fallen in love with it. It's been getting really good reviews wherever I play it too. The only slight problem is the designer is not replying to my emails - I don't know whether he's on holiday, ignoring me or the emails are being eaten by a spam filter somewhere.

Submissions

I'm still going through the rest of my submissions, there's still some I haven't played yet, and some that some pretty good, but I'm not sure they're good enough. I'm looking for something fairly cheap to manufacture next (maybe a card game?) since with It's Alive! and Carpe Astra so close together I'm running up a lot of costs. Something cheaper next is definitely the order of the day, especially seeing as it will take a few months before I start recouping the costs for It's Alive! and Carpe Astra.

StabCon and Carpe Astra Prototypes

After a good weekend at StabCon, I've spent the day working on Carpe Astra again. StabCon was good fun, I got to play a lot of games, mostly new to me, but not many prototypes. I ended up spending pretty much the whole weekend gaming with Steve, Paul, Andy and Richard (to various degrees - it was a fluid group with people dropping in and out), so we mostly played games that people had brought and wanted to play. I think in hindsight, I'd have been better off setting up on my own table and trying to collar a load of passers by instead if I wanted to get more playtesting done.

I did manage to get Codename: Ancient and Carpe Astra to the table and got some good feedback about both. Codename: Ancient went down well, so well in fact that Steve placed an order (I've not even picked it up yet) and said he'd even buy it without new artwork, which is pretty cool. Carpe Astra was played by Steve (who'd played it before at Beer and Pretzels) and Andy & Toby who hadn't played it before. The feedback was good and Steve thought it had improved in the last couple of months. I'm fairly happy with the scoring now (finally) and I was going back to some old rules regarding the number of pieces allowed on a hex. I think it's better the old way - it's certainly easier to keep track of your network if there's only one agent on each hex.

I've spent today in Adobe InDesign mocking up a new prototype for Carpe Astra. It's high time my version got updated (my one is done mostly with biro and colouring pencils), and this means I can print out a bunch more, for Ted and another playtest group in the US. It's still placeholder art, but it'll give an idea about the layout I'm considering. I've done what I need to on the computer today, tomorrow I'll print it out and then assemble it. I think it's going to be Wednesday or Thursday before I can post the US-bound copies, as I need to do some more spray gluing, for which I'll co-opt my friend's garage again.

In other news, the much delayed June Report will get done tomorrow, honest!

Short Day

I'm having the afternoon off today to spend some time with The Wife. I figure I'll be playtesting on the weekend at Summer StabCon, which counts as work so, I'm due some time off.

Yesterday, Paul and I got some playtesting in, as he was busy on Wednesday afternoon. We managed a 3-player game of Codename: Native, the first time I'd played it with more than two. It's growing on me - the first time I played it I thought it was good, but more plays seems to make it more interesting. We also got to try a new prototype which had arrived the week before, Codename: Farm. First impressions were that it had some interesting ideas, but needed a bit of streamlining.

In the evening there was a limited turnout for Paul's games night (everyone's on holiday) so instead we introduced Spencer to Codename: Ancient. The scores were much tighter this time, as Paul, Lisa and I had all played it before. Spence came last, which implies a learning curve. Afterwards we thought of ways to improve the layout of the prototype to make things simpler to play and get your head around.

This morning I'm going to chase a few stockists and my potential US Distributors to try and drum up more orders for It's Alive! I'm also going to make a start on some new Carpe Astra prototypes. I'm going to send a couple to the US for playtesting - a first for me.

Tomorrow I'm off early to StabCon. I think I'll take the following prototypes with me: Ancient, Native, Rising, Match, Colony, Backyard and Carpe Astra. Should be a good weekend.

Playtest-O-Rama

I've been playtesting like a man possessed over the last few days. Of the 58 submissions I've received, 12 prototypes are in process. Some of the rest I've turned down at one stage or another, others I'm waiting on the rules or a prototype from a designer.

Of those twelve prototypes I've got, I've now played ten of them, with two still to hit the table.

While Mal was here on the weekend, we played seven games of four different prototypes, Codenames: Backyard, Native, Rising (x4) and Carpe Astra. Monday night I went round to Paul's as usual, and as he was expecting a quiet night he asked me to bring some prototypes. We usually play 'real games' at Paul's games nights, so that was quite unusual. We played a couple, one that I'd played a few times solo and then with Mal, one for the first time. First we had a 3-player game of Backyard, followed by a 4-player game of Special, after Vin arrived. Both went down well.

Last night I held another Tuesday night playtesting session at mine. Lisa and Paul G. made it, so we had another opportunity to play a game for at least 3-players. We played four different prototypes, one of which was the first play. Before Paul arrived, Lisa and I played a couple of games of Codename:Rising, she was keen to play it again after the first game (and so was Mal on Sunday) so that's got promise. We were just setting up Codename: Ancient when Paul arrived so we had a 3-player game of that. I really enjoyed this one - expect to hear more on that front! Next up was a 3-player game of Codename: Backyard. We finished off with a quick game of Codename: Match.

Today I'm going round to Paul's again for my weekly Wednesday afternoon playtest. That'll be four playtesting sessions in four days - fantastic! I'm going to take:

• Ancient - I really enjoyed this 3-player last night, it'll be good to see how it plays with 2;
• Backyard - I'm enjoying this one too;
• Rising - A 2-player abstract that Paul's not played yet;
• Madness - I've only played this solo so far.

and probably Carpe Astra too.

Now that It's Alive! is nearly ready to go to the printers, I can split my time between trying to get distributors and shops to pick up It's Alive!, finishing off the rules for Carpe Astra and getting my submissions tested and evaluated.