Community

I love the gaming community.

I've been part of it since I started attending Beyond Monopoly in York in 2006.

Since then I've made gaming buddies in York, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Newcastle.

Plus loads of friends from around the country that I see at conventions.

This weekend I went to AireCon for the second time.

First time as a punter, not an exhibitor.

We were looking to see what they do well so we can make Tyneside Games Expo as amazing as possible.

We spoke to most of the exhibitors, pitching the show to them.

Lots of them were people I knew.

Or friends.

From UKGE, Tabletop Scotland, or our first AireCon.

Plus there were loads of people from Newcastle Gamers there.

And various other friends too.

I love that feeling, walking the halls and bumping into so many people I know.

And I even got to playtest my new game idea.

Jeremy thought it was excellent.

On it's third play!

I think it has potential.

I'll be trying it out again today with Joe of Word Dungeon fame.

Another gaming buddy.

Origin: Paul

I’ve always loved playing games.  I have many happy memories of playing Risk (and other games, even Monopoly) with my parents and of playing D&D (a lot of D&D) with friends after school.

Work and life got in the way of gaming for a few years, until I read about Carcassonne.  My wife encouraged me to ‘try it out’ by going to Beyond Monopoly! a gaming club where I live in York.  It rekindled my love of playing games.

I started a weekly games night with friends (and friends of friends)… and through Beyond Monopoly!, I came across this nice chap, Jack, who was looking for someone to help playtest his game.

I’d won the lottery, of sorts.  Suddenly, my life was busy with a lot of gaming and I found that I genuinely enjoyed playtesting and developing games.

But even more suddenly, I became ill with Limbic Encephalitis.  I had to give up work, and my memories of the previous day would vanish overnight.  But I had amazing gaming friends, who would still come round for games night, and patiently reteach me the rules of a game I’d learnt the week before.  And in time I recovered, retrained for a new career, and got a job as a teacher.

Then I changed jobs from teaching to working on a project to help teachers teach computing. And of course, those weekly games nights continued.

Throughout it all, I remained friends with Jack... even after he moved away from York.   In fact, we’d spend perhaps even more time together, staying for the weekend with our families at each other’s houses.  We would stay up late… long, long after the children had gone to bed, playing games and playtesting.

It was one such weekend visiting Jack, that I had an idea for a game.  Inspired by a game the night before, which had promised so much but never quite made it for me. Jack and I talked it through, designed it together, and FlickFleet was born.

I won the lottery, of sorts, again when Jack asked me to join Eurydice Games. No longer on the sidelines, playtesting for him, but instead a partner with him in our games company. 

We endured a nail-biting 4 weeks for our first Kickstarter and just managed to fund.  And suddenly there I was, with a laser cutter in my garage which I needed to learn to use.

We had more successful Kickstarters.  I was balancing the laser cutting, and bagging of components, around my day job.  But it was getting harder to fit it all in.

And then I won the lottery, of sorts, yet again.  The contract for the project I was working on ended.  But Jack and I calculated that Eurydice Games could pay me just enough that I could focus on manufacturing games… and my wife was OK with the drop in our household income.

And I love it…  the manufacturing, the playtesting, the demoing at events, even the packaging and posting. I get to do my dream job.

I’m so lucky to be here, doing this.

A Busy Week

It's been a very busy week this week. I've shipped the first two blind playtesting copies of FlickFleet, made my first batch of Zombology in ages (I've been focussing on FlickFleet for the last couple of months), had a UK Games Expo seminar accepted and then spent the weekend with Paul (my FlickFleet co-designer) doing some gaming, some playtesting and attending Beyond Monopoly, the club in York, for the first time in probably nine years. Finally, I found out that FlickFleet is not a finalist in the Cardboard Edison Award - despite really positive feedback from the judges.

The blind playtesting is a crucial step in the development of a game. You're sending a copy of the game, complete with rulebook to strangers for their feedback. They will have to learn the game from the rulebook, as if they'd bought it in a shop and then play it - rightly or wrongly based on their reading of your rulebook. You will then get feedback on the quality of the rulebook, what wasn't clear or was missing and their opinions of the game. From strangers. Who unlike the people you will have mostly been testing with, are not your friends and are less inclined to go easy on you to protect your feelings. It's an invaluable opportunity to find the weak spots in your rulebook (writing rules well is very hard, and invariably you will have missing things or made statements that can be interpreted in different ways), and to get a better idea how a random punter would experience and feel about your game - it's also a great opportunity to get a better idea of what the market reception of your game might be.

A blind playtest copy ready to go in the post

Zombology has suffered a bit over the last couple of months. I'd built up a decent stock in December, and while I intended to keep cranking out copies in January and February, sales were not fast enough to demand it (though on track!) and I spent what little time I had (The Baby has been sleeping terribly since Christmas, so I've been going to bed early and Eurydice time is between kids' bedtime and mine, a time period that has been heavily squeezed!) on FlickFleet instead. In January I was trying to get a Cardboard Edison Award submission done (more on that later) and then this month it's been upgrading my copy, getting a copy to Paul and then working on the blind playtesting copies. With a trip to Beyond Monopoly last weekend though I needed to boost my slowly diminishing stock a bit - I'd rather take far more than I need than have fewer than I could have sold. I got six boxes and three games made during the week, which meant I had 15 copies to take with me to Beyond Monopoly.

On Monday I also heard that the seminar idea I had pitched to the UK Games Expo in Birmingham in June (me hand-crafting a copy of Zombology live in front of an audience while talking about my experiences running Reiver and Eurydice Games and the many tips and tricks I've picked up over 16 years of hand-crafting games). It's going to be 1-2pm on Sunday 3rd June and spaces are limited to 50 people, so if you're interested I'd get there early!

Friday evening we braved the snow and drove down to York to see Paul and his family again. I was too tired in the evenings for our usual playtesting and gaming (baby-related sleep deprivation again!), but Paul and I made it along to Beyond Monopoly on Saturday afternoon - the big games club in York I used to attend when I lived there. While there I spent the afternoon demoing Zombology and playtesting FlickFleet and I sold two copies of Zombology :-) It was also great to catch up with some old gaming buddies. There was a lot of interest in FlickFleet too - several people signed up to my mailing list to be kept in the loop.

The week ended with the news that FlickFleet had not made the cut for the Cardboard Edison Awards finalists. From a field of 192 the judges had to pick approximately fifteen based on a video introduction, a rulebook and a brief overview. My video (done the night before submission) was spectacularly uninspiring - I sounded terribly dull and not at all excited about my game, and the rulebook was pretty poor too - it was also last minute, and had no examples and not enough diagrams. I could really have done with getting the new rulebook (finished last week) done in time for the submission at the end of January.

This week I'm hoping to make it to Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday to show off the latest FlickFleet changes and get peoples' opinions on them.

Bringing People Together

The Daughter was up between 4:15 and 4:30 every day last week, so I didn't get as much done as I had intended on the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Zombology. Still, the clocks have changed now, so I'm hoping that she'll be sleeping to something past five on summer time, and I can start going to bed a bit later myself - and get the last couple of copies finished off and then get them all in the post. It's Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday, so that'll be a late night and then there's Games Night on Thursday, so I'll have to fit the construction in around those.

So, not much progress to report but and interesting thing did happen on Tuesday. I went to Manchester again for work (it's becoming a regular occurrence since we were bought by an American corporation whose UK headquarters are in Manchester). It's often my boss and I who go down, and since he's a Games Night attendee, I usually take my iPad full of board games to help us while away the six hours of train journeys. The boss couldn't make it this week, so I opened it up to the floor and Sam one of our two new starters came instead. Sam's also a gamer, so the iPad came too. We played a lot of games on the two journeys many of which Sam hadn't played before. The last game of the first journey was Carcassonne (new to Sam) which Sam won despite my literally hundreds of games of experience.

The second journey was very busy - the train was crammed. Fortunately we'd booked seats and so had table space to play some more games. As we pulled out of Manchester, I offered Sam another game and he chose Carcassonne again. Sam and I were sat diagonally opposite each other on a four person table and we'd been on the move for about 5 minutes before the guy sat next to me started offering Sam advice! As the game went on Mr. Random Stranger helped Sam out a few times - he could sense I was the more experienced player and so was helping 'the underdog' :-)

The game came to an end, and seeing as Mr. Random Stranger hadn't got off yet, I asked if he wanted to play too. Pat (his name as it turns out) happily joined in and we spent the next hour and a half playing three player games until Pat got off at York. It turns out Pat had been to Beyond Monopoly (the games club in York I used to frequent when I lived there) and knew Jon, the guy who runs it (who used to help me playtest games when I ran Reiver Games). It's a small world. I also felt like I vaguely recognised Pat, though that might be my imagination, I've met a lot of people through Reiver Games, and I'm often bad at remembering names and faces.

In case you ever read this Pat, it was a pleasure to meet you - thanks for joining in!

Games/Life Balance

I now have the replacement power lead for my laptop, so I've been able to finish making the requisite changes to Codename: Vacuum. I didn't finish them until this weekend with the printing and assembly booked for this evening, since at the beginning of the week The Daughter was ill and not sleeping well as a result. In a bid to survive the working week we went to bed pretty early to try to get some sleep, which left me with very little time in the evenings to make the changes, print them out and then cut out and assemble the prototype in time for Thursday. I'd planned a playtest session on Thursday lunchtime and I'd intended to have it available for Games Night, but in the end I just couldn't find the time to get it ready. It's now been three and a half weeks since my last game of Vacuum, which considering I've been playing at least once a week for a year now feels very weird indeed.

All this reminds me of a blog post I've been meaning to write for a while about my balance of real life and games and how it's changed over the years. So here it is :)

In the early days of Reiver Games, I had a full-time job as a Software Engineer which morphed into a project management role. I was hand-crafting the games I was selling (four hundred of them between Border Reivers and It's Alive! first edition) and that took time. I was giving up weekends to go to conventions to sell the games and a good chunk of most evenings either assembling games, checking and responding to emails, doing some half-arsed marketing or designing games of my own. In addition, in the run up to a big convention such as The UK Games Expo, The Cast are Dice or Beer and Pretzels, I'd have to build up some stock to take and, seeing as the handmade games took 1.5 to 3 hours each to create, that was a significant investment in time - so I'd end up using some of my work holiday allowance to spend a couple of days working 12 hour days flat out making games. Games were starting to take over a large chunk of my personal life.

Following my MS diagnosis, and the subsequent life insurance payout, one of the driving reasons behind trying to get Reiver Games off the ground properly and running it as a full-time concern was that I'd get my evenings, weekends and holidays back, seeing as I'd be able to do all that stuff during the working day while The Wife was at work herself.

So now I was spending all day during the working week working on gaming stuff. Of course, as anyone who's run their own business knows, it's not that easy to turn off when you're the boss. So I still ended up spending a bunch of time on RG stuff in my 'free time'. In addition, all my friends in York I'd made through gaming, and my social life was twice weekly games nights at Paul's house, once a week playtesting evening at mine and frequent trips to Beyond Monopoly on a Saturday. My trips abroad were for Essen. Life was now heavily dominated by gaming. When we moved down south it was a similar story, my friends were all made through gaming, so my social life and my job were both entirely games related.

With the demise of Reiver Games I swung back the other way. With the exception of a weekly games night with my friends down south, I did very little to do with games. My work was once again software development, I spent little time gaming and no time designing games or playtesting.

Since moving back to Newcastle things have slowly started to swing back the other way again. I've started up my own Games Night once a week and bought a few more games so that I have a decent selection for people to play. I've been designing Codename: Vacuum, spending a few evenings a month doing graphic design on the computer and then cutting out and assembling the prototypes. I've been playing Vacuum once a week on a lunchbreak at work. In addition, in the last few months I've started up the Newcastle Playtest sessions and started attending Newcastle Gamers a bit more often too. Games are once again becoming a large part of my life. But I'm still a more rounded character than I was in the Reiver Games days. My work is software development again, and I spend some of my free time brewing beer and learning to play the guitar. Plus I'm a father now, so I spend a lot of my time entertaining and looking after The Daughter.

I often wonder what I would do with Vacuum if I ever get it to a point where I'm happy with it. If it ever reaches that point I'll have to decide - I toy with the idea of hobby publishing again like the early days of Reiver Games, or KickStarter, or approaching the other publishers I know through my days at Reiver Games. But what I come back to is that my family is a far more important use of my time.

In the meantime, I'm going to concentrate on getting the new Vacuum printed and cut out this evening, ready for tomorrow's Newcastle Playtest session at The Bridge Hotel, and then working on getting Vacuum to the point where it's 'ready'. That's plenty to keep me busy for the moment.