Wannabe

In 2006 I started self-publishing board games with Border Reivers.

In 2008 I became a hobby publisher, hand-crafting a 300 copy run of It's Alive! by Yehuda Berlinger.

In 2009 I became a proper publisher, getting a professional second run of It's Alive! done, followed by Carpe Astra (with Ted Cheatham) and Sumeria (by Dirk Liekens).

It went badly.

I lost a ton of money and wound up Reiver Games in 2011.

Eurydice Games was always intended to be different.

The name (suggested by Derek Hohls) was a clue - don't look back, do things differently.

We've spent the last 8 (or nine if you include Zombology!) years self-publishing small runs of FlickFleet and the roll and writes.

It's been different.

No professional runs.

Lots of Gamefound/Kickstarter campaigns.

All games we've designed ourselves.

There's been a few games I've wanted to publish on others' behalf though.

Sadly, none of them have got anywhere.

So we're still a SELF-publisher. 

Or a wannabe publisher.

That might be about to change.

Fingers crossed!

Learning From My Mistakes

One of the advantages of starting a second board game publishing company is that you have previous experience and in particular, lots of previous mistakes from which you can learn (if you didn't you still be running the first one!).

I had a lot of successes with Reiver Games and I'm proud of what I achieved, but the errors outweighed the successes over time and they came to define the company and eventually kill it. According to Carol Dweck, how you respond to failures is a key part of your mindset - some people treat failures as judgements on their abilities, others as lessons from which they can learn. I like to think I'm in the second camp, but you never know.

So what went wrong with Reiver Games? It was all going well while I ran the company as a hobby, hand-making games, it wasn't until I made the leap to professional publisher that things started to come off the rails. I can think of five major mistakes that I really don't want to repeat:

1. Jumped to professional too soon
2. Artwork is critical to retail success
3. Carpe Astra rushed out
4. Taking a bank loan
5. Losing momentum/motivation

Jumped to professional too soon

When my Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis led to my life insurance paying out I had a choice to make, keep working in full-time employment, running Reiver Games as a hobby in my spare time or invest heavily in Reiver Games and go pro. I chose the latter, far too soon. I had maybe ten true fans, and a whole heap of people who had heard of Reiver Games - enough to be able to sell 300 hand-made games within a year, but not enough to sell 3,000 games through retail channels. I should have waited until I had more experience and a better market presence. This time round I have no plans to go pro - I've a family to support now, I can't afford to go without a salary or take a big pay cut.

Artwork is critical to retail success

When you're making games by hand and selling them at conventions and games clubs you've a lot on your side - you're selling the games, and people like to support the little guy or the designer of a game who's excitement about their project is so palpable. When you're selling through retail channels no-one is selling your game. The store will stock it (if you're lucky!), but it will just sit on the shelf amongst hundreds or thousands of others - the staff won't know how to play and won't be pushing your game over any other game. So your game has to sell itself, whether through hype, word of mouth or shelf presence. A beautiful box will really help here, as it will draw people in to learn more. With both It's Alive! and Carpe Astra I got a friend to do the art, and he did me a great deal, so it was very cheap. But he didn't have board game art experience. I loved the art of It's Alive!, but the box was weak, so the second edition had a new box, which was weak in a different way. The art for Carpe Astra was also weak - especially the box. But when it's a mate doing it dead cheap it's very hard to ask him to redo it, especially when you can't clearly articulate what's wrong with it. This time round I'm not aiming at retail, so I can side-step a lot of this, and I'll be mostly selling the game face-to-face with people who have played it, which makes the box art less critical to its success.

Carpe Astra rushed out

If you want to make a living selling board games through retail channels you need to sell a lot of games. Let's say you want to earn £30K. The usual pricing for retail is that you sell to distributors at 40% of retail and aim to get it manufactured at 20% of retail. So your profit is 20% of retail (if you sell them all!). It's Alive! retailed at £15, so my profit should have been £3 per copy (I overspent, it was nearer £1.50). If It's Alive! was the only game I made I would need to sell 10,000 of them every year. That's excluding money for warehousing, attending conventions and advertising. One way to make things easier is have multiple games, that way you can do several smaller runs, and it makes it easier for shops or distributors to place an order with you. To try to get to this point I rushed Carpe Astra out. It had some nice ideas, but it wasn't ready for prime time, and as a result I was left with a lot of games that I couldn't shift. I should have had the balls to delay its release until I though it was ready, rather than rush to be a 'multi-game' publisher. This time round I'm not trying to go pro, so I'm very happy to only have one game on the books at a time, or even none if I've not got the next one ready to go.

Taking a bank loan

A couple of things went wrong with the launch of Carpe Astra, as well as rushing the game out before it was ready, I'd hit several delays when trying to get It's Alive! to market. I'd taken the £4,250 I'd made on the hand-made games and invested £12K of life insurance to fund the £13,500 cost of It's Alive! It's Alive! was months late, so when I wanted to launch Carpe Astra (too early!) I'd not recouped enough of the It's Alive! investment to fund the £10K cost of getting Carpe Astra manufactured. I could have waited, building up funds and giving myself more time to improve the game, but instead I went to the bank and got a loan. For the next three years I would be paying the bank £330 a month. In a good month I'd bring in a lot more than than, but in a bad one I'd bring in a lot less. So my cash on hand slowly dwindled and eventually I ran out. This time round I'm going to be very careful about recurring monthly expenses. At the moment it's just the bank account fees, that don't start for 18 months...

Losing motivation/momentum

It's easy to be excited and motivated when everything is going well, less so when sales are slowly tricking in and your bank loan and warehousing costs are draining your bank account before your very eyes. How you perform under those circumstances says a lot about your character and your likelihood of success. I'm sad to say that I lost faith and gave up - I was spending my days largely watching television on one, then two, then six hour 'lunch breaks', supposedly researching game ideas based on my favourite TV shows. I was pretty pathetic and had I manned up and hustled at that point it might have still been possible to turn things around. I didn't and I paid the price. Reiver Games went under. This time round I hope I'm a better man, I've seen what that leads to and know the warning signs to watch out for. The reduced pressure from not trying to make it a salary paying job will also make it less demoralising if things don't go to plan.

I really don't want to make same mistakes again. This time round I'm taking some things from my day job to help me keep on top of things. I'm adopting a process of continuous improvement and taking regular checkpoints when I ask myself what's going well, badly and what I should start doing that I'm currently not. This step back will hopefully let me spot problems before they become too entrenched and fix them, leading to more success than last time...

The Art of the Matter

Back when I ran Reiver Games I made four games. The first Border Reivers was a hand-made limited edition, and I did almost everything myself, including the art (except the box cover, that was an original painting by my dad, a retired art teacher and artist). It was ... basic. Very basic. But back in the days when a self-published game was a fairly novel item, it was enough to get me by, and didn't put off the 100 customers to whom I sold a copy of Border Reivers too much.

For my second game, I got a friend who was a computer games artist to do some really cool Frankenstein-themed art, and because he was a friend, I got it dirt cheap. It still added a £1 per copy to the total cost though, a not insignificant amount. While I loved the art on the It's Alive! components, I was less enamoured of the box art, and it received some criticism from punters, so when it came to making a second print run, this time aimed at shops at distributors, I asked him to do another box. Sadly, I don't think that box was any better.

My third game was Carpe Astra, and again I got the friend to do the art, again at mate's rates (though with a print run of 2,000 I could afford to pay a bit more this time, despite the fact I was aiming to sell to distributors and hence was pitching at 40% of retail for a manufacturing and art cost. Again I was a bit mixed on the art, I loved bits of it, but I think the box art could have been better, especially with the target market in mind.

For my final Reiver game I splashed out and hired bona-fide board game artist Harald Lieske to do the art. Harald's done the art for several games I own (Vikings, the Spiecherstadt, Puerto Rico) and several other famous ones (Dominion, The Settlers of Catan), so clearly a big name with loads of board game experience. He knows what looks good on a box and how to do all the art ready for printing. I was doing a relatively small print run (3,000 copies), so my budget was limited (but many times what I'd paid for the previous games!). We eventually reached an agreement where he'd meet my budget in return for simpler art than he was originally planning. I was delighted with how Sumeria turned out, it's still my favourite art associated with one of my games by quite some distance.

What brings this to mind is two things: Zombology and Kickstarter. With Zombology (which I've finally finished - one of my goals for the year ticked off already!), I went back to my roots and made a short hand-made print-run doing everything myself including the art and cutting out boxes and all the cards by hand. Actually, that's not strictly true, I took some of the icons from Game-icons.net, either as was, or slightly tweaked.

But the point still stands, the art is mostly mine and pretty basic, this is not a beautiful game. While I hope it's not so distracting as to put off the 28 customers I need to cover my costs, it's not winning any art awards.

In these days of Kickstarter, games need to be beautiful to attract punters, and despite the vast wealth of games on Kickstarter, generally the art is of a very high quality - it's almost expected. My friend Tim's game Toast is a great example of that. To set up a games company these days you need to either be a great artist (Daniel Solis, I'm looking at you), have a wealthy good friend who's an artist (do they exist?) or to fold a large art cost into the manufacturing cost of the game. I can't help but think that life would have been easier as Reiver Games or Zombology would have sold faster if I was a great artist or if I'd set up a partnership with a wealthy, games-loving artistic genius.

As I continue with my own game designing (and conceivably self-publishing), I want to work on and improve my artistic skills. Practice might not make perfect, but it's definitely going to improve my skills, which can't hurt in making my games easier to sell.

In other news, January was a staggeringly good month, 59 games played, Zombology construction finished and a weekend in Coventry with Tim and a weekend in York with Paul. I wish February would be as great, but a work trip to Boston, MA is going to get in the way of things, so I'm not expecting much. At least I'm hoping to finish off the print on demand version of Zombology as I planned in my 2016 goals.

I Need To Buy This Game!

Aside: I'm on holiday at the moment. I've posted this automatically and I'll respond to comments on my return.

Back to the matter at hand. 'I need to buy this game!' is how the exposition for a game should make you feel. The exposition of a game is what I'm calling the short description of the setting and mechanics that you use to summarise a game.

When I ran Reiver Games I used the exposition for many purposes:

• A brief summary of the game at the beginning of the rulebook
• A description of the game on the back of the box
• The first paragraph on the game's webpage
• The summary of the game on its BGG page
• On posters at conventions
• In adverts in trade magazines
• Sellsheets to send to shops and distributors

If I decide to KickStart it, the exposition would be the first paragraph of the KickStarter page too.

Clearly, it's important. I've agonised over the exact wording of each of my games' expositions. They've been through several drafts trying to get them to a honed sharpness of hook. The exposition should leave you thinking:

That sounds fricken' awesome! I need that game. So badly that I'm willing to sell my family to fund its purchase.

Writing them is very hard. I'm not a copy-writer, or a master wordsmith. I'm just a software engineer and occasional board game designer. Moulding the English language to my will does not come naturally. I did an average job on the Reiver Games ones (scroll down a bit in the links below to read the Description sections):

• Border Reivers
• It's Alive!
• Carpe Astra
• Sumeria

They're functional, but not particularly exciting. They didn't work very well either. The number of you who sold your families to buy the games was considerably less than the number of games I bought from the manufacturers.

For Codename: Vacuum, I've got an early draft that tries to cover the steampunk to sci-fi transition and the deck-building nature of the game. But it's not very exciting yet:

It’s 1897 and the discovery of the anti-gravity metal Cavorite has the world powers are poised on the edge of a Space Race to claim the Solar System. Lead your nation to victory by building a deck of strategy cards that will shape your empire for 300 years. What will be the defining features of humanity at the dawn of the 23rd century? Conquest? Exploration? Reproduction? Greed? Technology? Choose a strategy. Advance your technologies. Race to ensure your choice is scored.

Upon reading that, I'm decidely meh. My family are safe. Needs some work methinks!

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?

Translation Woes

A while ago I mentioned how I had created translation grids for the rules for all my games to make it easier for volunteers to translate the rules of my games into other languages. It seems to have worked. I've had a lot of translations done of my rules and this week I've received a couple more (Sumeria into Hungarian and Carpe Astra into Spanish).

So far all well and good. The translation grids work a treat, and make the layout of a new version pretty straightforward. Until everything goes wrong!

Several weeks ago I received a translation of Carpe Astra into Russian. Great! The same guy (thanks Yegor!) had done the other games too, and I'd already done Sumeria, so I started on Carpe Astra.

The translation grids make it really easy to just drop the translated text into the original Adobe InDesign document, using the same images and fonts. At least they do until you pick a stupid font. I'd used Agency FB Condensed, a narrow font that looked vaguely sci-fi, for the Carpe Astra rulebook and cards. Sadly this font did not support the cyrillic alphabet - when I pasted the translated text into the document all I got was little empty rectangular boxes where each character should have been. So I switched to Arial (it's not that important that the font is correct after all).

While this fixed the initial problem (Arial supports the cyrillic alphabet) it's a much wider font than Agency FB Condensed and the Russian translation was normally longer than the corresponding English text - so the translation no longer fits in the same number of pages. My first attempt at fixing this was to drop the font size from 12 point down to 11 (and fix all the layout problems this caused). But after a bit more cut-and-paste it was clear that 11pt wasn't small enough so I went down to 10pt (and fixed all the layout problems again). Guess what? Still not small enough. Running out of patience I shelved the translation and I admit it has been a few weeks since I last made any progress.

The arrival of the new translation grids forced me to go back to it however, and today I finally nailed it. The solution was finding out that InDesign allows you to change the width of a font - effectively allowing me to create an 'Arial Condensed' - a narrower version of Arial. This meant I could change the font size back to 11pt and nail it. It still took a bunch of work and a lot of fiddling to get the diagrams and their captions laid out correctly but the job is finished and off to the translator for proof-reading. This means I can concentrate on the other two translations over the weekend.

The moral of this tale? I'm not really sure, other than learn the abilities of InDesign so that I can fix this problem the right way first time!

Reminders Carry The Day

I had about forty pre-orders for Carpe Astra that I hadn't heard back from yet. I didn't know whether:

• They'd got the first email and not got round to ordering yet,
• They'd got the first email and didn't want it any more, or
• The first email didn't reach them (due to spam filters or whatever).

So yesterday I sent out a second email to everyone I'd not heard from. Off the back of that I got another eight orders and one cancellation. I'm getting through them now.

So far today I've been running around. I've been to the Post Office a couple of times, the box-makers and the warehouse to collect more stock. One of the overdue accounts has paid (yeay!) and I've missed the courier deadline for sending a couple of shipments. Those will have to go tomorrow. Still, at least I don't have to wait in for a collection any more, so I can go the bank and pay in some money :-)

November was a pretty good month, and I'm hoping December will be too - I've several orders I'm expecting still outstanding. I'd imagine things will slow down in the new year, I'll not have any more new products for a while so I'll be relying on re-orders. We shall see.

Oh, and me email is broken again. I think a new supplier when I move is called for.

Au Revoir Garforth

My friend Hugo has been running a weekly games club in Garforth, near Leeds for several months now. It started as having a few friends round, then migrated to a new venue and has been growing each month recently. It's a great venue, free (Hugo pays for everything but accepts donations towards the costs) and there's free tea, coffee, biscuits and wine gums. In other words everything you need from a games club. Today was the last meeting of this year, and hence probably my last attendance ever as we move at the beginning of next year. I usually get the train (cost £10) but Mike offered me a lift today, as seeing as The Wife was at work this afternoon and out for dinner with friends this evening I stayed later than I usually do - to the bitter end.

First up, Mike, Jon, Alan and I christened Mike's copy of Battlestar Galactica, I brought mine along too, but after Mike had played mine at Beyond Monopoly! a couple of weeks ago, he'd bought one :-) This game was a wash-out, we had a terrible draw, with lots of cylon attacks and very little progress on the jump track. There were several cylon attacks when we couldn't add any basestars, raiders and even heavy raiders to the board as they were all already on it. We were boarded four times. When the game ended after about two hours we'd travelled a grand total of one! Next up Alan suggested playing one of my games, so we cracked open Carpe Astra. It was a tight game, with lots of storytelling (and disbelief at the stories told on the slander cards), which Mike eventually won. He liked the game enough to buy a copy too - thanks Mike! Next up was a quick game of Dominion, I came third, but I had a much better game of it this time. I think I'm starting to get a grip on it. When the others suggested a big game of Who's the Ass?, which I loathe, Hugo stepped in and offered me a game of Border Reivers. I'd not played in a while (I had to look up a couple of rules!). All in all a great afternoon, I'll miss the club and the friends I've made there.

When I got home (fairly late) and checked my email I had another stocking order from a Spanish distributor which I wasn't expecting. Woot! Great Day.

Stocking Orders

Today is all about the stocking orders. I've got a stocking order for It's Alive! and Carpe Astra from a new UK distributor, a case going to a shop in Australia, and the Texan distribution I've been dealing with are also taking some Carpe Astra. I had to wait in for a drug delivery anyway today, so being in for the couriers is no big deal.

My trip to the box-makers yesterday went fine (they made some up for me while I was there), and it wasn't until I got home that I realised a problem. The bigger cases for Carpe Astra mean I need a bigger box. I got some bigger boxes, but when I got home and started checking the shipping prices (which require the size and weight of the parcel you're sending) I noticed that the larger box I'd bought to fit six cases of Carpe Astra was so large that its volumetric weight (cubic volume in cm^3 / 5000) was over 31.5Kg, which made it too heavy for many of the cheaper services I'd been using. Since I've already quoted several people shipping prices I'm just going to have to swallow this :-(

I'm going to go back to the box-maker today (the drug delivery has just arrived and the stocking order collections are all this afternoon) to swap some of the new boxes for the ones I used for It's Alive! which fit 4 cases of Carpe Astra quite snugly.

Talking of stocking orders, I've a few overdue accounts now from distributors. A few became due yesterday (the ones who collected at Essen among others) and I'm still waiting for the cash. Hopefully, it'll turn up in a day or two.

The individual pre-orders have slowed down now, I'm still waiting on 40-odd, I don't know whether they've even received the email, changed their minds or are just waiting for funds to become available. A couple of customers have had to cancel their orders as the credit crunch bites. What will become of the other forty? I've no idea...

Another Busy Day

Today I've got to press on with the Carpe Astra shipments. I've another six individual copies to post already today, plus I've got to prepare for the first of the stocking orders going out tomorrow. The couriers who will be collecting the stocking orders could turn up at any time, so I need to stay in all day, so all of my going out trips need to be done today.

First up, I need to pop over to the box-makers to get some more shipping boxes. I need something that will fit six of the Carpe Astra cartons (more than that and the shipping carton will be too heavy to lift - certainly too heavy to carry down two flights of stairs!). The Carpe Astra cartons are bigger than It's Alive! ones (the game is a little bigger) so I need to take some empty cartons with me for measuring purposes. Next up is another trip to the warehouse. I've got to collect some more Carpe Astra and a few It's Alive! too.

I'll have to do at least one trip to the Post Office with individual copies, and I've got to run a carton of Carpe Astra over to Jorvik Games a local online games store that are going to stock it. I've also got to go to the recycling centre with all the cartons I've emptied so far - we're supposed to be keeping the flat tidy for viewings. I'm not doing so well with that at the moment, the living room is full of games cartons!

Carpe Astra Thoughts

I sent the first twenty orders off yesterday, then I ran out of envelopes. I went and bought some more, but by that point the Post Office was closed. Today I've sent the next eighteen orders, and now the Post Office is closed. If I get any more pre-orders paying today or tomorrow I can at least parcel them up ready for trips to the Post Office on Monday. I'm going to need to go back to the warehouse on Monday too, I've got to collect some more stock, including some It's Alive! ready to send out the first of the stocking orders on Tuesday. I'll also have to get over to the boxmaker for some more big boxes to send the stocking orders out in.

I know this is a fairly biased viewpoint but I thought I'd give some impressions about my first view of Carpe Astra. This is the first time my name has appeared on a professionally made game, and also the first time I've used this manufacturer in Germany too.

The linen-finish on the box, coins, score markers and tiles is great, somehow it makes the game feel more professional. The box quality and the tiles, etc. feel really nice, and the board pieces are well cut and a decent thickness. The cards are nicely done too. All-in-all I'm very happy with the job the Germans have done. When coupled with the great customer service and good price I'll almost certainly use them again.

I've got to try and get on top of my inbox during this lull in shipping. I received a bunch of emails while I was away that I've not had a chance to reply to yet. Must catch up...

It's Here!

After making some changes to my wesbite, I popped over to the warehouse to collect some of the Carpe Astra boxes that had arrived this morning. Apparently, the driver had tried to deliver them at 8:15pm, and when turned away was very rude to the security staff. He then re-appeared at 6:45am this morning. Nice.

But they've arrive and in pretty good nick. I brought 28 boxes (168 games) home to start fulfilling my pre-orders, and then sent out the 'they're here, pay me and I'll send yours out' email. It's going to be a busy few days of back and forth to the Post Office...

Carpe Astra On Its Way

Carpe Astra was assembled in Germany on Saturday, and will be shipping from the manufacturer's warehouse today. I hope to receive it on Friday, when I can, all being well, start sending out the pre-orders.

I'm off for a couple of days tomorrow, which looks very well timed now, as I'll be back just in time to receive the games. Of course it's been ages since I had some time completely off, and surprise, surprise, this time will be no different (don't tell The Wife!) - I'll take Codename: Jorvik with me and might do some playtesting if the opportunity arises. Talking of Jorvik, I tried the new version out on one of my playtesters at Beyond Monopoly! on Saturday. Feedback was generally good, though I've only played this version a few times, so it'll need a lot more testing and tweaking before I'm happy with it.

I've had a quiet couple of weeks post Essen, with most of my suppliers having plenty of stock at the moment, but Carpe Astra will make next week very busy again. Several suppliers are ordering It's Alive! (or re-ordering it) at the same time as Carpe Astra, so that will make it even busier. I foresee a few trips to the warehouse on the horizon...

Toaster!

At Paul's games night last night we played Battlestar Galactica for the third games night in a row. It's unusual for us to play the same game repeatedly, but I must admit I'm loving it. It evokes the fear, paranoia and distrust of the TV show perfectly. Last night, I got to check the President's (Lisa's) loyalty card right at the beginning of the game. I take a look. Dammit, she's a Cylon. I promptly tell everyone: 'She's a frakking toaster!', Lisa responds: 'No I'm not, he is!' Of course, no one knows who to trust, so we're both considered at risk for most of the game. Lisa is often helpful to the humans, to appear loyal. Then she throws me in the brig :-( At half-time, I get the sympathiser card, so I'm back in the brig. The game went right to the wire, with the Cylons (Greg & Lisa) winning again. We've yet to see a human victory.

Yesterday, I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped. I was busy in the morning, and then finishing off the prototype took all afternoon. Still, seeing as it doesn't require much thought, I had Battlestar season three on in the background, in preparation for season four which was delivered yesterday.

Today I'll be soloing Jorvik a few times, to see what I make of the new rules and chasing up a few distributors about Carpe Astra. I've heard from my big US distributor that sales of It's Alive! are going pretty well, and they're interested in Carpe Astra too.

All being well, Carpe Astra is being manufactured today. Hopefully it'll turn up around the middle of next week. I'm still waiting for a firm delivery date from the German freight company, I need to know so that I can warn the warehouse staff of the impending arrival.

En Français!

I'll be spending this morning laying out a French translation for It's Alive! that I've received from a French customer. He's sent me the translation as a word document, so I'll get it into PDF form and put it on my website.

Carpe Astra is coming along nicely, I'm still taking a few pre-orders each day (now that the ad is up on Boardgame News along with a preview by Eric Martin. Interest seems fairly high, and the distributors are getting in line to stock it too, which is great. I need to contact a few shops in the UK, see if I can drum up some interest via that route.

Once those two tasks are out of the way my next order of business is to do some more work on Jorvik and possibly my sci-fi game, back to game design for the first time in ages :-)

Pay Day!

The two overdue invoices I had outstanding were both paid today - yeay! One of them was only a couple of days late, but the other (a shop in the UK) was over a month late, so to finally get the money was a relief. I've not had any other late payments, and in the current economic climate I was worried whether this was the shape of things to come, but for the moment at least the worry has abated.

The news that Carpe Astra will be ready early has thrown me a bit. I was expecting a whole month to try to get distributors and shops on board, and the run adverts on BoardGameGeek and Boardgame News. With all the house stuff and the Essen fallout distracting me I find myself with only a week until the game might arrive! I've had to change my plans accordingly. BGG has a minimum of one month for running ads, so I'm just going with one on Boardgame News instead. I figure that once the games have achieved widespread distribution I'll run more ads, but the current one shows: 'Pre-order now' text, so that will only be appropriate for a week or so. I don't want to run the ad after that until I have widespread distribution in the US, as most readers of both sites are from there.

The other big thing I need to do today is my books for last month. In terms of turnover, last month was my most successful month ever, and it puts me well on the way towards my target for this financial year (April-April). The start of the year was a washout, as due to the printing delays on It's Alive! I had nothing to sell for May, June, July or August. It's nice to be back on track. November should be another good month, as I'll get a bump from Carpe Astra pre-orders and hopefully some stocking orders. Let's see if I can reach my target early :-) Either way I don't expect to make a profit this year, what with having to pay for all of the It's Alive! and Carpe Astra print-runs up front.

It's All Go At Reiver Towers

Hmmm. Reiver Towers. I like that. When (not if!) Reiver Games is a massive world-spanning corporation, I think the Headquarters should be called that.

Anyway, back on topic. Today has been pretty busy. This morning I started going for a swim again before work. I've had a few weeks off, with injuries and the MS attack. On my return I've been trying to sort out the last few things for Essen (shipping the games over there for a start!).

If that wasn't enough to be getting on with, I've been trying to get the Carpe Astra Geeklist together, received my first re-order and got the proofs and plots from Germany for Carpe Astra.

The re-order is great news. With a UK distributor still dragging their heels (I've now been told I should get the PO this week), it's great that the other one are selling it successfully. They sold over a third of their stock in the first two weeks and the rest in the next two weeks. I'm sending them some more this week.

The stuff from Germany is the plots (showing location and cut lines, but not colour-accurate) and the proofs (colour accurate, but not showing cut lines). I need to check it all and then send them back signed confirmation via fax. I don't have a fax machine or a scanner though, which makes things slightly more complicated.

Around all this I need to do my German lessons and I had a doctor's appointment at lunchtime too!

Getting Exciting Now!

A couple of days ago I received a white sample of the Carpe Astra bits. I got a box, the insert and the punchboards, nothing had any print on it and the punchboards weren't die-cut, but it was enough to get me excited. This will be my first game with an insert and my first game that is linen-finished (box and punchboards - not cards). Somehow it feels more professional that way.

Carpe Astra is still on course for the end of November, despite the glitches in the box art that needed fixing (twice). I'm now trying to pimp it to distributors and shops in preparation for getting some stock. I'll put some ads up, probably on my return from Essen.

In other news, I've now finished my books for last financial year, and I'm going to start this year's this afternoon. Last year my sales grew 250% and my profit nearly 1000%, but it's still small fry, and I wasn't taking any wages out of the company. Due to the late arrive of It's Alive! and its knock on delay on Carpe Astra I doubt I'll make any profit this year, but my sales should be significantly up again.

I also got paid by one of my customers yesterday - a day early. Yeay! I've got some tardy customers too who I've got to chase for payment this afternoon.

I'm also trying to find time to do my German lessons. I got a course for my birthday, and I did a few lessons back then, but I've been slack and not done anything since. I'm trying to do a lesson every day between now and Essen to refresh me. I'll still be pretty poor - but it's the thought that counts (I hope!).

Hallelujah!

I've finally got through to the UK distributors. My contact (who's obviously an exceptionally busy man) is now off on holiday, so I spoke to someone else on the team instead. He said they'll do the purchase order this week. In other news, the other UK distributor seem to be doing pretty well, they've sold over a third of their stock in the first couple of weeks :-)

I was out of the office again yesterday, so when I got back I had a few things to sort out. The German manufacturers had spotted a couple of problems with the box design, so I fixed those and sent them off this morning. Now that the box and rules have gone to the printers I've posted the rules and some box pictures on my website and BoardGameGeek. I've been waiting for the rules to be up before I put the advert up, as I doubted that anyone would order a copy with so little information being available (except my true fans - thanks guys!). Now that the extra info is available I might do a BGG GeekList showing how the game evolved over time. Anyone interested?

I need to go back to doing my books too. It's dull, but I've got to submit a VAT return at the end of the month, so they need to be right up to date for that. I guess that'll be this afternoon's travail.

Press-Ganged!

My mate Mal is coming down for a long weekend this morning. This afternoon I've got to send off the art for the box and the rules. Mal has a good head for design. Hmmm. I'm seeing a cunning plan here. Mal arrives and is put to work critiquing the box design. I'm sure he'll be able to come up with some ideas to improve it further. Excellent. What's even better is that though I know Mal reads this, he's on the train at the moment - so he won't get an early warning and pull out :-)

In other news, I'm still really struggling to get a purchase order out of the other UK distributor. I've tried to email him (last response, the only one so far, was that he'd do me a purchase order last Wednesday - still no sign of that). I've tried to phone him (the receptionist always says he's busy, he doesn't return my calls). I know a bunch of shops want to buy from them, but they still don't have any stock, nearly a month after the game was available. It's very frustrating.