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!

FIVE

This month Eurydice Games Ltd turned five.

Six if you count the first year when I ran it by myself.

Almost as old as Daughter the Second.

I remember doing the initial graphic design for FlickFleet with her as a sleeping baby in one arm.

It's been fun watching it grow.

Get bigger.

Learn new things.

Same for Daughter the Second.

I’m excited to see what it grows up to be.

Much like Daughter the Second.

Road trip!

This week though, it is preparation for Tabletop Scotland.

It’s in Perth (Scotland, not Australia obviously!), this weekend.

It’s another weekend away with Paul.

Another road trip.

I’m really looking forward it it.

Friendship

I’ve known Paul for 17 years.

He brought two friends to my first ever public playtesting session.

All three of them ordered Border Reivers.

Reiver Games was born.

Paul invited me to his bi-weekly games night and we became friends.

When I moved away we stayed in touch and though I saw him infrequently, he was one of my best friends and playtesters.

We designed FlickFleet together in 2017.

He joined Eurydice Games in 2018.

Despite living 100 miles apart he’s my best friend.

We chat regularly on Slack, occasionally on FaceTime and meet up every few months.

We’ve just spent the last four days in each other’s pockets.

Breakfast and dinner together. On the stand all day together. Playtesting together in the evenings.

Road trip buddies

We evening shared a room and drove down from York together.

It’s been great.

It’s lovely to have a proper catch up.

Plan what’s next for Eurydice Games.

We don’t see enough of each other.

Four

I started Eurydice Games four years ago.

To self-publish hand-made games.

Specifically not to go to Kickstarter.

Or mess up like I did last time. To learn from my mistakes.

Things have changed!

Paul joined and we formed a limited company a year later.

We’ve been to Kickstarter four times, each more successful than the last.

This year is already our most successful ever, and we’ve a lot of games we hope to ship in the next six weeks.

Things are changing further.

Paul is going to be employed by Eurydice Games from September.

And earn a salary.

I never managed that with Reiver Games.

I really hope we can continue to be successful enough to support Paul.

Here’s hoping year 5 is a good one!

A lesson in Doing it Right

I noticed in passing Jamey Stegmaier's 2017 Stonemaier Games Stakeholder Report on twitter this week. It's an incredible read. Especially when you compare it to his inspiration, the Steve Jackson Games equivalent. And my earlier admission of failure.

What made it especially interesting to me was comparing it with my first attempt at running a publisher, Reiver Games, and my current self-publishing project Eurydice Games.

Jamey has been fantastically successful. Fantastically. Fair play to him, he's exceptionally good at what he does. Stonemaier have one full-time employee (Jamey) and made $7.1 million in 2017. That's more than double what they made in 2016. Plus, importantly they were profitable.

Their first game (Viticulture) was published just four years earlier. $0 - $7.1 million in turnover in four years. Now that's impressive. For comparison, Reiver Games ran for 5 years, its best turnover was around £22,000 and I never took a salary from it. Clearly Jamey does this way, way better than me.

Reiver Games was founded in 2006 and was just hand-crafted runs until mid-2008. I made the jump to 'professional' publisher then, just before the stock market crash in September 2008 when lots of people's spare cash dried up. I invested a small amount of my own money in it at the beginning, then a fairly large amount of my life insurance payout and then took out a loan. Servicing that loan killed Reiver Games. Stonemaier by comparison have no debt.

Now probably the biggest difference between us is Kickstarter. Kickstarter was founded in 2009 and Jamey has initially released most of his games through it, with great success. Pretty much everyone who is new to publishing (and quite a few old hands) now launch new games through Kickstarter, but it wasn't available in the UK until after Reiver Games had shut down and I'm still uncomfortable with it now. Which probably explains why I'm hand-crafting small print runs again and Jamey is turning over millions of dollars.

In addition to the fantastic success Jamey has deservedly raked in, there's several things in that report that staggered me.

Jamey has been that successful making one new game a year, plus a couple of expansions. When I was running Reiver Games I was convinced the only way to be successful was to have a lot of games on your books like Z-Man or Rio Grande. That was always my aim: get to the point where I had several games coming out a year. Hopefully one of them would be a smash hit, but if not, half a dozen less successful games meant that you could more easily sell to distributors and shops and meant that brand awareness would build as people saw your logo in more and more places. But even in these days, when there are thousands of new games appearing on Kickstarter, Jamey has been hugely successful with one new game a year. That goes to show the quality of the games he's producing, and the fan-base he's built.

The print runs show just how successful he's been. At the time of Reiver Games people talked about 5,000-10,000 copy runs being for very good games, with maybe up to 50-70,000 if the game won Spiel des Jahres or something similar. My 'professional' Reiver Games print runs were 3,000, 2,000 and then 3,000 (for It's Alive!, Carpe Astra and Sumeria respectively). Nowadays I'm hoping that I can find 200 people interested in Zombology (which admittedly is a niche, within a niche, within a niche!). Stonemaier have five games in circulation with between 31,000 and 150,000 copies in the wild. Those are epic print runs, and with such large runs come some huge economies of scale - something I never successfully achieved.

Even with those however, Jamey admits that his margins aren't where he wants them. He's aiming for manufacturing costs to be 14-20% of retail. He's not quite there yet. During my Reiver Games days I was aiming for 20%, but only managed it once. It was nearly 30% for It's Alive!, about 25% for Carpe Astra and finally 20% for Sumeria, for which I did a larger run (so some economies of scale) and bumped up the price to £25. Sadly, with my obsession for small boxes all that meant was my game was the only £25 game on the small box shelf, the rest were all £18-22. Looking really expensive by comparison didn't help me since the vast majority of my sales were through shops and distributors. Now that I'm making games by hand and selling directly I don't need to worry about shops and distributors getting their cuts, so I'm aiming for 50% (it's just under 40% for Zombology and due to the laser cutting and perspex it'll probably be over 60% for FlickFleet :-( ).

The other thing that stood out was the size of Jamey's audience. He's got 33,000 people on his mailing list (I've started from scratch again, so I've only got 60!), 9,000 twitter followers (to my 2,250) and is active on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube where I don't even have accounts. He's clearly doing a lot of things right.

For those of you coming here for advice on getting into game (self-)publishing, you should be going to Jamey. Come here for the cautionary tale instead!

The Sentiment Behind Craft Wednesday

If you follow me on twitter you've probably spotted my #CraftWednesday activity on, unsurprisingly, Wednesdays. I started it towards the end of last year and I'm pleased to say that it's been reasonably successful with a decent number of people getting involved, quite a few of them from week to week.

Cyvasse boardgame by @sprkwd

What is #CraftWednesday I hear you ask? Every Wednesday I post a series of tweets about cool board game-related crafting activities that I've seen during the previous week and then check in with the people who have previously got involved to see how they are getting on.

I've chosen crafting as the topic as it's something close to my heart. One of the reasons I started a second board game publishing company is because I missed the hand-crafting days of the beginning of Reiver Games - I love doing the graphic design, and hand-crafting the physical games. I also enjoy doing the art, though not as much (and I'm worse at that bit!). I am by nature a maker of things. Since as far back as I can remember I've preferred making things in my spare time to consuming them (it's been variously designing roleplaying missions and scenery, painting miniatures, writing bits of computer games, making mobile apps and for a long time designing, doing the graphic design and then hand-crafting board and card games, both prototypes and for sale). I love the creativity, keeping busy and focused and finally the pride you feel looking at what you've accomplished.

I strongly believe that a board game (which have been my passion for at least thirteen or fourteen years, and if you include tabletop roleplaying and CCGs then it's nearer to 25) isn't a game if it's sat in a box on someone's shelf (whether yours or the customer's) - it's just a collection of pieces. Games are only really games when they are being played, so obviously I want the games I designed to get played. There's a couple of traditional routes to this: approach a professional publisher or Kickstart it yourself. Which are both fine, but approaching a publisher means that the design and graphic design is done by someone else and the crafting is done by a factory.

Kickstarter lets you take control, but I don't think I've got the chops or the marketing skills to do a large run successfully through Kickstarter, I'm a little uncomfortable with the Kickstarter model, plus around my young family and busy job I don't want the hassle of trying to sell off the remaining stock to shops and distributors or organise and pay for the warehousing of it. I've done that before and I know how much work is involved.

So, here I am happily hand-crafting small print runs, desperately hoping that I'm good enough at marketing (and the games are popular enough) for me to sell out of the 200 copies of Zombology that I have in flight.

But #CraftWednesday is not about me, it's about the rest of the community of gaming-related crafters. It's about sharing the cool stuff that people are making, whether it's for sale, as a gift to a friend or a stranger or as a personal project to enhance the gaming experience in your own house. It's pretty broad, covering everything from hand-made dice trays, through laser-cut dice towers, scribbled prototypes, hand-sewn game pouches and bags and 3D printed game pieces or scenery. It's about celebrating the great stuff that people are making and sharing all that creativity more widely. It's about reaching out to those members of the community who share my love of making things and sharing their projects, achievements and successes with a wider audience.

It's also about encouraging that effort. On a recent training course I heard that research has found that setting yourself a goal is great but by itself it is not enough. You are significantly more likely to achieve it if you: write it down, come up with a plan, commit to a supportive friend to doing it and provide regular updates to that friend. Doing each of those things increased the chance of success, doing them all was the most successful option. I've taken that research to heart and I've set up a Board of Advisers for Eurydice Games to help keep me accountable. I realised though that I could give that back. By spending a chunk of my time on a weekly basis checking in with people on their crafting projects I could help them be successful.

That's time well spent!

What Does Success Look Like?

Following on from last week's blog about why I've gone down the route that I have and what my long term goals are I thought it would be good to share what my goals for this year are. In my head the year runs from September (when I started genuinely making Zombology) to August rather than the calendar year or the traditional April-April financial year.

This time round I'm trying to be a bit more business-like than I was with Reiver Games. I've got a business case I've written with sales predictions, costs and planned actions and risks.

Success for me is not based on the reception of Zombology directly, though the criteria will only be met if it's fairly well received. Zombology is a niche game that's likely to be a bit love/hate with people. One of the advantages of a small print run is that I can make more unusual, interesting games, ones that might not succeed as mass-market games. Some people like a zombie theme, others hate it. Semi-cooperative games are a turn off for a lot of people. Some people might find it too deep/complex for what is a 10-15 minute game once you know how to play it. I'm hoping that most of the people who buy it enjoy it and are happy with their purchase, but it's hard to treat that as a success criteria, and I don't want to rely on something like BGG scores as a proxy.

So the obvious measure is sales. My business plan has me selling 135 out of the 200 copy print run by the end of August next year. That's five a month most months with the exception of the pre-orders and launch buzz in Sept/Oct and Christmas in December and an aggressive target of 50 sales at the UK Games Expo next year.

Not quite on target yet!

In the days of Kickstarter goals are not enough. You also need stretch goals. So let's throw a couple of those out there too - one that's tough, but might be within reach and one that's crazy hard.

Stretch Goal 1 is to sell the whole 200 copy print run within the year - i.e. by the end of August 2018. That's tough, but not impossible I think. I sold 300 hand-made copies of It's Alive! in 2007-08, for £15 each, so 200 at £10 should be distinctly possible. Obviously it's a different, more niche, game and there's a lot more competition these days thanks to Kickstarter. Also, I've a young family at home that I want spend quality time with, so there's more time pressure on the crafting, marketing and selling than there was back in the early days of Reiver Games.

Stretch Goal 2 is pie in the sky, but if you don't dream big you'll never get there. Stretch 2 is to get Zombology picked up by another publisher for a professional run after I've finished the hand-made run. I'm not going to put any effort into this, so I'll not be submitting it to publishers or hawking it to them at conventions. The only way I can see this working is if Zombology gets great reviews on BGG or similar or if someone who works for a publisher orders it and really likes it (that happened for It's Alive! - I had the chance to licence it to another publisher, but back then I wanted to be the professional publisher, so I said no).

So there we are - that's what I'm trying to acheive. Wish me luck! Any advice greatly appreciated.

Quarterly Update

Eurydice Games is just over two months old and has completed its first calendar quarter. It's been a busy one, with most of my focus (unsurprisingly) on Zombology.

At the very end of July I officially formed the company and requested a bank account. During a busy August I spent a week in the US for work, then ordered and collected the Zombology artwork from the printers and then went to The Netherlands for a week's holiday. When I got back I could finally crack on.

The website went live, I shipped the proof copy to Derek (who didn't get either of the versions I had previously sent him due to the vagaries of the South African postal service) and I began making copies in earnest.

September was all go. I had intended to make 23 copies (which I did with 1.5 hours to spare!) and ship the first 20 pre-orders. With a busy first couple of weeks (four evenings written off by work travel, friends visiting for a weekend and preparing for Daughter the First's birthday party), I got off to a slow start, but things soon picked up.

It turns out the 4.5 hours I need to make six copies equates to three or four post-bedtime evenings (by the time we've got the kids to bed, eaten and tidied up there's not a lot of time before I need to go to bed, seeing as I can be up very early with Daughter the Second). So the second half of September felt like I hardly saw The Wife, but I got it done. I think that now I've nearly fulfilled all the pre-orders I'm going to slow my construction down to six copies (the number of boxes I can make from a single sheet of SRA2 greyboard, and hence my batch size) every ten days, rather 6 copies every seven days - that way I should be able to cram in some time with the family too.

I didn't quite hit the target of 20 sales (I had enough games and enough pre-orders but a couple of the pre-orders have gone dark and probably won't actually buy and I was trying to only email people when their copy was ready to post, so it moved quite slowly from my end).

Things are looking pretty good for October, I've already sold five of my target of 12 and have another six pre-orders I'm confident that I can sell to and deliver this month. By the 20th I hope to have built up stock for the first time, at which point I can make it for sale on my website and the BGG marketplace.

I'm also hoping to get a couple of reviews in the next few weeks, which might lead to some sales if I'm lucky!

Board of Advisers

One of the advantages of running a larger company is that you have people around the office to bounce ideas off and a corporate board to whom you are accountable. As a sole trader, I have neither of those things.

So I've decided to form a board of advisers instead. I've invited a group of friends whose opinions I respect, plus designers and publishers I know and a couple of people with business experience. Unlike a corporate board these people have no legal responsibility and will not get vast wealth through share allocation - they are just doing this as a favour to me, for which I am extremely grateful.

Bristol Ruinart Boardroom Meeting by Hotel du Vin Bistro on Flickr

Obviously I don't want to take the mick, so I'll just be sending them a quarterly report of my progress, successes, failures and challenges and hopefully I'll get some other perspectives and great advice as a result.

The first report goes out this week, I'm excited to see how their different viewpoints can help me be more successful.

It's Alive!

Nope, I'm not talking about a reprint of the game I published back in 2007 (and again in 2008), but instead Eurydice Games, my second board games publishing company.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been doing the various things I need to do to make it a reality (getting a bank account, telling HMRC, creating a website and then buying a domain name and some web hosting and setting up a PayPal account ready for accepting web payments from the customers I hope will flock to buy Zombology from me :-)

This has been a curtailed week, I didn't get home until Monday, from a work trip to Massachusetts last week that was book-ended by stays with my parents down in Bristol. Tuesday I was in Manchester for work and then Wednesday I was in Sheffield for my biannual MS check up as part of the clinical trial on which I'm registered. Thursday was my only day in the office because I'd taken Friday off to get ready for a family holiday to The Netherlands which started on Saturday (I wrote this blog post last week and then automatically posted it during my holiday).

The other exciting thing about this week is that I collected the printed materials for Zombology from the printers on Friday. I've now got everything I need to hand-craft 200 copies of Zombology. The first order of business when I return from the holiday is to start making and shipping the pre-orders, I don't want to start accepting money until I have the games ready to ship, so making and shipping the pre-orders is a necessary step to complete before I can put the games up for general sale on my website, BGG and potentially other marketplaces.

Jet Lag Hustle

I've spent the last five days in Massachusetts for work - it's somewhere I visit a few times a year as our corporate headquarters is based there. Despite being a fairly frequent traveller I'm pretty bad at it and I suffer from jet lag every time. But being an optimist I view it as an opportunity, rather than a hindrance.

While in the US I woke around 4am every day (except the last one when I was finally on US time, just in time for my return to Bristol). I used the jet lag hours of 4-7am to work on Eurydice Games, cracking on with a bunch of tasks that have been sat in my todo pile for quite a while now.

I had hoped to be able to do a few things that required spending money, but the business bank account wasn't opened until I got to the US and my bank card was delivered to my house while I was away, so I'm not able to spend any money until I return home on Monday.

That didn't stop me making progress though. I've done a load of work on the website (nearly finished!) and also tweaked the Zombology artwork, ordered another proof with the new art and made a laser cutting file for my new dexterity game idea.

In addition, I've written a couple of blog posts and finished reading the Kobold Guide to Board Game Design, which is excellent - I highly recommend it. It's a series of essays written by really experienced game designers, developers and editors providing really sound advice from their years of experience. Several of the essays made me think about games design in a different way, so it was a very worthwhile read.

This week I've got a lot of train travel (more opportunities to make progress!) and then we go on a family holiday to The Netherlands at the end of the week during which I'll be focusing on my family and will make next to no progress on anything. Hopefully I'll get a few things done before I go!

Ship It!

I'm writing this blog post in the Departure Lounge of Bristol Airport, shortly before a work trip to Boston that will eat up the whole of the coming week. Why Bristol? We came down here for a school friend's party and spent the weekend with my parents (I'm coming back here afterwards and The Wife and The Daughters are staying the week). So I'm away from home for 11 days.

That gets in the way of a whole bunch of Eurydice Games things (I can't make games while on the road!) but it isn't a total wipeout as I'll be awake with nothing to do during the jet lag hours of 2-6am while in the US. I'm planning to spend those hours finishing the first version of my Eurydice Games website, tweaking the Zombology files a little before ordering the print run and doing a laser-cutting file for a prototype of a new game idea I've had.

Last week has been focused on getting things ready, not done :-/ I made some progress on a few things - I got a proof done of the new artwork by the printers:

There was a problem with the cards (printed on the wrong stock), but the box and the rules were fine and having those done, in combination with the cards from the previous version, meant I could price up shipping costs (one of the last remaining unknowns).

Shipping prices have increased hugely in the 11 years since I started Reiver Games (I know, inflation!), and the small and fairly cheap (£10) game means that shipping makes up a significant proportion of the total cost:

• UK: £3.70
• Europe: £4.40
• Aus & NZ: £5.95
• Everywhere else: £5.50

I also told HMRC that I was starting a company and applied for a company bank account. I was hoping that the bank account would be completed before I left so I could order a few things while in the US, but it's not completed yet, so it'll all have to wait for my return unfortunately. Progress in August is going to be less impressive than last month, especially since we're off on holiday for a week shortly after we return from Bristol. 

Let's Get Organised!

One of the things that will be critical to the success or failure of Eurydice Games is my ability to focus on what's important and get it done in a timely fashion. At work I use Trello extensively to keep track of and prioritise myriad tasks, so it makes perfect sense to replicate that for Eurydice Games.

So I have set up the Trello board shown above for Eurydice Games. For the moment it's a single board with all the tasks I'm aware of on it. As and when I think of something else I add it to the board immediately, rather than trying to remember it (and inevitably forgetting).

This provides several advantages:

• I don't have to rely on my notoriously bad memory for important tasks,
• I can access the board from my phone, iPad or laptop,
• I can get a quick view of everything on my plate.

Trello brings several other benefits: I can label tasks and then filter them (I've currently got labels for the three games I have in active development, company stuff and blog post ideas), I can give tasks a due date and get reminders when they are approaching. I can also see tasks moving through the process and get the dopamine spike from incremental achievements. You can also include notes and checklists on tasks too.

I use Trello in a Kanban-esque fashion, with lists for future tasks, tasks to do in the next month, tasks currently in progress and tasks completed in the last month. Weekly and monthly maintenance keeps those lists up to date so I can focus on what is most urgent which is particularly important around a full-time job and a young family - I've little time to devote to this effort, so I want to make sure I'm using it effectively.

One of the reasons Reiver Games failed was that I lost focus when things got difficult. As sales came in slower than expected (hard to see as I didn't have a business plan with sales projections!) I became disillusioned and to some degree gave up. I had no idea how to drive sales of my games in far flung shops, so instead of spending every minute hustling to drive awareness and sales of my games (and I was doing it full-time at that point, so there was plenty of time available) I slumped and started watching more and more TV each day. Clearly with my limited time this time round that is not an option, I need to stay laser-focused on bringing my games to people's attention and finding those customers who would be interested in buying my games. I still don't completely know how best to do that, but with 200 (instead of 3,000!) copies to sell it should be easier this time.

I give almost all my tasks an aggressive (yet achievable) due date, and then work hard to achieve them. There's loads to do at the moment (I'm setting up the company, designing a website and organising the printing of my first game) and, with upcoming family holiday and work trip to Massachusetts, even less time than usual to do them. I'm doing a bit most evenings and also often during my lunch break at work. Once those things are out of the way the next focus is hand-making the pre-ordered games which take 45 minutes each.

Eleven Years Wiser?

Eleven years ago this month I founded Reiver Games to self-publish my first game: Border Reivers. Then, as now, I was intending to make a small print run (100 copies for Border Reivers) by hand and to try to sell them via my website, BGG and by attending games clubs and conventions.

A lot has changed since then, both personally and professional and in the world in general. It'll be interesting over the next year to see whether my plan to essentially try to repeat the early successes of Reiver Games still works in the world of 2017, rather than 2006.

So what's changed?

Personal

The month after I founded Reiver Games I experienced my first Multiple Sclerosis symptoms. It took another seven months to get a confirmed diagnosis and then I had a pretty unpleasant couple of years of frequent relapses and constant fear over what my future would hold. Thankfully, I was lucky enough to get on a clinical trial of a treatment that has worked wonders for me - I've now been relapse free for eight years.

When I started Reiver Games I had a job that involved a reasonable amount of international travel, and the 300 hours of hand-making games in the first year, and then 450 in then second year was a struggle to fit in around the travel and wanting to spend some time out of work with The Wife. So I jumped at the chance of investing some of my life insurance money (yay MS!) into the company and quitting my job and going full-time. Of course I now have another job that includes a reasonable amount of international travel and I've still got a (the same!) wife and now two daughters under five too (one's only eight weeks old!). I'd like to spend some time with, so I'm back in the same boat as the beginning of Reiver Games. Thankfully Zombology only takes 45 minutes to make, so I'm looking at 113-150 hours of construction in the first year, assuming I can sell them all within a year, so that burden is lower at least. I'm hoping I can get this done in one or two evenings a week after the daughters have gone to bed.

Professional

Skills-wise I've learnt a lot in the last eleven years, not least having five years of board game publisher experience that I didn't have last time round. I also now manage a decent sized budget at work now, so I'm a lot more finance-savvy than I was the first time around.

I've also got a lot of contacts in the board game business and enough people know me that I can say 'I'm getting back into self-publishing' on BGG and get a few pre-orders purely based on my previous reputation!

Market

This is where things get interesting. I founded Reiver Games three years before Perry Chen, Yancy Strickler and Charles Adler founded Kickstarter. Since then the number of board game publishers has exploded, especially people self-publishing their own games on Kickstarter. Back in 2006 I was pretty unusual as a hobby self-publisher, now everyone's doing it. Furthermore, everyone else is funding games on Kickstarter without risking their own money, and making games that are professionally manufactured and have professional art. Is there still a market for hand-made limited edition runs of games? Especially those with, what I'll charitably call, amateur art? I'm betting a chunk of my savings on the hope that I can find 150-200 people who would pay £10 for a simple-looking hand-made game. Only time will tell whether it's a dumb wager to make...

A Gamble And A Plan

I've spent this week (and by this week I mean the hours of 9-11pm, holding an almost sleeping baby in one arm while) trying to finalise the art for the new version of Zombology taking into account the feedback I received here and on Google+ for the last version I posted. With the exception of the box art, it's almost done.

With it almost done, I don't want to share what I've got until I've finished, so instead I thought I'd talk about my business plan instead this week. When I ran Reiver Games my initial business plan consisted of 'Make games by hand, without taking any salary and sell them for twice the printing/pieces cost so I've got some money to cover expenses, trade show attendance and to invest in new games'. Seriously, that was it. It's a wonder I was at all successful. 

But I was. Fast forward two years and I'd nearly quadrupled my initial stake and I had my life insurance payout to partially invest. This was the moment when I needed a rock solid business plan, but again I had none. The result this time? Losing a bunch of money, selling games to liquidators at 19p each and two years with no salary earnt at all. That'll teach me.

This time round I'll be trying to replicate the first half of that, not the second one! But, I also need to ensure that I learn from my mistakes. I'm older and hopefully wiser this time, and with experience now of managing a large budget in my day job. So I need to make sure I've though out how this could go down.

As with any investment, this is a gamble: I could win big, or I could lose it all. I'm intending to invest £1,000 in the company to fund the setup costs, stationery, website hosting and printing of Zombology. So I've potentially lost a grand. Which would be bad. I've already got a bunch of pre-orders, so assuming everyone who has pre-ordered actually pays for a copy, that's down to £840 at risk. Still a significant chunk of cash.

I'm still hovering between making 150 and 200 copies of Zombology v2 and to take advantage of the economies of scale I need to decide this before ordering the printing next month. If I sold them all (I'll be giving a few away to reviewers) then the potential payout is £1,500 to £2,000, so at worst I lose £840 and at best I gain £1,000 on top of my original stake. Now that gain also has to pay for a bunch of things: website hosting, stationery, travel and expenses for attending conventions or games clubs, so it'll be less than that, but that's an upper limit on my payout in the first year.

I've drafted out what I think will go down:

• Sales of 20 copies in September (pre-orders, currently at 17)
• Sales of 10 copies in October (launch buzz)
• Sales of 10 copies in December (Christmas pressies!)
• Sales of 50 copies at the UK Games Expo next June (there were over 16,000 unique attendees this year and a 15 minute game for 3-8 players can be shown to a lot of people over three days)
• Other than that, just five copies a month through my website and the BGG Marketplace.

That's 135 gone in the first year at an average effort of 2.5 hours of game manufacturing a week (should be just a single night a week of effort on average). If sales dropped to two per month in the second year with another 10 at the UK Games Expo in 2019 then that would be another 35 taking me to 170 in total.

Now obviously there's quite a lot of risk in that. Is there still a market for hand-made games in this era of Kickstarter? 17 people say yes, but that's a shed load less than 200 or even 150. Are my sales estimates accurate? Can I shift the games through BGG? My website? Is 50 copies at £10 each reasonable at the Expo? The numbers I'm basing this on are 11 years old, and pre-Kickstarter.

Pretty soon I'm going to have to make a decision about 150 vs. 200. It'll be time to put my money where my mouth is. Literally.

I Need Your Help, Please!

If you read this blog regularly you are among my biggest fans - thank you very much for your support over the last 11 years of my game design career. As a regular reader (you're not? Ok, start here and then continue until you're up to date!), you'll know I'm about to get into self-publishing hand-made games again. I've got previous for this - the first two very successful years of Reiver Games from July 2006 until July 2008 when I made 400 games by hand (Border Reivers and It's Alive!). But things have changed. There was no kickstarter back then, and certainly in year two I had built up a bit of a fanbase and had a mailing list of interested gamers.

This time round there's a lot more competition through kickstarter and as the father of two young (one's only five weeks old!) girls I'll be busier than I was first time around. So I need your help to be successful. If you're interested, here's a few ways you can help my second board games publishing effort be a success:

Do you own Zombology, and have played it?

Please provide an honest rating and comments on BoardGameGeek, please also download the second edition rules and introduce it to new people and let them know I'll be making another hand-made run of it shortly if they'd like a copy of their own.

Do you own Zombology but you haven't played it?

Please also download the second edition rules and introduce it to new people and let them know I'll be making another hand-made run of it shortly if they'd like a copy of their own. Then please provide an honest rating and comments on BoardGameGeek.

Do you own one of my hand-made games?

If you have a copy of Border Reivers, It's Alive! first edition (grey box) or Zombology, please could you provide a quote I can put on my website about the build quality of my hand-made games?

You don't own Zombology?

You can still provide feedback on the new rules, if you know anyone who likes zombies, mad scientists, fillers, semi- co-operative games, card-drafting, and/or hand-made and rare games to the Zombology BGG page or this blog. Tell them there's a new version coming shortly and they can pre-order a copy of the world's only game about curing the zombie plague using healing crystals and magnets from me for only £10 + P&P.
Thanks in advance for spreading the word!

First Steps Again

It's been another busy week as I embark on setting up my second board games publishing company. I've a Trello board of all the things I need to do as part of that process, and this week I've ticked a few of those off (and added a few more!).

Last week's post about the Zombology art garnered some good feedback, so I'm incorporating that, I also ran a couple of polls (one on twitter and one on Google+) about what people would want or expect from a hand-crafted game as market research. There were some interesting differences between the two results (although the sample of Google+ was much bigger, so it might be closer to the truth).

On Thursday I'd taken the morning off to go to register Daughter The Second's birthday, so I squeezed in a trip to a small business adviser and the bank too. I prepared a business case for year one in preparation for the small business adviser, but he wanted me to send it to him in a different format, so I'm now re-jigging it - still a worthwhile effort as I have to add in some extra information that makes it more useful.

On top of all of that, I've been obsessing about a game idea that Paul and I had last summer. This week I've had another idea for that (as yet un-prototyped) game. My sister-in-law and her husband visited on the weekend, so I tried a very rough test using a few cobbled together components including toy food made out of MDF! I think the game has loads of potential - I just need to start prototyping and testing it properly!