Visualise

I use Trello to organise all the tasks I have to do for Eurydice Games.

This year I’ve added a new column for quarterly objectives.

And put a 3 year goal at the top of that column.

I’ve used the cover feature to add a picture to that card:

Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash

The picture calls to me.

I love hiking up hills. Though I haven’t done it much since the kids were born.

The photo spurs me on. It calls to me. 

Every single day.

I want to climb that hill. Reach the top. See the view.

Amazing what a great photo can do.

So far this year I’ve been incredibly productive. 

Far more than recent years - more than I expected.

Related?

Dreams

Sometimes...

I dare to dream.

Eurydice Games is going so well.

Much better than last time.

It even employs Paul (on a small part-time salary).

How far can we go?

I need to remember last time.

Jumping off the deep end.

Living two years without a salary.

Losing a bunch of my 'investment'.

I must learn from my mistakes...

Monthly Goals

Every month I have a list of things I need to do. Some of those I have to do - if I don’t record depreciation on the laser cutter in our accounts that’s really bad. Others are things I’d really like to do - two of which I’m notoriously bad at: playing our games with strangers (a great way of raising awareness and getting face-to-face sales) and doing something in the media (another great way of raising awareness).

It’s been months since I’ve done either of those and getting on for a year since I did both in the same month.

Until now! Last week I was interviewed by Chris from TableFlip last week via email and that interview is now live and then this evening I’m off to Tabletop Manchester to hopefully play FlickFleet and Zombology with a few people. I go to Manchester fairly often for work, but it’s usually there and back in a day and I rarely stay over. Tomorrow morning I’ve an early meeting so I’m going down this afternoon and have the evening free - so I’m going along to Tabletop Manchester for only the third time in as many years.

I also returned to shipping FlickFleet copies last week, posting 12 copies and making 13. I’m posting another seven today. When I met Paul on the way back from Manchester just over a week ago I got everything I needed to make and send another 28, so I’ve still got another 9 to finish and post this week, when I get back from my trip.

Once those are done we will have shipped all of the second deluxe reward tier - these were due in June! It’s great to be nicely ahead of schedule and thinking about what to do next :-).

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.

Choices and Long Term Goals

A couple of weeks ago I talked about how I was forming a Board of Advisers to help provide input on my plans and give me advice on how to be more successful. I sent the first report to them last week and got some really useful feedback, including a long email from Brett Gilbert, designer of Divinare, Elysium and Professor Evil and the Citadel of Time. I've know Brett since my Reiver Games days when he submitted one of my favourite prototypes to me. He lived fairly locally, so we met a few times to discuss it, but sadly it went no further. In the meantime, Brett has co-founded the Cambridge Playtest UK group, been recommended for a Spiel des Jahres for Divinare and nominated for a Kennerspiel des Jahres for Elysium. So he struck me as a perfect candidate for the Board, and I was delighted when he accepted. His response to that first report was great, it really made me think about why I'm doing this. I've reprinted (with his permission!) an excerpt from his email below, along with my response - since I figure you guys might be interested too!

Perhaps the biggest question that this report doesn’t answer is what your long term goals are. You have a clear focus on hand-crafted games (and that’s a noble aim!), but you also raise the threat that a crowded internet space, in which other creators are drowned out by the noise of big Kickstarter campaigns, puts on your ambitions. KS is here to stay, and it has completely changed the landscape.

The best thing about the internet, as someone once observed, is that it makes everyone a publisher; and the worst thing about the internet is... that it makes everyone a publisher.

So. I'm just going to put something out there, just to see how it sounds…

Why are you laboriously hand-crafting games if your finished product is designed to look just like something that’s mass-produced? Zombology seems to be a POD product, just with *way* more leg-work for you. There are few exemplars of artisanal game-makers; indeed the only one I can think of is Gavin Birnbaum (Cubiko, Jam Sumo) — but he literally hews his games from lumps of wood, crafting objects with the spirit of a piece of art. That’s his thing, and he does it really well (and Jam Sumo is an absolutely cracking game), but every single one of his ‘pieces’ are unique and literally unattainable by other means — and buyers know that; they *feel* it. It takes him all winter to make 30 games. Their preciousness is *why* they are sought after — but also the thing that limits his success. Do you expect — *can* you expect — your buyers to have the same reaction to a box of Zombology?

This may feel like too harsh or too profound a judgement, but if you want to become an artisan rather than just a designer or a publisher, then the soul (for want of a better word) of your product has to be the thing that sells it. But if your goal is to make games — rather than crafted objects that are *also* games — then it seems as though hand-crafting your games will only slow your ambitions down.

I appreciate that this may not be the sort of feedback you were hoping for. But I hope there is something here to inspire you!
Best,
Brett

Hiya Brett,

You’ve raised a couple of great questions and ideas there, ones that deserve a reasoned response.

I’m a maker of things. At times it’s been (bits of) computer games, game designs, painted miniatures, mini scenery, hand-crafted games, mobile apps and hand-crafted games again. I’m much happier making something that I can be proud of than reading a book or watching TV or a movie. In the words of Race for the Galaxy I would rather Produce than Consume.

I enjoy designing games, I enjoy playtesting them. I love doing the graphic design (though I’m not great at it) and will give doing the art a go too (I’m pretty bad at this though, see Border Reivers and Zombology). I also love physically making games. Yes, it’s hard work and yes it’s time consuming, but I enjoy doing it, and doing it well so that I can look at the final product and be proud of the quality I’ve achieved.

You describe three different routes: the standard publisher/Kickstarter, my halfway house with hand-crafted games that aim for almost professional quality and hand-crafting works of art like Cubiko. Why have I chosen the route I have, and where am I aiming to take this? I’ll answer the first one first!

I’ve got previous self-publishing games. One of the things I learnt during my Reiver Games days is that I’m a pretty bad judge of what makes a popular game, more so if it’s one I’ve designed myself and I don’t have the distance to be able to judge objectively.

To Kickstart a game successfully you need great art (which I can’t do, so I’d have to pay for) and to be a great marketer (which I’m definitely not). I could easily throw a few grand at trying to Kickstart Zombology and fail due to my own shortcomings as a marketer, regardless of the quality of the game. I’m also uncomfortable with the ‘money up front before the product exists’ model of Kickstarter. The effort required to fulfill a Kickstarter quanity of orders and then try hawking the remaining stock to distributors and shops is also more time than I’m prepared to invest around a young family and a busy job with a reasonable amount of work travel.

The route I’ve chosen is also quite a lot of work, but I know exactly how much (it’s going to take 150 hours to make the print run) and it’s something I’m good at and enjoy. Sure, the fact that I’m only making a few games a week is slowing me down, I could sell the games faster if they were in boxes filling my garage (like the good old days!). But this is a halfway house and I’m reasonably confident I can sell 200 games (I’ve sold 300 hand-made games in a year before, though admittedly before Kickstarter).

The true artist’s route would require a different type of game, maybe I’ll design one of those in the future, but the only way I could do that with Zombology is to hand-paint the cards and I don’t have the skills for that.

To answer your second question (what are my long term goals), I want to continue sharing my games with gamers and hopefully bringing some fun to their lives through my games. I've invested £1,000 in the company. That's a chunk of money: not so much that I'd cripple myself if I lost it all but nor is it enough to do much in the games business. I've a plan I think I can deliver in 2017/18 to turn that into a slightly larger pot of money. If Zombology does well, I'll have more money to invest in my next game and so on. The hand-made print run is small enough that I believe I can sell it all, but large enough that the economies of scale mean I can do it at a reasonable price and still make a profit. Over time maybe I can build up enough reputation, brand awareness, customer loyalty and cash on hand that I can do a larger, professional print run, but unlike last time I do not want to rush it and end up losing money. If Zombology is hugely popular then I'm happy for someone else to publish it via Kickstarter or whatever, but that's not what I'm good at or nor what I want to spend my evenings doing.

I've got a day job that pays a decent salary and a family that I have a responsibility to help support. I'm not looking to quit my day job and start a publishing company again. Last time I invested a huge chunk of my life insurance payout and lived off another chunk for a couple of years. I didn't earn a salary for two years and managed to recoup only a third of what I'd invested in the company. Two years without any earnings, pension contributions, etc. I'll not be doing that again. I want to create a company that lets me fund my games design hobby, slowing growing over time while allowing me to share my designs with gamers so that those games can live outside of my games room and hopefully bring some fun to gamers I don't know and will likely never meet.

Habitual Game Designer

Daniel Pink (author of Drive) sent me to the Farnham Street blog this week and I ended up reading this blog post about Habits vs. Goals. It got me thinking about my approach to running Eurydice Games.

This time round I'm far more organised than I was during my Reiver Games days - I've written a business plan and I've a Trello board with all my tasks in. I set myself deadlines that are aggressive (I hit most of them in July, but missed a lot in August due to work travel and holidays).

What I need to do to be successful is to maximise the impact I get from the very limited amount of time I have to work on this around my day job and my family life. I need to build a set of habits that enable me to get loads done without stressing me out. Making them habits means they just become a natural part of my week rather than something I'm straining to achieve and stressing about.

I've already got habits in place for social media (twitter, BGG and Google+) plus blogging, hopefully these will allow me to raise enough awareness for me to find the 197 customers I need to sell out of Zombology. The next most obvious thing to add is actually crafting the games I'm trying to sell. If I habitually make five games each week I will finish building the print run for Zombology in nine months - i.e. the end of May next year. That would be great.

As part of my approach of continuous improvement I'll be reviewing my achievements each month and I can adjust my habits accordingly.

2017 Aspirations!

For the last few years I've set myself some goals at the beginning of the year (2014, 2015, 2016), I've never aced them, but last year was weak, especially where games design and blogging were concerned.

2016 In Review

My new job, which I started in October 2015, took up a lot more time than I was expecting. It was my first time leading a team of any reasonable size and so I had a lot to learn in terms of leadership, budgeting, strategy and people management. On top of all that I ended up doing a lot more travel than I was originally expecting (four trips to the US, 20-30 to Manchester - often overnighters, and a frantic week-and-a-half long tour of Taiwan, China and Japan), which sounds great if you're not doing it, but it's very tiring and all you really see is offices, airports and hotels. This led to a double whammy of less free time and wanting to spend that free time with my wife and daughter, so I had a lot less time for games design-related shenanigans. I only made it to Newcastle Gamers once (out of at least 24 opportunities) and Newcastle Playtest probably only five times our of twelve. I've not played a prototype since September!

I failed both my blogging goals, giving up regular blogging as I had very little progress to report, most of it about designing mobile apps rather than board games (I've been coding since I was ten, the lack of coding in my new day job meant I fancied doing more of it in my limited free time, to the detriment of my games design) and doing nothing in November for NaGa Demon.

Gaming was the one area I aced, I played a lot of games in 2016. This was helped by starting a games club in the office on Wednesday lunchtimes (when I'm in the country!) and my weekly games night, plus a few trips with Ian (including to the US twice and round Asia) and my trusty iPad full of games. I even played 24 new games in the year (three of those on Dec 29th - games I got for Christmas!).

I did get the hand-made limited edition of Zombology finished in January and the print on demand version up on Drive Thru Cards in March/April (copies sold to date: 3!), so that was Games Design passed, but other than thinking of some rules tweaks to Zombology I did very little games design after that.

I didn't even finish my German language app that I wanted to wrap up. I made a lot of progress on it, but it's still not even ready for a beta release. I did tweak BGG Last Plays at the end of the year though - someone on BGG with a collection of 3,500 games tried it out and found it crashed on a collection of that size, so I fixed that and tweaked a couple of other things. He's got another couple of requests and so I'll do another version of that shortly. It's still my most popular app (150 downloads - on Windows Phone!), and if you've got someone keen enough to engage with the creator you should try to keep them happy!

2017 Aspirations

Seeing as I did so badly last year I'm going to change things up this year. No goals. Just some more vague aspirations:

• Get back into Games Design. Maybe Codename: Vacuum (I've a few ideas floating around in my head - it's probably been a couple of years since I last touched it, so maybe that distance will help when I come back to it)
• Blog when I have something to say. No regular weekly schedule, just talk when I've something worth discussing. Hopefully at least once a month.
• Code. It's been a passion of mine since I was a little kid and my day job for 13 of the last 16 years. Release apps. Enjoy it.
• Game. I only managed 36/52 possible Games Nights due to my travel schedule, but I want to game on Wednesday evenings at home, at work during Games Club, on the iPad on trips and also try to get to Newcastle Gamers and Newcastle Playtest more.

Fingers crossed...

I'm Stealthy, Like The Ninja

It's been a good week. Monday and Tuesday I had the house to myself in the evening while The Wife was in Germany, so I spent the time getting a decent chunk of functionality into German language phone app.

Wednesday I managed another Games Night (work commitments are cancelling a disturbing proportion of them at the moment). We played Lost Cities, Alea Iacta Est (knocking it off my not yet played this year list), Pandemic: The Cure (same again, plus we played it twice, so two more plays towards ten plays) and then a couple of games of Zombology. We'd also manged my first lunchtime games club in ages that day too - Gav beat me twice at Taluva. Man, I'm so glad I bought that! We've been playing it loads.

Then finally on Saturday I made it to Newcastle Gamers too. Newcastle Gamers is on twice a month. We're halfway through the year, so there's been at least (they hold a few special extra sessions every now and again) twelve sessions in 2016. And this was my first one. First! Turns out this new job is keeping me pretty busy.

Thankfully I had a great evening. I got there about quarter to eight, and after waiting for five or ten minutes I joined Ruth, Tom and Sarah for a game of Beyond Baker Street. It had a lot of similarities to Hanabi (you play with face-out cards in your hand and have to build sets playing blind from your hand). Our four player game seemed extremely hard and Tom and Sarah who had played it a lot since being taught it by the designers at the UK Games Expo said it was easy with two, but tricky with three. After that, they looked at my pile of games (Endeavor, Homesteaders, K2, Kodama and Zombology) and chose Zombology. We played it a couple of times and again, I didn't tell them I was the designer until we had finished. They seemed to enjoy it, and asked about where to get it, but of course the only option at the moment is the very expensive shipping from Drive Thru Cards.

After a couple of rounds of Zombology Tom and Sarah headed off so I went looking for another table and managed to join Becky, Mangler, Gordon and Richard for a game of Sushi Go! As soon as I saw it was I keen to play - I knew the designer was of interest to me (though I couldn't remember who it was) and I love sushi, so it seemed win-win. It turns out the designer was Phil Walker-Harding who used to blog here with me eight or nine years ago, before he became a very successful designer (Archaeology, Sushi Go!, Cacao and most recently the Spiel des Jahres nominated Imhotep). I'd not played any of Phil's games since I playtested Cannonball Colony years and years ago, so it was great to try one of his designs and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Like Zombology it's a drafting game, but one with a steadily diminishing hand and set-collection elements. The art was cute, the theme was cute and it was a quick, fun game. I've added it to my wishlist :-)

After a couple of games of Sushi Go! we also played a couple of Zomobology (after Gordon left), and again I neglected to mention I was the designer until after we finished. They seemed to enjoy it (and Becky was complimentary about the art too!) and they also asked about how to buy it when I made my reveal. I'm beginning to wonder whether I should make some more hand-made ones...

We rounded the night out with a game of Kodama, another one on my ten plays list (only one game left!).

All in all this week, I managed to play two new to me games (Sushi Go! and Beyond Baker Street), three games towards my ten plays list (Kodama and two of Pandemic: The Cure) and two off my not yet played this year list (Pandemic: The Cure and Alea Iacta Est). Busy week!

At the halfway point of the year, I've managed to played nineteen games for the first time this year, that's nineteen towards my goal of 24 - it's looking very achievable!

Hello From Sunny San Antonio

As I mentioned last week, I'm in San Antonio, Texas this week for work. It's a very busy week but I've managed to get tonight off so that I can go to the San Antonio Board Gamers meetup at Dragon's Lair. I've brought Zombology, Dragon Dance (which needs an overhaul) and Kodama with me, hopefully I'll get to try some new stuff too.

Last week I was away for a mid-week trip to Derbyshire for my friend Tim's secret birthday party. It was Monday to Friday, but we had to leave on Thursday as I was flying from Newcastle first thing on Friday morning. I took a decent stack of games: Zombology, 6 Nimmt!, Kodama, Incan Gold, Ca$h 'n Gun$, King of Tokyo, Colt Express and Firefly. Tim had brought a load of games too and Simon and Duncan had also brought a few. I managed to play everything I brought except 6 Nimmt! but managed to miss every game of something someone else brought due to either looking after The Daughter, cooking a meal or having gone to bed early to make up for a game of Firefly the night before which had finished just after 2am.

Zombology was well received after the first couple of games when people were still trying to work out what was going on - it seems there's a fairly steep learning curve for new players. We also saw a game where Zombyism was cured but none of the players won, which was a first I believe. Two plays of Ca$h 'n Gun$ took that off my ten plays list and the plays of Kodama and Colt Express also moved them nearer to escaping from the ten plays list.

I've now got 12 games left on the list, one of which is definitely going, three (Koi Pond, Libertalia and Pandemic: The Cure) are at risk and might well go too and the others I expect to have cleared off the list by the end of the year. My unplayed so far this year list however still has 26 games on it, including many previous staples such as Die Speicherstadt, Puerto Rico, Thunderstone and Agricola.

These lists are just for interest this year, instead of part of my goals. The only gaming goal I have is to play 24 new to me games this year. At 16 by early June I'm in good shape for that, let's see if I can add any tonight!

2016 Goals

We're four days into 2016, so it's about time I set myself some goals for the year. I've done it for the last three years and I'm doing the same again this year. As before, there are four categories: blogging, gaming, game design and app development.

Blogging
Since my page views tanked in May last year I've no idea what is an achievable page views goal any more, so I'm just not going to set myself one, instead just these two:

• Blog every Monday in 2016
• Do something for NaGa DeMon

Not sure what to do for NaGa DeMon at this point, we'll see how I get on with the remaining games in my stable (Border Reivers Second Edition, Codename: Vacuum and Dragon Dance) before I commit to anything.

Gaming
For the last few years I've set myself the goal of playing at least one game for every day of the year (i.e. 366 in 2016). I usually nail this one (over 400 plays last year), but if I pull this off I'll reach 4,000 plays recorded in BGG (since August 2006), so well worth going for again.

Over the last couple of years I've also set more structured goals: play every game in my collection at least once in 2014 and have played all the games in my collection at least ten times by the end of 2015. I found this to be a real bind last year with it taking over the games played at Games Night to the exclusion of others' preferences so I'm not going to do anything like that this year. I'll still use my app to keep track of which games I've not played in 2016 and which ones I've not played ten times for honing my collection purposes, but it's not a goal and so I'll not be sucking the fun out of Games Night with it.

Instead, I'm going to aim to play 24 new to me games in 2016. That's a 50% increase on the 16 I managed last year. Because the vast majority of my gaming is either on my iPad or at my Games Night, we almost always play games I know. Time to broaden my horizons. Trips to visit gaming friends and Newcastle Gamers will also help with this I hope.

Game Design
Finish him! I need to finish off the Zombology hand-made run I started in November for NaGa DeMon and get the art up on Drive Thru Cards for the Print on Demand version. Let's say end of January for making the hand made run and end of Feb for the Print on Demand version. After that, get back into game design, either on one of the other games mentioned above or something new.

App Development
Finish him II: Revenge of the him! I've just finished the expanded Duolingo German track, so I need something new to get my teeth stuck into, and the app I have in development should be that thing. I meant to finish it last year, but didn't get round to it, so let's get it out the door in 2016.

That should be plenty to keep me out of trouble, let's see if I can actually finish them all this year!

A Friend Who Games

I'm notoriously bad at keeping in touch with people: I'm hopeless at keeping in touch with the friends I went to school with; I'm not in touch with anyone I went to university with; I've had many jobs over the years, and the only former colleagues I'm still in touch with are the guys I used to work with in Newcastle (and now work with again mostly).

There is an exception to this rule of rubbishness however. When I lived in York I met many friends through board gaming. Paul was one of my key Reiver Games playtesters and I used to attend his games night twice a week for many years. Despite leaving York in 2009, we've kept in touch and we see each other every couple of months either in York or Newcastle for hanging out with our families and late night gaming. We had planned to meet up for the Easter weekend in Newcastle, but then I was invited to a wedding in York.

It was Dave's wedding, another gaming friend from our time in York. Dave and I had got on famously after originally trying to arrange a game of Space Hulk together. After a year or two, Dave moved to Plymouth - which, as far as I can fathom, is about as far from York or Newcastle as is the moon. Dave and I have met up about four or five times in the eight years since he left York, but as a gaming buddy we stay in touch if only by occasional emails. Another gaming buddy who I've managed to stay in touch with.

When I pulled out of having Paul and his family up for Easter due to attending Dave's wedding, Paul invited us to stay with them in York instead. So instead, we had a long weekend of gaming (in an awesome confluence of events, the bathroom is being replaced at the moment, so instead of four days at home with no facilities to wash ourselves, we got to be at a friend's house - with a shower!).

We left Friday morning and we hung out with Paul's family on Friday afternoon, Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, and with Dave and his wife and friends all day Saturday and Sunday morning. Plus I got late night gaming in on Friday and Sunday with Paul and Saturday with Dave. It was an awesome weekend, and I start the month of April with eighteen games played in the first five days including three towards my ten plays goal!

Tomorrow is Newcastle Playtest, I'm hoping to take along Zombology, Dragon Dance and possibly some hand-scribbled cards for a new version of Border Reivers.

Coincidentally, Terry, Andrew and Graham, my gaming buddies from Bedford (which I left 3.5 years ago) and I are still in touch too. Via twitter, the occasional convention or games weekend. A gaming friend is a friend forever!

A Digital Digression

As I've discussed over the last couple of weeks, one of my goals for this year is to get back into hobby publishing, like I did in the early years of Reiver Games. I've got all year to do that though and there are more pressing things on my plate - like the NaGa DeMon Winners' copies of Dragon Dance (and bonus Zombology) to finish and get in the post.

I've made no progress on either of those things this week though. Not even taken any more pre-orders for the as yet unannounced game (still at 4/50!).

Instead I've been focusing on a couple of my Windows Phone apps. I'm technically a programmer by profession, but over the last few years I've been moving into more of a project management/team leadership role, so I don't get to do much actual coding anymore. I still enjoy it, but with little practice in the office my skills are atrophying, so I've been making a few apps for my Windows Phone (bought because I could make apps for it in the languages and tools I 'use' in my day job). Several of these apps have an audience of one (Codename: Vacuum randomiser and recorder anyone?), but a couple of them, while written for my use and as a coding exercise, potentially had a bigger audience, so I've uploaded them to the store.

The first of those, BGG Last Plays was an app version of the excellent Last Plays by BGG User Heroku App. I wanted this as I'd set myself a goal of playing every game I owned at least once last year, and I was using that webpage to keep track (but I wanted a few extras that were easier to implement in app format). One of my goals for this year is to make another version of this which makes it easier to keep track of this year's gaming goal: To have played every game in my collection at least ten times.

The most recent app I've added to the store (which is starting to get some downloads finally) was a pass-and-play version of the Martian Dice game by Scott Almes.

I had a trip away for work this week, so I had an evening to kill, plus five hours on trains, so I took my laptop and decided to work on my apps. The first priority was fixing a crash in Martian Dice that had been reported three times in a week (despite only 16 people owning it!). I had a stack trace showing me where it happened, but couldn't reproduce it myself. Still the stack trace was enough information to fix the problem. No soon had I done that, then my mate Mal pointed out a rather glaring bug in the undo functionality: if you rolled any tanks in a turn you could forget them by clicking undo! That totally broke the game :-( So I fixed these two problems (and made a couple of usability tweaks recommended by a user on BGG).

With the urgent things fixed, and still some time to spare, I moved onto making the Last Plays app support my new goal. I've added the ability to sort by the number of games played, and to select a number of plays below which a game is highlighted. 26 days into the year and I've already completed one of my goals for the year! I've also added a link to the game's BGG page if you press and hold its listing in the app.

On Saturday night I published both of these updates to the Windows Store - they should both be available now.

With these out of the way, I can now focus on the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Dragon Dance and Zombology. I've printed and made the games, it's just the rulebooks and box labels outstanding. I've got a few hours on Tuesday night while babysitting for some friends that I can apply to this task, plus if necessary a bunch of hours on trains on the weekend, while I go down to Bedford to see my mates down there for a games day.

2015 Goals

The last couple of years I've set myself some goals for blogging and playing and designing games (see: 2013, 2014). I want the goals to be achievable, but also a stretch, so they encourage me to push myself and learn new things. This year, in addition to the usual three categories, I'm adding a fourth: app development :-)

Blogging

Last year I wanted a 10% growth in page views, to blog every week, to take part in NaGa DeMon and to gain ten new followers. I hit most of those, except the followers one which, to be honest, I don't really care about, so this year's goals are:

• 45,500 page views (taking me to 183K in total), another 10% growth
• Blog every Monday
• Do something for NaGa DeMon (I've enough games on the go, so it might not be starting a new one...)

Playing games

Last year I wanted to play every game in my collection at least once and play at least 365 games in total. I'm going to mix it up a bit this year:

• Play at least 365 games during 2015
• Have played every game in my collection (with the usual exceptions) at least ten times.

I'll use this second goal to hone my collection a bit again, and give me a chance to gain a better understanding of some of the longer games in my collection. Games bought during 2015 are excluded.

Designing Games

I'll keep it simple here, yet excitingly different. This year I want to release a self-published, self-illustrated board game in a limited edition, like the good old days of Reiver Games.

Only one goal? Yes, but it's a biggy. The Wife bought me a graphics tablet for Christmas, so I'm going to use that to hone my illustration skills and along with Adobe Creative Cloud (which is damned expensive, but I get a discount as a CS3 owner and I'm putting Christmas present money towards it). I'm already tinkering with some Bayeux Tapestry inspired art for Dragon Dance!

This is a real challenge. It'll probably be either Zombology or Dragon Dance, whichever is the better game (and most sensibly priced) in a run of maybe 50 copies, or one hundred if there's a surprisingly high demand. I'll be blogging artwork and sketches for feedback throughout the year. Why a limited, handmade run you ask? Despite the lure of KickStarter, I'm still uncomfortable with it and it was the large print runs that I couldn't get working with Reiver Games. The two handmade limited editions I did: Border Reivers and the first edition of It's Alive! both sold out quickly and made me money (excluding time spent!). A short print run is a known quantity that I can manage around my family and work commitments and I know exactly what I'm getting into, having done it successfully before.

The exciting and challenging bit will be doing the art myself - this will require learning lots of new skills.

App Development

I'm learning German again, using the excellent Duolingo. In many ways it's superb, but I'm the sort of person who likes to learn from structure, so being able to visualise tables of pronouns and verb declensions really helps me. In the vein of my current selfish app development, I want to make an app to help with that. I also want to release a new version of BGG Last Plays that helps me track this year's different plays goal.

There, that's enough to be getting on with! Wish me luck...

3,000

I started recording my boardgame plays on BGG back in August 2006. Since then I've religiously recorded every play of a published game I've had. During my Reiver Games I didn't record plays of prototypes, which means the actual count is much higher, but it's still an indication of just how ridiculously obsessed with board games I am.

The reason I mention this is that the number of games I've played over the last eight years according to BGG is 2,999. Which is a big number. It's more than one game a day on average for eight years!

What will be my 3,000th play? I nearly made it to Newcastle Gamers on Saturday for the first time in several months, but was thwarted at the last minute. So it could have been anything. There's Games Night on Thursday, potentially a Zombology Playtest before then at lunchtime. Or it could even be something with The Wife one evening if we're not too knackered.

In other news, I've started my third Windows Phone app (before finishing the other two, of course!). It's based on the last plays app I came across on BGG. I've been using that web app for the last seven months to keep track of which of the games I own I've played this year, as one of my goals for the year is to play all my games at least once. The app was down for a while, which made me think of doing my own version, which is now half finished. It's as fully-featured as the web one, but has two extra things that I find useful:

• It colours things according to whether they've been played this year or not,
• It saves the results, so you don't need to query BGG every time you look at it.

It needs a few more things before I can make it available - the ability to configure the user and colouring and I want to be able to select games to ignore (i.e. hide from the results). Still, it's pretty simple, so it shouldn't take long...

Ding! Ding! Half-time. Change Ends.

We're halfway through 2014, so I figure now would be a good time to review my progress against my goals for the year. So here goes:

Games Design

Let's start with the bad news. My games design goals were to make four new versions of Codename: Vacuum, make some progress on Dragon and get Zombology ready for hawking to a publisher/self-publishing. I've done nothing with Vacuum since January, so only one new version so far this year and I've not touched Dragon (though that will probably be the focus of my NaGa DeMon efforts this year). Zombology has been my main focus for the last six months. I've made good progress, but this last week's feedback (see below) has made me think I'm not as close as I was hoping. But there's still four months to go so I might yet hit this one. Vacuum is looking more doubtful.

Blogging

My blogging goals were to get 40K page views and 10 new followers along with posting every Monday (plus more during NaGa DeMon in November). I'm at 19,200 page views, which considering the massive bump I got last November means that I should be able to hit that assuming I do NaGa DeMon. I've got three new followers, so that one is looking pretty difficult - I'll probably miss it; but I've not missed a Monday yet, so that is looking good too.

Gaming

I had two goals from a gaming of point of view: play at least 365 games this year and play every game in my collection at least once. On the first point I'm doing very well: 274 games in the first six months of the year, I'm pretty sure I'm going to ace this one! And on the second point, I've got nineteen games in my collection yet to play (excluding nine games that I've excluded for sentimental or other reasons). This should be pretty achievable too, but I think a few of those will probably leave my hands in search of more accommodating owners. Citadels, Cleopatra and the Society of Architects and Pirates of the Spanish Main are currently candidates for jogging on. Qwirkle, Tigris and Euphrates and Snow Tails have already left the stable.

In other news, it was Newcastle Playtest again this week. We started with a couple of games of Zombology and it got pretty mixed feedback this time, those people who enjoyed it last time seemed to enjoy it again, but Paul in particular really didn't like it. He felt like he had no control and no idea how to win. It's a ten minute game, so I'm ok with it feeling pretty random, but I don't want it annoying people. I've also heard back from a couple of my blind playtesters. One of them emailed with a few rules questions that will help me improve the clarity of the rules, the other has played it once. He was generally positive, but said it needed work and had a bunch of suggestions, so I think I need to go back to the drawing board and address these concerns. I'm thinking of taking a couple of types of cards out, but that leaves me with some slots to fill - ideally with cards that make it more interactive and fun without becoming more complicated. Hmmm.

2014: Setting Myself Some Goals

Like I did last year, I'm setting myself some goals for the year. As I mentioned last week, I had mixed success with my goals last year, I aced the blogging ones but made pretty poor progress on the games design ones. So this year, I'm going to stretch myself on the blogging ones again, and reign in my designing goals to something a bit more realistic.

Games Design

I want to make some decent progress on Vacuum, and Dragon. I want to get Zombology to the state where I can consider hawking it to publishers or going it alone (again) and I'd like to do NaGa Demon again in November. I'm thinking print and play again, I felt it was a great success this year.

Blogging

I want to blog every Monday for the year, plus a bunch more posts in November for NaGa DeMon. I managed 76 last year, so let's say 75 for 2014. Last year's page views were the best ever by quite some stretch and also included my best two months ever, both better than the reddit month which I thought was completely unbeatable. I'd targetted 20,000 views for the year but ended up getting over 35,000. This year's target is 40,000 over 10% growth. My blogger followers went from 49 to 56 last year, a gain of seven. I'm hoping for another 10 this year. As you can see these are all a stretch, hopeful they'll encourage me to do more on the blog and continue building an audience, which might help if I ever have a game to actually sell in future!

Gaming

I've had in my head over the last 7 years a goal of playing as many games as there are days in the year. I've managed it 4 times including 2013. My goal for 2014 is to do it again. I'd also like to end the year with no games in my collection that I haven't played in over a year. Exceptions for games that I own for sentimental reasons (i.e. Reiver Games' games and games that I've received as gifts for certain things) and games that we own as a family (that I'm not particularly keen on playing). I'm going to use this to focus my collection on games that I actually play (or want to play). So I'll probably get rid of a few more of the ones that aren't seeing any action.

It's good to have something to aim for, something to stretch me and stop me just coasting along.

Moving the Goalposts

Back at the beginning of the year, I set myself some goals. My next major target according to those goals is to get copies of Codename: Vacuum to playtesters around the world by the end of May. Which is just over a month away.

That's not going to happen. Not even close. The last couple of weeks we've had my parents up for a week and now my father-in-law up for a week. In two weeks time we're off on a family holiday for a week and we've another long weekend family holiday at the end of May. For the last couple of weeks I've not made much progress on Codename: Vacuum for all these reasons (excuses again!) and it's clear to me now that I'll not get those playtest copies ready by the end of next month. In fact, after the rulebook disaster, I'm not even sure I'll manage to get the rulebook re-written by the end of May, let alone the playtest copies constructed.

So, I'm moving the goalposts. I've got a work trip to the US in June, so it's unlikely to be done by June either, but maybe July is achievable. In the meantime, I've just printed the April version for myself which I now need to cut out and I'll need to make update packs for Terry and Paul who have the March version. I can also be making boxes and box inserts for the playtest copies already. The other components will change between now and the end of July, but the boxes won't so I can make them ahead of time.

The other thing I need to be thinking about is who gets the playtest copies. I want people who can give really good feedback, people who like deck-building games and people who are prepared to play it several times to make the cost of sending them a copy worthwhile. I've a few ideas, friends I made during my Reiver Games days. But I think I want to send out maybe fifteen copies, so I'll need to find a few more playtesters. I feel a BGG post coming on, nearer to the time...

In other news, I've been having some more ideas about Codename: Proteome. Maybe it's time to make another version of that and get that tested too.

Honestly I'm Not Normally A Deviant, But ...

I'll get to the subject of that provocative title in a minute! Aside: this is my 666th blog post. Make of that what you will.

Just a brief update on progress this week, and a review of my card purchases.

At the beginning of the year I set myself some goals. Seeing as one of them was a deadline for last Thursday, I figured it'd be a good time to take stock of how I'm progressing against those goals. The deadline was to get initial playtest copies out to some close friends who were key Reiver Games playtesters by the end of February. I missed it, but only by a couple of days (I got them ready over the weekend, so they are ready for posting today). It was close, so I'm going to count that as a goal met! The only other goals relevant at this point are the blog ones. So far I'm on track for those too, I've blogged every Monday this year, the page views are above the target of 20,000 views this year and I've two new followers since the start of the year too. All good :-)

Setting the goals has really focussed me, I've worked quite hard the last few weeks to the get playtest copies ready, spending my evenings after The Daughter goes to sleep printing, cutting and collating to get the copies assembled. The biggest stumbling block was the rulebook, which I had to write from scratch in Adobe InDesign since the previous one was written in Microsoft Word, had no examples and was hideously out of date. The last minute change to simplify things that I thought of last week didn't help as that made changes necessary close to the wire.

Still, I consider myself on track so far this year :-)

As another aside, I recently read an article on BGG by Lewis Pulsipher, designer of Britannia among others, stating that to be taken seriously as a designer you need to be working on multiple games at once. One game makes you look like a dilettante apparently. I consider myself focussed, rather than a dilettante, but maybe others feel differently. Anyway, I've a family now and they come first, with limited time available the only way I can make any progress is to focus on a single game.

In other news, in making these prototypes I mentioned above, I've finally got around to using some of that card I bought a couple of weeks ago. I bought it from PaperCutz a supplier I'd not used before, so I thought I'd review the purchase briefly. I've used the card extensively in the prototypes: the box insert, deck dividers, cards and player mats are all printed on and made from the new card.

PaperCutz were pretty easy to deal with, I ordered over the internet, the card arrived in a couple of days. The card was fairly well wrapped and then boxed, but regardless both the 300gsm and the 240gsm were slightly dinged on one corner, probably as a result of exuberance on the part of the courier. It's not a problem, since I cut at least 10mm from each edge as part of the construction and I can feed the dinged corner into the printer last so it doesn't throw the printer out of whack, but still slightly disappointing.

I bought 25 sheets of the 300gsm for making box inserts and 250 sheets of the 240gsm for the cards, dividers and player mats. That's enough to make 15 games :-). Or at least it was until I fell in love with the 300gsm stuff. Honestly I'm not normally a deviant, but the silky smooth, unblemished exterior coupled with a firm core that kinks pleasingly when you caress its surface with a craft knife totally got me. I've used it for the box inserts as intended, but also for the dividers and player mats, so now I've enough card to make 3 more games. I need more. I'm going to get another 100 sheets of the A3 300gsm, which I'll use for the dividers and player mats and I'll also get 25 sheets of a more voluptuous SRA3 (a slightly bigger size) for the box inserts. It turns out that I can't do maths to save my life, and the calculation I'd done in my head which lead to the decision that A3 would be big enough for the box inserts was way out. SRA3 isn't big enough! But it's close enough and will do. After those purchases I'll have enough to make another 15 copies - so I should be sorted for the next wave of prototypes in the summer too :-).

Setting Some Goals

It's a time of year traditionally dedicated to proudly proclaiming a set of Resolutions about how you will improve yourself that inevitably fall by the wayside by the end of January as things settle back to normal after your Christmas blowout.

Rather than set myself some New Year's Resolutions in that vein, I've decided instead to set myself some Games Design Goals instead. I'm not promising anything, I'm not changing the way I live my life (no matter how short-lived!), I'm just going to state for the record what I hope to achieve with Codename: Vacuum this year. I might achieve them, I might not, but I'll certainly try and it'll be interesting at the end of the year to look back and see how successful I've been in meeting them.

Creation and Play Goals

My goals are pretty simple for Creation and Play, now I'm back, I'd like to establish myself as a regular blogger again. The aim is to blog once a week on a Monday morning. I expect to miss a few due to holidays and illness/laziness, but I'd like to blog at least 45 times this year. I've hit 60,000 page views for the blog now over its 3 year history of stats. I'd like to get above 80,000 by the end of this year with a few extra followers to boot.

Codename: Vacuum Goals

I'm really pleased with the progress I'm making on Codename: Vacuum, the next stage is to get it out in the world. I'd like to get copies to my previous gaming buddies in York and Bedford by the end of February and then several copies to blind playtesters by the end of May. I hope that I'll be able to incorporate their feedback and have a print-ready game (sans artwork) by the end of November, when I need to decide whether the game is good enough to publish and if it is, what route to take to market.

There's a fair amount or graft needed to reach those goals, but if you don't set yourself something challenging you'll just fanny on interminably. Wish me luck!

Goals

I've been thinking about where I want to go with the company. At the moment, my first full-time year is on track, but even if I meet my goals for the year, I'll not make a profit (I spent a lot of money getting Carpe Astra and It's Alive! manufactured, too late in the year to recoup the cost). I've worked out my targets for next year, which include a significant growth in sales. If I meet them I hope to turn a profit next year and be able to take some money out of the company.

But what do I want to do long-term? Get to the point where I can pootle along, making enough money to live on? Or dominate the world?

There are a bunch of case studies. I'm going to use American companies that do strategy games as case studies, I don't know enough about the German ones and most of the UK ones are run as hobbies (Ludorum, Ragnar Brothers, Fragor), with only Warfrog and JKLM that I know about as a full-time job.

The ones I'm going to concentrate on are: Fantasy Flight, Rio Grande, and Steve Jackson. I don't know anything about Days of Wonder or Z-Man.

Fantasy Flight are the 800lb Gorilla founded in 1995. Their 'American' games are often licences, feature nice art and cool components. According to the Inc.com 5,000 fastest growing companies in the US their 2006 turnover was $6.2 million dollars, and they had 28 employees in 2007. Nice.

Rio Grande, founded in 1998, predominantly re-publish German games in English, although with Dominion they are branching out into publishing original titles. Again, according to the Inc 5,000, in 2007 Jay had a second employee and a turnover of $4.2 million dollars. That's a lot of turnover per employee.

Steve Jackson Games, founded in 1980, tend to focus on role-played games and lighter games such as Munchkin. According to their 2008 stakeholders report their turnover was $2.9 million dollars and they have 18 full-time employees. 75% of their turnover comes from Munchkin! If you've got a winning product - you need to keep it in print.

So there's a few different results and a few different methods of getting there. So what are my goals in terms of games, turnover and staff?

Games

I want to concentrate on publishing new games. Although re-printing already popular games is a bit less risky (you've got some indication of how popular they are already) I'm not that interested in that, whether it's first English editions of otherwise foreign language games or re-printing out of print games. As to what type of games, I'm still not sure. It's Alive! was fairly light auction game, Carpe Astra a more thinky brain-burning game, Sumeria will be a more family Euro-type game. I think a range is best to start of with, until I find my feet.

Turnover

It's clear from the numbers I've shown above that there is plenty of money in the games market. But as a newcomer I've got to fight with the established companies to get my share of it. I'd like to get to the point where I can earn a decent living from the company and ideally employ some staff to do the bits I'm not so good at (marketing). It would also be great to have someone to playtest/co-design with during working hours. Fantasy flight do a lot of their games design in-house, and to get to that point you need a whole bunch of talented people on hand. I guess I'd like to be turning over £1 million in 10 years. That's a hard goal, but as the above has shown, it's possible.

Employees

As far as I'm aware Z-Man is a one man show. Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande does a stirling job with only one other employee. Steve Jackson and Fantasy Flight are much bigger companies which give them some strength in depth, holiday/sick cover and means they can do a lot of work in-house. I'd like to get several staff (maybe 5 or so) in that 10 year period. Enough so that I can offload some of the drudgery, share in the games design/playtesting and recruit people with skills I'm missing.

Roadmap

How do I get there? That's the hard question. I need to keep coming up with successful games. I need to sell out the print runs I do to maximise my return on investment. I need to strengthen my relationships with distributors and expand my list of distributors to increase the reach of my games. Alliance Game Distributors (the largest distributors in the US) has over 2,000 customers. If each took one copy of Carpe Astra it would have sold out. And that's not including any European or Asian sales. If I can get to the point where I'm regularly doing medium-size print runs (5,000 - 10,000 copies) with 5 or more games in a year I'll be doing alright. Getting there from where I am now is going to be the difficult part. At the moment I don't have enough capital to do runs that large, I need to work up to that. Each game I do has to at least break even, that way I'm growing the money in the company. I think marketing will help there - increasing customer and shops knowledge of my products. What's the best thing to do there? I'm not yet sure. More on that in another post.