Retro Evening

I couldn't play games this evening, both Dave and Paul were busy, so instead I decided to make some games. Sadly the boxes still haven't arrived, so I couldn't start another batch of It's Alive!, instead I made a copy of Border Reivers, or at least most of one.

At the Expo another publisher asked for a copy of It's Alive! and Border Reivers. It's Alive! was no problem, I've all the pieces to make that, but I was low on Border Reivers components. I had a few spares of most things but no greyboard for making the tiles. Fortunately the artwork for It's Alive! came wrapped in paper rather than in a cardboard box, and it was protected on both sides by, you guessed it: greyboard. The publisher contacted me a couple of days ago to ask whether I'd forgotten. Man that's embarrassing. I really should get the copies off quickly.

This evening I made a whole game of Border Reivers except for the tiles, which will have to be another night's work outside in a friend's yard. I made the box out of the thicker greyboard (probably 1.5 or 2mm). I really liked the solidity of the thicker box, but I think the thinner card I use is alright, and it less raw materials from an environmental point of view. It felt good to be doing Border Reivers again, a nice change from an endless stream of It's Alive!

I've now got ten copies of It's Alive! at home waiting to be paid for. I got an email from one of my American customers asking if his copy was ready. This is what I was afraid of, I'd emailed him a couple of weeks ago to tell him it was, somewhere along the line a spam filter must have swallowed it. How many more people has this happened to?

Not Quite To Plan

Friday was a mixed bag, I had a little bit of time to cut out It's Alive! bits, I met the small business advisor but the professionally made boxes didn't turn up. D'oh!

The small business advisor gave me a lot of advice around tax (VAT registered or not), business status (self-employed or limited company) and how to limit your tax burden. It was very informative. Plus free, which is a bargain.

The boxes didn't turn up while we were in, we had to pop out at lunchtime, so they could have arrived then, but there was no 'We tried to deliver a parcel' note when we got back, so we don't know whether or not they tried. Hopefully they'll try on Monday, but I've got to go to work that day so I'm hoping for one of those notes that explains how to collect the parcel from the depot. I've six games left to finish in the meantime, the boxes are made so it's just the interior to make. I've five finished copies at home, and twelve notified orders. Now that I can make a game in half an hour I can notify more people that their copies are ready. Some people pay up immediately, others take a few days or more, so rather than wait on those people I can move ahead a little and reduce the waiting list. Of course, now that it's holiday season people may well not be around to check their email.

Stepping Up

It's a busy few days in the Reiver Games camp. Yesterday I was on the radio, tonight I've been constructing games and tomorrow I'm seeing a small business advisor.

It was fun being interviewed on the radio, I was on the air for about twenty minutes and The Wife said I came across well. I did however make a few mistakes that I've learnt from. They asked me to bring along some games so that the interviewer could describe them on air and having something tangible to discuss. I took my copies of Border Reivers and It's Alive! The interviewer concentrated on Border Reivers, even going so far to ask 'If any of my listeners would like a copy how would they go about getting one?', to which I had to reply 'It's sold out.' The moral of this tale: only take the product you're promoting, old ones are best left at home. I also mentioned that my core audience was hardcore gamers, which The Wife rightly pointed out may have put off casual gamers who were listening in. Still, apparently I came across well, it was good experience, and I'll learn from my mistakes and be better prepared next time.

This evening I've finished off a batch of eight It's Alive! boxes. Hopefully they are the last I'll have to do for quite a while as over one hundred and forty professionally made boxes are turning up tomorrow. This will allow me to dramatically reduce the construction time, and hopefully burn through my waiting list a bit quicker. I'm really looking forward to having stock again, and being able to promote the game properly.

Tomorrow I've got the day off work. I've a trip to my neurologist at lunchtime, the boxes are due to arrive and in the morning I'm meeting with a small business advisor to discuss the next step for Reiver Games. The small business advisors are a free service provided by the government. I saw one last March, before I set about launching Reiver Games and Border Reivers and it was really helpful. They gave me loads of useful advice. I'm going to be asking them about how to progress to professionally made games and selling to shops and distributors. I need to think about whether to continue as a sole trader or make the leap to Limited company, and also what to do about VAT. In the UK you don't have to be VAT-registered until your turnover crosses £50,000. But if I'm selling to other companies rather than end-users it might be advantageous. I'll let you know how it goes...

Reiver Games Rules The (Air)Waves

I'll be on the local radio station this evening, talking about Reiver Games, Border Reivers and It's Alive! To be honest I'm not really ready for it, with fifty-six outstanding orders and only five finished copies at home. But I've already put it off once and it should be fun. I'll be on BBC Radio York (103.7, 104.3 & 95.5 FM) just after 6:30 this evening. It should in theory be available via their website live and after the fact, but they seem to be experiencing some technical difficulties so I wouldn't count on it.

In other news, the professionally made boxes are due to arrive on Friday, which should significantly speed up my production, I'm hoping to be able to make at least twelve games a week once the boxes arrive, meaning I should clear my backlog in four weeks or so. I've got a convention to attend in that time though, so it'll probably push out a little.

There are a few people on the waiting list who have gone quiet. I've emailed them (weeks ago in some cases) to tell them their copies are ready and they've neither replied to say they don't want it any more nor paid up. The silence is a little frustrating, as I don't know whether to: keep a copy ready for them in case they are about to order; keep them on the list but concentrate on others or remove them from the list and give their copy to the next person who orders. I'm going with number two at the moment. I'm now getting through the copies ordered at the Expo, so if you ordered there I'm getting to you!

Update from Phil

Just thought I'd post a quick update about what's been happening. First of all I received It's Alive! a couple of days ago. It looks great and I am eager to play it. One corner got squashed in shipping though :( Thanks Jack for shipping it so quick!

As for my designs, I have been working hard at re-working Archaeology into a card game. The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly I'd love to be able to do another print run, and cutting the cost and production time down by just producing cards will help this heaps! Secondly, there are a few rule tweaks I'd like to implement to streamline the game, and up some of the strategic play. Seeing as the original game was pretty close to being card-based anyway, this feels like quite a natural progression. I think I am getting close to locking everything in for it now.

London: Day Two

I had no evening plans for my second night in London, so I had a good few hours to spend on my Jorvik and Artist prototypes. I finished off colouring in the Jorvik prototype and coloured in the Artist prototype and did a bunch of solo playtesting on Jorvik. Soloing a game doesn't give you the full experience (and in particular it's bad for hidden information or bluffing games), but it will give you an idea about whether the basic mechanics work and will give you a feel for card distributions, etc. If you keep ending up with the same cards that you haven't used, then there are probably too many of them. Generally I think things are starting to work, there doesn't seem to be any first player bias (both first and second player were winning games), but there is definitely more work to do. A few of the stage three cards appear to be too numerous, and there were several cards I wanted that I hadn't made, so I'll probably swap out some for those new types. Another problem seems to be that whoever scores highest in the first stage also scores highest in the second and third stages, and hence wins. The second stage is supposed to be the great leveller, but it's not working that way at the moment. I'll probably down-grade the stage one cards to make them less powerful.

I've also tweaked my Artist prototype to fix some problems we had with it last time I played. There was an advantage if you were lucky enough to be given two scoring areas adjacent to each other as some pieces only scored if you controlled both areas. I could have just removed those pieces, but I liked them, so instead I made all the scoring cards double so they covered two areas. I've also coloured in the pieces to work around some problems that came from the pieces just having the colour written on them (which wasn't visible enough). Doubling the size of the scoring cards' areas means that each player now has less to remember (a cause of frequent card checking), and a player shield (which I'll make when I get home) will mean that the cards can be kept face up and yet hidden, so memory will be less of a problem. I've also got some ideas to make things a bit more interesting which I can try out next time I test it.

I feel like I've made some progress on both games tonight, although from my description it might not sound like it!

In other news, It's Alive! got the thirty ratings needed to become ranked on BoardGameGeek today. Its officially the 1558th best board in the world. I would expect that to move up in the coming months as it gets more ratings (which will slowly outweigh the dummy Bayesian ratings), hopefully we'll break the 1000 barrier in a few months. Fingers crossed.

London: Day One

I'm in London most of this week for a training course. This means that I can't do any game construction, but that doesn't mean that Reiver Games is on pause. This morning I posted another copy to the USA, continuing my efforts to work through my backlog.

This evening, after meeting my sister for dinner I returned to my hotel room and started working on Jorvik. I'd spent some time on the train on the way down yesterday drawing up the cards for the next prototype. I'd started testing the first part of the game on Saturday, and I'd tweaked the balance slightly already. I also removed a few cards to make the game a bit quicker. Tonight I roughly coloured the cards to make it easier to differentiate between the three stages of the game. I then played a couple of games with the new cards to get a feel for how the new version was working.

I'm trying to create a quick, simple two-player card game, which also has some depth and player confrontation. The early versions lacked the depth and the confrontation, but were quick and simple. About four months ago my mate Dave had a cracking suggestion which definitely improved the depth and confrontation, but the prototype we were playing with had a dodgy card balance which just didn't work right. I'd had some ideas for a while about how to improve things but I'd been way too busy with It's Alive! to do anything about them. This trip to London is finally giving me that chance. I've also brought Artist with me, as I had some ideas about that ages ago that I've been meaning to try out for a while.

Tomorrow night I've got the night to myself, so I'm hoping to work on the Jorvik prototype and continue my tweaking of the card balance to keep improving the game. I'm also hoping to try out the new ideas for artist and see how that goes.

Border Reivers is Dead, Long Live Border Reivers

Eleven months to the day after I released Border Reivers I have finally shipped the last two copies. A couple of copies were left on order for the last couple of months and they've finally been claimed. It's all done. I'm not quite sure how to feel.

I'm proud of the game, its good reviews and the production quality I achieved making the game by hand. I've learnt a lot about how to manufacture, promote and sell games over the last year. Is it the perfect game? No, of course not. I've already got some ideas about how it could be improved, and when I send off the prototype copy to the other publisher that's interested I'll probably include those ideas in the copy.

Here's a quick round up of my lessons learnt over the last fifteen months producing Border Reivers.

Things That Went Well

• I sold out. In less than the twelve months I had set myself as a goal. I was confident that I could sell fifty, but one hundred was definitely outside my comfort zone.
• Americans bought the game. The exchange rate is awful at the moment, but still over twenty Americans coughed up the $80 to get the game and get it delivered over the Atlantic.
• Production Quality. I had no idea what the finished game would look like until I finished the first copy, but when I did I was extremely pleased, and the production quality has received universally good feedback.
• Publicity. When I plugged the game on BoardGameGeek, a story ran on Boardgame News and I was interviewed in the Yorkshire Post I got interest and sales, I need to keep doing this, but in a way that doesn't spam people.
• Convention Attendance. The game was well received at the conventions I went to, and I usually had no difficulty finding people to play the game. Plus sales at conventions weren't subject to PayPal fees :-)
• PayPal. The fees ate into my profit, but probably 60% of my sales were over the internet and PayPal made that possible.
• Spares. The printer sent me more sheets than I asked for (about 5-10%).

Things That Went Badly

• Cocking up. I cocked up four copies, which cost me £120 in sales. As time went on I became better at it, but at the beginning I cocked up a lot of pieces.
• No spares. The wooden pieces supplier sent me around the right number of pieces, and some of those were knackered, as such it was these that stopped me making more copies.
• Tiles. The tiles were a bitch to make, the gluing was unpleasant, slow and could only be done outside, which meant I had to arrange to use a friend's yard/garage, then the cutting out hurt and was slow and error prone. The 2mm thick greyboard gave them a nice solidity, but made the cutting out awkward to say the least.
• Recycling. Because of the glue and the lamination I couldn't recycle some of my cut-offs. The spare card not used for the boxes was alright, but pretty much nothing else.
• Time. I had difficulty fitting the construction around my full-time job and personal life. Reiver Games has been pretty much my life for the last year and a bit and that's not fair on my family or friends.

What To Change

• Lamination. It was an accident that It's Alive! is not laminated, but the quality is fine (I think, correct me if I'm wrong), and it means that I had money free to get some of the boxes professionally made, and all my scraps are recyclable.
• Avoid thick card components. It wasn't fun making them.
• Time Management. Somehow spend less 'spare' time on future projects - not sure how to achieve this one.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who bought a copy of Border Reivers; who gave me feedback (both positive and negative); who gave me moral support or who helped me in some fashion and those who plugged Border Reivers/Reiver Games whether professionally or not. It's been a blast and I'm looking forward to publishing (and designing) more games in the future.

In other news, after months of tunnel vision on It's Alive! I've finally got some enthusiasm about Jorvik again. I've made some blank cards to take to London next week which will allow me to make another prototype and do some solo-playtesting while I'm away. I've had some ideas to improve the interaction of the players further and to simplify things a bit. One of the problems we had with the last prototype was being stuck with a few cards you couldn't play - hopefully that problem has been solved.

Slow, Then Faster

It's Alive! construction is continuing. I've been managing around six copies a week for the last few weeks, which has been good, but I've over fifty outstanding orders, so I've some way to go. I'm going to have a couple of slow weeks of production due to weekends away and working in London for a few days next week. So I'm going to have to do something else as I can't take all the construction kit with me.

While I'm in London I need something to occupy my evenings, so I'm thinking of taking the bits for my next Jorvik prototype so I can take that and do some prototyping and solo-playtesting. This prototype will be slightly higher quality than previous ones, I'm thinking of colouring the cards in using pencil crayons to aid differentiation between different stages of the game. One of the problems we had during the last playtesting was remembering to score before a new stage started, and I think coloured cards will help with that in the absence of final artwork. I've also received the first of four prototypes I'm expecting in the next few weeks. I can take that with me too and read the rules and maybe even solo it to see what I make of it.

In the meantime I need to get some copies of It's Alive! ready and shipped. I've two remaining copies of Border Reivers too that have been waiting to be shipped. I hope to get those sent off in the next few days (ideally by Thursday so that I sold out within eleven months :-) ). I'm going to spend Wednesday night making copies of It's Alive!, hopefully finishing off the next batch and getting the tiles done for the last copy of Border Reivers.

In other news I took Monday afternoon off work, so that I could post the box artwork to the box-makers in London and get some prototyping raw materials for the next version of Jorvik. I hope to receive the finished boxes in about three weeks which will allow me to step up my production of It's Alive! to maybe twelve copies a week. This will be good as I've a convention in early August, and a lot of outstanding orders to make. Once I'm ahead of the game I can add the PayPal buttons to the site and start publicising the game again, I've been pretty quiet since the Expo as I didn't want to attract more sales until I had some stock to sell, rather than a backlog of orders.

I've also had someone who ordered a copy of It's Alive! pull out when they realised just how bad the exchange rate is at the moment. This happened once with Border Reivers, I was hoping the lower price tag and shipping costs would avoid it for It's Alive! but sadly not.

All in all, things are ticking along quite nicely, but it's definitely the amount of time I have available that's holding things back at the moment.

It's Alive! With Yehuda

Yehuda was in York for a couple of days so I invited him round to our tiny flat. It also gave me a chance to give him his free copies of It's Alive!, a couple for other Israelis to save them postage, and to get mine signed.

I've been reading Yehuda's blog for well over a year now, but I never expected to meet him. It was a bit weird, this was the first person I'd got to know over the internet that I'd met in person. Put your minds at rest dear readers, there were no red carnations in button-holes and his daughter Tal was there as a chaperone!

Firstly I handed over Yehuda's copies, plus two others for other Israelis that Yehuda had kindly agreed to take home with him to save them the postage costs. Then I got him to sign a couple of games, those for me, my family and Dave (who had helped out at the It's Alive! launch at the UK Games Expo). We talked about how It's Alive! was going, and what my plans were for the future. We played a couple of games (one basic, one advanced), and then a couple of games of PitchCar which Yehuda had never played before.

Before we called it a night we signed a slightly amended contract, which changed some wording I was worried about, and amended the sub-licence fees that Yehuda was interested in.

It was a nice night, and it was great to play the game with the designer.

I've now heard back from the printers that they can do the boxes for It's Alive! I can only afford 150 of them unfortunately, but even that will save me over 110 hours work, so it's worth doing. I just need to send them the artwork and pay them for their troubles. This means that the waiting time for those towards the end of the orders list for It's Alive! should significantly decrease.

In other news I now have four prototypes on the way from three designers in the US and UK. I need to start thinking about Reiver Games' next game, and at the moment neither Jorvik or Artist are ready enough for consideration. I foresee a big play-off on the horizon when we play all the games back-to-back to help me in my decision-making process.

It's Alive! Progress

It's Alive! was release four weeks ago and the last four weeks have been a bit of a blur. I thought I'd give you an update on how things are going.

Orders

The orders are still coming in thick and fast, though thankfully slower now than I'm making the games. I've got ninety-seven orders, nearly a third of the whole print run, and it's only been out a month! Most of this week's order are as a result of my Geek of the Week thread on BoardGameGeek.

Construction

I've now made thirty-nine copies, all but one of the original forty boxes I made in the run-up to the UK Games Expo. I've started another batch of boxes and hope to construct another six games this weekend, while The Wife is working. I've been averaging six games a week since the Expo, but we've had a few weekends away, and I've been away a fair amount for work during the week too. I need to step up construction, or those at the end of the list will have to wait a long time. Fortunately, the box-makers in London have come back to me with a quote, so I can pursue them to make some of the boxes for me. I can't afford to get all the boxes made, but I think I can afford one hundred and fifty of them, so that will allow me to break the back of the waiting list, as once the box is made it only takes forty minutes to make the rest instead of an hour and a half for the whole thing. That should up my production rate to at least twelve games a week.

Sales

I've now shipped thirty copies (including those I sold at the Expo). As I finish a batch I contact the next group of people on the list of orders, so I'm getting through them.

Feedback

I've now got twenty-four ratings on the Geek for It's Alive!, ranging from 6 to 8.5. The average is 7.62 so when this gets up to thirty ratings this should debut pretty well in the rankings. Because there will be more copies of this available than Border Reivers I expect more ratings in the long run, and hence the Bayesian averaging will have less effect. We shall see. In other news Scott Nicholson of Board Games With Scott didn't especially like it (he's the only six rating), but he's only played it once, and with five players, which might explain his disappointment. In other news, Border Reivers is now the 1840th best games in the world, as another rating has come in.

Geek Of The Week

I'm BoardGameGeek's Geek of the Week this week, following in the footsteps of Yehuda (It's Alive!'s designer) and Luke who occasionally posts here. The Geek of the Week posts a potted bio, mine has a humourous error, and two truths and a lie. Random members then get to ask them questions and guess which is the lie.

In other news I've received another submission and quite a lot of interest in Border Reivers, which is gone.

Self-publishing - my processes and lessons learnt

Finally managed to put together an account of making Archaeology! Because it is really long I posted it over at BGG. Here is the link for those interested:

Self-publishing - my processes and lessons learnt

Play testing Bobby's "Game Knights" games at Gamex

The games I brought to Gamex to get feedback and play test were: Cutthroat, Dueling Dice, Battlin Bones, Hatchlings and Peg Leg's.

Gamex is a game convention in Los Angeles. One of the three Strategicon conventions.

Peg Leg's is a kids game so it was only played twice by one kid and one adult. The young girl who played it really enjoyed it and asked to play again but I had to run and do something else.

The prototype of Cutthroat is made of wood and is very tactile so it got a lot of interest from passers by. We managed to play one 4 player game and I explained it to a lot of people. Although it's a very simple roll and move game, there's a lot of backstabbing and stealing so the players said they enjoyed that aspect of the game.

Battlin Bones was played quite a few times and as I already knew, it needs some re-wording of some of it's cards. I was up pretty late typing them up so there were a few typos and I need to add MAY and MUST to a few of the cards.

Hatchlings was never played but it was explained to few people.

Dueling Dice was a hit i think. It's a very simple 2 player dice/board game. It can be played quickly and it can be played just about anywhere. I received a lot of positive comments about this game. A few play testers even helped me develop a 4 player version of the game. The 4 player version had a completely different almost Chaotic feel that was very exciting. One of the play testers offered to buy one so I gave her a copy of the game board so she could put one together on her own.

Here are a couple of pictures of people playing the prototypes.

New Tangata Manu board design

Here's the latest version of the Tangata Manu board. It has 2 less rows than the last version and I added the spaces for Draw and Discard piles. The game plays very nicely now. The original version took a long time before players started releasing boulders to squish the other climbers. Now it happens much faster. I also feel there is much more overlap of trail travel on this board. I don't think the game is too long anymore but I have only play tested it with two players and 3 players so far. I still need to try a four player game a few times.

This would be too expensive for me to produce on my own so I'm about ready to start shopping it to publishers. I'm sure it will meet a lot of the same dead ends that my other games have run into.

click the image to enlarge it.

Border Reivers 1861st Best Game In The World

Border Reivers has finally got more than the thirty ratings needed to become ranked on BoardGameGeek. It is currently ranked 1861! The system of BGG rankings is intentionally biased against games with a small number of ratings to avoid small numbers of people (or indeed shillers) affecting the top ranked games. This is done using a Bayesian average - to get the ranking for a game the actual ratings are considered in addition to one hundred average ratings (the average rating for all games - currently around 5.3 I think). This means the thirty-one real ratings I have (average 6.9) are signficantly pulled down by the Bayesian spoof ratings. So please rate it!

This is one of the reasons why I've done a larger print run of It's Alive! as the larger print run should mean more people get a copy and hopefully I'll get more ratings. That way the ranking should be less affected by the Bayesian spoof ratings.

In other news I'm pressing on with the It's Alive! ordered copies and I've been revisiting Border Reivers. I had six copies of Border Reivers left at home: mine and five orders I've not sent yet because I'm waiting for the money. This week, two of those have gone - one to it's original orderer, and one to someone from my unofficial waiting list when one of the orders fell through. And another has started to move. I've only got four copies left at home. Weird. I've had the bits for it kicking around for nearly a year now, it's going to feel strange when it's all gone. I'll be very glad to have finished cutting out the tiles when that comes about though. As well as the remaining three copies (which are complete apart from their tiles) I also need to knock together another copy from the spares for another publisher who has expressed an interest.

BoardGameGeek

I've been watching the BoardGameGeek statistics for the two games I've published almost obsessively for months now, and it's interesting to see how they differ.

Border Reivers

Border Reivers has probably been listed on BGG for over a year now. It's been available for over ten months and sold out recently (though I'm still holding a few copies for people who have ordered). Border Reivers has twenty-nine ratings at the time of posting, almost to the thirty required for ranking. It's received generally positive feedback, with the odd person who doesn't like it: ratings range from four to eight out of ten. The average rating drop as low as 6.4 a while ago, but has been steadily increasing in recent months to it's current value of 6.88. Thirty-seven people are listed as owning a copy (I've shipped eighty-seven copies), and another twenty-two are listed as wanting a copy.

It's Alive!

It's Alive! by comparison is a newcomer. It's only been listed on the Geek for a few months and been available less than one month. Currently I have nearly seventy outstanding orders to fulfill. It's Alive! has already garnered twenty ratings (from twenty-four sales), and has received good feedback with ratings ranging between 7 and 8.5, and an average of 7.67. Only thirteen people are listed as owning a copy, and seven listed as wanting a copy. Interestingly twelve people have rated the original version (The Menorah Game) which has both a wider spread (5 - 10) and a lower average (7.27). I'll take that as a vote in favour of my theme change. :-)

It is interesting to me that less than half of the people who have bought a copy of Border Reivers have listed it as owned on the Geek, and just over a third have rated it. Whereas despite only half of the sold copies of It's Alive! listed as owned on the Geek, I've got twenty ratings from twenty-four sales - a much higher percentage than Border Reivers. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the It's Alive! ratings as more copies are shipped...

Tangata needs to be shorter!

Last night I play tested again as if it was a 3 player game. I started at 11:00pm and the game didn't end until 1:30am. That was with me making decisions really fast. I assume with a 4 player game full of people that haven't played it before we would be looking at a 3 hour game or more. I definitely need to shorten the game.

The first thing I'm going to do is shorten the length of the board by 2 hexes. I'm also going to add a fourth type of trail card and overhang "protection" cards. The one thing that is a little difficult and might take a while to dial in is the number of tiles available. Once the trail tiles are gone from the stock piles, each player can move unoccupied tiles around the board. There can't be too many tiles and there can't be too few...

Blue won the game last night with eight tribesmen reaching the cave with 8 bird eggs in hand.

Tangata Manu - Further Development

I realized the first board was way too big and I think the changeable tiles were not necessary at this point so I made a new board...

This new board is designed for 2 to 4 players instead of 2 to 6 players. I also changed the move generator from just cards to cards and trail tiles. This method of movement is almost dialed in and seems to work well but I'm still not happy with the boulders. As it is I've included boulder cards in the same stack as trail cards and I feel there are too many boulders taking out every tribesman that is scaling the cliff. If I just make less boulder cards then one person might control them all with the luck of the draw... that would not be good. I'm considering that the boulders should be a separate pile of cards and something should generate the ability to release a boulder from above. Perhaps each player gets 4 boulders and can choose to release them at any time - one per turn... ?

I will be play testing different methods all week and will meet with some gamers on Friday to get their unbiased input.

Here's a close up of some of the trail cards.

Here's a close up of the start zone on the board.

Here's a close up of the end zone... You can click on these images to make them bigger. These are just mock ups still. The artwork should obviously change. I just feel much better play testing with something that actually looks like a game. It's hard for me to get a feel for a game when it's just notes on paper or note cards.

Mechanisation - The Way Forward

I've got over ninety copies of It's Alive! spoken for, not all sales, but the vast majority are.

My problem is this: It's going to take me around 135 hours to make these copies alone. Assuming a conservative 5 hours a week that's twenty-seven weeks construction! I really need to speed things up.

Fortunately, because the lamination failed at the printers I have some budget free to look into getting some of the slower tasks done by machine. The time breakdown is approximately:

• Box - 45 mins
• Cards - 25 mins
• Player screens, guides & slabs - 15 mins
• Rules, coins & boxing - 5 mins

So, unsurprisingly I'm concentrating on the box and cards. I'm trying to get a quote to get the boxes professionally made (hard & expensive for such a small run), and I'm investigating getting a die-cutting machine and a custom die to do the cards - much quicker than cutting them out with a craft-knife and steel ruler. I'm hoping the die-cutter will be less erone-prone too, I've already cocked up a few cards. :-(

I'll let you know what I decide (and can afford to do)...