There's a new GeekList on BoardGameGeek listing the highest rated horror games in the database. It's Alive! is at number 5, which is excellent!
In other news, I've now got a huge pile of copies of It's Alive! at home, all but a few people have been notified that their copies are ready, but there's a delay between notification and payment, hence the stockpile. I'm thinking of opening it up to the public soon now.
I've now sold (i.e. received the money for and shipped) the first one hundred copies of It's Alive! I've a bunch of customers that still haven't replied to my emails letting them know their copies are ready, but I know for a fact that some of my notification emails are being swallowed by spam filters. I'm still not sure how to get around that. I wonder how many haven't heard from me due to spam filters, how many are waiting for more cash to come in first and how many have gone silent because they've changed their minds?
I've another thirty-eight orders outstanding, but a bunch of those are for friends and family who will get them when I see them, and at least fifteen are waiting to hear back from the customer. So the waiting list is feeling a lot shorter. Once I've cleared the waiting list I can make the game properly available, with PayPal buttons on my website, and a listing in the BoardGameGeek marketplace. Once the game is available to buy I should have less of the customers who fail to respond, as I expect that the first thing I'll hear is that I've received the money.
In other news, I've started playtesting some of the submissions I've received. Whether I publish a game of my own or another submission I only really want to go with games that I think are excellent. When playtesting another designer's game I have the advantage that there is a critical review by someone who isn't invested in the game (i.e. me). The game has to convince me that it's worth gambling some of my hard earned cash and a lot of my precious free time on. Whereas when the game is my own that is lacking - I've invested a lot in the game already and I want to see my name in print again, so I've got to look at it really carefully to make sure I'm not favouring it and pushing it out before it is ready. My company is too small to suffer from publishing a game that is not good enough, that kind of thing could really harm my fledgling reputation.
I'm going to hold a six-way play-off between the games I'm considering in the next few weeks in a pub in York one evening. If you'd like to come along and help out let me know in the comments. In return for your time and effort you'll get your name in the credits and a 20% playtesters discount on any of the games you play that I publish.
I've been having some issues folding the player shields for It's Alive! Up until now I've been scoring the card with a craft knife, aiming to cut approximately halfway through the card and then folding it neatly along the scored line. Most of the time this is fine, sometimes I don't cut enough, which makes folding it a little harder, but at least the shields look pretty smart. Recently I've had a couple of problems. In the run-up to The Cast Are Dice, I over-cut a couple, actually cutting through the card, so the shield had a hole in it. I had to bin those ones, obviously. At TCAD, Luke (of this blog fame) spotted that I'd given him one of these over-cut shields in his game - I'd obviously not noticed that I'd done it. Damn. So I gave him a new shield, and he was happy, but I was beginning to think I needed a new technique. Yesterday I received an email from one of my customers, whose copy now had a couple of these broken shields after over one hundred plays! I'm going to ship him a couple of replacements (despite him living on another continent), because it's an artifact of the way I've made them, and customer service has to be important to any company, but especially one as small as mine.
This afternoon, in an attempt to fix the problem, I bought a specialist scoring tool from a craft shop. It's like a very small pizza cutter, with a rotary blunt metal blade. I've tried it out this evening, scoring both the inside and the outside of the shield, and neither work very well. Firstly they don't dent the card sufficiently to make it easy to fold, and secondly because the ink on the outside has to be stretched round the fold (rather than separated when I score with a knife) it tears and ends up looking really messy. Back to cutting with a knife, just a bit more carefully.
In other news I've now had ninety-nine people pay for their copies of It's Alive!, very nearly a third of the print run, I've 138 orders, which is nearly half the print run, and probably over half of the amount that will be for sale (once cocked up copies and freebies are discounted). Not bad for less than three months work. The number of orders has been helped by another stocking order, this time from a Bricks-and-Mortar store down South.
Tuesday night I went to another designer's house to deliver copies of Border Reivers and It's Alive! which I had traded at cost for a copy of his latest game at cost. We'd spoken at the Expo, and I'd got the impression that they were looking for games, and were vaguely interested in Border Reivers.
So Tuesday night I went over to his house, took It's Alive! and Border Reivers and played both, explaining the rules. It was me, the other designer and a friend of his. We played Border Reivers first, then discussed ways to improve it for a second edition, and then It's Alive! After the game of Border Reivers we discussed the game. I'd been biting my tongue throughout the game, trying to resist mentioning changes while the others were learning the rules. It was a good game, really close and in the end the other designer won economically - though we would each have won on our turn had we been able to stop him. The others both said they enjoyed the game, and I described some ideas I'd had to improve it if it went to a second edition. They had some ideas too, and being far more experienced designers, they were good ones :-)
I dropped hints that I had no plans to do a second edition anytime soon as I didn't want to do anything that demanding by hand, and I didn't have enough cash to do a professional run. Nothing. By this point I realise that I had imagined a lot of stuff, in my excitement at the Expo. D'oh. Ah well.
The next day I emailed him asking whether he was interested in doing a second edition of Border Reivers. I figured I needed to ask him straight out, since it clearly wasn't his intention, so I needed to make mine clear. The worst he could do was say 'Hell, no. It's awful'. What did I have to lose?
His reply? He'd not thought of that. Now he is thinking about it. Result!
In other news, Archaeology - The Card Game is at the printers and should be released at the end of next week (unless anything goes horribly wrong). The print run is 125 copies, and the rules will be available on BGG any day now.
It's Alive! now has forty-four ratings, which due to the Bayesian nature of the BoardGameGeek rankings means that it has climbed the rankings quite quickly. It's now the 1276th Best Game in the world, which considering only thirty-nine people on the Geek own it is not bad. There are over 31,000 games listed on BGG, so to be near the top 1,000 is something I'm very proud of.
You can also nominate It's Alive! for an award in the Golden Geek Awards - BGG's equivalent of the Oscars.
In other news I went to another publisher's house last night to play Border Reivers and It's Alive! I'm hoping they will consider publishing a second edition of Border Reivers. They enjoyed both games, and we discussed a bunch of things that could be done to improve Border Reivers for a second edition. They had a bunch of ideas that I'm keen to try out. Now I just need to find the time.
Last week was a blinder of a week. The combination of shipping twelves copies to Games Lore and The Cast Are Dice convention lead to my highest weekly sales of It's Alive! so far. Thirty copies! Games Lore received the games today and apparently two have sold already :-)
The Cast Are DiceThis year's con was slightly bigger than last year as it starts to become established. Nick and Sue of Shire Games had 169 tickets pre-ordered plus a few on the day. Nick had reserved me a table right in the entrance that you pretty much had to walk past, so the location was perfect. I was right next to Dean of Ludorum Games who was demoing Fagin's Gang and a new prototype that was getting a lot of positive feedback. Dean and I chatted throughout the con and he gave me a lot of really useful advice about professional runs, having made 1,000 copies of Fagin's Gang last year in Germany.
After being stymied at the Expo by a lack of stock (both my printer's presses broke the week before so I didn't get any artwork until the Thursday morning, leaving me two days to make as many copies as possible), I was determined to take far more than I needed. I was donating a couple of copies to the raffle table, delivering four pre-orders and hoped to sell ten. So I reckoned I needed about sixteen copies. I took twenty-six. Anything I didn't sell would go to the next people on the waiting list.
Sales-wise I set myself the target of ten sales, to match the income I got from selling five copies of Border Reivers last year. By the end of Saturday I had six, and I got another six plus one order on Sunday, so I'm counting that as thirteen, a good result in my book.
As well as seventeen games of It's Alive! over the two days I also managed to get a game of Fire & Axe: A Viking Saga and fellow blogger Luke's Tour. Both were very enjoyable. I meant to play Luke's games last year but I didn't find him until a couple of minutes before he left, and even after a year's waiting the game definitely lived up to my expectations - great stuff. Rumour has it Border Reivers also hit the table somewhere, which is nice.
This WeekThis week is already off to a good start, I've sold three copies already (in the last eighteen hours), and tomorrow after work I'm off to see another publisher to demo Border Reivers and It's Alive!
I've been frantically making copies in the run-up to The Cast Are Dice, to avoid running out of stock at the convention like I did at the Expo. Last week I managed seventeen copies, and so far this week I've managed fourteen. I'm off work tomorrow though, and The Wife is out in the evening so I'm hoping to get at least another twelve done. I've fourteen copies stacked up ready to go, so hopefully twenty-six in total as stock at the con. That should be more than enough.
In other news, Parcel Force are collecting my largest order tomorrow, twelve copies for a UK internet retailer. It's going to be really cool seeing one of Reiver Games' offerings for sale in a retail setting. One small step down the road towards being a real publisher...
Someone out there really likes it:
http://cooliosity.blogspot.com/2007/08/its-alive.html
They've never played it though.
In other news it's still doing well on BoardGameGeek, up to 34 ratings now and still well over 7. I reckon another couple of decent ratings should push it into the top 1,500. Hopefully after TCAD it will gain a handful of new ratings...
That was a very busy week. The first week making games with the professional boxes. I finished seventeen games this week. That's nearly three times the average for hand-made boxes. At this rate I will clear my backlog fairly quickly. I'm already up to copy number 86. If you ordered a copy with a lower number and you haven't received an email from me telling you your copy is ready yet, that is due to a spam filter somewhere eating my email. Drop me a line and I'll let you know about payment and delivery.
I've received the cash for my largest order (twelve copies for an online store in the UK), made the games, and started stockpiling games for The Cast Are Dice in Stoke-on-Trent next weekend. After running out of copies so quickly at the Expo I'm determined to take more than I need. I sold five copies of Border Reivers at last year's con, at twice the price. I'm hoping for around ten sales of It's Alive! this year. I'm hoping to take between twenty and thirty to ensure I've got plenty!
In other news I've been in touch with a couple of UK publishers, discussing future runs of both Border Reivers and It's Alive! When there's anything to report I'll let you know...
Now that the boxes have arrived I can make a copy of It's Alive! in just over thirty minutes. Up until now it's taken nearly ninety. I've been making about six copies a week on average so far, it would have been more, but we've had a lot of weekend plans with either friends or family visting us or us visiting them. This week I've made seven already, in only three days. It's going much better. The next order I have to fulfill is a special one. At the Expo the owner of a UK online games store played It's Alive! and really liked it. He liked it so much that he wanted to stock it in his shop. He'd never got involved with hand-made games before, only the professional ones, but this one he wanted. I was obviously ecstatic, and after I got back we ironed out the details via email. I'm trying to get his order of twelve copies together now, should be done by the weekend. It'll be really exciting to see one of Reiver Games' games for sale at an outlet that I've bought games from for probably six or more years. It'll feel like I've arrived!
This weekend we were down in Bristol visiting my parents, The Wife's parents and some friends from school. I showed Codename: Artist and Codename: Jorvik to my family, in particular my Dad, whose brain works totally differently to mine. He's not a gamer at all, but he has a very creative brain, his years as an art teacher mean he automatically thinks of the visual aspect of games, and he's always thinking up new ideas, far more off the wall (and hence innovative) than anything I could come up with. I wanted to show him Jorvik, because he and Mum had played it months ago, and it had changed significantly since they had played it. I was also considering asking him to do the artwork for it. The game's not ready yet, but I can start laying the foundations. When I got to their house I saw one of his latest paintings, half done in the living room. I really like some of the effects in it, and I thought they would be a really good fit for Jorvik, while being innovative enough to really stand out from the crowd with respect to artwork. He agreed to try out a few things for me.
I also wanted to show him Artist, as the whole game came from an idea of his. He had given me a single word, and asked me to design a game around it. I didn't recognise the word, but it was the surname of an artist. He suggested I design a game based upon the artist's body of work. So I did. It's still fairly early on, but I'm really excited about this one. I'd like to do Jorvik next as it's really simple to make, but I think this one might be more ready. It's going to be an abstract strategy game, which is something I've not tried before. I played a few turns with my dad on Saturday, and then a game with my brother, his girlfriend and my sister on Sunday. They all liked it, and Dad was very excited. The scoring was a bit problematic (12, 12, 12, 10!) but the mechanics seemed to work pretty well.
Now that I can get through It's Alive! copies much quicker I need to start thinking of the next step. I've two prototypes at home from a couple of designers (one fairly high profile :-) ) another two from a published designer on their way, and Artist and Jorvik. I'm thinking of doing a six-way face-off, getting a load of play-testers round to play them all and get an idea of which ones are most ready to go. That'll be a good night :-)
I'm not that impressed by TNT. The boxes were supposed to arrive last Friday, instead they turn up on Tuesday. The delivery guy gives me four boxes. Four! I was expecting one. But I check, and the labels on all of them are addressed to me. So I sign the delivery note ('It says two but there are four') and lug them up two flights of stairs. The two smallest boxes are the heaviest - heavier than I was expecting, bizarre. The first box I open (one of the smaller ones) is full of Cisco Routers. Five of them. So now my already tiny flat is rammed with someone else's IT hardware. I contact TNT to tell them of their mistake, and the woman on the phone says she will have to log a support call and get the support team to ring me within an hour. They don't. So I'm going to somehow arrange to get TNT to come and collect the routers and ship them to the right address. I'll probably have to stay in for them too.
In happier news, the boxes are pretty good. They're a little sturdier than the hand made ones, and although the registration on the tray artwork is slightly out, it took The Wife a good while to spot it knowing there was something wrong. I've got 143, which should keep me in games for quite a while and allow me to clear the backlog of orders fairly sharpish.
I've also started pricing up a professional run of It's Alive! to follow on from the hand-made one. At the moment it's proving to be very expensive, just the boxes and wooden bits (pre-bagged) come to 116% of my budget. I'm going to have to find some cheaper suppliers. I'm also going to try Carti Mundi as I know they made the Canal Mania second edition which is nice quality.
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?
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 WellI'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.
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