Merry Christmas!

A very short blog post today, just to say Merry Christmas to you all. I hope you've had a great 2017, but regardless I wish you an even better 2018.

In the meantime, I hope you have a great week, get loads of gaming in, and just a quick reminder that I'm giving £5 to charity for every sale of Zombology this month - it's not too late to get a copy of Zombology and also choose which of the five charities I've selected gets the £5.

FlickFleet Level Up

As I mentioned last week, FlickFleet has been pretty much static for a few months now. I've been playing it quite a lot and it's been getting great feedback, but I don't want to just throw it out the door as soon as people start enjoying it, I want to make it awesome.

To do that requires trying out new ideas and keeping those that improve things, while discarding those that don't. The problem up until now has been what ideas to try. Usually in the early stages of designing a game it's so hideously broken that it's obvious what needs improving. With FlickFleet, it's been perfectly playable almost since the beginning and there's been nothing obviously wrong with it. People have said 'It's great fun', 'I prefer it to X-Wing Miniatures' and 'I prefer it to Flick 'Em Up'. All of which is nice, but doesn't really help improve things.

Can you spot the new stuff?

I took it down to Paul's this weekend and I was keen to play it with Paul and see if he had any ideas. Paul's been instrumental in the original idea and several early improvements, so I was hoping to rely on him again for more inspiration.

There were a couple of things about the game as was that were a bit weaker than the rest:

• The turn order was a layer of complication, and led to things like Dreadnought-launched fighters often getting destroyed before they could act.
• The game turned into a bit of a grind when you were down to your last few ships as you battered away at each other without doing much damage.
• The destroyers were a bit boring as all they really did was move and shoot.
• Once a ship lost its Engineering location it potentially became a floating hulk quite quickly.

Paul and I played a game with the existing rules, talked about a couple of ideas I'd had (free turn order with activation tokens, giving the destroyers shields) and then spent a good half an hour talking about some other options, before trying a new version. The new version was a lot more fun, so my task now is to get the new rules written up and order the bits to make a few more prototypes - one for Paul, a new one for me and a couple for some people who are interested in playtesting for me.

I also need to get some more Zombology sales. December has been very slow, despite my charity donation offer. What I need to do really is put aside some time to go and play it with people, as that has definitely been my best route to sales (whether among friends or strangers).

Winding Down

Last week was a quiet one. After a busy and demanding week in Belgium the week before, I took some time to catch up on sleep (when I could - Daughter the Second is not sleeping well at the moment, so I spent a fair chunk of the week up in the night or early with her). So I made no progress on Zombology until the weekend - there's no chance at all that I'll hit my quarterly production target, but there's still a good chance of hitting my sales target.

The highlights of the week were FlickFleet related. I made it along to Newcastle Playtest (for only the second time since the birth of Daughter the Second back in May) and we played four games of FlickFleet. The feedback was good again ('better than Flick 'Em Up'!) and there was nothing glaringly wrong, but a couple of ideas surfaced and I started to try those out. At the end of Games Night I got another play in using one of those and I think it could be an improvement.

FlickFleet at Newcastle Playtest

Since Thursday night's play at the end of Games Night I've finally had some inspiration for several more changes - I'm looking forward to trying those out shortly. I've also been collecting some market research via Google+ and twitter polls!

This week is also pretty busy (we've a big meeting at work with a couple of nights out including our office Christmas party), but I'm hoping to get some gaming in at the weekend when we head down to York to visit Paul and his family. Paul was instrumental in the first idea of FlickFleet, so I'm hoping to show him the progress I've made too.

NaGa DeMon 2017 - Part 9: Complete

My goal during NaGa DeMon this year, as with a couple of the previous years that I've taken part in, was to make concrete progress on a game idea, while benefitting from the wisdom of the crowd to help me consider things from a different angle.

At the beginning of the month I had played FlickFleet a grand total of 7 times, but versions with wildly different levels of maturity and none with all the pieces I thought I needed to give a true reflection of the game in my head.

During the month of November I played it another 9 times, all with the components I wanted and all were very well received. I got some great ideas on production, feedback on the rules (which I wrote up of the first time) and I even started designing the box. As with previous years the competition I ran started off very well with lots of interest and then things tailed off a bit in the second half of the month - I struggle to retain people's interest! We did get one late entrant, Steve who gave me some great information about scroll saws and then further advice in a follow up email, but Todd carried it in the end.

The final scores were:

PIPs	Rank	Name
10	Officer Cadet	Not A Cyborg Zircher
6	Very Petty Officer	Games Book
5	Very Petty Officer	Steven Davis
4	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	Chris Preston
3	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	Mike Jones
2	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	7isprime
1	Red Shirt	Eric Francis

So Todd, I'll be reaching out shortly to get some contact details to arrange delivery of your prototype, which probably won't arrive until January I'm afraid.

And We're Back!

I've spent the last week (since Sunday afternoon) in Brussels for a work training course. I'm now finally on my way home. It's been a gruelling week, the course was excellent, but mentally and emotionally challenging and I've slept badly while I was away, so I'm shattered now. I had hoped to come back refreshed after a week without being woken in the night by a baby, but that was not to be.

There is another way I am back too: after a month of NaGa DeMon (more on that in Monday's blog post) I'm now back to focusing on Zombology.

In November I've put a lot of work into making progress on FlickFleet and I've learnt a lot and have made the first decent chunk of progress on it, but Zombology has suffered - I didn't quite meet my November production target and I put little effort into promoting it or making progress on the website and other things I need to do to drive people's awareness of it.

I now need to swing back the other way and make decent progress on Zombology (while not completely abandoning FlickFleet). The first thing I've done in that regard is to announce a promotion on BGG where I give £5 to charity for the first 33 (the number of games I have in stock currently, plus the number I hope to make in December) copies of Zombology I sell during December. That £5 is more or less the profit I make per game, but will come from our personal funds, not Eurydice Games. The Wife and I have chosen five charities we want to (and currently do) support to receive those donations, but the Zombology purchaser gets to pick which of the five they would like 'their' £5 to go to (from that list).

Hopefully it will achieve a triple goal of encouraging us to donate more to charity this month that we had planned, raise awareness of Eurydice Games, Zombology and the great work these charities do and also hopefully lead to a few extra sales.

I have a couple of other ideas to work on too, including hopefully playing it at games clubs more this month.

While in Belgium I managed to get to Outpost Gamecenter and play Zombology a couple of times (plus Between Two Cities and Vanuatu) with some lovely, welcoming Belgian gamers. The four who played it liked it enough to play twice, but not enough to buy it.

I'd mentioned to the people on my course that I was a board game designer too, and several people expressed an interest (the fools!), so I showed them the finished game. At which point several of them wanted to play it, so during a break on Thursday afternoon we played six games (with I think six different people many of whom played several or all six games). The game was well received and I sold three when we returned to the main room! A couple of the other attendees want me to send them some details via email too.

It was a great week, but I'll be delighted to get home and now need to take some time to consolidate everything I've learnt this week.

NaGa DeMon 2017: Part 8: Production Considerations

It's far too early to be thinking about production for FlickFleet, so I've spent a good chunk of this week thinking about production considerations for FlickFleet *shakes head*.

I'd like the game to retail (i.e. the price on my website) to be about £30 ideally. My first quote for the laser cutting was going to be £60 per game (regardless of print run size), then there would be the box, rules, ship cards and wooden pieces on top of that. I'd end up losing a ton of money unless I priced it around £100! Which is clearly a crazy price.

Since then I've been looking around for other options, and I found another company that would do it for £20 (so probably £40-£50 retail once the other stuff is included) and then last week I bumped into the MakerSpace people who reckoned (wild guess at this point) about £3 per game plus £10 per month, so assuming 16 games a month around £3.50 a game. That price doesn't include perspex (which is about £7.50), so the two of them are about £11. Then there's the box card and labels, rulebook, ship cards and wooden bits. My guess is it'll end up being in the £30-£40 range with this option.

FlickFleet ships

Obviously I need to price up the boxes, rulebooks, ship cards and wooden bits at volume. I also need to check the pricing on the laser cutting at MakerSpace, but it's not looking obscenely expensive like it was to begin with. It turns out the perspex is the really expensive part, so I've laid out 4 games worth of perspex pieces on a bigger piece of perspex and done it more efficiently - I've got from 500x400mm down to 470x395mm (which over a lot of games actually saves quite a lot!). I had to lose a destroyer from each player's allotment, but 3 destroyers, 2 carriers and a dreadnought (plus all their fighters and bombers) is plenty for a decent sized game and several different scenarios.

Before I can think seriously about production I need to do a bunch of things: playtest the crap out of it (in progress, I'm hoping to playtest it with Belgians this week during my trip to Brussels!), confirm ship points values, come up with some scenarios, write up the rules properly in InDesign with examples, images, etc. and design a box.

I've got some time in my evenings during my trip to Brussels (I arrived about 8pm last night, I should be back around 7pm tonight, Tuesday I'm at Outpost for demoing Zombology and playtesting FlickFleet, Wednesday I should be back by 6pm), so I can start work on some of those. Probably the things I'll focus on are the box design and the rulebook, keep your eyes peeled for another blog post on Wednesday evening letting you know how I've got on...

Finally, here's an update on the PIP situation, no movement again this week, the competition for the free, unique early prototype closes on Thursday, so if you'd like to get your hands on the free prototype time is running out!

PIPs	Rank	Name
10	Officer Cadet	Not A Cyborg Zircher
6	Very Petty Officer	Games Book
4	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	Chris Preston
3	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	Mike Jones
2	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	7isprime
1	Red Shirt	Eric Francis

NaGa DeMon 2017 - Part 7: Too 'Good'

And by too good I don't mean great, I mean good, just too much.

Traditionally when I design a game the first play is curtailed about a third of the way through. We agree never to talk about it again and I go away and work on the hideously broken mess that was the physical incarnation of a game that was great in my head. Later, once I've fixed the most glaring errors, we reconvene and as we play it's still broken, but not so broken. Maybe we change a couple of rules as we go, evolving things that don't work in practice. This can go on for months.

Eventually, we reach a point where the game is reasonably stable and it's only the occasional edge case where something unusual happens that requires a change to the rules. But by this point the game has been through several iterations, and lots of ideas have been tried out. Some have worked, others not so much. But there's a possibility space around the current rules where I've got a good understanding about what changing various things about the game does to the feel of the game. And I've lots of ideas about what I can change to improve it.

FlickFleet is an anomaly in that regard. I first played it (once!) in July with MDF toy food. It was fun and definitely worth pursuing.

Hmm, spaceships you say?

After a few months I finally got some bits laser cut and played it again four times at Newcastle Playtest in October. It was definitely still fun. We made a couple of changes after the first game and then left it alone. I'd not yet ordered the wooden pieces or made the ship cards, so the bookkeeping was all done with pencil and paper, which was sub-optimal, but hey, early prototype, so who cares.

Just in time for NaGa DeMon in November I did the ship cards and the wooden pieces arrived. I've also played it a lot in November. And it works, which is surprising. It's been getting great feedback ("I prefer it to X-Wing", "It's as good as Flick 'Em Up") and it's good fun.

But it's not yet great. And with nothing obviously broken I'm struggling to see what I should be changing to see if I can get it from good to great.

Any ideas?

NaGa DeMon 2017 Part 6: Making a Scene

Last week I played a couple of games of FlickFleet (bring the Dreadnought into play for the first time in the office lunch break sessions), which let me tweak the Destroyer's point value slightly - I think I under cooked it - it's more like 12 than 9 points (though it is especially vulnerable to fighters and bombers).

I've also been thinking about how I could get it made and whether it's possible to get the laser cutting done professionally at an affordable price. I've found a company who will do it for £20 a copy including perspex and VAT, which is much better than my first quote, but still very expensive. Then quite by fluke I bumped into the guys from the Newcastle Maker Space at a craft fair on the weekend. I spent some time talking to one of them about the project and he reckons it would be about £3 a copy (plus £10 a month membership). So if I could make 4 a week that would be less than £3.50 a game (plus perspex). This is looking much more affordable (if far more draining on my time as I would have to be there to run the machine).

Now that the points values are starting to take shape I can start considering some scenarios for the game. I know that two destroyers are more or less equal to a fully-laden carrier and three are equivalent to a fully-laden dreadnought, so there are a couple of fair-ish fights that I need to come up with a story for. But in scenarios there are other things you can do than just a points-based fair fight (which is the point of free play). I can play with things like reinforcements arriving halfway through a game or goals other than destroy your opponents (cross the board and exit before being destroyed, protect a departing civilian ship, stay alive until reinforcements arrive, etc.). I think having a turn counter would help with a few of these. What scenario ideas do you have?

Tonight I'm having the first playtesting night at my house since I started Eurydice Games (I've been meaning to do this for months but work travel has kept getting in the way). Hopefully we can try out a few of these ideas and then I can write some of them up into the rules that I published a while ago.

The dreadnought launches its fighters

Finally, here's an update on the PIP situation, no movement at all this week, there's only two weeks left now, so if you'd like to get your hands on the free prototype time is running out!

PIPs	Rank	Name
10	Officer Cadet	Not A Cyborg Zircher
6	Very Petty Officer	Games Book
4	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	Chris Preston
3	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	Mike Jones
2	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	7isprime
1	Red Shirt	Eric Francis

NaGa DeMon 2017 Part 5: All Shapes and Sizes

I got a couple more games of FlickFleet in at lunchtime today and I've another planned for Friday lunchtime too. I'm using these games to continue to work on the point values for the ships (I think Destroyers need to go up a bit) and also to see if there's anything I can do to simplify things without losing the essence of the game.

Still no changes to the rules or ships at this point.

In other news, I've started to think at a very early stage about the manufacturing of the game. The biggest stumbling block is going to be the cost of laser-cutting the pieces, seeing as the cost is largely proportional to the laser burning time, so more copies is more expensive - there's little in the way of economies of scale.

I've done a very simple first stab at the ship shapes - just something to get me started. Since making my copy in September I've changed the way the ships move (you now flick them too) so my original plan for the bomber wings (three stacked chevrons) no longer works - when you flick them they separate. To combat this, the next version will jigsaw together so moving them doesn't cause them to separate.

The ship shapes are an interesting conundrum. I want them to be big enough to not get knocked around too much by the dice and yet small enough that they don't use up too much perspex. I want them to look visually like spaceships, but to minimise the length of their outlines to reduce total burn time. On top of that there's some constraints of the manufacturing process, if they are made out of 5mm thick perspex, they shouldn't have bits less than 5mm thick to minimise warping from the laser heat.

This is what I've got so far:

FlickFleet ships to scale

What do you think?

NaGa DeMon 2017 Part 4: Points Mean Prizes

The most surprising thing about NaGa DeMon 2017 is that I've not made any changes to FlickFleet yet. It's been through four playtests last week and I've not come out of them with any changes to make to the gameplay. That won't continue, it's almost certainly too complex and will need some simplifying, but there's nothing glaringly broken about it, which is great at this very early stage in the game's development.

With no glaring errors to worry about I've been able to think about the two things that are currently missing: points values for the ships (needed for free play and scenario creation) and some scenarios. I spent a good hour or so in my Parisian hotel room on Thursday night facing some very small fleets off against each other in an effort to determine which was stronger (and hence should be worth more points). The results were as follows:

Carrier > fighter
2x fighter > carrier
Bomber > carrier
Destroyer > fighter
Destroyer > bomber
Destroyer > carrier
2x fighter > destroyer

The most interesting thing I found was the bombers. Due to firing a D6, they always damage capital ships on a hit and do double damage. So against capital ships they are way better than fighters. The downside of them is that against fighters (which fire first) they are actually pretty weak - the fighters can destroy them before they get a chance to attack, or at least severely hamper them.

Another FlickFleet playtest

I like that - they are powerful, but weak and you will need to play tactically to try to avoid exposing them to a barrage of fighters. With those results in, I've a first cut at the points values - I'm sure these will change quite a lot as the game gets more plays...

Ship	Points
Fighter	5
Empty Carrier	6
Bomber	8
Destroyer	9
Empty Dreadnought	20
Fully laden Carrier	24
Fully laden Dreadnought	30

Finally, here's an update on the PIP situation, we've got a couple more people involved during the week, but Officer Cadet Not A Cyborg Zircher and Very Petty Officer Book are still ahead!

PIPs	Rank	Name
10	Officer Cadet	Not A Cyborg Zircher
6	Very Petty Officer	Games Book
4	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	Chris Preston
3	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	Mike Jones
2	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	7isprime
1	Red Shirt	Eric Francis

NaGa DeMon 2017 - Part 3: The Proof is in the Pudding

FlickFleet has been a long time coming. My friend Paul and I had the idea on a walk last summer, but I didn't do anything with it at the time. It wasn't until this summer that I had the idea of using the dice as projectiles and the die results and a damage selector, at which point I got really excited about it again. I tried it out this summer with my brother-in-law and then Paul again using MDF toy food and it kinda worked, so I was inspired to do a design for the ship pieces and get them cut out (which I did with the help of my friend Dan) in September.

The first attempt using MDF food!

Once I had the laser cut pieces I was able to take a half-made prototype to Newcastle Playtest at the beginning of October (it was just the ships, I used frantic scribbling on pen and paper to record the status of the ships). We played this four times that evening (two against me, two with me watching) and most of the people who played wanted to play again. It was described as 'fun' which, considering it was it's first real outing and it was half-finished, was very exciting.

Laser cut bits at NewcastlePlaytest

I got the wooden pieces I needed ordered from SpielMaterial a couple of weeks ago and then the ship cards design done and printed last week. Now all I needed to do was play the latest version and start iterating versions to iron out the inevitable kinks.

With these successes under my belt I was keen to make more progress, but I've been focussing on hand-crafting the Zombology print-run so that I've got some stock for sale, so I've not really made any FlickFleet progress. I've decided to do NaGa DeMon again just to give me the kick up the behind I need to crack on with this. I'm hoping that it will force me to make some progress, but also in an ideal world rope in some crowd-sourced wisdom to make the game improve even faster.

And so far, so good. I've had some great feedback on the rules and I've managed to play the game a couple of times at work in my lunch breaks where it earnt the 'I prefer this to X-Wing' plaudit from Chris!

I'm focussing at the moment on fixing any glaring problems (I haven't found any yet which is both bizarre and exciting!) and trying to sort out the point values of the various ships (which I need for free play and to design balanced asymmetric scenarios). I've even taken the prototype with me to Paris (for a 24 hour work trip!) so that I can spend my evening in a hotel facing various combinations of ships off against each other to get a feel for what the point value of each type should be.

In action at lunchtime

I really hope that someone who gets involved with my NaGa DeMon challenge does have access to a laser cutter and I can start getting feedback from a wider variety of people. I think this game has huge potential, now I just need to test the crap out of it and more playtesters means faster feedback!

NaGa DeMon 2017 Part 2 - Let's Make It!

As I mentioned last time, to make FlickFleet (in it's current incarnation) you need a bunch of laser cut ships, some wooden discs and cubes, the rules and some ship cards.

The ship cards are two sheets of A3 that need cutting into seven parts (the cut marks should be self-explanatory. One page is the ship cards for the Imperium, the other for the Insurrection, other than colour differences they are the same. You can download them here. You also need a D10 and a D6 (with fairly rounded corners).

A couple of ships and their fully-loaded cards

The laser cut file is for a piece of material that is 25x20cm. I use 5mm thick perspex but, as long as it's not too thin, MDF or wood would probably work fine. You need to cut a couple of sheets so you've got pieces for both sides, but to be honest you could just cut it once and play asymmetric scenarios using one set of ships (which obviously means you need half as many cubes and discs and only one sheet of A3 ship cards). I've done it as an SVG file, but if you need it in a different format I can probably convert it - just let me know the specs.

So you are the perfect person, you have a laser cutter, some perspex lying around, an A3 printer and bot loads of wooden discs and cubes. You've got nothing better to do than make a prototype for me (those PIPs are like crack aren't they?), so what is it I want you to test?

Number one: Is it fun? Does it have potential? Did you enjoy playing? What changes would you recommend?

My intent is that the game can be played in free play where players can build a fleet of their choosing up to a given points total or scenarios, where the players have potentially differing fleets, differing points and differing goals.

I currently have no points values for the ships and no scenarios. So any ideas on those fronts would be much appreciated.

For information, here's the current ship roster:

PIPS	Rank	Name
8	Very Petty Officer	Not A Cyborg Zircher
6	Very Petty Officer	Games Book
2	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class	7isprime
1	Red Shirt	Eric Francis

NaGa DeMon 2017: Part 1 - Introducing FlickFleet

I've decided on the walk to the station this morning to take part in NaGa DeMon (National Game Design Month) again this November. Like the good old days I'll be running a competition so you can all collect Pointless Internet Points (PIPs) for all the help you provide me during the month. The person who helps the most will get a copy of the game as it stands at the end of November shipped anywhere in the world for free! In addition, the top three (at least) will get their names mentioned in the rulebook in the examples and everyone who gets involved will get a shoutout in the credits.

This time round I'm working on a dexterity game (I've alluded to it a few times on twitter as the 'Super Secret Dexterity Game' - clearly it's less secret now!). It's essentially the illegitimate lovechild of Star Wars Armada and Pitch Car - a game in which you flick a fleet of capital ships around a table and then flick dice at each other to fire weapons.

You can read the latest rules (and comment to your heart's content) here.

So as before, there are PIPs available. You get your first free PIP for commenting below and offering to help design FlickFleet (working title). There's a second PIP available for subscribing to my quarterly email newsletter. After that you'll have to provide some meaningful help to the project to get more points: signal boosting on twitter, Google+ or somewhere else, reading and commenting on the rules, proof-reading and corrections, printing and playing the game (requires access to a laser cutter I'm afraid!) or anything else I find helpful. To further encourage you, you'll get ranked according to your level of support:

PIPs	Rank
0-1	Red shirt
2-5	Ensign (Expendable) 3rd Class
6-10	Very Petty Officer
11-15	Officer Cadet
16-20	Lieutenant
21-30	XO
31-50	Captain
51+	Grand High Uber Vizier Destruction

All points are awarded at my discretion and I'm capricious, so have a go and see what happens!

Zombology In Stock!

I got the Zombology artwork from the printers back in August, the day before I left on a week long family holiday. In the intervening two months I've been on holiday twice and away for work a few times, the baby's had a filthy cold that wrecked our sleep for a couple of weeks and I've still managed to make over 36 games. That's 27 hours of games crafting!

These are now available for sale!

This week I cleared the last of the pre-orders so I finally have games in stock (and a personal demo copy!). This means a few things - I've finally made the game available for sale (rather than pre-order) on my website and added it to the BGG Marketplace and I can also start trying to push it a bit harder - I didn't want to put too much effort into marketing when I didn't have the copies available for sale as that would just delay getting to the point where I had games for sale.

I need to get better at driving interest online for Zombology - especially trying to find the people it would appeal to and getting it in front of them. The other thing I need to do more of is getting out there and playing Zombology with people. It's been one of my most successful routes to getting pre-orders and it should be easier to get people to part with a tenner for a game in hand rather than sign up for (and then later confirm) a pre-order that could be months away. I fulfilled all the pre-orders before making my copy, but now I've got that (and some stock) I can start trying to go to conventions and games clubs and playing it with random people.

With a newish baby, a full-time job and a young daughter the opportunities to travel to play the game will be fairly limited - I'll have to see if I can tie something in with my work trips...

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.

Quarterly Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Board of Advisers

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

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

Bristol Ruinart Boardroom Meeting by Hotel du Vin Bistro on Flickr

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

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

Working in the Cloud

Back when I started Reiver Games in 2006 there wasn't a lot of cloud functionality (I had GMail, that was about it). I didn't own a smartphone or a tablet. My bookkeeping was done on paper (in a physical ledger book), all the spreadsheets I had of game manufacturing details, orders, sales tracking, etc. were OpenOffice (it's free!) spreadsheets on my laptop.

As someone who traveled a lot for work it made running the business quite awkward. I would only be able to update things properly at home. Doing my books turned into a weekly, then monthly and then yearly nightmare. I could only respond to emails when sat at a computer with a physical internet connection. It made things harder and less productive.

This time round I'm approaching things differently. I've a smartphone with a decent data plan that I can use in the UK, Europe and the US. So I can check and respond to emails at home, on the move, at lunch or even while travelling abroad.

Clouds by theaucitron on Flickr

I've made a concious decision to host as much of my Eurydice Games stuff as possible in the cloud. My books are online, so I can update them as soon as I receive an order or incur an expense, keeping them up to date like this removes the horror of the 'my taxes are due. Quick! Let's catch up the months of bookkeeping I've been putting off!'. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my task list is in Trello which I can access from my laptop, from my iPad and my phone. If I think of a cool idea I can just write it down.

I use Evernote to record information about the game ideas I have in flight - so I've got notes, rules, ideas all written down and accessible from all my devices.

I even use the CC (Creative Cloud) version of InDesign and Illustrator for the graphic design of my games, so I can work on them while travelling too.

Having all this data and information available while out of the house, on a trip to the US for work, on the train to Manchester or at lunchtime means I can be more productive and have to keep less stuff in my head. It's a great way to work and I really appreciate the improvement over the first time round.

I Need Data!

This time round I want to do a better job than I did with Reiver Games. Reiver Games was actually pretty successful during the first couple of years when I was hand-crafting Border Reivers and first edition of Its Alive! It wasn't until I tried to make the jump to professional publisher that it all went wrong.

There are a large number of reasons why it went wrong, but one of the most egregious was my inefficient use of my time in the professional phase of Reiver Games. To compound matters, I kept very little data on the things I was doing and how well they worked, so it was difficult to determine what was the best thing to be doing anyway.

This time round I'm trying to keep better information so that I can use that to inform decisions, especially around how best to use my limited time. I'm keeping track of what sources lead to Zombology orders, web traffic to my blog and website and twitter analytics. I'm even trying to get very accurate information about how long it takes to make each part of the games too (a set of cards take 21 minutes to cut out and then another 4 minutes to round the corners and pack them in the box!).

I'm not making much use of this data yet, but once I've collected a decent amount of it I can start using it to drive some of my decision making - hopefully leading to higher productivity or better marketing efforts.

In other news, I've started shipping Zombology to my pre-orders. Only three so far, but I've now got a stock of games so I can start working through the list. I'm hoping to make at least twenty copies this month, so hopefully a decent chunk of my pre-ordering customers will get their games soon!