Notable Progress

The week was largely mobile development progress. I've been focussing on my German language app for yet another week, adding more content, but also adding local notifications, so you get a toast notification when you get something to practice and the shell tile updates with the number of words you need to practice every half hour. It's amazing how much more professional that makes it feel (the first German language app I got on my phone didn't do that - you had to keep opening the app to check). It also makes it much more usable, for that very reason - now I only start the app when practice tests are ready or to learn something new.

I set myself a goal to release the app this year, and that is now beginning to look achievable.

The weekend (and it was an epic six day weekend :-) ), was all about the games. My sister in law and her husband came to visit and we played nineteen games! Double Firefly! Two plays of Taluva, Kigi and one of Koi Pond, Ca$h N Gun$ and Colt Express from my ten plays list and also my first play of the year of Koi Pond, Vikings and Kigi, The only slight downer was the couple of spectacular sickness events The Daughter managed on Friday and Saturday :-(

In other news I started a lunchtime games club. Mal, Gav and I played Taluva (fast becoming one of my favorite games - also one of Gav's). We're going to play it again next week. In yet further news, at Games Night we only managed one game: Battlestar Galactica, which I'd not played for a couple of years. It was a weird game - we were all humans until distance six, and then the two cylons (including myself) revealed quickly to try to scupper things before they reached Kobol. We had almost no cylon fleet action until the last couple of jumps and the humans managed a fairly easy win (though we did get them down to 2 fuel and 1 population). I'd like to play again for a more normal, paranoid experience!

Decent Progress All Round

This week hasn't been as epic as last week, but I've nevertheless managed to make solid progress on a couple of things. It was a busy week at work (though all in the office - no travel!) with visitors from America and Manchester up along with my boss for several days and a work night out (rare enough for me) on Tuesday.

Once that was out of the way we had another good Games Night on Wednesday (more Taluva and Colt Express :-) ) and then I fit in some more development in the evenings towards the end of the week. One of the things I miss about being a developer in my day job is the feeling of accomplishment you get when you write some code, compile it and it works. You've clearly achieved something. These days my day job involves meetings and sending and responding to emails - it's harder to spot when you've done good work.

The last couple of weeks I've made really good progress on my learning German app, and I can tell that, because I can use it to strength my German - the proof is in the pudding. I'm now in a position (after a whole week of faffing on refactoring things) that I can quite quickly add a lot more vocabulary, which is what it needs to be useful. To me and others.

There's a bunch more stuff it needs to be shippable, but it's not a million miles off, so that's a goal for the year in my sights. I want to use it to strengthen my skills in a way that Duolingo doesn't allow me to, and the other apps I've tried don't do either. I've started learning Portuguese with Duolingo too, and already I'm wanting to get a Portuguese version of my app together too. So I must be doing something right (if only for myself!).

The other thing that has gone well this week was more Dragon Dance playtesting. I got a chance to try the new version out with Amaury, who really wasn't very keen on the previous version. He reckoned the new version was 'way, way better for the dragon player' and we even saw a win for the knight - the first in ages.

I need to tweak a couple of minor things and then I'll be looking for more playtesters and a wider range of feedback. Shout if you're interested.

An Epic Week

I've spent a whole week in Newcastle! That doesn't sound that impressive, seeing as it's where I live and work, but in the preceding two weeks I spent five and a half days in America and two days in Manchester.

With a whole week of evenings at home I've been amazingly productive, with Dragon Dance, with Zombology and also with my German language Windows Phone app. Broad-based productivity!

Last weekend I picked up my German language app again for the first time in at least eight months. It was the first time I'd written any code in eight months! My new role at work doesn't involve any coding and I'd been so focussed on Zombology (and latterly Dragon Dance) that I'd not done any at home either.

After last weekend's long night of coding on Saturday while The Wife was out, I've been working all week re-structuring the code extensively to make it easier to add extra vocabulary to the app. I want it to do two things which I struggle with in Duolingo (the app I've been using to extend my German skills): limited vocabulary, and a lack of tabulated data. I find it easiest to learn verb conjugations or adjective declensions from a table where I can see at a glance how things are structured, but in Duolingo you come across things fairly haphazardly and never get to see the table (don't get me wrong, I think Duolingo is great - I use it daily for strengthening my German and more recently learning Portuguese ahead of a holiday).

It's coming along nicely, and it feels great to be coding again - it's been a hobby of mine since I was ten and my day job for the vast majority of the last eighteen years.

If that wasn't enough, I also had my first Games Night in three weeks (the aforementioned travel nixing the previous two) which was also epic. There were only three of us, but we managed six games: three of Hive with Mike before Gav arrived (ticking Hive off my not yet played this year list); two of Taluva (christening my new copy, ticking two plays off my not yet played ten times list and Taluva off my not yet played this year list) and then one of Colt Express (christening my new copy and ticking one play off my not yet played ten times list). I'd not played Taluva in about four years, but it was just as awesome as I remember it being, and Mike and Gav seemed to really enjoy it too (we almost played three games back to back).

After Games Night, I printed out a copy of the new version of Dragon Dance I came up with last week and then Gav and I tried it out on Friday lunchtime. Gav seemed to enjoy it and I think it's an improvement on the previous version - I need to run it by Amaury now to see if it addresses his problems with the previous version.

Finally, to round out the week in style, I got the Print on Demand proof of Zombology from Drive Thru Cards and got to proof it on Friday night (I'm a wild man of Rock - that's how we wild men of Rock spend our Friday nights). There was one glaring error (I'd somehow managed to delete one of the card backs) and a couple of minor ones (the front and back cards that are intended to form the equivalent of a box lid and box tray design were facing the wrong way). So I've fixed those and uploaded the corrected art. After talking to Brian I'd already uploaded new art with the 100% Key black replaced with Rich Black, but the proof had been done with 100% Key and it looked fine and there were a couple of registration issues on some cards, which would make rich black look really dodgy, so I unwound that change too.

If only every week was that productive!

Asymmetry In Dragon Dance

The game I'm currently focusing on, Dragon Dance, is a two-player game themed around the epic struggle between St. George and the Dragon. I want it to be a game of simultaneous action and bluff that recreates the feeling I had when sparring during my Tae Kwon Do days - watching your opponent careful for the minute tells that telegraph his next move so you can counter-attack, block or move out of the way appropriately.

Clearly a game which features a human knight and a dragon also needs to mirror the asymmetry of that match up - the knight needs to feel in mortal danger throughout as he takes on a vastly more powerful foe. At the same time the dragon needs to feel frustrated as the nimble knight dances around his vast unwieldy bulk delivering small wounds which slow add up over time to a threat.

So the game needs to be, and feel, different to each player. Initially the asymmetry was fairly superficial. The knight had far fewer hit points than the dragon, and the dragon was limited in his actions by a smaller pool of dice that were required to perform an action, requiring the dragon to pause more frequently to recuperate and regain his dice.

Some of the first feedback I got back during NaGa DeMon 2014 was that the game felt too samey, so I tried to change the actions available to each player to make the dragon feel more powerful but clumsier - which I chose to do by making his actions work well with good dice and do nothing with poor dice. Sadly this just broke the bluffing aspect for the dragon player, as his choice of dice (the possible bluff) was now: He's doing x or wasting a turn - so clearly, he was doing x.

When I came back to Dragon Dance at the beginning of this year, turning it on its head improved some things (the theme feels tighter now, as does the reading the tells bit) but broke others - the dragon's options were too few and too samey. It felt much less interesting as the dragon.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been trying to think of a way to make the dragon's options:

• More thematic
• More powerful
• More lumbering and unwieldly

While somehow making it not so powerful that it always wins effortlessly in the first couple of turns!

I had hoped to do something in the early mornings while away in America, but by that point inspiration had yet to strike so I had to settle for just finishing the Print on Demand version of Zombology and reading books.

Inspiration finally struck at the beginning of last week, which meant I was well placed to work on it while I was away in Manchester at the end of last week (I missed Newcastle Playtest last week because after five and a half days away in America I had another couple of days away the week after - I chose to spend some time with my family in between instead).

I want the dragon to feel clumsy and slow, very powerful, very dangerous, but clumsy and slow. Fewer action cubes (the dice equivalents in the new version) is part of that, but the new cards with three possible actions on them (an attack, a defence and an action) mean that the dragon feels very similar to the knight, and since the dragon's cards were all very similar, the choice of card wasn't very interesting either.

So I've decided to further rein in the dragon by reducing his options. Now each of his cards contain two out of the three options: attack, defend and action. As a result, I hope the choice of card will be more interesting (Attack/Defend? Attack/Action? or Defend/Action?) but the dragon will feel more restrained and hence clumsier, which will also give the knight a little more information, hopefully making the game less heavily weighted towards the dragon (I want the dragon to win a bit more than the knight, but not 100% of the time like it is at the moment!).

In other news, during a meeting with my boss's boss on Friday he ordered a copy of Zombology! There's only one of the limited edition left now, almost done!

Out of the Closet

I started working for my current employer back in 2001, when it was a smallish independent company. I was working for them when I started designing Border Reivers and several of my friends and colleagues were among the Border Reivers playtesters. In 2005 I left the company and it was during my years in the wilderness that I finished Border Reivers, set up Reiver Games, self-published Border Reivers, went into full-time publishing and eventually gave it all up for a salary.

After a couple of years out of software development I came back for a summer as a contractor while winding down Reiver Games and eventually I rejoined as a full-time member of staff in 2011. Since then I've been running a weekly Games Night (known as Wizard Night in the office - one of my colleagues thinks we all dress up and play D&D), largely populated with friends who are current or former colleagues from my current employer.

In August 2012, my employer was bought by a large American corporation, and I've spent the last week in Milford, MA visiting the corporate head office for a meeting.

As part of that meeting we had a networking exercise where the 65 attendees had to provide a unique fact about themselves and then you were tasked with finding out which unique fact belonged to each of your 64 colleagues. I chose 'I have designed three published board games' as mine, since most of my corporate colleagues didn't know about my inner geek - it doesn't come up in conversation much.

Ok, so that's a slight stretch, the three games were all self-published, and Border Reivers and Zombology had a very small print run. But it's technically true.

As a result of discussions around my games publishing past (and current!), I found three gamers out of the group (including my boss's boss!), got invited to go and play Netrunner in Boston one evening (which unfortunately I had to miss due to a prior dinner engagement), played Netrunner in the hotel bar with a colleague and sold and delivered my first copy of Zombology to the US to another colleague.

My secret is out!

Off the back of this I've been invited to Tabletop Manchester if I'm ever staying the night there on a Monday night by my Netrunning colleague and have been approached by another colleague about an educational board game design project he's been considering for a number of years!

Finally, in the taxi back to the airport from the office I got chatting to my driver and it turned out he was a keen gamer and game artist (with 33 games listed on BGG) who had been to Essen a couple of times and GenCon too.

I also got to spend the hours of 3:30-6:30am most mornings working on the Print on Demand version of Zombology and getting the art uploaded and a proof ordered. For a business trip it was surprisingly game heavy!

On My Way to the US of A

When this post goes live on Monday morning I'll be en route to Milford, MA for work. Last week was pretty hectic with preparation for my trip, so I didn't make a huge amount of progress on anything, but I did manage to get Adobe Creative Cloud installed on my work laptop, so I can work on the Print on Demand version of Zombology during the very early mornings in the States when I'm likely to be awake with nothing to do. I might also get a chance to tweak Dragon Dance too, once I've had a chance to think how I'd like the tweaked version to look.

The best thing about the Creative Cloud install was that no sooner than the apps were installed all my files appeared on my machine too. The files I'd created on my laptop were backed up to the cloud and automatically copied down with the new install - mint!

The print on demand version is mostly done - I've done the game cards and laid them out in a print document - now I've just got to do front and back 'packaging' cards (the deck of cards comes in a clear deck box, so the first and last card are effectively the box lid and box back). I'll put box art-y things on those, but then I've got the reverse of those cards free for extra information.

I'm also going to do a re-layout of the rules so that they fold nicely to fit within the deck box.

Once that's done, the last stage is to order a copy to ensure I've got everything right and then it can go live.

Dragon Dance Art and Playtesting

I've mostly been focussed on Dragon Dance again this week. After a busy January finishing off the physical copies of Zombology it felt good to crack on with Dragon again.

I made a second version which replaced last week's hand-scribbled version on the train on Tuesday on my way down to Sheffield for my now six-monthly hospital visit. It was pretty much the same as the hand-scribbled version, with a couple of tweaks based on the games I had at Newcastle Playtest and then again with Gav in the office.

On Thursday I got to try out the new version with Amaury, who had played the 2014 version a couple of weeks ago. Unlike Gav (who preferred the new version), Amaury preferred the old one, he found the new one less strategic. In a good discussion after our three games we came up with some ideas, in particular to give the dragon more exciting options (the dragon cards are the moment are all pretty similar).

Interestingly, giving the dragon more exciting options was some of the feedback I received back in November 2014 when I was making the first few versions during NaGa DeMon. Clearly, I need to pay more attention to the feedback I'm getting.

Later in the week I had an evening to myself while The Wife was out and I started getting to grips with some artwork for the new version. With separate cards now for long and short range I can make the card backs a bit more informative, so I want the cards to represent what your opponent sees when you initially play them face down. So the short range cards are a knight's helm (see below) with the eyes peering out, and the dragon's eye up close, while the long range cards are a full view of the knight and the dragon.

Obviously this is a very early work in progress version, but I'd like any feedback you have.

In other news, I'll be in Milford, Massachussetts all of next week for work. I've set myself a goal of getting the Print on Demand version of Zombology finished in February. Thanks to being up around 6am (or slightly before) most days in the UK, I'm likely to wake very early while I'm in the US, so I reckon I can finish off the graphic design on the computer in my hotel room between the hours of 3/4 and 7am every day, so hopefully that might be a second goal successfully ticked off this year! I've not got any travel this week, so I can try to either do another version of Dragon or get a headstart on the Print on Demand Zombology one night this week.

First Dance of New Look Dragon

This week I made it along to Newcastle Playtest for the second month on the trot (pretty good effort - since my new job started there's been a lot more travel and hence fewer nights out). Of course, it wasn't straightforward, as I was in Manchester for work that day, so rather than heading over from work at 6:30, I turned up at 7:45 from the station. Several of our regulars were even more inconvenienced by travel, so it was going to be a fairly quiet night until a couple of new people (Hello Michelle! Hello Bart!) turned up - in the end there were five of us with Paul and Alex. Alex had brought his two player game: Swag, Blag and Goons, Paul had brought his two player game: Kick, Punch, Stomp! and I'd brought two two-player games: a new version of Dragon Dance and Border Reivers Second Edition. We ended up splitting up and playing a couple of side-by-side two player games, but not before playing three games of the copy of Zombology I'd delivered to Paul at the start of the night. Both the new people seemed to like it, which was encouraging.

I'd spent a couple of hours on the train that afternoon designing and constructing a new version of Dragon Dance, using the idea I'd had a few weeks ago. For once I'd followed my own advice and not over done the prototype, as this was effectively a new game, so likely to be hideously broken:

We played a couple of games that night, one with Paul and one with Bart and they flushed out some problems, and also some weaknesses, Bart had not played the previously version, and it had been a couple of years since Paul had last played so neither of them could compare it to the previous version (which I'd foolishly left in my desk and then failed to collect in time for the session due to delayed trains).

Initial feedback was that it was interesting and worth pursuing if clearly in early development.

On Friday lunchtime I also got to try it out with Gav, immediately after a game of the previous version so he had a useful comparison. Gav preferred it to the previous version, which means I'm probably heading in the right direction (at least for Gav!).

The new version is still a Good Little Game, i.e 18 cards and things you can expect to find around the house, but each card now does one to six things depending on the tokens available to you. The bluffing still works (Gav caught me a few times on the hop) and he really liked that each card is now named with a tell that you're reading and trying to interpret.

I need to make another version now (this one has some inevitable flaws) and then start gathering more data. I want it to be slightly easier for the dragon, but at the moment it's very easy for the dragon - I'll need to tweak things to try to balance that out too.

The Art of the Matter

Back when I ran Reiver Games I made four games. The first Border Reivers was a hand-made limited edition, and I did almost everything myself, including the art (except the box cover, that was an original painting by my dad, a retired art teacher and artist). It was ... basic. Very basic. But back in the days when a self-published game was a fairly novel item, it was enough to get me by, and didn't put off the 100 customers to whom I sold a copy of Border Reivers too much.

For my second game, I got a friend who was a computer games artist to do some really cool Frankenstein-themed art, and because he was a friend, I got it dirt cheap. It still added a £1 per copy to the total cost though, a not insignificant amount. While I loved the art on the It's Alive! components, I was less enamoured of the box art, and it received some criticism from punters, so when it came to making a second print run, this time aimed at shops at distributors, I asked him to do another box. Sadly, I don't think that box was any better.

My third game was Carpe Astra, and again I got the friend to do the art, again at mate's rates (though with a print run of 2,000 I could afford to pay a bit more this time, despite the fact I was aiming to sell to distributors and hence was pitching at 40% of retail for a manufacturing and art cost. Again I was a bit mixed on the art, I loved bits of it, but I think the box art could have been better, especially with the target market in mind.

For my final Reiver game I splashed out and hired bona-fide board game artist Harald Lieske to do the art. Harald's done the art for several games I own (Vikings, the Spiecherstadt, Puerto Rico) and several other famous ones (Dominion, The Settlers of Catan), so clearly a big name with loads of board game experience. He knows what looks good on a box and how to do all the art ready for printing. I was doing a relatively small print run (3,000 copies), so my budget was limited (but many times what I'd paid for the previous games!). We eventually reached an agreement where he'd meet my budget in return for simpler art than he was originally planning. I was delighted with how Sumeria turned out, it's still my favourite art associated with one of my games by quite some distance.

What brings this to mind is two things: Zombology and Kickstarter. With Zombology (which I've finally finished - one of my goals for the year ticked off already!), I went back to my roots and made a short hand-made print-run doing everything myself including the art and cutting out boxes and all the cards by hand. Actually, that's not strictly true, I took some of the icons from Game-icons.net, either as was, or slightly tweaked.

But the point still stands, the art is mostly mine and pretty basic, this is not a beautiful game. While I hope it's not so distracting as to put off the 28 customers I need to cover my costs, it's not winning any art awards.

In these days of Kickstarter, games need to be beautiful to attract punters, and despite the vast wealth of games on Kickstarter, generally the art is of a very high quality - it's almost expected. My friend Tim's game Toast is a great example of that. To set up a games company these days you need to either be a great artist (Daniel Solis, I'm looking at you), have a wealthy good friend who's an artist (do they exist?) or to fold a large art cost into the manufacturing cost of the game. I can't help but think that life would have been easier as Reiver Games or Zombology would have sold faster if I was a great artist or if I'd set up a partnership with a wealthy, games-loving artistic genius.

As I continue with my own game designing (and conceivably self-publishing), I want to work on and improve my artistic skills. Practice might not make perfect, but it's definitely going to improve my skills, which can't hurt in making my games easier to sell.

In other news, January was a staggeringly good month, 59 games played, Zombology construction finished and a weekend in Coventry with Tim and a weekend in York with Paul. I wish February would be as great, but a work trip to Boston, MA is going to get in the way of things, so I'm not expecting much. At least I'm hoping to finish off the print on demand version of Zombology as I planned in my 2016 goals.

The Economics of a Very Small Print Run

Back in May I talked about the economics of a small print run of a game. At that point I was intending to start a second hobby publishing company (a la Reiver Games, my first, unsuccessful attempt) and make small print runs of hand-made games.

A promotion at work, coupled with the realisation that I really didn't have time for the sort of promotion required to sell 150 games in a year around my family commitments meant that pipe dream died, but I then resurrected a lighter version of it for NaGa Demon last year: instead of a 150 copy run - just twenty for the twenty friends and family who had pre-ordered a copy when I announced the 150 copy run.

I was going to make the run at cost, so I wasn't trying to make any money any more, just reward those supporters who'd backed me instinctively and do something fun for NaGa DeMon. I'd originally priced the 150 copy run at £9, cheap enough to encourage sales but expensive enough to make a decent return on investment, so I could invest further in future games. I decided to do the very small print run at the same price to be fair to those who had ordered at that price.

I found a local printer who could not only do it at that price, but also do the box labels as actual labels - on vinyl which (I hoped) would save a massive amount of hassle (affixing the labels to the boxes for Border Reivers and the hand-made first edition of It's Alive! was a massive pain and time sink), the only problem was that I needed to make thirty copies to (almost) break even. A quick post on BGG and another six were pre-ordered, leaving just four of the run unclaimed.

I needed greyboard (that's chipboard I think in the US) for the boxes, thick card for the box inserts and then the printing done. I had thick card and greyboard kicking around the house (what self-respecting game designer doesn't?) so I donated those to the cause for free which just left the cost of the printing.

The printing was going to be £255 for thirty copies, selling all of those at £9 would yield £270, but I'm keeping one, and I've given one to the designer of the font I used in the game in lieu of payment so if I sell the rest that's £252. I've also got to pay for the postage and packing to the US for the font-creator's copy, another £5.55, so if I sell out of the print run I'll have lost £8.55.

Once I've finished making the hand-made limited edition, I'm going to make it available on Drive Thru Cards as a Print on Demand game, which if it's priced sensibly might reclaim that £8.55 if I sell a bunch of copies - clearly I'm not getting rich from this, but hopefully not losing too much either.

I've got eight copies left at home now, five of which I've finished and three of which are just awaiting their cards (an hour and a half's work). Two of those eight are definitely spoken for, two of them were pre-ordered but I've not had confirmation from the orderers (muninnhuginn and Richard W, if you're reading this, please let me know if you still want one!) and four are as yet unclaimed. If you'd like one they're £9 plus shipping (£4.10 to the UK, £4.75 to Europe and £5.55 elsewhere). Americans and Candians are definitely best off waiting for the Drive Thru Cards version, which will be much cheaper for you, unless you're desperate for a signed and numbered limited edition copy!

More KickStarter Thoughts

As I'm sure you know, I'm not a fan of KickStarter (see Exhibit A and Exhibit B), until this week I've only backed one project on KickStarter, and as unlikely as it seems, it wasn't a board game.

This distrust of KickStarter, coupled with my natural risk-adversity meant I didn't consider KickStarter as a potential vehicle for Zombology last year, I just chose to repeat the most successful period of my Reiver Games days: the hand-made games. As it turned out, I didn't even manage that, with the promotion at work meaning I limited my ambitions even further to just making enough copies for the twenty fans who pre-ordered a copy when I announced the 150 copy run back in June.

What has got me thinking about KickStarter again, and what a game changer it is for the hobby board game publishing industry is my mate Tim. I've known Tim for nearly twenty-five years and we've spent that period gaming together at every opportunity, from Magic in the early days through miniatures, computer games and board games. Tim and I live about 200 miles apart (and have done for twenty years), but despite the distance and our two young families we try to get together a few times a year for some gaming (which now features his young son during the day and then late night sessions just the two of us after our wives bow out at a sensible time). Tim's been a professional computer games programmer for eighteen years and he's been working on a social deduction board game for the last year or two. When we've got together we've discussed and played it together and I've been providing (hopefully helpful!) information about board games publishing and playtested it for him too. Tim decided to go down the KickStarter route from the get-go, the game is themed around nobles poisoning each other at a formal banquet and he wanted the game to come with goblets and napkins for the full atmospheric effect. Clearly, this wasn't going to be something he could just cobble together like I've done for Zombology. Tim's done the research, sent preview copies to a whole bunch of very enthusiastic reviewers and got it live on KickStarter this week.

It's a really fun game, so I was one of the first backers (to be honest, I would have been even if I didn't like it! Tim's backed me through many years of games publishing, it's great to be able to return the favour), which means I'm now watching his KickStarter enfold.

Until now, I've almost entirely avoided KickStarter for board games. I pay no attention to games being KickStarted, I don't visit the KickStarter website, I don't read the Crowdfunding round-ups on BGG or anything. I know it's completely changed the market, from established publishers like Queen Games using it, through the new publishers like Tasty Minstrel and Stonemaier whose business models revolve around, to the massive successes of any project involving miniatures and Exploding Kittens. But I'm aware of it in the loosest possible sense.

So I'm watching Tim start his company by publishing his first game while thinking of my first attempt with Border Reivers and my second almost attempt with Zombology last year. It took me a year to sell 100 copies of Border Reivers (and co-incidentally a year to hand-make the damn things), a year during which I went to conventions, games clubs, ran competitions on BGG and blogged obsessively. Tim got his first 100 sales within 48 hours. I didn't consider getting a game professionally manufactured until I'd got two games and 400 sales under my belt because the £15,000 outlay scared the pants off me (thankfully most of it was life insurance money!). Tim's outlay is vastly smaller than that, and he will go straight to professional manufacturing with the money in hand from pre-ordering customers (assuming his KickStarter is successful). The two stories couldn't be more different. It's probably just as well that I got promoted and bottled out of starting up another publishing company, I'm now hopelessly out of date and my plan of hand-crafting 150 copies looks like something from the last century to a market that lives on KickStarter, as evidenced by the fact that it took me six months to get 25 pre-orders for Zombology.

Obviously, Tim's got it easier because he's got a great game with neat components, fantastic art (it helps working with computer game artists!) and slick videos and website, but watching his backers climb towards his goal reminds me how much has changed since I was struggling to service my bank loan during the latter stages of Reiver Games.

Anyway, please check out Tim's KickStarter if it sounds like something you'd be interested in - I need it to get funded so I can get my prototype upgraded into a proper copy :-)

In other news, I've made good progress on Zombology this week towards my goal of finishing the limited edition run this month. I've now got 25 copies completely finished and by tomorrow will have shipped 20 of those. Nearly there!

Turning The Dragon Inside Out

It's been a great start to 2016. Last weekend I spent a couple of days with my old friend Tim (I've known him since school, but never went to school with him). During the days we hung out with our families and played with the kids, while discussing his forthcoming KickStarter for a game he's designed (Toast: a game about poisoning each other during banquets). Then in the evenings we had a couple of late nights of gaming. All told I'd played 11 games by the 3rd of January!

Monday I was back at work and it was Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday. I'd missed quite a few towards the end of last year with various work trips getting in the way so it was great to get along and catch up with everyone. We also played a couple of games of Dragon Dance (my NaGa DeMon game from 2014) and one of Zombology (I'm no longer playtesting that, but I'd delivered a few copies of the handmade version and it's one of the staples of Newcastle Playtest, played almost every session since November 2013 when I started work on it - even sessions I didn't make it to!

Wednesday was my regular Games Night with an attendance of eight and seven games played, and then I played a couple more games of Dragon Dance at lunchtime on Thursday.

Why such a focus on Dragon Dance you're wondering? With Zombology finished and the handmade run hopefully being completed and shipped this month, I need something new to work on. I've not really touched Dragon Dance since the end of NaGa DeMon 2014. I'd left it kind of working: there was some bluff and strategy involved and there was nothing obviously wrong with it, but it wasn't particularly good either.

It's a game of simultaneous action selection with a bit of bluff: each action consists of a card and a die that affects the efficacy of the card. I wanted to capture the feel of combat where you're acting simultaneously using your opponent's slight tells to guess what they are about to do so you can counter or attack as appropriate. I've (technically still!) got a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, so I wanted to get the feeling I remember from sparring and competitions.

So in the game each player simultaneously chooses one of their limited number of dice, and then once you've seen the die your opponent has chosen, simultaneously chooses a card - the die is the tell and can be used to bluff your opponent or to telegraph your next move.

So far, so good. You've got a small number of dice and when you use a card and a die they are both put aside until you give up a turn to reclaim them. The die add an element of randomness but also limit the number of turns before you have to catch your breath. I'm thinking of changing it so you choose the card first and each card has three options: attack, defend and rest, the die you use will determine which of the options you do. This effectively turns each card three cards, increasing the number of options every round.

On Sunday, I even considered getting rid of the dice altogether and instead having a selection step after the card reveal to choose which part of the card to choose. Anyway, I've got ideas again, and some things to try out. Dragon is back in play. I also finished another four copies of Zombology and took payment for another two of the finished ones.

P.S. I finished the week on 27 plays by the 10th. If I could keep that rate up I'd beat my best ever month (66 plays in January 2014 when The Wife and The Daughter were banished due to my radioactivity). I won't though. I hope to finish up above 40; 50 is a possibility but above sixty is very unlikely!

2016 Goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2015 The Year In Review

For the third year in a row I set myself some goals at the beginning of the year in four categories: blogging, playing games, designing games and app development. They were meant to be a stretch, but achievable so here's how I got on.

Blogging
I set myself three blogging goals this year: 10% growth in page views, blog every Monday and do something for NaGa DeMon. All modest and achievable, or so I thought. Blog page views have been climbing steadily since I started blogging again back in 2012, but for some reason around April they suddenly dived. Whether Blogger have started blocking spam bots or I've suddenly become far more boring than I already was (which would be a real stretch!), the readership tanked and never recovered. I was aiming for 45.5K page views and I only managed 36K, which was 15% down on last year. Epic fail. I did manage to blog every Monday (as far as I recall) and I did something for NaGa DeMon (publishing the handmade run of Zombology) so mixed success on the blogging front.

My most popular posts were:

1. Why Aren't I KickStarting
2. After The Drought, The Deluge
3. New Games Company Checklist

Gaming
My gaming goals were to play at least 365 games and to have played every game in my collection at least ten times (with exceptions). At this point, with a few days to go I've racked up 413 plays with the following over ten plays this year:

• 58 plays: Unpublished prototype (mostly Zombology)
• 27 plays: Ra (I think all on the iPad)
• 22 plays: King of Tokyo (one of the games I had to play ten times - nailed that one!)
• 20 plays: Carcassonne (all but one play on the iPad)
• 20 plays: Pandemic (iPad)
• 17 plays: Hey! That's My Fish (iPad)
• 15 plays: Lords of Waterdeep (iPad)
• 12 plays: Galaxy Trucker (ten plays list again and all on the iPad)
• 12 plays: Stone Age (mostly, but not all, iPad)
• 11 plays: No Thanks! (A Games Night filler favourite)
• 10 plays: Coup (Games Night favourite)
• 10 plays: Martian Dice (some in the flesh, some on the app I wrote for my phone)

The other goal was to have played every game I own at least ten times by the end of the year. Not necessarily during this year, if I've played it at least ten times in the past I didn't have to play it this year at all. I started the year with seventy-something plays required to hit that goal, and I didn't quite make it (there are four games at nine and two at eight plays left at this point and that's almost certainly how it's going to end). Close. But no cigar.

I've found the ten plays goal useful for honing my collection (I gave away 11 Nimmt!, 20th Century, Divinare, Euphoria, El Grande and Thurn und Taxis) but to be honest I've also found it to be a bind, it drove the games selection at almost every Games Night I had and sucked the fun out of things a bit. I mustn't get myself into a similar mess next year.

Another notable thing this year was the start of what I hope will be a large part of my life from now on. I've been a gamer since I was little. I've been a dad for three and a half years. But this year, I became a Gamer Dad. The Daughter has a few (very simple) games made by Orchard Toys: Where's My Cupcake?, The Lunch Box Game, A Game of Ladybirds and, since Christmas, Monster Dominos. She's learnt to take turns, roll dice, draw tiles and match symbols. She's also learnt to win and is in the process of learning to lose gracefully (that one might take a bit longer!). Where's My Cupcake?, a particular favourite, almost got a listing above with nine plays this year. As yet none of these games require any skill, it's just taking turns and following the rules. I don't want to rush her into proper gaming, I want it to be something that she wants to do for fun, rather than something I push onto her because I want to do it. We'll see how next year develops and what makes it into the list of ten least ten plays at the end of next year.

Designing Games
Only one goal here, self publish a game again this year with my own art. Well it was a roller coaster, but I just about pulled this one off. It started out with the goal of publishing a 50 or 100 copy run of either Zombology or Dragon Dance. Then that turned into making a 150 copy run of Zombology at £9 each. I took 20 pre-orders and started getting ready for that, setting up a bank account and everything and then disaster: I got promoted at work. Ok, that's not really a disaster, but it put paid to any notion I had of becoming a hobby games publisher again. At the last minute I decided to just make the twenty copies for the pre-orderers for NaGa DeMon at cost which I hoped I could get around the £9 I had initially advertised. Do you see what I did there? Folding two goals into one? Cheeky, but I make the rules so, I figure, acceptable. It turned out I needed to make thirty to hit the £9 cost so I wouldn't lose any money on it (but not make any either). During November I only finished fourteen of them (so I failed NaGa DeMon!) but the others just need the cards doing and I've shipped six of them, so that counts as a success as far as my goal for the year goes.

App Development
I'm still slowly learning German using the excellent Duolingo, but there's some stuff I'd like it to do that it doesn't, most notably, show verb conjugations and adjective declensions in a table and present similar words together. I'd started writing an app for that on my phone, and my goal was to finish and publish that this year. I've made some progress on that (it's now useable and I do use it on my phone) but it's not yet ready for public consumption, not even as an early beta/alpha, so another failure I'm afraid. I want to go back to working on that next year.

All in all it's been another good year, hard work and I didn't achieve everything I set out to at the beginning, but still good fun! Here's hoping for another good year next year.

Nothing To See Here, Move Along

As expected, it was a week of no progress. After Monday's trip to Manchester, we had several nights of interrupted sleep as The Daughter was down with a filthy cold that kept waking her (and by extension us) up throughout the night. I also had a couple of nights out with work: our Christmas party and a night out with the numerous visitors who were over for our three day planning meeting. With the nights out, the broken sleep and then coming down with the filthy cold myself, it was spectacularly unproductive.

This week will at least feature a Games Night (I've managed to cram an extra one in tonight, for Christmas, complete with mulled wine and mince pies :-) ), and I'll take a bunch of games down to Bristol for our family Christmas trip, so hopefully there'll be a few more games played before the year is out.

When I get back from Bristol I need to buy some packaging so I can start posting the Zombology copies and finish off the final 16 sets of cards. Then I can get the Print on Demand art done and start on something new (or at least different!) for 2016.

I hope those of you who celebrate it have a great Christmas, and I'll see you on the flip side for my 2015 round up post next Monday.

The Second Coming

No sooner had my parents' visit come to an end then my father-in-law turns up! It's been a busy couple of weeks with guests. I did manage to squeeze in a trip to Manchester for work and a Games Night between the two though.

Games Night was good, we had a new starter so, rather than try to split up the seven of us into two tables so we could cram in another couple of games from my ten plays list, we just got a lot of big games in instead. It felt quite liberating to not be controlling everyone's gaming through the ten plays list - I'll not be doing something similar next year - too prescriptive!

I managed to get a couple of hours of Zombology construction in during this weekend, so I've now finished off all the boxes, and all that remains is to cut out the cards for the last sixteen copies, which I estimate is about eleven hours' work. I've spent 24 so far, so it should be about 1 hour and ten minutes per copy when all is said and done,

I doubt I'll make any progress this week, I missed Newcastle Gamers on Saturday due to my father-in-law's visit (and the snow!), I'm writing this on my way to Manchester again for work and then I'm out on Wednesday and Friday for work dos including the office Christmas party. Around all that it would be nice to spend some time with The Wife seeing as we've had so many visitors recently.

Next week I've got one final Games Night of 2015 and then we're off down to Bristol for Christmas with our families. I think Zombology will have to wait until 2016.

In other news, I watched the Tabletop episode for Libertalia (not sure why) and promptly bought Libertalia (damn you, Wil Wheaton!). Buying a game unplayed is quite unusual for me, so we'll  see how that goes, but it looked fun, was a good length (under an hour is popular at Games Night) and I don't own any pirate games, so it gives us something to play on International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

I've also bought Splendor, Las Vegas and It's Alive! for the iPad. I've had a quick try of each of them and first impressions are:

• Las Vegas: Too much animation, creams the battery and Game Center login every time is annoying
• It's Alive!: Auction games don't work well Pass and Play (should have remembered this from Settlers of Catan)
• Splendor: Mint.

NaGa DeMon Post Script: Late Ruling

Another week, another blog post written in a hotel (this time at Manchester Airport, for work).

So my last blog post was written on the morning of the last day of NaGa DeMon and spelt out exactly what I had achieved during the month of November. It turns out that I also spent that evening folding, signing and numbering the rulebooks too, and that was still November, so that counts. So I got the twenty copies completed except for 6 games worth of cards (about four hours work). On top of that I've also got another ten sets of cards and eight box labels to do to complete the thirty copy print run. So there's not a huge amount to do.

Once the thirty copies are done and posted I'm going to finish off the artwork for the Print on Demand version and get that uploaded and available and also make the game available Print and Play too - lots of ways to Zombology!

Then Zombology is done. It's been my main focus for a couple of years now, so it's going to be weird to put it aside and go back to (or start) something else. My options are:

• Codename: Vacuum
• Border Reivers 2nd Edition
• Dragon Dance

I'm not sure what I'll feel like in the New Year, but I'm going to need to pick something up!

In other news, I didn't make much progress this week with my parents visiting, but I did manage to get a game of Eclipse in on the iPad on the way to London for work, so that's now ticked off my ten plays list. That just leaves nine plays of six different games left. I've got somewhere between one and three Games Nights left this year, a possible Newcastle Gamers next weekend and maybe some Christmas gaming. I'll get pretty close I think, but not quite make it.

NaGa DeMon: The Final Reckoning

November ends today, and with it, NaGa DeMon. This year I did something a bit different, instead of trying to design a game from scratch like I did with Zombology in 2013 and Dragon Dance in 2014, I set myself the goal of making a print run of a game in a month instead.

I set out hoping to make 20 copies of Zombology for the twenty people who immediately pre-ordered a copy of the short print run I announced back in May. After my promotion at work, I realised that on top of the job, the additional work-related travel, and the family, I would struggle to find the time to make 150 copies of a game, let alone do the marketing and convention visits required to sell them. But there were twenty people who had signed up for a copy at £9 plus shipping, so I would make those twenty copies in November for NaGa DeMon as a thank you to my pre-ordering chums.

That was the plan. As with all plans, they didn't pan out. First my printer had got a new customer service rep, and her poor levels of customer service meant I needed to find a new printer, and test them. Thankfully, I found Bang On Print just round the corner from work. Because they were an unknown quantity (and I was trying something new with the box labels), I wanted to make a test copy first to check everything worked OK. So I had to give them the art and £50 and then wait a few days for the first copy. Once I'd got that back and assembled it, I had to go back and give them another £205 for the remaining 29 copies. The astute among you will notice that 1 + 29 != 20. I had to increase the size of the print run to thirty to avoid losing a chunk of money on the printing.

Fortunately I have 25 friends and family and another six of them stepped up, so now all but four of the print run are spoken for.

Unfortunately, the delays of going to the printers twice coupled with several work trips away and my parents arriving for a week on Saturday means I ran out of time to make the games, the twenty aren't complete:

Total time spent (on construction): 21.5 hours

Progress:

• Boxes assembled: 30
• Boxes finished: 22
• Games finished: 14
• Games delivered/posted: 2

Fortunately, with some babysitting and a couple of mornings in work-related hotels I've managed to do most of the graphic design changes for a Print of Demand version, my self-imposed stretch goal - I'll be making this available after I've finished and shipped the hand-made ones.

It was a very different NaGa DeMon experience, but it reminded me just how much I enjoyed hand-crafting games back in the day - I find it a very relaxing way to spend an evening (or ten!).

NaGa DeMon 7: Back to the Drawing Board

But in a good way! This morning I'm in a hotel in Manchester, waiting for my colleagues to wake up so we can go for breakfast. Seeing as I expected to wake up early, I took my laptop with me so I could work on the graphic design for the Print on Demand version of Zombology (a NaGa DeMon stretch goal). Last week while babysitting I resized all the cards (which was a surprising amount of effort), this morning I've laid all the cards out in the order that the POD supplier wants them in.

I'm all done with time to spare, so I can blog about my progress :-)

The POD version is still not quite finished, seeing as the game will come in a clear plastic deckbox, they recommend adding a couple of extra cards, one at the front and one at the back to act as front and back box labels. I've not done those yet, but I don't envisage them taking a particularly long time, so nearly there.

Monday night I made another copy of the real game. Unfortunately, only one. By the time I'd put The Daughter to bed, packed for my trip to Manchester, ironed a shirt and had some tea it was nearly nine and I had to be up at five the next morning. So my best guess is now 14 finished copies by the end of the month, which I hasten to add is not 20. It's a shame that I'll not be able to complete the full twenty copies by the end of the month, but real life is more important!

NaGa DeMon: Week 3 Recap

It's been a week of two halves. To begin with, I spent the first half of the week just cooling my heels waiting for the artwork to arrive back from the printers. I paid for the rest of the print run on Monday and was warned that I wouldn't get anything back until this week probably as they were very busy, so I was just sat there thinking that that had screwed my attempt to get the print run made in November as part of NaGa DeMon.

Come Thursday I was itching to get started on something, so during my evening babysitting for some friends' kids I started working on the graphic design for the Print on Demand version. It involves resizing the cards from the 55 x 80 mm that fit nicely onto a sheet of A3 card to 2.5 x 3.5 inches (which is apparently US Poker size). Then, once that is done I've got to create a new file that lays all the cards and their backs out in a new order. It's a bunch of work. Fortunately, I got loads done on Thursday evening, all the cards were resized and I got halfway through the new card ordering too!

Then Friday the art arrived earlier that I was expecting - awesome!

I've spent the weekend evenings rattling through. Friday I cut out 21 box labels (I meant to do 19, enough to make the twenty original copies including the prototype that I did last week, but it turns out counting to 19 is not my strong suit). Saturday I stuck all the box labels on, finishing all those boxes.

Sunday I started making the games proper. My thinking was that i would get pretty close to finishing the print run - I've only four evenings to make the games proper: yesterday, tonight, Thursday and Friday as I'm away on Tuesday and back late Wednesday, then my parents arrive on Saturday. My guess (based on making earlier prototypes) was about 35-40 mins per copy, so about 13 hours, I get two or at most three hours an evening, so I might get pretty close.

Last night I spent 3:15 on it and made four games. Fifty minutes each. The slippery laminate and the un-trimmed sheets slowed me down a chunk as I had to take more care to avoid mistakes. So, again, it's looking impossible, hopefully I can get maybe 15/20 finished before mum and dad arrive.

I will however take my laptop to Manchester with me, and spend an hour or so on Wednesday morning working on the Print on Demand version.

Total time spent so far: 16.75 hours

Progress:

• 30 boxes constructed
• 30 inserts made
• 22 boxes finished
• 5 games finished
• 0 games delivered/posted

NaGa DeMon 6: Let's Go!

I got a phone call from the printers on Friday afternoon to let me know the art for Zombology would be ready that evening at 5:15 (just after they officially shut!). So I left work and trooped across town to collect it all.

This is awesome, they were originally saying it would be ready next week, but next week I've only got three free evenings and then next weekend my parents arrive for a week long visit, so that would mean I only had three evenings in total to cut out the box labels, stick them on, cut out the cards and fold the rules for the 19 copies remaining of the 20 I'm aiming to complete by the end of the month. The boxes are all made (all 30 of the print run), but labelling them and doing the cards I reckon will take about 45 minutes per game or just over fourteen hours in total.

Getting the artwork on Friday evening doubles the amount of time I have available for construction - I've now got last night, tonight and Sunday night as well. Fourteen hours between six evenings is a far more achievable two and a half hours a night rather than five.

Last night I cut out all eighteen box labels (there's two per sheet so I had two already from the prototype test run), and finished a second box. Tonight I hope to finish the remaining eighteen boxes and possibly even start on the cards for the second game.

Total time spent so far: 10.5 hours

Progress:

• 30 boxes constructed
• 30 inserts made
• 2 boxes finished
• 1 game finished

NaGa DeMon 5: Rollercoaster Trough

As promised on Monday I went back to the printers to pay for the remaining 29 copies of the print run after the success of the first copy. The good news is that payment was made and that I'm just awaiting delivery of the finished printing. The bad news is the timing.

This week I'm moderately busy, it's Games Night tonight and I'm babysitting for a friend tomorrow, but other than that I'm free, including this weekend. So I've quite a lot of time to do the construction of the remaining 19 copies.

The artwork won't come back from the printers until next week though - they're very busy this week. This week I'm just cooling my heels. That's pretty much knackered any hope of getting it done by the end of the month as I'm away for two nights next week and then my parents arrive next weekend for a week long visit. So if I don't get the art until next Monday I have only three nights to finish it off. I estimate there's 40 minutes work per copy left, so 40 x 19 = about 13 hours left. Considering I don't get to start until 8ish and I go to bed pretty early, that's going to be a struggle on three work nights.

I exhorted the printers to see if they could get me anything this week, so we'll see if they can save me...

On the plus side, I'll take my laptop with me when I go babysitting on Thursday and away for work next week, so I should be able to make some progress on the stretch goal of getting the artwork ready for the print on demand version.

NaGa DeMon: Week 2 Recap

This week has been a rollercoaster. It started on a high as I finished the boxes off and sent the art to the printers on Monday. Then there was the wait. Endless waiting... years passed. Finally on Wednesday the printers emailed me to tell me the art was ready to collect, so I left work early and headed over there on the way to collect The Daughter from nursery. The printing looked good, but Oh no! The laminate! On the untrimmed sheets it looked really messy and I was worried that it hadn't bonded as well to the paper as I remember it working for Border Reivers.

Wednesday was further darkened by an apoplectically tired The Daughter requiring a cancellation of Games Night. Thursday I was in Manchester for work again and in the end I didn't get around to making the prototype copy until Saturday night. Thankfully it all turned out fine and the laminate looks good after the cards have been cut out:

But there's another problem! The laminate is incredibly thin, but not insignificantly thin. When you multiply it by fifty-four cards and two sides it adds about 5mm to the thickness of the cards, so now the cards don't fit perfectly in the box any more :-(

The lid still fits on fine so it's not a disaster, but it does spoil the aesthetic a bit :-(

This lunchtime I'm heading off to the printers to pay for the rest of the copies and then I've got a few more days of rest before the epic finale of trying to make the remaining copies by the end of the month begins. I should sleep while I still can!

In other news, on Saturday night I made it to Newcastle Gamers after finishing the prototype. We played Macao and Homesteaders - knocking two plays off my ten plays goal and removing Macao from the list.

NaGa DeMon 4: The Moment of Truth

On Tuesday morning I finally finished all thirty game boxes, then it was just a case of waiting for the proof of principle artwork to arrive back from the printers. The proof of principle copy is a single copy printed using the same printing and finishing as the final copies, so that I can check everything works OK before splashing out on the full print run.

The proof of principle is costing me £50, but the remaining 29 copies in the thirty copy run cost £205, so the total cost is £255, just under £9 each. Once you discount the copy I'm going to keep for myself and the copy I'm giving to the font creator, I'm only losing £3, which is entirely acceptable.

I've not used these printers before, so I wanted to check out the quality before committing £250 to the cause especially as there's also something I'm doing for the first time: printing the box wrappers onto self-adhesive labels - I need to check that this works ok. For Border Reivers and It's Alive! what I did instead was to print onto laminated paper and then paint the other side of the paper with watered down PVA glue which I then stuck onto the naked boxes.

I collected the proof of principle from the printers last night and have already folded the rule sheet and checked that works OK. The next step is cut out the cards and the box wrappers and stick the wrappers on to see how that works.

Both the box labels and the cards have been laminated - not in the horrible thick plastic pockets that you can do at home or in the office, but professionally. Professional lamination applies a very thin coat of plastic to the paper which gives it a nice smooth feel and also protects the ink from handling and wear and tear - very important for a card game!

I'm moderately concerned that the lamination isn't as good as the stuff used on Border Reivers. My copy of Border Reivers was printed in July 2006 (nine and a half years ago!) and has been played at least a hundred times - it was the official demo copy during the year I was trying to sell out of Border Reivers and recently we've been playing it again at Newcastle Playtest while I work on a second edition.

The Border Reivers cards arrived as two sheets of A3 card that I cut the fifty cards out of using a steel ruler and a craft knife and all these years later they still look perfect - there's no sign whatsoever of the laminate peeling round the edges or any bubbles where it has failed to ahdere properly.

It's too soon to tell whether the new cards are as good, seeing as I've received unfinished sheets (SRA3) that haven't been trimmed so I'm seeing a different view to what I had of Border Reivers (plus my memory is terrible, so I can't really remember what the original sheets looked like for Border Reivers). What I need to do now is cut the cards and the box labels out tonight on my return from Manchester and see what the final thing looks like - if the laminate isn't good enough, I'll have to go back to the original printer, despite my recent poor customer service experience with them.

Tonight all will be revealed!

NaGa DeMon: Week 1 Recap

Historically, during NaGa DeMon my regular Monday morning blog posts were used to record the scores in the NaGa DeMon competitions I ran for people helping me design the game by providing feedback and playtesting the early cuts.

Because I'm not designing a game this time there's no competition (known as The Game Within A Game or TGWAG for short) this year, since none of you have come to my house to help me construct the games. Thanks a bunch.

So instead, I'm just going to do a quick recap on progress during the week. My best guess is that each copy is going to take 60-90 minutes to construct, so the twenty copies I committed to are about an hour a day on average, and the thirty copies I'm getting printed are an hour and a half a day worth of stretch goal.

I'm doing this around a full time job, a family and a chunk of work-related travel, so that's going to be a challenge, but we'll see how I do.

In the first week I've done almost seven hours construction, and in that time I've completed 24 boxes and all thirty inserts. The boxes are actually taking a bit less time than I was expecting, and the fact that the new printer can print onto labels means the box wrappers might be a lot quicker than I'd bargained for (sticking the wrappers on with watered down PVA glue was a bit of a faff for Border Reivers and It's Alive!), saving yet more time.

I'm almost at the point where I've done all I can until the artwork arrives, six more boxes and I'm cooling my heels. This week I've also got a trip to Manchester for work which will swallow up an evening and Games Night which swallows another. Next week I've got a night's babysitting for friends (I can't take all my construction stuff round theirs!) and the week after a two day trip to Manchester, so things are going to get tighter still. Must crack on while I can!

NaGa DeMon 3: Insert Here!

Last night I finished off the twenty boxes plus one for the prototype. Here they are in all their glory:

It was a good day yesterday, at lunchtime I'd been to the printers with the art on a pen drive and paid for the prototype. I'd got the guy at the printers to quickly check the art and it all looked OK, so fingers crossed that's a few days away now.

I'm going to have to make thirty copies to avoid losing a bot load of cash on this, but I'm still setting myself a goal of getting the original twenty pre-orders done for NaGa DeMon, i.e. by the end of November. If I can get the other ten done, so much the better.

My best guess is that the games will take about 1.5 hours per copy to cut out and construct. I've spent 5:45 so far, with twenty boxes made but no wrappers on them yet.

The next step is the box inserts, little slips of card that sit in the tray of the box keeping the two stacks of card separate:

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the box tray is 117 x 91 x 20mm. The insert has to fit in there, so it has to be less than 117 x 91mm in folded size. The cards are 55 x 80mm, so the two flat bits under the card need to be at least 55mm wide and I want it to almost fill the height of the tray (20mm) so there's little room at the top for cards to drift over. I've gone with two 55 x 89mm flat panels separated by a 19mm high peak. so the total width is 55 * 2 + 19 * 2 = 148mm and the height is 89mm. This is then scored three times - once on the front for the mountain fold and twice on the back for the valleys.

When finished it looks like this:

One down, twenty more to go...

NaGa DeMon 2: Time To Commit

Over the last few days I've been able to scrape together another couple of hours (now 4:15 in total!) for making boxes for the Limited Edition run of Zombology. I've almost finished cutting out and scoring the 20 boxes for the print run, plus an extra one as a prototype dry run to test everything works OK before committing to the full 20 copy run.

Once they are all cut out (I'm hoping to finish that tonight after writing and posting this blog post), the next step is to tape the boxes so that they actually form a box, rather than just two bent bits of greyboard. The next step from there is to make the box inserts: little bits of white card that will sit in the tray keeping the two piles of cards separate for easy setup. They're pretty easy to make - just a rectangle of 300gsm card with a mountain and two valley folds (which need scoring to fold neatly).

In the meantime, I've been negotiating with a local printer for getting the print run printed out ready for cutting out and assembling.

When I was thinking of getting back into games publishing as a business, I was going to do a print run of 150 copies of Zombology, and I'd priced that run up. I could get them done at a price that would allow me to sell them at £9 (a sensible retail price for such a game in the UK) while still making a decent profit that I would be able to re-invest in the next game I made.

When my promotion at work and associated travel made that plan no longer achievable, I still wanted to do the short print run to thank the 20 people who had already pre-ordered a copy of Zombology, and I intended to do it for the same £9 per copy that I'd offered them initially. Now that I'm not intending to funnel the profits into a company, I'm happy to do it not making any money at all (even a slight loss is acceptable, seeing as I'm also intending to make it available print on demand in the US, which could be done for a very slight profit to eventually recoup the loss).

The local printer (Bang On! Print and Design) has been very helpful and they're so close I can wander over there at lunchtime and have a chat with the staff. Unfortunately, the cost of such a short print run is too expensive for the £9 a copy I've been aiming for. However, they can do a 30 copy run for £9 a copy. Intriguing.

A quick query on BGG has led to a few more takers, so tomorrow I'm taking the art over there at lunchtime to pay for a print a single prototype copy for testing their set-up. One of the advantages they have is they can print the box wrappers onto self-adhesive labels which, if it works, will be significantly less hassle than using watered down PVA glue like I did for It's Alive! and Border Reivers. I'm looking forward to trying them out!

NaGa DeMon 1: Boxy!

As I mentioned last week, for the last couple of years I've started designing a new game for NaGa DeMon, first Zombology and then Dragon Dance last year. Each year I've run a competition, complete with Pointless Internet Points (PIPs), achievement levels and prizes for the winners, to encourage people to help out by playtesting and providing feedback as I post multiple iterations of the rules.

With Zombology, I spent another couple of years working on the game and I'm now ready to call it finished, so this year instead of designing a new game in November I'll be making a short hand-made run of one instead. So no competition I'm afraid this year, I can't think of a way you guys can help me make the games!

So November started yesterday and I got off to a good start, cracking on with the boxes. I've got the greyboard (chipboard in the U.S.) kicking around, so I'm going to just use that rather than order some more specially. The games will come in standard two deck tray and lid boxes (like 6 Nimmt! or No Thanks!), which are 121 x 95 x 20mm. I make the lid less tall so the bottom sticks out slightly (making it easier to take the lid off), so the lid is 121 x 95 x 18mm and the tray needs to be smaller to fit inside, so that's 117 x 91 x 20mm. Both nets are a big rectangle with smaller rectangles hanging off each side, the size of the height, like so:

The best thing about this is due to the difference in height, they both end up being 157 x 131mm in total size - convenient! I mark the internal lines at the same time as the outer rectangle, because I can do several at once, that way saving time. Once I've cut out each rectangle, I then score the crease between the sides and the top/bottom and cut out the corners which are for the bin:

I then bend up the side along the score line and tape the corners using Scotch magic tape (which has a matt finish which is better for the wrapper glue to adhere to).

The large sheets of 2mm greyboard I've got are big enough for twelve rectangles, so I can do twelve games per two sheets - I needed four sheets for the twenty copy run and the prototype. Fortunately, I've got eight sheets at home already. Last night I cut out all the rectangles and scored folded all the trays. Time spent on the construction so far: 2 hours, 15 mins.

In other news, I'm changing printers. I've used Stress Free Print in the past for Border Reivers and It's Alive! (back when they were called Asterisk Digital), but their new customer services rep has been particularly slow and unhelpful, so I'm going to try out a local company instead. I'm going to pop over at lunchtime today with a prototype and Border Reivers to discuss it and see what they can do.

NaGa DeMon 2015: Full Circle

So November is almost upon us and it's NaGa DeMon time again. As I said at the beginning of the year, my NaGa DeMon goal was 'to do something for NaGa DeMon'. This week I've decided what that something is: MAKE a game. Not design one! Make one. I guess that makes it NaGa MaMon.

I'm going to make the twenty copy hand-made print run. In a month.

The art is finally ready to go, I'm just waiting on a quote for the printing so I'm almost all set. Once I get the quote I'll have to massage the art into the final format for the printers and pay for it and send the art off. Then I can start making the tray and lid boxes and box inserts while I await the finished printing.

Once the printing turns up I've got to glue on the tray and lid wrappers for the boxes, cut out 2,160 cards and pack the cards and the rules in each box.

And seeing as that looks like a ridiculous amount of work for someone with a full-time job requiring a chunk of travel and a young family I'm going to set myself a stretch goal (madman!): Get the art re-formatted for the print on demand version.

Let the frivolities commence!

In other news, Zombology has been submitted to BGG, hopefully it'll be live there soon...

In yet more news, it's been an awesome week. Games Night on Wednesday (a disturbingly rare event these days) involved a couple of games of my ten plays list, and then on the weekend my friend Paul and his family came up from York for Saturday night. We played five games, two from my list and two that Paul had brought up that were new to me: Above and Below and Ligretto. Ligretto was a fun, very quick simultaneous play card game which was alright, but I really enjoyed Above and Below. A strange mixture of Choose Your Own Adventure and worker placement game that was lots of fun with a nice 60 minute play time. Pretty art too.

We ended up inviting Paul et al. to stay Sunday night too, and got another five games in (and another two off my list!). A great weekend's gaming. Including six games off my list, three of which were Chinatown, which is still awesome.

Zombology Almost Final Art!

As I mentioned last week, things have been picking up pace over the last couple of weeks, the combination of a bit more focus and having Adobe Creative Cloud on my decent laptop (as opposed to InDesign CS3 on my prehistoric, slow laptop) have meant that I've been able to really apply myself.

Last week my trip to Manchester for work was a rare one on my own, so I took my laptop and went to work on the rules and the box art, they aren't finished, but they are definitely taking shape now. I also 'finished' the card art:

When I say finished, I mean I'm happy with it now, pending feedback that I receive from wiser minds. Now I need to get try the latest version of the rules, get some feedback from playtesters and get a test game printed by the printers I'm going to use.

There's a couple of potential printing pitfalls I might run into:

• The game box wrapper might be too stiff to wrap around the box
• The artwork may have too much ink coverage to laminate

So the next step is to try it out as if it was the final print run, but with just a single copy, so I don't blow a load of cash to find it's all wrong. I also need to get a quote for the 20 copy run, I'm expecting it to be a chunk more expensive than the 50 copy minimum I've previously been quoted (which was about £7.50 a copy), but I'm hoping I can still sell it for £9 a copy, even if I have to make a small loss - the print on demand price can include a small profit that might eventually offset the loss!

Please can you provide any feedback you have on the card art above, and anyone who fancies proof-reading or trying out the rules, you can get the current version here.

And We're Off!

I've actually made some decent progress across the board this week for a change.

Monday to Wednesday The Wife was away for work, which unfortunately meant I missed Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday. I'd been hoping to playtest a game for one of our London Playtest UK confederates on Tuesday, but seeing as I was going to miss it, and he wanted some feedback before Essen, I spent Monday night soloing his game and providing some feedback on the rules.

Tuesday was then free for work on Zombology, so I copied all the files from my old laptop onto the new one and then made the changes I'd been planning to the cards and started on the rules. I'm hoping to get Zombology finished fairly quickly now so that I can crack on with something else.

Wednesday was my weekly Games Night, and we had six people, the most for a while. I requested a try out of some new Zombology rules, which were considered an improvement across the board I think, plus a couple of games of Coup and King of Tokyo, a game of Martian Dice (on my phone after being knocked out of KoT) and another play of Kigi. Including three plays of Zombology that was eight games in total!

Friday I got to see The Martian at the cinema (I'd been stoked for this since I heard it was coming out - I loved the book). I thoroughly enjoyed the film too, though I can see that Wilka's comment that he wished it was a 12 episode season on Netflix would have meant less would have been cut.

And then to round it all out I made it to Newcastle Gamers for the first time in months on Saturday and got a couple of plays towards my ten plays goal: Macao and Alea Iacta Est.

It's been a great week, now I just need to build on this momentum and keep cracking on with Zombology - it's within shouting distance of the finish line!

Another Quiet Week

Not much progress again this week, my father-in-law has been visiting and we were camping this weekend near the Scottish border, where thankfully we weren't set upon by Reivers, though we were savaged by midgies.

I've done the bacteria-based background for the Zombology cards though, so it's not be a total wash out and we managed to get a game of Firefly in on Wednesday (towards my ten plays goal).

The Wife is now en route to Switzerland for work, so I'll be missing tomorrow's Newcastle Playtest, but I'm hoping to attend Newcastle Gamers on Saturday and get some more progress made on the Zombology artwork, if only getting the existing stuff off my crappy old laptop and onto the new one.

I will do better this week!

Art: Looking for Feedback

It's been another busy week, I've been in London Wed night, Thursday and Friday and I was babysitting for a friend on Tuesday. So little time at home. As a result, I chose to stay home on Saturday and miss Newcastle Gamers.

The busyness doesn't mean no progress however. I took my laptop round on Tuesday when babysitting and spent that evening finishing off the Zombie head that I showed last week:

Then (due to conditioning by The Daughter) I was expecting a couple of early starts while down in London. So I took the laptop again, and spent my mornings sat in my hotel room bed doing some more art too. I've done this (can you guess what it is yet?):

And also these:

These bacteria images are intended to be a very feint background pattern on some of the cards and the rules sheet, the next thing to do is to actually get that together.

What do you think of these? I'd appreciate any feedback you have.

Art Evolution

So I'm pretty much done with the game Zombology. The feedback from the blind playtesters was fairly critical and hence very useful. Most of them played the game 'right' (i.e. they played the rules as written and intended) but didn't follow the spirit of the game, as a result, they didn't enjoy it.

Most of my other playtesters do really enjoy it, so clearly I need to improve the rules to make it clear the 'real' way to play the game.

One of the other main criticisms was that the game was too random. They didn't like that aspect of it all. However, it's intended to be a 10-15 minute chaotic drafting game, it's meant to be random. If you don't like short chaotic games, then you are not the intended audience. I wanted it to feel a bit like 6 Nimmt! in that you've got a little bit of control, but your opponents' actions can complete scupper you. I think it has a similar vibe.

With my new plan for route to market, I want to get it out there as soon as possible, rather than radically changing the game to cater to a different audience. Before I do however, I want to improve the art, which in some places is quite nice, and in others is really quite pants. So I want to boost the art a bit before making the tiny hand-made run or uploading the print on demand files.

I've made a tiny bit of progress on that this week (I got back from holiday on Monday, was in London Tuesday and Wednesday and then went away for the weekend, so not much time available) and this week is going to be another busy one (I'm in London Wednesday night through Friday night), but I'm babysitting for friends on Tuesday, so that'll be a chance to make some decent progress, I should have three or so hours of concentrated art time.

As a little teaser of where I'm going, here's a quick look at the new Zombie:

The rest of the art of the game is quite simple and iconic (not unlike 6 Nimmt!), so I wanted to improve the current (really bad) Zombie icon and knock it up a notch. This is clearly a work in progress, but I think the direction is clear (above the nose!).

Let me know what you think...

Late!

I've been away for the weekend for a short family holiday, followed by friends round for dinner and then an earlier morning trip to London for work (I'm writing this from my hotel room, before breakfast). So needless to say, not much progress and the blog post is a couple of days late.

I did manage to get a Games Night in last week, and we played a couple of games towards my ten plays goal (The Bridges of Shangri-La and Village), but sadly that was the only Games Night in five weeks, I'd missed the last two due to trip to Manchester for work and I'll miss this week's and next week's due to trips to London for work!

I'm hoping to get a bit more done on the Zombology artwork this week though, taking advantage of InDesign Creative Cloud and being about to use my decent laptop. I'm aiming for a November launch of Zombology, once the art is complete.

The Only Constant Is Change

Regular readers will know I've been prevaricating for the last two or three months about whether or not to go through with my plan to do a limited edition hand-made run of Zombology this year.

One of the reasons for this has been a secret up until Friday, but now the cat is finally out of the bag I can admit to it! I've been in the running for the last few months for a promotion at work. Seeing as several of my colleagues (and friends) read this blog, I didn't really want to be discussing it here until a decision was made and they found out through official channels. On Friday I received the job offer and accepted it, so it's all go, starting next month.

The new job is a big step up and will require a load of new skills, learning on the job and responsibility, plus more travel, i.e. less time for games design. For the last couple of months I've already been travelling around once a week, which often clashes with Games Night or Newcastle Playtest, further complicating making progress on games design.

The majority of my mates in Newcastle are also colleagues and have helped me with the lion's share of my Zombology, Codename: Dragon and Codename: Vacuum playtesting. These mates will now all be reporting to me. Which is going to be really weird, and also probably not conducive to playtesting.

So everything is changing. What I don't need on top of that is a huge commitment of my spare time and additional stress around marketing and trying to recoup an investment. So I'm ditching the plan to hand make 150 copies of Zombology and instead going with Print on Demand, which requires no effort from me other than the graphic design.

As I mentioned in my review, there's a few downsides to this, not least the cost of shipping to the UK. Most of my 17 pre-orders are from the UK, almost all friends or family. I don't want them to have to pay silly money to a company in the states for a copy of the game so in addition to the print on demand edition, so there will be a Super Limited True Fans Edition™ of the game, featuring a hand-made tray and lid box and laminated cards. I'll make 20 of these: one for me, one each for the 17 family, friends or true fans who've pre-ordered a copy and 2 spares. These will be selling at the original £9 plus shipping price quoted earlier, so I'll not make any money on them - I'm just doing it because I enjoy it and to support those who've supported me.

There's two spares... Just sayin'.

In other news, I made it to Newcastle Playtest this week for the first time in ages and got to play both Codename: Dragon and Border Reivers Second Edition and got some good ideas for both of them.

I've also invested in Adobe Creative Cloud as a little 'promotion present' to myself. It means I'll be able to work on the Zombology graphic design without having to wait a week for my old laptop to boot up and then continually fight with its glacial slowness. W00t! I've already started on the changes I want to make to Zombology before release.