Ready to Ship!

I spent Friday evening and Saturday daytime with Paul in York. Now the boxes for the games and expansions in the second Kickstarter have arrived, I needed to get down to York to sign almost 300 of them that are the deluxe rewards (the deluxe ones are signed, numbered, inscribed and optionally personalised on the inside of the box lid).

These are the games we signed, we did nearly twice as many expansions!

We did that in batches of 25 to give my arm and hand a rest between batches and in between batches talked games, marketing, game design, what’s next for FlickFleet and tried out the two new prototypes I'd brought with me (Coalescence and an idea we had together last time I visited with my family that I finished on the train down!).

It was a great and very productive 24 hours and we’re now in a position where we can start shipping the bulk of the rewards - everything due by the end of April is ready to parcel up and post and the rest of the rewards just need the laser-cutting and bits bagging done. We’re still on track for finishing fulfilment early again :-)

Designer Diary: Coalescence

As I mentioned last week, I’ve started designing games again after a crazy year of construction last year.

The first of these is Coalescence - a game of solar system engineering.

The theme for this one came first (I think it’s unique too!) - you start with a solar system at the proto-planetary disc stage (an amorphous disc of gas and dust) and take it to a finished solar system with planets and moons.

I first tried this game out with Paul towards the end of last year. At that point I was thinking of an action selection game with hidden goals that partially overlapped so there could be one or many winners.

As is often the case, that first game didn’t go very well (way too short and it didn’t feel particularly interesting).

The next step (at the end of last year) was to turn it into a dexterity game where the board mirrored the gravity well of the solar system - a layered board where things naturally fell towards the centre of the board:

The first dexterity prototype

I took that to the first session of Newcastle Playtest in early January. The dexterity element brought an immediacy that had been missing and also an element of chaos, which suits the theme of trillions of pieces interacting through gravity as they spiral round the new born star.

There were however a number of things that needed attention: the board was made of layers of 5mm foam core stacked on top of each other - the resulting steps were so high it was pretty much impossible to flick away from the star. That version was the first to feature the hidden goals, but they were very binary - by halfway through the game you knew you had won or lost, which made the rest a bit pointless. And there was no story for why you were doing it.

A couple of weeks ago I took a new prototype along Newcastle Playtest:

The second dexterity prototype

This one was made from layers of card so the steps (5 instead of 2) were easier to cross. I’d swapped out the wooden cubes for the gems in Incan Gold which had a much more interesting shape and added a time limit to the game rather than playing until you ran out of rocks to flick. I made the board bigger and I also came up with a story hook:

Captain, there is a new solar system forming in Sector X/A9-4. I don’t need to tell you how tactical important that location is. We need that system to be perfect for us to colonise. Your mission is to go there with a stealth ship and a fleet of mass-driver drones and give things a nudge so it ends up how we want it. Like everyone else we’ve signed the galactic treaties that forbid this, so your presence and actions must go undetected - this is strictly on the quiet. Of course we expect everyone else to do the same, so expect inference too. Get this right and your career will be stellar.

The final change, suggested by one of the playtesters, was to have hidden scoring criteria instead of goals. So you would spend the whole game trying to get more points rather than you play until you met your win condition and then lose interest. It was much better all round.

Next up is to swap the six hastily scribbled hidden scoring cards for a wider selection and then work on balancing them properly.

Like the sound of this? Let me know in the comments or sign up to our newsletter to stay informed.

Designing Again

Last year I spent making FlickFleet copies. It was all-encompassing. We needed to make about 300 for the first Kickstarter’s rewards and each one was entirely hand-made. At the beginning of the year my half of the construction (making the boxes, cutting the dashboards and packing the contents in the box) took me about 25 minutes per game. 

I work full time and have two young kids so my chance to do this is in the evenings after the kids are asleep and we’ve tidied up for the day, so I started somewhere between 8:30 and 9pm. My youngest sleeps terribly so to survive I need to get to bed pretty early - ideally 10pm. As a result I ended up spending three nights a week making games for most of the year.

As a result of that and wanting to spend some time with The Wife after the kids were asleep, I did pretty much nothing last year except making games. In 2012 I set up a playtesting group with another designer. Last year I didn’t make it once (and he’s moved on too, so it petered out). We have a local games club that meets twice a month. I didn’t make it to that either. Nor did I do any real games design either. Even after Paul (who works 3 days a week and has an older kid) took a load of the manufacturing off my plate.

This time we’ve managed to reach the scale where we can get the dashboards cut for us and the boxes manufactured too (they’re finally turning up at Paul’s today!), so Paul is going to do all the construction (which is laser cutting the bits, bagging everything and then putting stuff in the boxes).

I’ll finish off the remaining stock from the first Kickstarter, do the books, website, marketing and admin stuff.

This frees up a lot of my time (especially good as I started a new job last week!) and as a result I’ve been in the mood for designing again. I’ve restarted the playtest group, started work on two designs and almost made it to Newcastle Gamers (the bi-monthly games club) this week, but was foiled by a truly terrible night’s sleep the preceding night.

I’ve got two ideas on the go at the moment: Coalescence: a dexterity game of solar system engineering and a multi-session game set in the FlickFleet universe that Paul and I came up with over breakfast on our recent trip to York.

I’ll be sharing more about these two games over the next few weeks.

Taking the Pledge

We didn't use a pledge manager (a separate system for managing fulfilment, late pledges and pledge upgrades after the Kickstarter closes, e.g. Backerkit or Gamefound) for our first Kickstarter and weren't intending to for our second. As the second Kickstarter came to an end and it was clear we weren't going to unlock all the stretch goals, people started asking if they could get the missed stretch goals as add-ons in a pledge manager. We asked backers if they wanted a pledge manager and nearly 70% of respondents said yes. So we found ourselves at the end of the campaign quickly fishing around for a pledge manager we were not intending to use.

We were not expecting to generate much income through this, so ones like Backerkit that charge a flat fee were a bit off-putting. In the end we found Gamefound which is free to both backers and creators (I've no idea how they fund themselves!). So we went with that.

At the end of the Kickstarter we raised £13,162 which, after dropped pledges, fell to £12,879. The pledge manager ran for about a month and allowed people who missed the Kickstarter to late pledge at Kickstarter prices, people who wanted to upgrade their pledges to do so and anyone to add some extra asteroids on to their order for only £3-4 with free shipping for a single copy.

We had no idea what to expect, but it end up raising an additional £1,688 (an additional 13.1%), of which £552 came from nine late pledges and £442 from add-ons (the asteroids). The remaining £694 came from people who had backed the Kickstarter adding extra copies of the game or expansion or upgrading from standard to deluxe copies. Which is pretty incredible and way beyond what we expected.

Gamefound dashboard for FlickFleet

For comparison on our first Kickstarter we just used the Kickstarter reward surveys and offered to take PayPal payment for anyone interested in an upgrade (we had seven upgrades and an additional deluxe and standard ordered for a total of £198 (an additional 1.6%). It's not a fair comparison as we didn't have an equivalent of the £3-4 add-on, but it's clear the pledge manager was a good thing from a sales point-of-view.

It was not all smooth sailing, however.

Before we get into this, the problems were exacerbated by my own mistake: I told backers (via a Kickstarter update) that the Pledge Manager was live for late pledges before I'd loaded in their rewards from Kickstarter. Some of them immediately leapt on to Gamefound and completed their Gamefound order before I'd uploaded their Kickstarter credits or the rewards for which they had pledged. Afraid this was the beginning of an avalanche of excited backers jumping on early, I quickly uploaded the credits only and cancelled the too-early orders.

So now people who know how to use Gamefound could re-select the rewards they got through Kickstarter and add on anything extra they wanted while only paying for the add-ons or upgrades. But quite a few people didn't realise they needed to add their original pledge to the order (due to my mistake), so we got several orders for just an add-on (and shipping on that), which later needed cancelling along with info to the backer on how to correct the (my!) mistake.

I've spent about 40 hours over the last couple of weeks building a fulfilment spreadsheet from three sources: PayPal (where we received the upgrade/add-on/late pledge money), Gamefound and Kickstarter. I've had to cross-reference them all to ensure we didn't miss anyone. I've had to deal with Kickstarter backers who haven't fulfilled the pledge manager (about 10%), all the erroneous pledges caused by my mistake and include the late pledges that weren't in Kickstarter. That has been just about doable, but clearly is not sustainable if our next Kickstarter is (a lot) more successful. Having to merge the two formats and then do a three way cross-check has been very painful and slow. And even after all the chasing, I'm still missing 6 shipping addresses (about 2%) and 57 (about 34%) lots of personalisation info. The Gamefound support was good (they have a guy in the UK), and things were definitely made worse by my mistakes, but I wonder how much effort would have been saved if I done things right in the first place.

A Meeting of Minds

Paul and I live about 100 miles apart, he lives in York (where we used to live) and me in Newcastle.

We meet up every couple of months or so for a nice family weekend together and some gaming and Eurydice scheming.

This weekend was one of those. We had a lovely time all hanging out together and Paul taught me three new games (Montana, Fabled Fruit and Century Golem Edition) all of which I really enjoyed. We also spent a decent chunk of time thinking about FlickFleet scenarios, the next FlickFleet release and we had an idea over Sunday breakfast for a new (very different!) game set in the FlickFleet universe that we spent all day Sunday fleshing out in between eating, reading stories to the kids and soft play.

Paul and I being apart is not usually a big problem for Eurydice (most of the stuff can be done via WhatsApp and meeting every couple of months), but we’re in one of the times when it does. The deluxe copies of FlickFleet and the expansion from our second Kickstarter need to be signed by both of us. Those boxes arrive at Paul’s this week (hopefully Thursday), so I can’t do my signatures before then. Paul has everything ready to put in the first 130 or so boxes but can’t post them until I’ve signed them.

So I’ve taken this Friday (my last day in my current job) off and I’ll be travelling down to his house on Thursday after work to spend Thursday evening and Friday frantically signing boxes! Once that’s done we can start fulfilling the Kickstarter at a decent pace.

I’m also hoping to knock up a first cut of our new idea to try out on Thursday evening once we get bored of box signing!

Paul's garage mid construction!

Almost Ready!

Things are starting to move now on the second Kickstarter fulfilment. Last week I made a couple of outstanding website orders and all the Alpha Wing pledges that hadn’t upgraded to a different level in the Pledge manager and I’ve been posting those in my lunch breaks.

I’ve also been catching up on the bookkeeping and trying to collate the Gamefound orders with the Kickstarter backers. Due to an error on my part we didn’t load Kickstarter backers chosen rewards into Gamefound so we have the late pledges and ~90% of people with a Gamefound order and then a bunch of people who haven’t completed the pledge manager so I’ve got to track them down in Kickstarter instead (and chase them for their shipping address). I’m trying to build a single spreadsheet that contains all the information to make fulfilment as straightforward as possible.

The manufacturing orders I whinged about last week are sorting themselves out - the missing acrylic (plus a couple more sheets I needed to order due to another mistake of mine :-( ) arrived on Friday and the missing wooden bits were restocked at our supplier last Friday too and are shipping today. The boxes are due to arrive on Monday 27th and then it's just a case of cutting the bits, bagging them and shipping them.

I was hoping to spend the last day of my current job (31st) going down to York to help Paul with the boxing of bits and to sign all the deluxe boxes, but he's travelling to a convention that day, so we'll need to do that another day instead.

Exciting times!

The Course of True Love...

You know where I’m going with this!

The orders for the FlickFleet fulfilment are not running smooth. Half of the wooden bits order have arrived, they are out of stock of the rest and will send it on when it arrives from their supplier. Annoyingly the bits they've run out of are the ones we’ve run out of too, so we can’t make any more full game sets until they get here.

The acrylic arrived last week. Or at least some of it did. Despite asking them to arrange delivery with Paul (he needed to be in at home to receive it), they didn’t - just emailing me an hour(!) before it was due to arrive at Paul’s. I quickly told him and he raced home from work and it arrived a couple of hours later. When it did arrive, three of the colours were missing. We got on the phone and they were very apologetic and said it would be delivered next morning. It was, but it was only then that Paul double checked and the previous day’s delivery was missing 8 grey sheets (of 155) and 88 red sheets out of 185 (nearly half!). Needless to say we’re chasing that at the moment. And the clear sheets are too small. Not a happy customer.

However, the boxes order is going ok. The proofs are arriving today and assuming they are fine they will be printed next week. Once we’ve got those we can start shipping the sets we’ve got made up.

Paul and I met up yesterday to swap bits. Last year he was cutting the 1st edition box labels and greyboard so I’ve taken all of that plus a decent number of bagged up games so that I can keep fulfilling website/retail orders using the 1st edition leftovers. I've collected the 2nd edition and expansion rules and dashboards from the printers in Newcastle, so I handed all of that over along with some shipping boxes.

This year Paul is taking on all of the construction and shipping in addition to the laser-cutting (thankfully it's a lot easier this year as the dashboards are pre-cut and the boxes made for us). I will continue to do the website, accounts, social media/marketing and graphic design.

Just to prove it's not all going badly, here's a look at some bits coming off the laser-cutter:

The fluorescent objective tokens

All Change

Happy New Year everyone! I hope all had a good winter break/Christmas.

Last week was both quiet and busy. We had four website orders, but I need to meet Paul and get some bits before I can fulfill all of them. I proofed and placed the order for the expansion printing (rules and dashboards) which I’ll collect on Friday and the box proofs are on the way.

There was a problem with the wooden bits order (only half of it arrived) but I hope that will be resolved soon. We’re almost at the point where we can start fulfilling the Kickstarter rewards...

In other news I restarted the Newcastle Playtest group which I co-founded but have been unable to attend for over a year due to FlickFleet crafting and work travel. That’s tomorrow! I’m really looking forward to it. Over the weekend I’ve been making a prototype for another space-themed dexterity game that I’ll be taking along to try out. It’s very early days on this one, so we’ll see how much work it needs. Probably loads.

In yet otherer news I handed in my notice at work last Thursday. I’m going to a new job, still in Newcastle city centre so I can still walk to work and it should include less travel, certainly in the short term, so that’s another bonus. It’s going to be a wrench, I’ve been with my present employer for 8.5 years and have worked there three times over the last 19 years. I’ve known a lot of my colleagues for 19 years and consider several of them my closest friends. Fortunately the new job is with a former sister company, so I’ve known a lot of them for 19 years too!

Happy New Year!

Another brief one this week, as I’m still on holiday with my family in Bristol at the moment.

I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone who has supported us in any way during 2019, especially those who bought our games or backed our Kickstarters - we literally couldn’t have done it without you.

And finally I’d like to wish you all a happy, healthy and successful 2020!

Merry Christmas!

Today’s blog post will be brief as I’m now on holiday for the Christmas break.

I’ve spent last week on the last few orders of FlickFleet materials and starting to catch up on the bookkeeping from the pledge manager. We’ve now placed all the orders except the Expansion rules and dashboards printing (2nd January) and are just waiting on the boxes, wooden bits and main acrylic order before we can start making and shipping rewards. It’s all coming together for a big push early in the New Year.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, and Happy Holidays to the rest!

Orders, Please!

Last week the focus of my lunch breaks and evenings was mostly around getting quotes and placing orders for the FlickFleet reprint materials.

These are all done except the wooden bits now, and we’ve already received the dice and asteroid acrylic and the printing proofs. This week we hope to get the rest of the acrylic and the printing so then it’s just the boxes and the wooden bits outstanding. That and the printing for the expansion (rules and dashboards) which will follow in the New Year. Next up for me is making the first set of rewards (7 deluxe games with no extras). Paul meanwhile is flat out laser-cutting bits for the second set of rewards: deluxe games and expansions, which aren’t due until April, but there’s a lot of them.

Test cuts of the deluxe asteroids, ramming ship and round counter marker

Then we’ll have a break for Christmas before I start on the other tasks: website work and designing the next expansion for FlickFleet.

With the boxes (approx. 15 mins / game) and the dashboards (~4 mins / game) now being done on our behalf, a decent chunk of my time is freed up. Last year I really struggled to work on anything other than making and posting games, which is clearly not sustainable!

I’m looking forward to being able to spend time in 2020 on tasks that got neglected this year. Hopefully that will lead to noticeable improvements in our preparedness for the next project.

We're also getting some of the first Kickstarter left-over stock into Travelling Man, a small chain of game stores in the North of England. I'm delivering some stock to the Newcastle store at lunchtime!

Spend! Spend! Spend!

With the pledge manager now closed we know what we’re on the hook for so I’ve been able to start placing the orders for materials. First up was the boxes - these have the longest lead time. Once they were ordered next up was the dice (a simple order) and the asteroid acrylic. We’ve also asked for fresh quotes on the printing (which came in yesterday) and the wooden pieces.

The last part of the puzzle is the main acrylic order which is dependent on me laying out all the components on cutting sheets (until now all I’ve just laid them out on small Print and Play sheets). Over the weekend I did the Imperium (grey), Uprising (red) and the Civilian ships (blue). Monday lunchtime I did the mines and the clear acrylic (mine blast template and cloaked ship). That just leaves the objective tokens and I can get a quote and place the order.

Once the orders are all placed things are ready to go. The dice have arrived and asteroid acrylic will arrive this week, the box proofs before Christmas. The printing and wooden bits I’m still waiting for a date on.

Our next deadline is shipping the deluxe only copies (down to 7 as several of those pledges got extra expansions in the pledge manager) by the middle of January. We’ve got almost everything we need to do those already as we can use the leftover stock from the first edition.

Three Times!

I’ve seen Paul three times in two weeks! Two weeks ago I spent the day in York playtesting FlickFleet scenarios with him; then last Monday I dropped in at a moment’s notice after my train travel to Manchester for work was heavily disrupted leaving me with some time to kill in York; and finally my family visited his this weekend as a pre-Christmas celebration. 

It’s been great to see more of him - we used to game together two or three times a week at one point and now I only see him a few times a year.

We’ve spent the last couple of visits talking manufacturing and planning for the second Kickstarter fulfilment. The focus of last week was finishing off the print and play files and sharing them with P&P reward backers ahead of Saturday’s deadline. The trip to York meant the deadline was actually Friday lunchtime - we left Friday evening and then we’re busy all day Saturday. I managed it though - so it was all good and slightly less last minute than last time!

With the P&P rewards done the next focus is on placing orders for the games’ materials.  First up is the boxes, then the asteroid acrylic, printing, wooden bits, other acrylic and finally dice. I’ve a decent chunk of work to do before placing the two acrylic orders and a little before the others. Better crack on!

Pressing Deadlines!

We hit all of our deadlines on our first Kickstarter, fulfilling pledges on time in the worst case and up to four months early in the best and I’d like to repeat that this time.

Last time round the Print and Play rewards were the tightest (I was sending emails with the files at 9:30 on New Year’s Eve!). This time around it’s the P&P rewards again that are proving to be the most challenging.

When setting the deadlines I hadn’t banked on running a pledge manager (it finishes next weekend - last chance for late backers to get the Kickstarter discounts and subsidised shipping!), and choosing a platform and setting that up took over a week (of the four I’ve got between the end of the Kickstarter and the end of this month) so things are pretty tight.

There's less than a week left of the Pledge Manager!

I’ve tweaked the base game files and they are ready to go, so I’m now working on the cutting files, instructions and rules. I did some in my lunch breaks last week and I’ve got a night in a hotel tonight to work on them too so I should be ok. But it’s cutting it fine!

Design and Play

With the pledge manager live, and generating a very surprising (to me and Paul at least!) number of upgrades/add-ons, I’ve been able to focus this week on the graphic design for the expansion. In the run up to the Kickstarter I didn’t want to invest too heavily in it because I didn’t know which stretch goals we’d unlock. With that information sorted I’m now in a position to lay out the rulebook (and the ship dashboards - something else I’d deferred to focus on the Kickstarter). Last week I spent my lunch breaks on the dashboards and this week I've finished them off and started on the rulebook. We've also made a couple of tweaks to the base game rulebook to make things easier to understand and adjusted the points value of the fighters slightly (from 5->6 points).

The other thing we needed for the expansion rulebook was a bunch more scenarios. Again, the exact selection of scenarios relied on which stretch goals we unlocked - we’ve a limited amount of space in the rulebook, so we wanted to get a nice spread of scenarios that covered all the unlocked stretch goals.

On Saturday I went down to York (where Paul lives) and we spent six hours thoroughly testing the scenarios we’d chosen and confirming the points values for the new ships. I also got two hours on trains to work on the dashboards too!

Testing a scenario with the mines

This week will be all about graphic design again so I can get everything we need in place for on-time delivery of the Print and Play files (due by the end of this month).

After that it will be back to crafting physical rewards and ordering the stuff we need from manufacturers to do that. The Kickstarter funds have finally arrived, so it's all systems go!

FlickFleet Pledge Manager Live!

This week has mostly been about refreshing manufacturing quotes, setting up a pledge manager and getting on top of all things I should have done last weekend when my eye injury stopped me doing almost everything.

The manufacturing quotes are coming along nicely, and with a bit of jiggery-pokery around laying out the ships on larger acrylic sheets to reduce wastage per game and merging orders for expansion and base game to get economies of scale we’ve been able to get the price down to the point where we can include the Civilian Ships expansion (which everyone wanted but we didn’t unlock during the campaign) included in the expansion along with the Objectives.

Included for free!

The pledge manager is now live on Gamefound for late pledges/failed payments and the add-on. We'll be inviting all the Kickstarter backers to complete it in the next few days, once we've tested it out thoroughly. It will run until the end of November.

We Did It!

I’ve not had a chance to prepare a proper Kickstarter debrief post so here’s a quick and dirty ‘it’s done’ post for the moment.

Funded! In 3.5 days as opposed to with 4 hours to spare!

We did it! We ended up 188% funded (£13,162 before payment errors) with 304 backers.

We had 85 backers of our first campaign return to get the expansion (that’s pretty much one third!) which is amazing. I’m amazed and delighted that so many people loved FlickFleet enough to want to get more.

And another 220-ish new supporters. I’m slightly disappointed that with ten times the advertising spend we didn’t get more people than last time but I think that it’s at least in part due to the video being too long and too serious. Lesson to learn there.

Even with funding really quickly (3.5 days) the Kickstarter process was still uncomfortable. The app on my phone notified me every time we got a new backer, but not cancellations (we had a lot again) or adjustments (positive or negative), so I was constantly checking to see where we were. Cancellations and negative adjustments still felt awful, like we’d failed in some way, despite the few people who explained it saying it was nothing we were doing wrong, just financial pressure.

Again I was completely thrown by the pledge levels people chose. Last time I was expecting a few deluxes and mostly standard but it was pretty much 50-50. This time (learning from that) I expected a 50-50 split with maybe a third of new backers wanting the expansion. This time it was 2/3rds deluxe and 85% of new backers opted for the game and the expansion.

And then the campaign ended with a (literal) whimper. On Wednesday afternoon I managed to get a paper cut on my eyeball. How you ask? My own ineptitude. Still it was very sore Wednesday evening so the stuff I had hoped to do (video editing) fell by the wayside. Thursday morning it seemed ok, so I went to work but as the day wore on it got worse and worse and I had to leave early. Thursday night we were into the last 48 hours and I dosed myself with painkillers and went to bed at 8:30. Friday morning it was agony, so I went to A&E and got prescribed all of the eye ointments. I spent most of Friday in a dark room with my eyes shut. Saturday morning was agony again so I got my hands on some codeine which did the trick, enough to do the bare minimum at campaign end.

Thankfully it’s doing much better now, my vision is returning (still a bit blurry at long range) and the pain is pretty much gone. Still I can’t help but think we could have had a better finish if I had been more on the ball.

Final Stretch

We’ve less than a week from the end of the FlickFleet campaign now and I’ve been spending the week tweaking components, the Kickstarter page and our Facebook and BGG ads ahead of a big push in the final 48 hours.

One of the things I struggle with is advertising, it’s not something I have any formal training in and sales and marketing don’t come naturally to me, so it’s been difficult. I’m tracking where our pledges come from and so far Facebook ads are doing ok (we’ve had 6 backers for £205 vs. a spend of £181, but we’ve also had three people buy the game from our website via that route too). Of course that’s only counting people who clicked on the ad and immediately backed, if they did any research or searched KS for the project later I have no way of tracking that.

One of our ads

Our BGG ads had 73,700 impressions early in the campaign and only led to 130 clicks to the KS campaign. As yet, no-one has immediately backed, so I’ve no idea whether that has led to anything at all :-(

I’m really hoping we can unlock some stretch goals for our backers and would love to get to around 400-500 backers so we can get the boxes made for us, but that’s looking pretty unlikely now unless the final 48 is absolutely incredible.

Please share the project if you can!

The Quiet Period

The rules of thirds says that on average a Kickstarter campaign will raise approximately 1/3 of its funds in the first 48 hours (when all your fans and people from your mailing list jump on early) and 1/3 in the last 48 hours when the reminder email goes out and there's a rush to get on board before it closes. The remaining 1/3 comes during the rest of the campaign, which is our case is 17 days. After the initial rush things slow right down (we saw this with our first campaign too), as the ratio goes from 1/2 days to 1/17 days. It's the doldrums, and that's where FlickFleet sits now after 8.5 days.

The slow bit!

We've tried doing a few things differently this time including spending some money on advertising on Facebook, BGG and The Crowdfunding Center. So far we have very little to show for that (we gave the three groups attribution links so we know if someone clicked on an ad and then immediately backed the project). The Facebook ads have been running continuously throughout the campaign, we've had 1,234 clicks to our campaign so far (for £97.55 spent so far), but only two confirmed backers through that route. The Crowdfunding Center started a few days ago and will run throughout (for £45) and claim to have given us 34 leads to date, but we've nothing confirmed from them yet and finally via BGG we've spent around £60 so far (a few days at the beginning and then we're going to do a big blast at the end). They've shown our ad 73,700 times, but we've only had 130 visits to our campaign page and so far nothing confirmed in terms of backers.

So either I'm hopeless at advertising (a strong possibility!) or the methods I'm using to track it really aren't working.

Anyway, we're half-way, we're funded and we're hoping for a strong finish when we'll be spending more on ads on Facebook and the vast majority of our BGG ads, so I'm still hopeful we can unlock a few of those stretch goals! We've also already got as many people following the project as we had at the end first time, so hopefully the reminder email will lead to a decent number of late backers. By the rule of thirds, we should be on for around £15,000 (200% funded). Here's hoping!

Ding, Ding, Round Two!

We launched our second FlickFleet campaign on Kickstarter on Saturday afternoon. It was about half an hour later than I’d hoped due to laps of the block trying to get The Toddler to take a nap in her buggy, but once she fell asleep I was able to sort it all out in fairly short order.

As I’ve mentioned before, our first FlickFleet Kickstarter was a very stressful month, funding with five hours to spare. We were hoping that the combination of a lower target (we don’t need another laser-cutter!), more reviews, interest from first KS backers and the fact that we’ve now got a completed KS under our belts would improve our chances this time. And it did!

We’re still in the first 48 hours and at this point we’ve raised 79% of our target!

Off to a stronger start!

I’m feeling much better about this one!

2018-19 Our First Yearly Report

We've just completed our first financial year as a limited company. Inspired by Stonemaier Games and Steve Jackson Games, here's a report of how we got on in our first* year, following Jamey's template mostly.

*I ran Eurydice Games as a sole trader in the previous year, we only became a limited company when Paul joined last summer.

2018-19 Revenue and Personnel

94% of our income came from the FlickFleet Kickstarter campaign.

• Revenue: £12.8 thousand
• Full-time employees: 0 (Paul and I both work about 10 hours a week in our spare time)
• New games: 1
• New expansions: 0
• Kickstarter campaigns: 1

Total income £12,846.56 (~1/1000th of Stonemaier/Steve Jackson)

Last year (when I only had Zombology for sale), our income was £1,217.21, so we've grown ten-fold over my previous incarnation! We were profitable again, but only because we're not paying ourselves salaries or renting an office or warehouse space. We would need to be far bigger to support those costs. We have a small loan from me and cash got unbelievably tight as we finished fulfilling the Kickstarter (the pre-orders since then have given us a little wiggle room), but we will need to lend the company some more money to fund our next Kickstarter - this time we're actually going to properly advertise it, which costs money we don't currently have.

Games in Print

The numbers below are all as of the end of our financial year.

• FlickFleet: 289 in circulation (BGG Average Rating: 8.4 from 29 ratings)
• Zombology: 220 in circulation (BGG Average Rating: 7.1 from 22 ratings)

FlickFleet has been a huge success for us (both in terms of backer response, reviews and sales). Hence the plan to reprint it and an expansion through another Kickstarter. We've no idea how viable that will be, but with only 319 backers of the first Kickstarter we believe there are a lot more people who would really like it if they heard about it, hence the second Kickstarter and an actual advertising spend on this one!

Social Media and Other Metrics

• Quarterly newsletter subscribers: 289 (58% open rate)
• Twitter followers: 3,214
• Instagram followers: 71
• Facebook fans: 68

Most of Jamey's stats don't apply to us, and of those that do it's clear we're in a very different league! Our mailing list has more than doubled since the first FlickFleet Kickstarter, which is pretty good, and it's clear that I don't use Facebook or Instagram effectively :-(

Biggest Changes, Observations, and Mistakes

• Kickstarter was a game-changer for us. It let us make a game that required almost £10,000 of investment without the capital to pull that off and also gave us access to a massive marketplace (over 1/3 of backers found us through Kickstarter).
• The cashflow situation was incredibly tight - I need to be much better at estimating shipping prices and sizing print runs to avoid the same problem next year.
• Retail was a channel I intended to avoid (our margins are way too tight for retail and distribution), but I ended up selling Zombology through a single UK retailer with four stores in the north of England. We delivered games by hand to avoid shipping costs and hiked the retail price so that it was just cheaper than buying it (including shipping) from our website. It was phenomenally successful. Those four stores bought 40% of the print run and have sold almost 60 copies. I'll bet there are a lot of professionally manufactured games that they haven't sold 10 of, let alone 60. Being able to interact with the teams personally and teach them the game made a huge difference.
• Our hand-crafted runs let us make tiny print runs at a profit (but at a considerable cost in personal time). They let us get games out in small numbers and yet still be profitable and not end up with thousands of copies in a warehouse somewhere costing us money every week. It's not a scaleable method, but I'm hoping it'll let us get started and slowly scale up...

Looking Ahead to 2019-20

• Our second Kickstarter campaign launches in just under a week. We've set a lower target (we don't need another laser-cutter!), but I'm hoping with the advertising spend and additional very positive reviews we can do better than last time. I'm really proud of FlickFleet (is it too early to call it the best game I'll ever make?) and I think it has huge potential, the struggle will be reaching that potential with a very small marketing budget, against the wealth of competition on Kickstarter and elsewhere.

I'm happy to answer questions on any of this - I hope you find it interesting!

Straight to Video

For our last Kickstarter we spent a decent chunk of the video pitching ourselves and our ability to deliver since we didn’t have any completed Kickstarter projects under our belts. This time round we’ve chosen to focus on the game instead, since a Kickstarter project that we completed early gives us a bit of a pedigree!

The video is the thing that has pushed the Kickstarter back from September to the 12th October - we were really struggling to find a date that we could all do. But we found some time yesterday afternoon that Wilka, Paul and I could do, so we spent a couple of hours recording it - we now have the footage and are just waiting on the editing and a couple of voice segments.

We’ve chosen to make the video focus on a round of the game showing off a few aspects of gameplay, and we’ve co-opted the help of a bunch of people to provide voices for characters on the ships - I’ve got most of those files now - just waiting on a couple more.

The hardest thing about the videoing was I had a very clear script of the action including what the dice results were, so it took a lot of takes to get the right numbers (I was also flicking with my left hand as my right would have blocked the camera’s view - so just hitting the target was challenge enough!

Still it’s all done now, and I got the last two copies of Zombology finished last night too! :-)

Zombology!

I started work in earnest on Zombology in November 2013 for NaGa DeMon, starting from an idea I’d had for a game for my employer to give away at trade shows. I worked hard on it for that month and then continued plugging away at it for a year and eventually decided to make 30 hand-crafted copies and sell them at cost for NaGa DeMon 2015. It took me 6 months to sell those, and then slowly over time I built up a short list of people who after playing we’re interested in getting their own copy.

Early Zombology card 'art'

In September 2017, six years after shutting down Reiver Games I started a second board games publishing company, Eurydice Games to make and sell a second print run - this time at a profit so I would have money to invest in other projects. My goal was to sell 200 copies within a year (I’d sold 100 copies of Border Reivers and then 300 copies of It’s Alive! within a year each at the beginning of Reiver Games). Conscious of the fact that Reiver Games went wrong due to trying to scale up from hobby hand-crafter to ‘professional’ publisher too soon, I was determined not to go into retail this time round.

The 30 copy run

It’s taken two years to sell throughout Zombology, but this week the last few copies will go to our retail partner: Travelling Man. Remember how I said I didn’t want to go into retail? That didn’t last!

It’s just as well though. Travelling Man have bought 79 of the 200 copies and sold at least 57, 22 of which were through a single store. In the middle of restocking three of their stores with another 11 copies I told the small press coordinator that I only had nine left and they they took those too.

The final version

What with that and the 27 we sold through the first FlickFleet Kickstarter over half have gone through routes I didn’t expect to take - which shows how important being willing to change your mind is!

Zombology is now sold out. You can get the Print and Play files from our website, but we have no plans to reprint it, despite it selling well in the shops. It has a BGG average of 7.1 from 22 ratings, which is pretty good, but FlickFleet by comparison has an average of 8.4 from 28, which is my highest ranked game ever!

Yay! And Boo :-(

This weekend, in addition to successfully wrangling both kids unaided for 33 hours I finished the FlickFleet pre-orders and finished a couple more copies - FlickFleet is in stock! You can buy it from our website! Yay!

Of course, not everything runs smoothly, so we’ve had to push the Kickstarter back from the end of this month until mid-Oct because of the scheduling woes I mentioned last week. Boo :-(

The downside is it’s going to make things a bit tighter for finances and I’m going to end up sending a couple of quarterly newsletters within a month of each other which might annoy subscribers, but the good news is it gives me more time to get things in place for the Kickstarter which was looking very tight.

In other news, thanks to a couple more stocking orders from our only retail stockist, Zombology is almost sold out! They’ve sold at least 57 copies through their four stores and ordered a total of 73. Not bad sales for a game I’ve literally made by hand! Yay!

Scheduling Woes

We are hoping to return to Kickstarter in September for the FlickFleet expansion pack and reprint of the base game.

The Kickstarter page is mostly done (except for the video and the stretch goals) and everything else is in place.

The plan for the video has a brief bit of Paul and I talking at the beginning, like we did on the last one. But that requires me, Paul and my mate Wilka (our videographer) to all be in the same room at the same time and The Wife to be free to look after the kids (or to do it one evening after bedtime). Wilka is a force of nature with an impressive social life. Paul lives 100 miles away and is in France for two of the next four weekends and my parents are visiting at the end of the month for up to two weeks. Finding a single evening were we can all get together in Newcastle was proving tricky to say the least. Especially if we want to do it early enough to get the editing completed before the end of the month.

As a result we’ve changed our plans to replace the talking heads with some scrolling text, which means that Wilka and I can do it one evening after bedtime.

We also needed to meet up and swap stuff - I needed to get more bits from Paul to enable me to make the remaining pre-orders and then put FlickFleet live on the website and I needed to give him some Zombology copies for the two Travelling Man (our only retail stockist) stores nearest to his house - we met on Saturday in a motorway service station for a brief chat and prisoner exchange!

Kickstarter Stats - A Deep Dive

In November 2018 we launched the Kickstarter campaign for FlickFleet, a 2-player space combat dexterity game (think the love-child of X-Wing Miniatures and Flick 'Em Up).

We'd just formed a limited company taking the place of a previous sole trading company that I'd been running for a year to self-publish Zombology. We weren't really ready for Kickstarter, but we went for it and were successful (just) in funding. Last week we finished shipping the last reward tier four months early, so now we're in a position to take a look back at how it went. I'm hoping these stats will be useful for people hoping to bring a game to Kickstarter in the near future.

One big proviso first: ours was a slightly odd campaign (we hand-crafted the rewards and our stretch goals were for moving to professional manufacturing) and there's no guarantee your experience will be similar!

Our campaign ran from 8th November 2018 to 8th December 2018, funding with 4 hours to spare. We wanted to raise £12,000 to fund all the materials to make the rewards and buy a laser cutter to enable us to make the ships ourselves. 325 backers raised £12,127 of our goal (101% funded). Eighteen of those had payment failures, but by the end of the week-long grace period twelve had managed to pay successfully, so we can 319 backers and £11,891 (99% funded). One of the dropped backers later paid by PayPal, so it was slightly better than that.

Kickstarter say their fees are 8-10%, so we'd banked on getting £10,800 (90% of our target), but in our case the fees were £1,008 (8.4%), so we ended up with more than we'd bargained for, despite the dropped pledges (£10,883).

The biggest surprise of the campaign was the popularity of the deluxe version (the ships have their names and detailing etched onto their top surface) . We'd made 50 available expecting a few of our close friends to get some, with maybe 20 or 30 going in total. Those 50 sold out within 16 hours. When it became clear we weren't going to be on the hook for hand-crafting ~700 games in a year, we made another 50 available and, when those went, another 50. Including the deluxe pledges and extra copies and people who later paid for an upgrade via PayPal we sold 138 deluxes and 136 standards. That still blows my mind. We also received 27 Zombology orders too.

The pledge breakdown was:

Reward	Backers	Pledge	Total	%
No Reward	35	£1	£169	1.4%
Print & Play	42	£5	£251	2.1%
Standard	98	£27	£3,422	28.8%
FF + Zombology	20	£37	£928	7.8%
Deluxe	116	£45	£6,511	54.8%
2 copies	8	£54	£610	5.1%

21 generous souls over-pledged to help us cross the line - thank you so much!

I was also amazed by the number of backers we got from the US, especially considering the cost of international shipping:

The top five destinations were the UK (42%), the US (35%), Germany (4%), Canada (3%) and Australia (3%).

According to Kickstarter 46% of our pledges came from them. I think that's debatable, but what I do know is that 41 people from our tiny mailing list backed the project. I was told at TableTop Gaming Live in September last year by a well-known industry guy who has run several successful Kickstarters that our mailing list of 136 people was nowhere near big enough for us to be successful. My counter argument was that most of the people on it had signed up because they were interested in FlickFleet and I was expecting maybe 40 of them to back the project. 41 did! 15% of our total was from people on our mailing list before the project went live. That meant from the 136 people (including backers and non-backers) we had a 30% backer-rate and a £13.08 per subscriber average pledge. Clearly this will never be this high again - as our mailing list grows these figures will go down.

The second highest single source was twitter, where I'm very active. According to Kickstarter £1,495 of our total was directly attributable to twitter.

Finally our marketing spend was minuscule. We gave six prototypes to reviewers (and got five reviews). We spent £95 on marketing (£80 on flyers that we gave to a number of UK gaming/geek shops) and £15 on Facebook Ads. I've no idea whether the flyers worked, but the Facebook ad yielded at least one deluxe backer, and even it's only one, the ad made us money (after accounting for the Kickstarter fee, subsidised shipping, the cost of the game materials and the cost of the ad). Next time I think I would use them again and hopefully target them more effectively.

I hope this info has been useful (or at least interesting!), let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Almost Done!

I had hoped to finish shipping the Kickstarter rewards last week, but with a long weekend camping and my daughter’s birthday I ran out of time - so in the end I’m five copies away from finishing, which I hope to make tonight and then post on Wednesday. With that out of the way I’ll be able to spent more of my evenings with The Wife for a couple of weeks until I get the stuff I need from Paul to fulfill the pre-orders. I’ll also be able to spend my lunchtimes on the Kickstarter instead of multiple lunchtime treks to the Post Office per week!

It’ll be good to focus on the Kickstarter - it’s taken a back seat (and rightly so) to the fulfilment so it could do with some love!

It's The Cash That Is Gonna Kill You

When running a business there's two things you need to keep a close eye on: profit and cash. Profit is the money you make when you sell something, either before (gross profit) or after (net profit) taking account of overheads. Because we're doing Eurydice Games in our spare time and not drawing salaries from it, our overheads are very low, so despite a low gross profit (small print runs have few economies of scale) we have very good net profits. We're making money and this is, in it's current form, a viable business.

Cashflow is the money going into or out of the business and is what kills most companies apparently - including Reiver Games, my first games publishing company. Cashflow isn't as closely related to profit as you might think. For example, our cashflow was very positive in December (when Kickstarter released the funds) but has been negative since - we've bought a laser-cutter, all the raw materials for the print run and then being paying for postage and packaging materials every time we post a copy. Every time we sell (ship) a copy we make a small profit but our cash decreases.

At the beginning, just after the Kickstarter, we needed to make a decision about how many copies to make. We needed to make at least enough copies to fulfill the Kickstarter rewards, but we could make more. The more we made the better the profit per copy, thanks to economies of scale, but the worse the hit on cash flow as the total cost for the raw materials would be higher.

At that point we didn’t know exact shipping costs, how much Royal Mail would increase their prices in April and how much we would be spending on tape, bubble wrap, etc. I had to make an educated guess.

My guess was poor! Even with a number of post-Kickstarter deluxe upgrades and a decent number of Zombology sales during the year, money has run out. We’ll rebuild it as we fulfill pre-orders (which haven’t paid yet so will boost profit and cash simultaneously) and when Kickstarter releases the funds from the second Kickstarter, if we’re successful. But for now we have almost nothing in the bank (<£10!), so to support the second Kickstarter, Paul and I will need to lend the company some more money.

California!

I spent most of last week in California for work, which it turns out is a very long way from Newcastle.

The good news is, as suspected, I coped poorly with the jet-lag and woke very early each morning (between 02:30 and 03:40) so I had some jet-lag hours to work on FlickFleet before work. My main focus was trying to flesh out the second Kickstarter page, but I also spent a little time on the website (which still needs more work!) and ran #CraftWednesday starting at 04:00!

Over the weekend I returned to FlickFleet crafting and we have just two weeks of crafting left to finish the Kickstarter rewards - we’re still on track for shipping them all in August.

After that I’ll be reaching out the the pre-orderers and seeing if they want immediate fulfilment at full price or to wait for the second Kickstarter and a discount.

We’ve also got the first of the second wave of Kickstarter reviews from Dan Thurot over at SPACE-BIFF! He was smitten!

Week Off!

I'm writing this blog post at 4:45am in an airport lounge while awaiting a flight to Amsterdam, and then a connecting flight to San Francisco. Which sounds pretty glamorous, but the reality is that on arrival in San Fran I'll be whisked to a hotel on a business park in Pleasanton where I'll spend the next two days probably awake from midnight to about 6pm and working (on the same business park) from 9 until 5. I'll not see much of California at all.

Being awake for most of the night with jet-lag does mean that I'll have the jet-lag hours of midnight until 7am to work on the next Kickstarter and other computer-based tasks, but obviously there'll be no crafting until I get back. Last week the crafting finished early too as I needed to find our camping stuff in the boxes in the garage on Thursday and then we were camping Friday and Saturday and I needed an early night on Sunday because of the 3am start this morning.

I've only got 37 more copies to make, so my current plan is to make seven one night next weekend, and then three nights of six the following week. That leaves just twelve to do the following week, which is another two nights' work - just as well as we're off camping again at the end of that week.

If everything goes to plan I'll have finished the crafting by the 22nd of August!

After that I'll have to knuckle down on the next Kickstarter and (at a slower pace!) make up the last of the Zombology stock and some FlickFleets for the pre-orderers who don't want to wait for the Kickstarter.

For now though, I've a plane to catch!

Help! Send Time!

I’m really struggling to find time for crafting at the moment. With the summer holidays started and the recent swathe of hot weather the girls have been going to bed pretty late. By the time we’ve got them asleep and I’ve cleaned and tidied up after a day of kids at home it’s often 9:30-10 before I’m free. That doesn’t sound that late, but our nights are still broken by The Toddler waking up and we need to be up early either for work or The Toddler getting up early, so I really need to go to bed at 10 or 10:30.

I can get the crafting done in three evenings a week if I spend 1.5 hours on it, but clearly, even in the best case scenario, there’s not an hour and a half between 9:30 and 10:30.

Last week, with a couple of late nights on the weekend I managed to finish the sixteen planned copies for the week and five of the eight copies that slipped from the week before. This week I’m travelling Monday and we’re camping with friends on Friday and Saturday. I also need a very early night on Sunday as I need to get up at 3am for my trip to the US :-(

Next week I’m away from 4am Monday until Friday lunchtime and I’ll be hideously jet-lagged on the following weekend. At least I'll have some time while I'm away (the jet-lag hours in the very early morning!) to do some more preparation for the second FlickFleet Kickstarter.

I think I can still finish the first Kickstarter rewards by the end of August, but it’s getting pretty tight...

A Bump in the Road

With delivery from Paul of everything I needed to finish the Kickstarter rewards just over a week ago and then another visit from Paul yesterday with enough cut box labels to finish the rewards, the time it takes me to finish a game has dropped from 25 mins to just under 14. 

I had intended to complete another weekly batch of 16 last week, but with three days in Manchester for work and then a very late bedtime for The Toddler on Sunday I only managed to get eight done (though I gave those to Paul and he's posting them today) so there’s now only 72 left to do - four and a half weeks’ work. I'm going to try to make up the eight I missed last week over the next couple of weeks, so hopefully I'll be back on track before my trip to California at the beginning of August (I get a week off crafting that week!).

Either way, the end of August that we're aiming for is a personal target - it's way ahead of the December target we set in the Kickstarter.  One of the benefits of hand-crafting the games is that everything is under our control so we're not at the mercy of a factory's production schedules or international cargo shipping.

Of course the downside is that we're spending a lot of time physically making the games, and hence we have a lot less time for testing other games or working on scenarios.

My hope is the next Kickstarter will be successful enough to support more manufacturing outside my kitchen and Paul's garage!

All Systems Go!

For the last six months Paul and I have been managing FlickFleet construction between two sites that are 100 miles apart.

I’ve got all the printed stuff (box labels, dashboards, Zombology bits) and to begin with had the greyboard for the boxes too. Paul has the laser cutter, acrylic and wooden bits (and for the last couple of months has had the FlickFleet box greyboard as well).

Paul, who works part-time, has been blasting through his half of the construction and we’ve been periodically meeting up so he can supply me with the bits I need to finish copies and ship them - either through family visits on the weekend or a quick pint in York (where Paul lives) station on my way home from frequent work trips to Manchester.

With my house move looming over us for the last several months I’ve been trying to minimise the stuff I’ve got in my house, so I managed to offload the greyboard onto Paul (and he cut all the box blanks from it!) and I've been trying to turn the stock around as quickly as possible to minimise finished stock in the house.

With the move now safely behind us, I need to reverse that trend. I'm aiming to make and ship 16 copies of FlickFleet a week now, and the last couple of times we've met up I've taken 20 or so copies from Paul (which due to the weight of the acrylic and wooden bits is pretty much all I can carry!). I go to Manchester every three to four weeks - that's clearly not a solution we can rely on, so this weekend we invited Paul and his family up to see the new house and bring everything I need to complete the Kickstarter rewards - that's around 100 games' worth of box blanks, acrylic and wooden bits and all the postage boxes he had.

Now I have everything I need to complete the fulfilment - Paul's done (more than!) his fair share. Though he did take eleven finished copies back with him to post while I'm in Manchester next week. He also took a bunch of labels - so he can cut them out - saving me a further three minutes per game (about five hours for the rest of the Kickstarter rewards).

All I need to finish Kickstarter fulfilment!

In related news, I'll be at Tabletop Manchester at The Wharf pub tonight for gaming and will have Zombology and FlickFleet with me if you're interested to try them out!

Back in the Saddle

This week I have resumed FlickFleet crafting in the new house!

We’re still in a chaotic state with boxes everywhere, but I’ve found the FlickFleet materials and started making games again. 

With my crafting table in pieces on a pile of boxes in the garage I’ve had to improvise, and I’ve been using the kitchen island instead.

Bon appétit!

The good news is that this is a better height for standing at (I stand up to cut out the labels and dashboards) but worse for sitting at (the bar stools are much less comfortable than my office chair!).

Last week I made 16 copies as planned and this week I have everything I need to make 10 of my 16 target, then I've run out again. So we’ve arranged for Paul and his family to come up and see our new house (and bring everything he’s made that I need to complete the Kickstarter rewards: 87 cut box blanks, 87 bags of sorted bits and all the postage boxes he’s got). 

That will remove one of the obstacles to hitting our deadlines: our need to meet up periodically and exchange things made at one or the other house!

Box Fort!

Last Tuesday we moved into the new house. It all went fairly smoothly on the day and now we are just sorting through all the stuff we still have in boxes trying to work out where it will all live.

My half of the Eurydice Games stuff ready for the move!

Long term the plan is that the smallest bedroom will end up as a crafting studio for me to make Eurydice Games, but in the short term The Toddler is in there while we sort out the other rooms.

On Friday I brought the bits I’d collected from Paul and left at work home with me and I intend to resume crafting this week. Progress will be slow for a few weeks while I sort out the rest of the house, but at this point I’m still right on track for completing the Kickstarter rewards in August.

All Change!

Tomorrow we move house. It's only a short move (about 1.5 miles), but it's the first time we've bought and sold a house on the same day and the first time we've moved with kids (now aged 6 and 2). It's been remarkably stressful, but hopefully by mid-afternoon tomorrow we should be in our new house surrounded by piles of boxes.

I've spent the last week trying to get as much stock finished as possible and then getting that in the post (or stored under my desk at work so that the movers can't damage it in transit). The un-assembled stock is still here though, but as flat sheets of card or greyboard in sturdy boxes I'm less worried about that!

I'm not expecting to get much crafting done over the next couple of weeks as we'll still be frantically unpacking/working out where things live/sorting out our stuff, but at this point we're still on track for finishing fulfilment by the end of August - four months ahead of schedule!

In time, we're hoping to make the smallest bedroom an office for Eurydice Games, but for the moment it'll be The Toddler's room until we sort out some of the other rooms. I'm really looking forward to having a dedicated crafting space :-)

Until then I have a lot of stuff to put in boxes, and then a lot of stuff to take out of boxes - wish me luck!

Hiatus II: Return of the Hiatus

After three months of living in limbo, it appears that we finally have a date for our house move: next Tuesday. So I have just over a week to sort our stuff out and get rid of as much finished stock as possible to avoid it getting damaged in the move. The good news is that I currently only have one finished copy of both FlickFleet and Zombology and three half-finished Zombology copies. I need to finish those by Thursday as I'll be restocking our only retailer, Travelling Man, in Manchester on my way home from a work trip.

I’m also going to meet Paul in York and pick up some more FlickFleet bits on my way through, though I’ll leave those under my desk at work until I get the move over with.

I’ve planned for a few weeks of no crafting as we settle into the new house and start sorting out all our stuff and yet still expect to get all the Kickstarter rewards in the Post by the end of August - several months ahead of schedule.

For now though my focus needs to be on sorting out our belongings for the move!

No Take Backsies!

The prevailing wisdom when fulfilling a Kickstarter (i.e. Jamey Stegmaier) is to expect about 1% fulfilment errors - games that fail to arrive at the backer.

With just over 300 backers we would therefore be expecting about three. This week we got our first two returns, one from the USA (insufficient address) and one from France (not collected). This is a first for me, despite eight years of selling games over the Internet.

I’ll be looking to get those both back in the post this week. Hopefully we’ll not have any more, but at least with a signature required and tracking for international parcels and the return address on the box we’ve got a decent chance of not losing the games themselves, just the postage.

I’ve got a very busy week at work this week, hosting visitors all week, but I’m hoping to get 6 of the last 9 Bomber pledges in the post today and then the last 3 early next week.

Our move is hopefully a week or two away now, so there will be a shipping hiatus while we pack everything up and then settle back in again.

Doubling Up

Until now our focus has been wholly on making copies of FlickFleet as fast as we can and then getting them in the post to complete the FlickFleet Kickstarter fulfilment.

We’re now on the Bomber pledges (a copy of FlickFleet and one of Zombology), so Zombology is also required now too. We had a few of the earlier pledge levels get an additional Zombology, but that was a total of  seven copies over the months of Jan to May, now we need 20 copies of Zombology in fairly short order.

A blast from the past!

Because Paul does most of the FlickFleet crafting they're only take me about 19 minutes now, but Zombology is still 42 mins per copy so doing 20 will take me 14 hours - that’s several weeks’ crafting with another 20 copies of FlickFleet on top. It’s going well at the moment - I’ve made 12 FlickFleets and 11 Zombologys (and eight of those rewards are in the post, with the rest going in the post tomorrow). Next up will be the remaining eight FlickFleets and then it’ll be nine more Zombologys and the Bombers are done.

The final reward tier is 98 FlickFleets which we’ll do in July and August I hope.

The other thing that is splitting my focus is the next project. We’re planning to do a second FlickFleet Kickstarter once the first one is completed (i.e. all pledges in the post). There’s a ton of stuff that needs doing ahead of time (the KS page, video, photos of finished games and working out exactly what the Scenario Pack expansion will contain), but thankfully most of it can be done during lunchtime on a PC (on the days I don’t go to the Post Office!).

Busy, busy!

Hiatus Averted!

Last week was a particularly weird one as we didn't know until Wednesday whether or not we were moving house on the Friday! I was trying to hedge my games production so that I didn't have loads of half-made games kicking around the house that might get damaged during the move - my goal was to try to finish and ship as much as I could without starting more.

As it was, we found out on Wednesday afternoon that the move wasn't possible (it was a very last minute rush that had a fairly low chance of happening) so I was able to return to production over the weekend.

We've now made (and almost shipped!) all of the rewards except the Bombers (a copy of FlickFleet and a copy of Zombology) and the Fighters (a standard copy of FlickFleet). That sounds great, but there's nearly 100 Fighters to do, so there's still a chunk of work ahead of us.

With the Bombers at the top of the pile now I've gone back to making Zombology copies as we need to ship 20 of those over the next few weeks. I had four finished FlickFleet boxes left over from last week's crafting and five Zombology box blanks, so I've labelled them up and cut the cards so I could post those four rewards. On my way back from Manchester on Tuesday I met Paul again and gave him a couple of copies of FlickFleet for a friend of his and accepted from him the rest of the box blanks I needed for finishing the Bombers, plus the bagged bits for all twenty of the Bomber FlickFleets.

My plan was to dump all the stuff I got from Paul under my desk at work if we moved this week so it was safe from damage in transit during the move, but with that avoided, my new goal is to try and get as much of it in the post before the move (which is now up in the air again - hopefully some point in June!).

I'm really appreciating Paul taking on the box blank cutting, as that's saving me about five minutes per game, which doesn't sound like much but it's almost 25% of my construction time, so it makes a big difference! The other benefit is that all the box card is now at Paul's not stacked up under my spare bed, so that's one other thing I don't have to worry about the movers damaging!

Our Kickstarter Experience

If you've been reading this blog for years you'll know I was very wary/disparaging of Kickstarter in the past. Last November Paul and I ran a Kickstarter and we're now just over half-way through fulfilling 325 backers with lovingly hand-crafting board games.

So what changed? What was it like eating humble pie? Now that six months have passed how do I feel about it?

As I've said in the past there were a few things about Kickstarter that put me off:

• It lowered the bar to publishing so low that games that possibly shouldn't have been made are being made,
• As a publisher, you go into it not knowing what you're on the hook for until it closes, and
• You owe people stuff for months (or maybe even years).

So how do those concerns tally with our experience?

I still maintain there are a lot of games being made that wouldn't have seen the light of day via a traditional publisher. Arguably FlickFleet is one of them. Some people will say that's a good thing, removing the gatekeepers and letting more projects see the light of day that would never have been picked up. Others will say that there are too many games being released and lots of those are weak. I don't really play enough new games to be able to make an informed decision on this, but probably lean towards the latter despite having benefited from the former!

My concerns about what you're getting into were mostly around stretch goals. You see loads of projects that have a vast range of rewards and various expansions or extra pieces or upgrades that become available as stretch goals. Had we run one of those campaigns (FlickFleet was a pretty vanilla campaign), I might have more opinion on this; but it's related to the biggest negative for me and Paul: will we/won't we. For all but the last 4 hours of a 720 hour campaign our project hadn't funded. Even for those last four hours we were still so close to the target that a couple of cancellations (of which we had loads including a couple after funding!) could have sunk us. The toll on our mental health was terrible. It was so stressful. I was checking the funding total on my phone at a very unhealthy frequency. We'd had to set quite a high target to fund the laser cutter and all the materials, plus leave enough in the pot after Kickstarter fees to cover shipping 275 games - it was a stretch, and one that we only just managed to reach.

All of that was very stressful. Even the green bit!

The final concern is something that is probably not a concern at all for most people, but I don't like owing people for things. On the day we funded we were suddenly indebted to 319 people to the tune of £11,891. I'm not comfortable with that. I've chosen to clearly spell out how much we owe in our bookkeeping so I can see what is hanging over me and watch it decrease by a few hundred pounds every week. This affects other decisions I make too - we've had numerous people ask to upgrade their pledges after the Kickstarter closed. We're not using a pledge manager, so I've just been making a note against their pledge. We could charge them at the point they requested it, but that would increase the debt, rather than reduce it - and I'm not fine with that. So instead I've been charging people at the point that I'm ready to ship their pledge. We'll probably lose a few upgrades that way, but I'd rather that than sit on people's cash for months and add to my mental burden about the debt.

So was there anything good about Kickstarter? There were definitely benefits! Kickstarter allowed us to make 400 copies of FlickFleet for a personal outlay of £480, rather than a £10,000 one. Which made it a possibility. In addition, about 35% of the backers found us through Kickstarter - we went into the Kickstarter with a mailing list of 136 people: way, way too small to be successful. Plus the Kickstarter timeline encouraged our supporters to help us raise the money in time, focusing their (and our) efforts to get us the backers we needed to be successful during the funding window.

In hindsight, it was an awful experience (due to the stress) and a lot of my fears were realised, but FlickFleet wouldn't exist without it, so on balance it's a good thing!

Take Two!

Paul and I are currently working on plans for our second Kickstarter later this year. We're working under a few constraints:

• We have very limited time for playtesting whatever comes next due to FlickFleet construction,
• We have very little cash due to FlickFleet shipping,
• We don't want to run it until we've shipped all the 2018 Kickstarter rewards.

By the end of August (hopefully!) there should be about 300 people in the world who have a copy of FlickFleet. Which is a lot considering every single one of those will have been loving hand-crafted by Paul and me. But it's not many as a proportion of the 7.4 billion people who live on the planet (or even the gamers among them).

FlickFleet has been getting excellent feedback and Paul and I would love to see more people get the chance to enjoy it. Now there's a number of reasons why we only got 325 backers for our first Kickstarter (not least of which was that our advertising spend was less than £100). Lots of people will avoid Kickstarters from first time creators because they are wary of getting stung by people who don't know what their doing and have no track record. It's one of the reasons that we spent so much of our first Kickstarter page and video talking about our credentials and experience.

If we come back to Kickstarter in September then we can do things a bit differently. We will hopefully have a completed Kickstarter under our belts with fulfilment having been completed early, rather than late. We have a community of FlickFleet owners 300 strong, many of whom (assuming the same level of excitement among backers who have yet to receive their rewards as we've had from those backers who've already got their copies) really love the game. Some of those are already clamouring for extra FlickFleet content, others will hopefully help us by reaching out to their friends, games clubs, families and random strangers in the supermarket to espouse the game.

This time there's a few things we’re hoping to do differently, with this in mind:

• Focus the video and the page more on the game than on us,
• Be more upbeat (and less knackered!) in the video,
• Use stretch goals more effectively,
• Set a lower target because we don't need a(nother!) laser cutter,
• Reduce the amount of crafting required for the standard edition.

I've started this process by scripting a new video on the train this week, focussed on playing the game. Which gave me an idea for a scenario - so once I've tested it I'll be adding that to the Scenarios page too!

Deluxe Pledges Complete!

Yesterday I finished off the last of the Rise Up deluxe pledges, which were due in September. I’ll be shipping them over the next couple of weeks. 

Last week was a good one with a chance to make it along to Tabletop Manchester where we played Zombology four times and a visit from Paul and his family on Sunday afternoon.

Seeing as Paul has more free time than me, he’s taken the greyboard for the box blanks and will be cutting those for me. He’s way ahead of schedule on the laser cutting, so I’m the weakest link at the moment - this will help out quite a lot (making a box blank takes me seven minutes and 39 seconds, so when Paul gives me the cut and scored blanks back all I’ll have to do is fold them and tape them - maybe two minutes' work. A five or six minute saving doesn’t sound like much until you realise we still have 270 boxes to make!

I’ve kept enough greyboard to make the boxes for the Commodore pledges which are up next. After those (two weeks’ work) it’s the Bomber pledges which also require me to make 20 copies of Zombology, so I’ll crack on with those afterwards.

Tonight I’m off to Bedford on the train for my friend Andrew’s funeral. I’ll be spending eight hours on the train over the next two days getting there and back again, so rather than spending that time dwelling on our fleeting time on this planet, I’ve taken my laptop so I can distract myself with some Eurydice Games work.