The Calm Before The Storm

This weekend has been a bit strange. Last week I was frantically chasing suppliers, but of course I can't do that on the weekend, so all I could do was some assembly. I've got the dice and the card, but no print jobs or wooden pieces yet, so pretty much all I can do is make boxes. I've now made twenty-three - enough for all my pre-orders, complementary copies and the ten I want to take to The Cast Are Dice. Ten seems like a lot, but there could be up to two hundred people there, and I definitely want to take too many - it would really suck to run out if it's popular.

Here's the results so far:

Why the storm? Next week I have the playtest event on Thursday, which will require some prototype construction, and I'll also need to collect the first print job, the wooden pieces (hopefully) and send off the second print job. Next week will be even worse - assuming I get the bits in time. Still, I've booked some time off work next week to give me plenty of time for construction.

I'm impressed by the amount of support I'm getting from the gaming community, especially from people I've never met and who've never played the game, but are still interested. Thanks!

Supplier Woes

I've been trying to get Border Reivers ready for The Cast Are Dice, and I've three major things to do before I'm ready. I need to receive the wooden pieces from my supplier: Game-Components.com. Once I've got them I can take a photo of the completed game to put on the back of the game box. Once that's been added I can finally send the second print run to the printers. I need to get the second print run back in time to assemble the tiles and apply the box artwork to the boxes.

Needless to say, things are getting a bit tight. I'd not heard from the wooden pieces suppliers for a week or more since sending them payment and I was expecting to have already received the pieces by now. So I chased them up yesterday and found out that there was a problem with my order, some of the pieces I wanted were end of line and they didn't have enough left to complete my order. So I spent today trying to redesign my order in such a way that I could get it sorted quickly. Hopefully my order is now winging its way to me from Germany, and I'll receive it fairly soon. I think the chance of getting it ready in time for TCAD are fairly slim now - which is a real shame. But I'm learning a lot about dealing with suppliers, and the ups and downs of publishing.

The tales of a casual games designer: Part 3

As Jack said, First Past The Post works as print and play because it's about 6 A4 pages in total. However the game I've been workign on lately will not be print and play. If it playtests well (I'll be taking it to Cast are Dice hopefully) then I'll be releasing it as "I make, you buy". Something that, as my wife agrees, will make the time I put into creating it a little more worth it. Sure I have to cover costs and some of my time expenses but it should still be cheaper than games on the shelves, and as I'm making it, it will be limited. The game is called "Tour" and is based on the Tour de France. It borrows from Formula De with regards to moving through dice roll - BUT you make a team of five cyclists in a draft with the other players at the start of the game and they have different strengths and weaknesses. You can use "power" to breakaway from the pack but going it alone will eat into your Resilience more quickly and you may well get caught. Stitting in the pack means you don't tire and if you're directly behind another cyclist you get a +1 movement bonus for streamlining. With the normaly roll either 2, 3 or 4 and the breakaway roll either 3, 5, or 7 there's only a small amount of variance in hwo far you go, making tactics and timing more important leading up to the spring finish. I've sorted out the team mats, and a number of player cards (I have to draw the heads of cyclists and scan them in for the cards). My prototype stages are handdrawn on large cartridge paper. There will be two stages per sheet which means people can collect and buy the stages they desire. I just need to come up with a good way of printing the stages - maybe with my father in law's structural engineering printer that prints onto A1 paper.

That's A Lot Of Card

The recycled greyboard arrived Friday for Border Reivers, again on the second attempt. I'd ordered it from Craft Creations another UK supplier. I'm impressed with the service, the online shop was easy to use, the delivery was very prompt, despite the large size of the order, and delivery only cost me £3.

£3 sounds pretty cheap, but when you consider I had order 0.086 cubic metres of card you begin to realise just how good a deal that was. It came in three enormous boxes, padded with foam chippings, and the postman was delighted that he didn't have to take them back and unload them from the van again. I appreciated his fervour once I'd lugged the damn things up two flights of stairs :-). I'm still waiting for some tools that were part of the order, hopefully they'll arrive soon.

I've spent the weekend constructing the first batch of boxes - those I need to take to The Cast Are Dice in a couple of weeks time. It takes a while, but at least it's not too difficult and doesn't require lots of thought.

Published vs. Print and Play

A while ago I did a post on methods of getting your game published, and I included:

• Submit it to a publisher,
• Publish it yourself in an amateur fashion,
• Publish it yourself professionally.

That very evening, Luke posted with his tales of his Print and Play experiences. I guess that begs the question: Why didn't I consider Print and Play? Technically it counts as publishing, as members of the public get the opportunity to own and play your game.

I've nothing against Print and Play games. I think it's a nice, selfless way of publicising your game - unlike the methods I suggested you are not going to make any money (whereas with the methods I suggested, it's unlikely you'll make any money - but there it that possibility). Here are my perceived pros and cons for Print and Play:

Pros:

• It's free for the designer,
• It's almost effortless for the designer,
• It's practically free for the players.

Cons:

• Giving you game away free may cause people to perceive it to be of lower value,
• Not great for games with lots of (complicated) components,
• Construction requirement may put people off.

I think it's the second listed con that stopped me considering Print and Play for Border Reivers, with it's seventy-two double sided tiles, fifty cards, and nearly one hundred wooden pieces in five different colours it's not an easy game to cobble together yourself. Luke's First Past The Post by contrast is perfect - a card game featuring only cards and a few small finance tokens.

So in conclusion, if you've got a game with simple components such as cards or tokens, that only requires pieces that most players will have to hand such as D6s, counters or pencil and paper and you've no intention to make money from it, then Print and Play could well be the way to go for you.

Printers!

I'm still waiting for the wooden pieces to come over from Germany, but I've now finished the artwork on one of the two print jobs for the printers. This was submitted to them this evening, so hopefully I'll be getting a proof copy fairly soon.

The second print job is waiting on a photo of the completed game, which is in turn waiting on the wooden pieces. Hopefully they'll get here soon, as this second print job is the one that features more construction on my part and hence requires more time.

First Delivery

At 9am this morning we had a rude awaking by the TNT guy who was delivering the dice I had ordered from Plastics for Games. He'd been round already on Friday while I was at work, but it was really easy to arrange a new delivery, far better than some other courier firms I've had to deal with recently.

I'd ordered 200 D6s for the combat, and 100 D10s for the reinforcements, plus 400 card-stands to hold the mountain ranges upright. I've not counted them, but I'm happy with the quality, and the service was remarkably prompt. Delivery seemed a little steep (£15 + VAT inside the UK for a fairly small box), but the dice themselves were pretty cheap. They've a minimum order of £50 though.

I also popped along to Beyond Monopoly briefly to buy some baggies from Jon - believe it or not he was cheaper than several suppliers I had found, plus no delivery charge :-) Sadly I didn't have time to stop and play games...

I'm hoping the wooden pieces will arrive from Germany fairly early next week.

An Update

I've been very busy over the last week or so since I got back from holiday as I'm trying to get the artwork for Border Reivers finished by this weekend so that I can start sending it to the printers in time for The Cast Are Dice on August 12/13th in Stoke-on-Trent. I'll be constructing the tiles and boxes myself, as well as cutting out the cards in an attempt to reduce the costs, so I need to get the stuff back from the printers with time to spare. I'm making a run of 100 copies, fortunately I don't need to construct them all at once.

This last week I've bought a colour A3 printer (so I can look at the artwork myself and make a more accurate prototype for the last bit of blind-playtesting) then promptly had to take the damn thing back as it was trashing the page as it printed. Fortunately, it did ok with card so I could get the cards and the scoreboard done before I exchanged the printer for a (hopefully less knackered) new one.

I've also done the scoreboard design and started the box design, and since I'm doing a short day at work tomorrow I hope to get it finished on time. The only slight worry is the Border Reivers logo and box illustration which my Dad is doing for me (he was an art teacher, and now that he's retired is a full-time artist). Hopefully Dad will come through on time.

I've also set up a business account at the bank, and now that I've got the cards and cheque-books and stuff I've been able to start ordering. It's sooo exciting :-) I'm hoping the dice & card stands will arrive tomorrow, while the wooden pieces (from www.SpielMaterial.De) I ordered today and should hopefully arrive early next week. I've nowhere to put any of this stuff in our tiny flat, should have thought of that first...

Good Progress on Border Reivers

I had the day off work yesterday so I got to spend a decent chunk of time moving Border Reivers forward. I finished the design of the scoreboard, and made some progress on the several of the other components. I also printed out the cards and scoreboard using their new design so that my prototype looks more accurate for the blind playtesting I'll be doing over the next couple of weeks.

I finished off the day with a trip to the bank to set up a business bank account, which went smoothly. At the end of the meeting I asked about a machine that would allow me to accept debit/credit card payments and a convention, and the guy I was speaking to went out to speak to the Branch Manager. The Branch Manager came in and put me off the PDQ machine as it would be too expensive, he then admitted the main reason he'd come in was to see the prototype I'd brought with me - which I duly showed him. He then placed an order :-) They may have got my business but I got theirs too.

Needless to say I was rather pleased with that result.

The tales of a casual games designer: Part 2

Well, I have over 300 views of my First Past The Post entry on BGG and although my own views are in the tens, it means other people ARE looking! Hopefully a percentage will be happy to print it out and give it a try. Anyways, my reason for print and play for this game are numerous but mainly because I see the game as a light filler, the first 'proper' game I've looked at developing and have completed, and one that I AM proud of, but know that it can probably be tested, tried and feedback left. Something I HAVE spoken with my wife about (who'd be much happier if my games invention turned into income, however miserly the amount) is going the whole print and sell approach myself - printing as required on decent quality card with a good finish and put into a well made and printed box. Of course I need a better printer to do that, but if it's a possibility who knows. I think as more games come from my brain, there will at least be one that I think "Oooooh this is it!" in which case I'll look to playtest and then approach a company to produce, although of course games chosen are few, and income for the designer can be very low anyways. My boardgames club was chosen to playtest a game on the verge of full scale production last week and apaprantly it was extremely average. Yeah yeah, there's joy in having a game produced and sold for you, but I want to be PROUD of it, and these first few games I see as paving the way for future successes and while I love First Past The Post and enjoy playing it, I feel there are better games within me.

I'm Back!

I'm now back from my holiday, so there will be some content arriving here soon. I'm now in the big push for Border Reivers trying to get it ready for The Cast Are Dice so I'll be posting less frequently for a while.

While I was away, I didn't play any games (The Wife wanted a well-deserved break from my games obsession), but I did take a notebook, and I did a fair bit of work on Codename:Dollyo, my second game, and I came up with another game idea: Codename: Beachcomber, a tile-laying game where you compete as young siblings trying to find interesting items on a beach, it's early days yet, but I think it has legs...

In other news, I won a copy of Football Tactics 2006 in a World Cup themed competition on BGG while I was away, and I've just been to collect it from the Post Office. I look forward to many games where England don't have a man sent off, and don't go out of a major competition on bloody penalties again.

Holiday

I'm off on holiday tomorrow for ten days in the South West, so I'll not be posting for a bit. I'm hoping to take a copy of Luke's game with me to playtest, and to enjoy a nice, relaxing break.

When I get back things will hot up with Border Reivers as I try to get everything together and construct a bunch of copies to take with me to The Cast Are Dice where I'll be playing it with anyone who's interested and hopefully selling a few copies. If you're going along please swing by and say hello!

The tales of a casual games designer: Part 1

As Jack asked me to say something about the latest game I've been working on, I decided that I might as well incorporate it into my own little series. Anyway, I'll be keeping you, the reader, up to date on the positive and negative feedback of my latest print out and play game "First Past The Post". It's gone out to a few people now so hopefully it'll get some positive reviews and gain some interest. I'm not looking for Lost Cities or San Juan mk.II, rather a game that is seen that "Not bad" and "Worth playing again". That'll be success for me as it's my first light game, breaking away from heavy maths invovled in previous attempts. Laters, Luke

Board Games Design and Publishing: Part 2

As I mentioned in the first part I'll not go into to much detail on the design front as it has been a long time since I did any real design on Border Reivers, so I'm going to concentrate on the publishing side of things.

In this part I'll discuss the options for publishing your game idea once you have designed it. I'm assuming two things - firstly that you want to get your game in front of a reasonable number of people and secondly that you don't have unlimited funds. As I see it, you have three options:

• Submit it to a publisher,
• Publish a limited run yourself in an amateur fashion,
• Publish your own game professionally.

Submitting your game to a publisher is the traditional route. You contact a range of publishers to see if they are accepting submissions (fewer and fewer of them are) and once you find one that is, you submit your game to them. How they like to receive game submissions (rulebook only, prototype, etc.) vary from publisher to publisher so it's best to ask before you submit. This route has the advantage of being the cheapest - the only outlay is a rulebook, or possibly a prototype until you get to the contract stage when you'll need a contract lawyer. In addition, since all the production effort is handled by the publisher, you have far more time available for starting another game design. The downsides are finding a publisher who is accepting submissions, and taking the criticism. You will get criticism. The publishers are likely to be far more experienced at this than you are - how you respond will likely determine the success of your game design. You need to be able to adapt the game design based on the feedback you receive without taking it as in insult. You must also be prepared to be knocked back - it's far more likely than acceptance, especially for inexperienced or unknown game designers.

The amateur self-publishing route is what I've chosen for Border Reivers. You produce a small run (i.e. less than 100 copies) of your game. For such a small run you will not be able to afford to produce all the parts professionally and the cost per game will be exceptionally high. The advantage is that while the cost per game is high the cost for the run is still less than a larger professional run. Also, you end up with a smaller number of copies to get rid of. It's a nice way to make enough copies to get some feedback without committing a small warehouse-worth of storage space. With a limited run you can get printing done professionally (due to the wonders of digital printing) and you can probably afford generic wooden or plastic pieces. However, custom boxes and box inserts, bonding printed sheets to thick card, die cutting and custom plastic pieces will be far too expensive. Unless you're a competent artist (or know one who'll work for free) the artwork will also be lacking. The game will therefore look sub-standard in terms of production quality, but you can sell it based on its exclusivity, or trade on the fact that you're a one man band (which will appeal to some customers). You could also make the run a limited edition or sign the copies to attract more customers. The bottom line however, is that your game needs to be good enough to sell at a fairly high price despite the low quality production. This route requires by far the most effort on your behalf, as not only do you have to spend time sourcing parts and suppliers, but you will probably have to do alot of the artwork and game construction (gluing, cutting, etc.) yourself. This will take an inordinate amount of time - trust me. For this route (and to a lesser degree the next one) you will also need to have selling skills, it's no good making them if they just go mouldy in your basement. If you're going it alone, don't underestimate the importance of sales and marketing - both will be required to successfully sell the run.

If you go down the professionally self-publishing route you need to be damn sure your idea is a winner. Stop, think of all the downsides of your game, playtest it and listen carefuly to the feedback. This route is by far the most expensive, both in terms of hard cash, and also storage space. When I lived in Bristol I met the guys who designed The Buntu Circus. They had their design accepted by Waddingtons or someone similar (I can't remember who), but turned them down as they wanted to re-style the game. Instead they published it themselves. Their small flat was rammed with boxes of the game. To go down this route you need to publish enough copies so that the economies of scale make it cheap enough that you can sell it to stores and distributors at 40%- 60% of the retail price, and still make a profit. You also can't afford to do anything yourself (except possibly box packing), as this will be too time consuming for a large number of games. You'll need somewhere to store them (a garage or large spare room is an absolute minimum - a warehouse would be better). You're looking in the region of 500+ copies, preferably more to get the price per copy low enough. Also you will need to consider the effort required to sell and deliver large volumes to distributors as you are unlikely to be able to get rid of all the copies over the internet or via personal sales.

In the next part I'll go into more detail on option two - the only one I've had any experience of.

Absolute Balderdash Review

Last night we went round to some friends for a really nice meal, and afterwards we played Absolute Balderdash. For once it wasn't me suggesting to play a game, which made a pleasant change.

I'll freely admit that I prefer strategy games to party games. However, Absolute Balderdash is entertaining due to the scoring method. The good: the scoring method requires you to interact with your opponents which adds interest. The bad: the board and pieces are fairly bland, generic party game fare.

In Absolute Balderdash, players take it in turns to read out a question from one of five categories:

• Words: The reader reads out an obscure word, such as 'Titillomania' and the other players must write down a meaning for it.
• People: The reader reads out the name of a person, and the other players have to write down why that person became famous.
• Initials: The reader reads out an acronym, such as ACNE and the other players write down what it stands for.
• Film: The reader reads out the name of a film, and the other players have to write down the main plot line.
• Law: The reader reads out the beginning of a law (e.g. In Brainerd, Minnesota, it is illegal for men to ...), and the other players must complete the law.

While the other players write down their answer the reader must write down the correct answer as provided on the card. The reader then reads out all the answers and players must guess which one is correct. Here's where it gets interesting. The scoring is as follows:

• You get one point for guessing the correct answer.
• You get one point if someone guesses the answer you wrote down.
• You get two points if you're the reader and nobody guesses the correct answer.
• You get two points if you write down the right answer.

The answers tend to be fairly off the wall, so your chance of writing down the correct answer with nothing to go on is fairly slim. Your best bet when it comes to getting points is twofold: write an answer so implausible that your opponents believe it is the right answer; and to correctly guess the right answer from those provided by your opponents - by this point there's more information available and it's much easier. The former is actually a very entertaining mechanic as you try to create answers strange enough for the other players to believe they're the right answer.

In addition to the question mechanics, the game features a scoring track which determines which type of question will be read out and a spinner allowing players who land on certain spaces to spin the spinner and either move back one or forward two or three extra spaces. These are fairly standard, and feature in lots of party games - so nothing particularly interesting there.

Still, Absolute Balderdash is fairly entertaining, even when sober, and if party games are your thing then it's a good example of the genre. I give it 6, but it's probably nearer 7.5 for party gamers.

Hot Games Action! - Part 2

Saturday night the games continued as we had several friends round for a games night. The temperature was equally ridiculous, it was 27 degrees in our flat at 11pm!

First up, Roman, Jochen, Paul and I played my first game of Power Grid by Friedemann Friese - a recent Birthday present (thanks Linz and Cath!). We chose to play not to play the Germany map (despite 50% of the players being German) since the American map is supposed to be slightly easier and none of us had played before. We read through the rules, and once we thought we had the idea we began to play tentatively.

Paul chose the cheap connection costs of the North-East, Jochen headed for Alabama, Roman the Mid-West and I chose the central North. During the first few turns things were fairly close with me lagging behind slightly, but just before stage two began Paul got trapped as we had surrounded him, so he had a turn or two without many expansion opportunities. Jochen chose to go down the renewable resources route, building green Power Station after green Power Station, and obviously benefitting from the reduction in outlay as he didn't need to buy any fuel. From Paul's early lead, Roman and I began to edge into the lead and Jochen started trailing, I'd gone for a few big power plants that were of mixed fuels so they were fairly cheap to power.As the game entered the closing stages I looked to the available resources and noticed there was hardly any coal left, I looked down and realised over the last few turns I've bought new power plants that all run on coal! No! Yup. I'd completely scuppered myself. I bid for the 50 renewable power plant but it was too late. Roman built a whole bunch of power plants after buying the last of the coal. So the final turn ends with us powering: Roman - 19, Jochen and Paul - 17 and me 12 out of my 16 plants. Soundly thrashed!

After that the Germans were all gamed out, so Paul and I cracked open my copy of Ticket To Ride and played three games of that. Paul picked the rules up very quickly and completely out played me over a three game series. He managed to complete high-value routes such as coast-to-coast ones, consistently claimed the longest route and won each game by at least ten points. I was quite conservative on my routes, only keeping all three of my initial draft once, and never choosing to take extra routes during the game. Perhaps that's where I fell down, I never failed to complete a route, but I never got many points for them either.

It was getting late, so we had a quick game of Carcassonne to end the night (at 1:45am). I won the game, but since I'd played hundreds of times and this was Paul's second game I can't really count it.

All-in-all it was a great night, and I got several people to sign up as blind-playtesters for Border Reivers, which is great, as I need some feedback on the rules once I've got them ready.

Despite not winning a game (except a couple of games of Carcassonne against two relative newbies - which don't count) Saturday was a great day's gaming. I got to experience four new games, and play nine games in one day (plus the first two hours of the next one). I'm going to miss the next games club meet as I'm going to be in Devon and Cornwall on holiday, but I'm looking forward to going again soon.

Hot Games Action! - Part 1

I went along to Beyond Monopoly again yesterday afternoon for a few hours of gaming. When I got there the place was pretty busy - there must have been over thirty people including I'd guess about 10 kids. It's nice to see the kids there, they are of course the future of the hobby.

Everyone seemed to be busy, then I noticed a guy hovering over one of the games, I introduced myself and we picked up Euphrates & Tigris a tile laying game by Reiner Knizia, set during the dawn of civilisation in what is now Iraq. While we were setting up and Wolfgang was explaining the rules, Colin and Paul asked if there was room for more so we settled down to a 4-player game. The first thing that struck me was this German version was for 2-4 players, whereas only the day before I had been thinking of buying the English version, which was only 3-4 players. Bizarre. The game was slightly complicated on the surface (we had three beginners playing and we all had difficulty remembering which tiles counted when resolving internal and external conflicts), but obviously had some subtlety hovering under the surface. I was playing fairly randomly for most of the game as I struggled to determine a decent strategy, I also failed to play either of my two disaster counters, which was probably a mistake.

Throughout the game, I was also completely short-changed of green tiles. The reason this matters is that you score independantly in each of the four colours, and your final score is the lowest of your four scores - forcing you to diversify. This was a really interesting mechanic, which I think with a little more practice I could learn to love. It's another game where you keep your scores hidden, so everyone is kept interested as they don't know whether they are still in with a chance of winning. Come the end, we were all convinced we had lost by miles, but it ended up being very close: Paul - 6, Wolfgang - 6, Me - 5, Colin - 4.

After Euphrates & Tigris we looked for another game for the four of us, and someone suggested Medici also by Reiner Knizia, about which I'd heard good things on BGG. It was the first auction game I'd played and as we were setting up Rob came over to join in so we ended up playing a 5-player game. Sadly I forgot to take a photo of medici, so you'll have to make do without one.

The game is set in Renaissance Italy, as players play as merchants shipping goods. The game is played over three turns, and during each turn players take it in turns to turn over cards describing trade goods and then auction them. You bid with your money, which is coincidentally your VPs, so not only do you have a limited supply but you want to end the game with as much as possible. There are five types of goods and the two players who have shipped the most of each type of goods so far get some money at the end of each time. In addition, there are points for having the heaviest ship during each turn. Again I was fairly lost during this game, as I had no idea what a heavy load was until the end of the first turn, and there are only three. I wasn't sure how much to pay for card combinations, and I'm sure I made a few mistakes. At the end of the first turn I was last by a fairly hefty margin, but I was lucky at the end of the second turn, since if it's your turn to draw cards and everyone else's ship is full you have to take whatever cards you draw from the deck, and I was lucky enough to draw two cards of a type I was already shipping this turn. This got me the most of that type and enough cash to get back in the game. In the end I managed to sneak second place behind Colin's comfortable lead: Colin - 122, Me - 83, Rob - 82, Paul - 75, Wolfgang - 72.

The others went to join in a game of Ca$h 'n' Gun$, which didn't sound that interesting from the explanation I got, so Paul and I played a game of Lost Cities. I'd not played it before, and Paul had just bought it so we were both up for it. It turned out to be my third Reiner Knizia game of the day, it wasn't intentional, but when someone has made so many games it's hard not to end up playing them, just through luck of the draw. Lost Cities is a card game of running archaeological digs to explore five lost cities.

I really liked this one. It's quick, it's simple and it's nicely themed. The cards are well illustrated (and the fact that each set of cards makes a larger picture of the appropriate lost city is pretty cool). Despite my appreciation of the game I really sucked at it. I couldn't keep track of my expeditions, and since each starts off worth -20, and the end of the turn always comes round much faster than you expect. I ended up regularly losing money on expeditions, and each turn Paul thrashed me. From 33-11 at the end of the first turn I ended up losing 99-27!

So, why the title? It was baking in there! It was like playing games in a sauna. Still, yet another good session of games that are new to me.

Festival of Games!

It's my local games club day today, so I'm going to pop along for several hours this afternoon, yet again I'm hoping to get to try out a few games I've not played before.

Then in the evening, if that wasn't enough we're having a bunch of friends round in the evening for games. I'm hoping to get a game of Power Grid in, plus anything else from my limited collection, I imagine Puerto Rico, Carcassonne and maybe Ticket To Ride will get outings.

Anyway, I'll get a couple of session reports up over the next few days...

Another New Game!

I went into town today with The Wife and we swung past my FLGS Travelling Man. The Wife was going to buy me a game so I had a look through the stock and I was drawn to two of the items on my wishlist from a couple of weeks ago: Tigris and Euphrates and Ticket to Ride.

It was a toss up, I'd played Ticket to Ride and instantly loved it (like 500,000 other people apparently), and I was keen to play Tigris and Euphrates. In the end I chose Ticket to Ride as the box of Tigris and Euphrates was slightly damaged and TtR plays with 2-5 whereas T & E is only 3-4 - a couple of numbers we don't often get.

Board Game Design and Publishing: 1

Part of the raison d'être of this blog is to recount my experiences of designing and publishing board games. However, the content has been sadly light on this front recently, so I'm going to try to remedy that over the next few weeks with a series of posts recounting the recent history of Border Reivers. They will be interspersed with other posts, but hopefully will form a fairly coherent history of the project.

I'll start this series off with a longer term history to get things up to speed, and then in the next installment start the recent history which is almost entirely to do with self-publishing rather than design.

Border Reivers was conceived during my Christmas holidays in 2002. As I've said before, I had recently played a game of Mighty Empires that had lasted 36 hours without getting anywhere. I liked the concept of the game (fantasy empire-building) I just didn't have whole weekends free to play games like that. For many years I had been developing bits of computer games in my spare time but I was getting frustrated by the amount of effort required to finish a computer game (professional ones take teams of tens of people a couple of years to complete). So I thought I'd try to create a board game for a change.

It carried with it the exciting (but at that point unlikely and remote) chance I might actually finish a project I had started, since it is definitely possible to design a board game by yourself - the vast majority are one person jobs. I'll not go into too much detail about the design effort as it was two years ago now and I've forgotten much of the detail. More on that when I get back to designing my second effort Codename: Dollyo after Border Reivers is out of the door.

Initially I had a concept (which is essentially still in the game) and I started playing the game against myself just scribbling the board onto a sheet of paper, using pieces from Settlers and Carcassonne. I also use coins and glass beads in the early stages. Once the balance of the early elements was sorted out (i.e. it wasn't completely broken) I started inflicting it on my friends and family. I got loads of really good feedback in those early stages which led me to simplify things a great deal, and add the cards (after a suggestion from The Wife). I'm definitely from the start complex and simplify school of board design.

As things started to settle down, and I got a feeling for what was working and what wasn't, the game continued to evolve. During this phase I created several versions of the cards (using Microsoft Publisher and a local printing shop) which I cut out with craft knife and cutting mat, and the prototype army, town, city, tower, castle and mountain range pieces which I sculpted from FIMO. The towns and cities were discs made by rolling the FIMO out flat and then cutting round 2p and 1p coins, the others were little sculptures. At this stage I was interested in making an attractive and interesting prototype to play while I solidified the rules - I had no consideration of minimising production costs. I also went through several incarnations of the tiles, initially badly painted foamboard, working up towards the pencil crayoned thick card ones I'm using at the minute, which are also laminated for reducing wear and tear. During this phase the rules were mostly in my head, with a few notes scribbled down in a notebook.

Once the design was nearly finished I started considering reducing the production costs, as I was looking into getting a few copies made for friends. I replaced four small decks of cards in the players' colours with a single deck, I reduced the number of pieces and tiles the game contained and generally looked to economise. By designing the tiles as double-sided I'd already made things difficult for myself, and over the last few years I have often considered various ways to make the tiles cheaper - but sadly I keep coming back to the double-sided version. I also wrote the rules up in a little booklet, again using Microsoft Publisher.

Once I considered Border Reivers complete, I stopped pushing my friends to play it with me, and I moved on to other things. Border Reivers got shelved, I started designing Dollyo and a couple of other games, and then moved away from my gaming chums. Recently, I decided to go for it again with Border Reivers and at that point I started looking into publishing it myself.

Why not tout it to real publishers and try to get it published professionally? I guess, as much as anything, I relish the challenge of getting the game published as cheaply as possible while maintaining what I consider to be an acceptable quality. I look forward to seeing not only my name in print, but a game that I made in every sense of the word. I look forward to introducing it personally to other gamers, getting their feedback and hopefully selling enough to cover my costs. But mainly I guess it's just down to needing an obsessive hobby :-)

Since the renewed effort on Border Reivers I have made only very small changes (re-tooling the rules on a couple of cards after realising they were pointless!), but other than that the rules are now finished. Before I do the final print run I need to do some blind playtesting where I give the game and rules to some people who've not played it before to see how clear the rules are and to get some last minute feedback on the game as it stands. It'll not be too late to make some slight changes to the rules at that point - hopefully that's all it will need.

The next installment will discuss how I started to go about publishing the game.