Publishing is Cyclical

The Summer has been pretty quiet here at Reiver Towers. After the rush of orders for the release of Sumeria, the quiet Summer months have just seen the occasional restock and submission.

With not a huge amount to do, and mixed sales, I've been feeling a little down and hence I've put off a whole bunch of things I should have been doing. Now all of a sudden I've got loads of submissions, a weekly playtesting session and only three weeks to go until Essen. Panic!

Let me explain the mixed sales comment. In a lot of ways my sales look awesome: I've got year-on-year growth of 1000% for the first quarter of this financial year and 150% for the second quarter. My second best month of sales ever was in June. For the first eight months of 2009 my monthly sales were up (and often by a lot) over the corresponding month of last year.

Of course, as with any statistics you can spin them any way you want, and if you're not feeling too chipper you look at the other side: September was the first month where sales were worse than last year. October last year will be a very hard month to beat. Last year with two games coming out in September and November, the vast majority of my sales (85%) were in the last half of the year, so although I've done much better this year so far the real test will be the next six months when I don't have any new games coming out. My sales so far this financial year are half of last year's total, with half the year gone and no new games on the horizon. I'm hoping for a boost from Essen and the holiday season, but how much of a boost will I get?

Anyway, I digress. The last few months haven't been that busy. All of a sudden there's loads going on and I'm struggling to keep up. I've been approached by Grégory of Vassal Factory to do a Vassal module of Sumeria. I've got to finalise everything for Essen (and by everything I mean: flights, getting my games there and any overstock back, stand display), I'm trying to work on two prototype games and trying to get playtest copies for a third made up and sent off to my blind playtesters. In addition I've got to catch up on my books, do a VAT return and calculate and pay my designers their royalties.

This is definitely a business where I go through cycles. When I'm getting a game ready to go to the printer, or getting ready for a big convention like Essen, there's loads to do (and of course a bunch of other stuff just happens to fall at the same time), then there's a lull until the next period of frantic activity. Fun!

The Curse of the Good Prototype

As a publisher, I'm always looking for new games to publish. I'm fortunate to receive a lot of games submissions on a more or less constant basis. Quite a lot of these are types of games I'm not interested in (mass market, trivia, sports), and so can be instantly discounted. Some sound interesting, but have so many components that I have to rule them out on cost. Lots sound interesting at first blush and so I ask for a prototype to play with my playtesting team.

Some of those I try aren't very good when you actually play it and can be quickly discounted. Occasionally, you get an awesome one which is pretty much ready to go (Sumeria was one of these). The vast majority however are 'good'. Which is a bad thing.

There are tens of thousands of board games out there (BoardGameGeek has over 50,000 in its database) and hundreds more get released every year. If you're a big company like Fantasy Flight or Games Workshop, you've got the marketing budget and market presence that means your games will sell well. If, however you're a little guy like me with a tiny marketing budget and very little market presence your games will have to fight tooth-and-nail to sell themselves. For comparison, the third edition of Space Hulk was released two weeks ago. It has 761 ratings on BGG and 1554 people listed as owning it. Sumeria has been out fourteen weeks and has 100 ratings and 116 owners. Very few people rush down to their local games store to buy the latest Reiver Games release when it arrives on the shelves. Instead they might hear about it, add it to their wishlist or want to play list. Maybe wait for a friend to get it so they can try it out, or hope to find it at a convention where they can try it out. Of the much smaller number of people who are interested and who find a copy to play, only people who really like the game will tend to buy it.

If I publish a game because I think it's good, the chances are most of the few people who play it will also think it's good. Nobody rushes out to by a good game. They rush out to buy a great game. The internal conversation goes: ' I know Bob's got Zombie Ninja Pirates in Space, but it's frickin' awesome, I need my own copy', not: 'I know Bob's got Watching Pastel Paint Dry, but it's a pretty good game, I need my own copy'.

I need games that at least I think are great, in the hope that I can find several thousand other people who think the game is great enough to warrant buying.

Still, it's very hard to go back to a designer and reject their game because it's good. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's solid, it works. But it's not great. It doesn't help that great is subjective.

Hello? Hello? Anyone There?

Sorry it's been such a quiet week here at Creation and Play. Mainly due to a very busy week in the real world. Why so busy? A number of things, all conspiring together to rob you of my virtual company!

First up, I've received a promising prototype which I'm sending out for blind playtesting to a bunch of gamers from around the world. I've only been sent a single prototype, so this means I've got to knock up a bunch of copies to send out. To do this I've had to do several steps, to ensure that the copies I send out at least meet my submission guidelines for prototypes. I've ordered some greyboard (I think it's called chipboard in the US), and made some simple tray and lid boxes out of it. I've not bothered labelling them, but they are the right size - i,e. the size the game would be if I published it. I've ordered the wooden pieces from SpielMaterial.de, then counted them up and bagged them ready to go, I've been to the local toy shop to buy a metric ton of dice (my usual dice supplier Plastics for Games have a £50 minimum order. There's still a bunch of stuff left to do: I need to do the art for the board and the cards, and run my take on the rules by the designer (once I've added some of the prototype art into them for diagram purposes. This is a fairly expensive process (it'll end up costing over £100 once you include the materials and postage), but I need to do this for games before I sign them. I did it a bit late for Sumeria, I'd already signed the design, and had the feedback from blind playtesting been terrible (it wasn't fortunately!), I'd have been stuffed since the art and manufacturing was already in train. The advantage of doing it earlier is that you get longer for the feedback, and more time to respond it, plus if the game tanks, you're not signed up to anything and can cut your losses. The disadvantage is that you end up spending this money for more games, some of which you'll end up dropping and hence will never get a chance to recoup the cost of playtesting. With any luck I'll get the prototypes finished by the middle of next week, and then I can get them in the post.

One of the advantages of re-doing the prototypes is it gives me a chance to check out a few ideas. I get to put the game in a box that is the size I'm intending to use (the same size as Carpe Astra and Sumeria for the moment). I get to re-size components (e.g. boards, cards) to sizes that fit the box or that are ideal for production. In addition, I can to try some layout ideas: what happens if I put that here, or use that iconography? The art will be pretty rough, but you can still get an idea about things from a rough draft.

This time, I can pimp the prototypes a little, since I was sent a box of spares by the Sumeria manufacturers. They were limited in what they could assemble due to a shortfall in the wooden pieces. As a result they had spare punchboards, cloth bags, boards and inserts. As a result I've given each of the prototypes an insert and I'll use the spare Sumeria boards as a substrate for the prototype boards (I'll just glue the prototype art on top).

In addition to the prototypes, I've also been working on some stuff (and the furniture) for my Essen stand. And to top it all, it's a busy week for gaming :-)

Yesterday, Tim, one of my oldest friends (and co-incidently one half of the Best Man double act at my wedding), came round for a day of gaming. We christened my copy of the new version of Space Hulk, and played a few Eurogames, including Sumeria. I had a terrible day (I'm blaming waking up at 5:50am), winning only 2 games of Space Hulk out of eleven games in total. He even beat me twice at Sumeria (a rare event :-) ). The new Space Hulk is lavishly produced (if ever there was a good advert for the economies of scale -Space Hulk is rumoured to be a print run of 70,000+ copies), the board sections are embossed with details, the counters are prolific and on very thick stock (3mm?) and the minis are extremely detailed - if overdone in the posture department. Tim loved Sumeria too, which was cool. Tomorrow (and hopefully Monday) are playtesting days, and I'm at an all day games day on Saturday.

It feels great to be really busy again (the Summer was pretty quiet), but there's so much to do!

Demo Days In America

As I mentioned last time, I've been doing a few demo days, where I go and spend the day in a games shop with demo copies of each of my games teaching them to regulars and random punters. The idea is that I introduce my games to a bunch of people who haven't played them, raising awareness of the games and hopefully boosting sales (both for me and the shop). In addition, I get to improve my relationship with the shop owners.

I've recently done demo days at Inner Sanctum Collectibles in Cambridge and Eclectic Games in Reading. I've also lined up two more: Patriot Games in Sheffield on 31st October and Spirit Games in Burton-on-Trent on 7th November. There are a couple more in the pipeline that I hope to arrange before the end of the year.

In the comments to the last post Todd suggested that I could get some reps to do demo days for me further afield, e.g. the US. It's an interesting idea, but one with some logistical issues.

Stock

When I do a demo day in the UK I take a bunch of stock along with me. If the demo day goes well and the shops sells a lot of games they can get those from me on the day, rather than having to order a lot in from a distributor in advance and having to pay for them whether they sell or not. Any stock they don't want I take home with me, so they are not left out of pocket.

Presentation

In addition, I know that when I turn up I'm presentable, reliable, on-time, I know the rules to each game correctly and I can demo the games enthusiastically.

Geography

I can also cover pretty much the whole of the UK by myself. Ok, Northern Scotland or Northern Ireland is a bit of a trek, but it's possible.

Recompense

This is my job, if I want it to continue to be my job I need to do everything in my power to make the company work. I'm perfectly willing to give up my weekends to achieve that.

America is the biggest market for my games, it has five times the population of UK, is an English-speaking country and as a result 50% of all my sales to distributors have gone to the US. Plus, some to Canada too.

Once the games arrive in the US, things get a little more difficult. My games arrive on the shelves of the store, but my 'small box, big game' strategy hurts me, because by comparison to the other games my games look very expensive (of course shipping the games to the US makes my games more expensive too!). A small, expensive-looking game tucked away on a shelf is unlikely to sell particularly well, especially when no-one locally has played it.

Demo days would really help me here. If I could do a demo day in the biggest store in every state (52 stores), that would significantly boost the sales of my games. I know that there are at least 2,500 hobby stores in the US, so I could really boost my sales if I got my games into a reasonable proportion of those, and then introduced the games to the clientele.

Stock

The aim of a demo day is two-fold, to raise awareness of my games and to sell some games. What would be ideal for the store is that on a demo day the store can get some games on sale-or-return. They can get plenty of stock in to ensure that they don't run out and hence miss sales due to running out of stock, but they don't have to invest a chunk of their capital on games that might take months to sell. How would I get around this in the US? I've got stock here, but it would be expensive to ship to the US. My US distributors have stock in the US, but won't lend it back to me.

Presentation

Reps demoing my games in a store are representing my company (hence 'rep'). When I do it, I know that I'll do a good job, because it's my livelihood that's on the line. I know I'm presentable: smart, polite, knowledgeable about the games and fragrant (in a good way!). How do I pick people that will do a good job and represent my company in a way I'd be delighted with, when those people live at least 3,500 miles away and I've never met them?

Georgraphy

America is huge. Really huge. There's no way someone could cover the whole of it unless it was their job (and possibly their life!). Which means multiple reps. Which means multiplying the presentation and recompense problems by the number of reps.

Recompense

It's still early days for Reiver Games. It seems to be going ok, but I don't have much cash on hand and when I do I want to invest that in more games. How do I make it worth a rep's while to give up their time demoing my games? Do I give them free games? Free T-shirts? Travel expenses? A wage? What are reasonable amounts for each of those things? What about US employment law? How do I prove that I got return on investment?

While it's a nice idea, I don't know how I'd go about solving these problems well enough to make it work for all involved. Any suggestions?

Demo Days

Back in June, just after Sumeria came out, I did a demo day at Inner Sanctum Collectibles in Cambridge. I turned up with my demo copies of each game and a couple of cases of each game and sat and played my games throughout the day in the store. As I said at the time, the day was a great success, and I was definitely interested in doing more of these events.

What with moving house and starting a new treatment, things have been pretty hectic for the last couple of months, so I didn't get to do a second Demo Day until yesterday at Eclectic Games in Reading.

This time, I put a bit more effort into publicising my visit, mentioning it on Twitter and BoardGameGeek.

Although Eclectic Games have a massive games room at the back of the store with loads of tables for playing games, they had kindly set me up on a table in the main store, just behind the till, so I was much more prominent as a result. There was less interest than last time (at ISC a whole bunch of customers had come in specifically to see me and my games, whereas yesterday I think all the interest was from people who just happened to come in). I think next time I should get the store to publicise it as much as possible among their regular board games customers to help boost interest.

I still think the demo days are a good use of my time, and I've just contacted six games shop owners I know to see if they are interested in hosting a games day. I've also asked on BGG for recommendations for other stores that might be interested.

Newsletters

Newsletters, when done right, are what Seth Godin calls permission marketing:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

I've asked everyone on my mailing list for their permission to send them a newsletter every quarter, and in every case they have signed up, saying they want to receive this information.

I offer people who meet me at conventions the chance to sign up and I offer people who email me the chance to sign up. Only those that want to get the emails. It's not spam.

In the newsletter, I always list the conventions I'll be attending over the next few months, how each of my games are doing and any information about new games in the pipeline. After Tuesday's discussion about a sale, I decided to offer the sale only to those people on my mailing list.

Pros

Only offering the sale prices to those people on my mailing list is a way of giving them something back for giving me permission to send them marketing information. It says that I appreciate their permission.

Although I am undercutting some retailers with my sale prices, it's a limited time offer, to a select group of people, so it shouldn't annoy my distributors and retailers.

Cons

Because it's going out to a limited number of people, lots of whom will already own my games, it won't boost my sales that much.

Because it's only mentioned to people on my mailing list, although it is a reward for being on my mailing list, it doesn't act as an incentive to join my mailing list as those people who aren't on it will never hear about it.

It's led to a few sales so far, not sure how many more to expect.

September Could Be Slow

I'm expecting September sales to be fairly low, since I've no new games coming out, and I hope lots of people will be waiting to buy from me at Essen next month (and get the Sumeria 2-player expansion free with a purchase of Sumeria!).

So far, every month's sales this year has been better (sometimes a lot better) than the corresponding month last year. So far so good. But in fairness, last year I had a few hand-made copies of It's Alive! in April and May, then nothing until September when the professional re-print of It's Alive! arrived.

Last year's September was at the time my best month ever, more than twice the turnover than the previous June (which was the best I'd had so far). Of course it didn't keep the record long as October was when I went to Essen for the first time, and last October's sales were nearly five times September's, which remains my current record.

The It's Alive! re-print will have been out one year on Friday. Last September's figures were the result of the pre-orders and the initial stocking orders for It's Alive! With no corresponding new game launch this year I'm going to struggle to match last year's September figures this year. I've been considering doing a September sale to try to boost sales this month.

To make it worthwhile, the sale price has to be low enough to entice people to buy from me (not a local internet retailer), while still making me some money after I've paid the shipping and VAT. I figure I've got three options: free shipping, discounted games with full price shipping and discounted total (shipping and games). I'll consider these against example UK and US online pricing (I've used Games Lore and Board and Bits respectively as examples). I've used Carpe Astra as the example (it's in the middle of my game price range) and the middle price for Boards and Bits shipping ($8.50). Note that both online retailers offer discounted (or free) shipping if you place a large order, so me considering a purchase of just Carpe Astra is a little disingenuous.

Free shipping. My price for Carpe Astra: £22 (approx $36.30). Games Lore Price: £20.20. Boards and Bits price: $34.10. Makes the game more affordable for US customers (but still more expensive than buying from an online retailer in the US), and doesn't help UK customers at all (they can get it cheaper from a UK online store, or from a shop). I'd make a decent amount money on a UK sale (£22 - £3.14 shipping = 18.86 which is £16.40 ex VAT), less on a US sale (£22 - £8.30 shipping = £13.70 which is £11.91 ex VAT).

Discounted games, full price shipping. If I did 30% off: My UK price: £15.60 + £3.14 shipping = £18.74, My US price: £15.60 + £8.30 = £23.90 (approx $39.50 - almost full retail price!). Helps the UK customer, but doesn't help the US customer at all (since the shipping is not discounted and very expensive). I'd make a reasonably amount of money each sale (£13.56 ex VAT).

Discounted total. Say 40% off the total game and shipping price: My UK price: £25.14 * .6 = £15.08, my US price: £30.30 * .6 = £18.18 (approx $30). This would be a great deal for the UK customer, and a reasonable deal for the US customer. My ex Vat pricing would be £10.38 for a UK sale (more than a distributor sale, less than a shop sale), £8.59 for a US sale (in the same range).

So, I wonder. Would this work? Would I sell any copies as a result? Would I look desperate? If I decide to do it, then I can advertise it in my quarterly newsletter which is due soon, and on BoardGameGeek and Boardgame News.

A How To Guide to Submissions

I've received over 150 submissions in the three years I've been running Reiver Games. I've published four games. Not many make the cut! But I'm on the lookout for more games all the time. I'd love to have a full pipeline, where I know the next 15 games I'm going to publish. I'm nowhere near that point yet.

I'm most interested in light- to medium-weight strategy, ideally language-independent games with a fun theme that play in an hour or less, like the games I've already published. In this post I give some advice to aspiring game designers on how to submit a game to me.

Obviously this information only applies to submitting a game to Reiver Games - other companies will have different procedures and preferences. But I would imagine a lot of the information is similar across the board among those publishers who accept submissions.

I run a three stage submissions procedure, with the first two stages designed to weed out things I'm really not interested in and the third being the real test of the games.

Stage 1: Overview

In the first instance I ask for a couple of paragraphs via email describing the components, theme and major mechanics. This stage is designed to quickly weed out broad categories of games I'm not interested in: trivia games, mass-market games, sports games and card games playable with a standard deck of cards. I can also rule out a few games based on other criteria: if I find the theme offensive or games featuring very expensive components (if it's got 1,200 plastic space ships I'm not going to be able to make a small print run affordably). I also like a brief description of the number of players, game length and age category.

Stage 2: Rules

The next thing I ask for is a copy of the rules. To be honest very few games fail at this stage, only those that I realise have too many components or actually sound more mass-market after reading the rules that they did during reading the overview.

For the rulebook, the following can definitely help:

• Get it proof-read by someone with excellent English - the more readable it is, the easier it is to understand how the game works.
• Get the game blind-playtested: get someone who hasn't playtested it yet to learn it from the rules. This is a great way to find out what is missing or unclear in the rulebook.
• Add diagrams. They don't need to be works of art but they can help to clarify the more complicated bits of the game.
• Read the rulebooks of a few of your favourite games. Try to copy the style and structure of a well-written rulebook for a published game.

Stage 3: Prototype

If I still like the sound of your game I'll ask you to send me a prototype to try out with my playtesters. This will ideally take several months but with some of the submissions I've received it's taken a lot longer than that. Here's what I look for in a prototype:

• A box. Seriously. It doesn't have to be a nice tray-and-lid style board game box, a corrugated mailing box is fine, but it makes it easier to store, easier to cart around and easier to send back.
• Include the rules. Again it sounds obvious, and I know you've already sent them to me via email, but if you don't I won't always check the box before I take it to a playtesting session and not having the rules in the box is very frustrating if I've just got all the bits out to play with.
• Include all the bits required. They don't need to be wazzy plastic miniatures, custom wooden figures or little FIMO sculptures, generic wooden pieces is fine. Sure, I've got a spares box, but there's no guarantee I've got the three different sizes of pieces in eight different colours that you need.
• Ensure cards are shufflable. If you can't print onto thick card, you can print onto paper and put them in card-sleeves with Magic: The Gathering commons for added rigidity.
• If your game includes cardboard counters with labels attached use a decent glue. Label paper is good. Permanent spray adhesive is good. It's worth knowing that glues can fail as they age. It may seem fine at the beginning, but after a couple of weeks it might fall apart. Test it at home first.
• Good art is not required. I'll be redoing the art anyway to ensure it fits with my company style. It's not worth paying a designer to do the art for you, or spending hours on it. I'll probably want to change a few things, and it's easier to do that on a simple home-made prototype than a professional-looking product. Prototype art doesn't affect my decision, it's the gameplay I'm testing not the aesthetics.
• If your game has a board make sure it fits in the box. Making a quad- or six-folding board isn't straightforward, but it is possible to do at home (I've made a few, and several submissions I've received have got them). If it fits in the box it's easier to cart around and send back to you if necessary. I'll not necessarily keep the box you shipped it in for all of the (potentially several months of) time I'm testing it.

If at the end of all that I don't want to publish your game (the most likely outcome!) I'm happy to return the prototype at your expense, or I can dispose of it - your call.

Games Designer's Block

It's just as well that I mostly publish other peoples' games designs because since I've started working on Reiver Games full time I've struggled to make progress on my own designs. I've had a few ideas for games, usually theme first, and then I've struggled to get anywhere thinking up mechanisms that mesh with the theme and yet sound even vaguely interesting.

Fortunately, I've received a lot of submissions, so my lack of inspiration isn't getting in the way too much.

When I receive a submission I have three possible outcomes in mind:

• If I really like it then I want to publish it. This is the ideal outcome, I'd love to be in the position where I know what the next ten games I'm going to publish are.
• If I'm not wowed by the game, then I want to reject it. I get lots of submissions that work fine, but I'm just not feeling the love for them. It's hard to give the designer a good reason why I turned these down, but at the end of the day I only want to publish games that I think are awesome. If I think it's pretty good, that's sadly not good enough.
• The third outcome, is a trickier call. When I receive a submission that I think has the potential to be an excellent game but needs a lot of work in my view, then I offer to co-design it with the designer. This is what I did with Carpe Astra and Ted Cheatham.

The third option is not optimal for the same reason that I find it easier to publish someone else's game - a lack of perspective.

When you're designing a game it's hard to draw a line under it. You make a first version. It's awful. You tweak it. The second version is better. You tweak it again. That version is worse! You tweak it again. This process continues for months or years and you lose all perspective. It becomes your baby. You're desperate for it to succeed and as the game approaches complete it gets harder and harder to tell if your fine tweaks are making things better or worse. When is good enough? When is awesome? When do you stop fiddling with it?

When I receive a submission I miss out on all this, I get a game - I try the game. Either I love it and want to publish it or I don't. There's no attachment - it's just another prototype, probably from someone I've never met or never even heard of. I can be completely objective. Is it worth me risking thousands of pounds of my own money to playtest, manufacture and sell this game? Will it make me any money or will I be left holding lots of stock and a sizable debt?

Despite the disadvantages I still sometimes consider this. Only if I get a game that I think could become one I think is awesome, but that needs a whole bunch of work to get there. Is it a bad game as it stands? Not necessarily. It could have an awesome theme, or a brilliant mechanism, but it's just not a game that excites me or that I think would sell well as it stands.

In these circumstances I'm willing to work with the designer to make significant changes. I make the changes I think of and send it back to the designer for comments and more suggestions. The designer makes a bunch of changes of their own and sends them to me. I try them out, and so on. This process carries on until we're both happy with it.

Last week I received a prototype that sounded interesting. It was a sci-fi themed game and I got to try it out last Friday. As it stood I found the game too long and lacking interesting choices in a couple of areas. But I could see the potential and I had a bunch of ideas about how to move it towards the sort of game I want to publish. I approached the designer about co-designing and he's up for it.

I woke up at 4am this morning, my head buzzing with ideas about the game. I couldn't get back to sleep and at 6:30am I finally got up and went and started making a prototype with the ideas I'd been thinking about. I've just tried it out and it doesn't work. But I'm still excited about it, and I've a few ideas that might improve things. I'd like to get some changes that at least sort of work before sending them to the designer - I don't want to look like a total chump!

Playtesting

I've moved house twice this year. Once from York to Bedfordshire (160 miles / 270 km) in January for The Wife's new job. Then again in June from the rented house in Bedfordshire to our own place in Northamptonshire (8 miles / 13 km).

While lots of things about the move have been awesome (nice new home, a garden, more space, meeting new people, swanky new office) one of the things I've really struggled with is getting gaming in. In York I used to go to Paul's games nights twice a week (about a mile away), and I tried to get to the Beyond Monopoly! club whenever I could (it was on twice a month so I missed lots but there were plenty of options). In addition, I held a playtesting night at mine once a week too.

Since moving down here I've found a group through BoardGameGeek that I play with on Tuesday evenings, and I've even managed to get along to one of their Sunday sessions yesterday. They're a great bunch of guys, but the 15 mile trek is a lot less convenient than Paul's games night was in York :-( In particular, if I can't drive due to MS there's no gaming for me :-(

I found a club on Thursday nights in Newport Pagnell, but since we moved the second time the 25 mile trip has got in the way of me actually attending. Last month I went along to another club in Leighton Buzzard, which was about 40 miles, but for a full day of Saturday gaming it was worth it :-)

Playtesting is even harder to arrange. There's no guarantee of the quality of a prototype (in terms of game play - the build quality doesn't bother me), so I feel uncomfortable asking people to potentially waste a good chunk of what might be their only games night for several weeks on a game that might be rubbish. So I'd much rather do a playtesting session, where everyone knows what they are letting themselves in for. I don't know anyone who lives locally, so I'm limited to people I find through my games nights, games clubs and BGG. Since all these people live at least 15 miles away (often significantly more than that), it's not so easy to arrange. I've started having sessions at Terry's house (again about 15 miles away - I've officially moved to the arse-end of nowhere!), and ideally I'd like to do them around once a week - I'll have to see how much I can impose on Terry's generosity!

Despite all the problems I had a really good week's gaming last week. I went along on Tuesday to Tony's, then with Tony off work I went over to his again on Thursday during the day for some proper games and a playtest. Friday was more playtesting at Terry's (six plays of four different games), and then on Sunday I got over to CJ's for another afternoon of gaming (including another playtest). This week is looking good too - Tuesday evening at Tony's, playtesting during the day on Wednesday or Thursday, I'm seeing Paul in York on Friday and then hopefully CJ's again on Sunday. Hopefully I'm getting things sorted down here now.

Essen Preparation

I'm starting to sort out my Essen visit for this year. Last year I went to Essen for the first time, as an exhibitor and as an attendee.

Having never been before I had no idea what to expect, nor really how to prepare. I had released It's Alive! in September (about six weeks before Essen), but I had very little in the way of distribution and very little buzz about me. Carpe Astra, which I had hoped to release at Essen had been delayed and so I was just toting It's Alive! and a hand-made prototype of Carpe Astra.

I'd been approached by Peter Struijf of Geode Games to see if I'd be willing to share my stand with him and I was. Turns out it was a great idea, not only did Peter's Krakow 1325AD game draw lots of extra people to my stand, but Peter was a great guy and we had a lot of fun hanging out on the stand over the five days. Peter's boundless enthusiasm was infectious :-)

This year, with a year's experience of Essen and three games to sell (plus the Sumeria 2-player expansion promo) I hope to be able to build upon last year's experience and have an even more successful show.

To determine if the show is 'successful', I need some benchmarks, to gauge its success.

The simplest and most honest success criteria will be do I turn over more at this year's show than I did at last year's? This is easy to work out since I already know what last year's turnover was, and I have to work out what this year's is in order to pay it in to the bank :-). Cash sales are also good for my business, as the mark-up I get on each sale is much higher than I would get selling to a distributor. This boosts the average value of my sales, and reduces the number of games I need to sell to break even on a particular game (none of my games have broken even yet).

On top of the simple cash turnover, there's a more involved, but still financial criteria: October's turnover. This includes not just the cash turnover at the event, but invoiced sales to shops and distributors at the show. Last year's October turnover was awesome - it's still my best month ever by quite some way, since as well as the cash sales on the trade show floor I also sold a lot of games to new distributors. This year things will be very different, since most of my distributors already have stock (though I'm still waiting for most of my European distributors to pick up Sumeria).

Then there are the other less tangible criteria: raising awareness of my games and my company, attracting new distributors, finding new artists and designers, projecting a good image of my company, etc. How to judge success on those criteria is much harder.

Last year at Essen, I did very little in the way of preparation. I spent £50 on some glossy posters, which I hung from the back of my stand with simple poster frames. I bought some material to use as table-clothes and just piled my games along the back of my stand in their cartons - a warehouse-like wall of brown cardboard. I also got It's Alive! listed in the 'Spiel fuer Spiel 2009' handbook, a full colour handbook printed by Dagmar de Cassan of Spielen in Osterreich.

This year, I'd like to improve the pre-fair awareness of my company and my games to draw more people to my booth. I'll be listing in Spiel fuer Spiel 2010 again, and I'll be spending 100 Euro on an improved listing in the SpielBox preview which includes not just the basic info (number of players, title, designer, etc.) but photos and descriptions of the games.

I'd also like to put some more thought into the stand design to make it look a little more professional (without adding hugely to the cost).

If you've got any ideas or advice I'd be very glad to hear them :-)

Back - Sort Of

Well, I've had a week off, mostly spent lying in bed and I have to tell you I'm exhausted!

The treatment I was receiving last week was five days of intravenous infusion with an experimental drug. The drug (originally used for treating Leukaemia) works by intentionally destroying your immune system. Since in MS your own immune system starts attacking the myelin sheaths that insulate your nerves in your brain and spinal cord, the study doctors figure that killing off your immune system and letting it regrow might fix the problem. The results of previous clinical trials have been very encouraging.

Of course, the downside is I've just spent a week being pumped full of very toxic chemicals and now I have no immune system, so I'm very vulnerable to infection and food poisoning. Also, I'm completely knackered, despite not having done anything for a week. I'm under Doctor's orders to take things very easy for a couple of weeks.

Much as I'd like to continue lying on the sofa watching telly (it was pretty much all I was capable of this weekend), I've got a swollen inbox now after a week off, and I need to get the art for the Sumeria 2-player expansion to the manufacturers by Friday, so I can't just totally slack off.

I'm also keen to make some progress on the Sumeria computer game which has been on hold for a few weeks. I'll have to see what I've got the energy for...

Off Topic: Week Off

As many of you will know, I have MS.

Next week I'm starting treatment with a new drug and will be in hospital all week. As a result there won't be any posts here and any Tweets I make will be few and far between.

This means that the next version of the Sumeria computer game will be at least a few weeks away. When I get back I'll also have to finish off the Sumeria 2-player expansion, as that will need to go to the printers fairly quickly.

See you all on the flip-side :-)

Sumeria 2-Player Expansion

Sumeria was originally submitted to me as a 2-4 player game. I played the 2-player version several times and really liked it.

During play-testing, one of my blind playtesters found a weakness in the two-player game that made the second city-state worth less than the third (and the choice of influence counters pretty meaningless). Since the 2-player version also added to the cost of the game (since it needed extra wooden pieces), Dirk and I decided to drop it so the game was only 3-4 player. Later in play-testing a slight change to the 2-player rules fixed these problems, but it stayed out of the game as released.

Until now! I've decided to release the 2-player version of Sumeria as a promo expansion at Essen. What's the deal? Buy Sumeria from me at Essen and you'll get the limited edition promo expansion free! It includes 6 extra trader pieces in each of the four player colours, a sticker to add to the board to show a fourth player turn per round and a rulesheet (in English and German again). All wrapped up in a plastic baggie.

If you've already got a copy of Sumeria (well done :-) ), the expansion will be available to pre-order from my website shortly, and if I have any left after Essen they will continue to be available there. To keep the cost to a minimum, I've decided on baggie packaging rather than a small box, this means it probably won't be available in shops ever, but I hope it will only cost £2 plus postage and packaging from my website.

This is my first time making both an expansion and a convention promo, it will be interesting to see how it goes...

Translation Woes

A while ago I mentioned how I had created translation grids for the rules for all my games to make it easier for volunteers to translate the rules of my games into other languages. It seems to have worked. I've had a lot of translations done of my rules and this week I've received a couple more (Sumeria into Hungarian and Carpe Astra into Spanish).

So far all well and good. The translation grids work a treat, and make the layout of a new version pretty straightforward. Until everything goes wrong!

Several weeks ago I received a translation of Carpe Astra into Russian. Great! The same guy (thanks Yegor!) had done the other games too, and I'd already done Sumeria, so I started on Carpe Astra.

The translation grids make it really easy to just drop the translated text into the original Adobe InDesign document, using the same images and fonts. At least they do until you pick a stupid font. I'd used Agency FB Condensed, a narrow font that looked vaguely sci-fi, for the Carpe Astra rulebook and cards. Sadly this font did not support the cyrillic alphabet - when I pasted the translated text into the document all I got was little empty rectangular boxes where each character should have been. So I switched to Arial (it's not that important that the font is correct after all).

While this fixed the initial problem (Arial supports the cyrillic alphabet) it's a much wider font than Agency FB Condensed and the Russian translation was normally longer than the corresponding English text - so the translation no longer fits in the same number of pages. My first attempt at fixing this was to drop the font size from 12 point down to 11 (and fix all the layout problems this caused). But after a bit more cut-and-paste it was clear that 11pt wasn't small enough so I went down to 10pt (and fixed all the layout problems again). Guess what? Still not small enough. Running out of patience I shelved the translation and I admit it has been a few weeks since I last made any progress.

The arrival of the new translation grids forced me to go back to it however, and today I finally nailed it. The solution was finding out that InDesign allows you to change the width of a font - effectively allowing me to create an 'Arial Condensed' - a narrower version of Arial. This meant I could change the font size back to 11pt and nail it. It still took a bunch of work and a lot of fiddling to get the diagrams and their captions laid out correctly but the job is finished and off to the translator for proof-reading. This means I can concentrate on the other two translations over the weekend.

The moral of this tale? I'm not really sure, other than learn the abilities of InDesign so that I can fix this problem the right way first time!

Sumeria V0.1

Well, the whole trying to run this through BoardGameGeek thing didn't work very well - it's down at the moment :-(

So I'll do it here instead. The first version of the Sumeria computer game is now available (ish!) on my website: Sumeria computer game with any luck if you download that MSI file and then run it, it will install Sumeria on your computer.

First a few provisos. This is a very early version to get some feedback about the user interface - very little actually works yet. What does work:

• You can install it
• You can start a new game from the Game menu
• You can choose the number of players, their names and the colours they play.
• You can highlight a state by moving the mouse over its tile
• You can set up the game by seeding the board with the appropriate number of traders.

What doesn't work? Anything else! Most notably you can't play the game. There's no AI and you can't get the game to work across the internet with remote players - it's three or four humans around the one computer.

The next release will incorporate feedback on this one and allow you to play the game on a single machine with no AI.

I'd really appreciate any feedback you have on what I've done so far - in the comments here for until BGG is back up.

Sumeria Computer Game

The first bit of work I did on the Sumeria computer game was a bottom up approach, write the code which kept track of the game mechanics and state. Though it was great to get it working there was very little to show for it, apart from a test suite that told me all my tests were passing - there was no UI at all.

The last couple of days I've been concentrating on getting some UI written so there's something to show for my efforts. There's not much, but enough to show you what I've achieved so far. Initially I've been working on getting the beginning of the game set up and displayed and the basic UI coded. The next step will be to get the game playable, but at least it visibly does something now!

Initially, the game shows an empty window (I'll put a splash screen there eventually), and allows you to read the rules (from the Help menu) and start a new game (from the Game menu):

Starting a game creates a game and shows the players position and the board and tiles as at the start of the game:

Although you can't do anything yet, I've included a couple of UI feedback mechanisms. When you move the mouse over one of the state tiles at the bottom of the board, that tile and state tile it corresponds to are highlighted:

Similarly, when you move the mouse over a settlement, that settlement, its state and state tile are all highlighted:

It's not much, but you can already see where I'm hoping to go with this.

I'm intending to run this as a semi-Agile development effort. I'll be releasing early versions for feedback from members of the game-playing public. I hope to post the first version (with basic UI but nothing working game-wise) on Wednesday. If you'd like to take part in the testing, or just look at what I've done, please subscribe to this BGG thread where I'll post release announcements and download instructions.

BoardGameGeek and Game Ownership

BoardGameGeek allows people to keep track of which games they own. It's a useful feature that I use myself, and when meeting up with someone else you can always say 'Look at my BGG collection - is there anything of mine you fancy playing?' which is pretty cool too.

I know exactly how many games I've sold to distributors, but I don't know how many of those the distributors have sold to shops, nor how many of those the shops have sold to gamers. They same follows with direct sales to shops. A tiny fraction of my sales are direct to a gamer, so I know those have gone to gamers, but that's not much as a fraction of total sales.

Why am I interested? A game sold to a distributor that ends up sitting in their warehouse for months isn't doing me any favours at all. The distributor will be less inclined to buy more stock as it's costing them money (in the initial outlay to me and warehousing space) but not making them any. Similarly a game that ends up sitting on the shelf for a long time in a shop won't convince the shop to get more stock in. In the ideal world the game is in the hands of a gamer who loves it and plays it regularly with their friends.

It's hard to work out where the games are. I can ask my distributors how much stock they have left, but that still leaves me unsure whether the games are in the hands of shops or gamers. In the case of direct sales to shops things are a little better as I can ask them how many they've got left, but in that case again it's only a small proportion of the total sales at my end.

Here's where BGG's stats come in handy. The people listed as owning the game are gamers. So I can get some indication of how many of my sales to shops and distributors have reached actual gamers.

Of course, as with anything statistics they can't be relied on as a final number, but they are indicative. There will be people who've bought one of the games and don't have a BGG account, and others who do have BGG account but don't bother keeping track of the games they own. However, almost everyone who lists themselves as own a game will have it (some people might do it by accident or forget to remove it from their collection if they sell or trade it away).

Because I made a couple of small runs of Border Reivers and It's Alive! which almost entirely sold directly to gamers, I've got an idea about the ratio of gamers who list themselves as owning a game to the number of end customers I've sold it to.

If you look at the stats for Border Reivers (100 copies made) then it lists 42 people as owning it - 42% of the copies in circulation. Similarly, when I had sold out of the limited edition of It's Alive! about 110 people listed it as owned of the 300 copies made (37%). So I reckon I can extrapolate that about 40% of the copies in gamers' hands are listed as owned on BGG.

Assuming that 40% figure is evenly vaguely accurate, then approximately half the copies I've sold of the second edition of It's Alive! are in gamers' hands, and it's also about half for Carpe Astra. Sumeria (which is still fairly new) is around one third. Not sure what to do with this information, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Designing Again

For the first time in ages I actually did some work on one of my own board game designs yesterday.

Yesterday was a weird day. I was up at 6am, and then on the road before seven for a hospital visit in Cambridge (about 60 miles away). It was a morning of strange neurological tests while they determine if I'm a suitable candidate for a new treatment. I then rushed back home as my friend Mal was stopping in on his way back home from the Latitude music festival down here in the South. I got a text from him upon my arrival home to say he was still about an hour away, so I rushed into town to pay in a cheque from a late paying distributor. It turns out my walking isn't so good at the moment, the 2 mile brisk walk left me very tired and I was really struggling by the time I got home. But I did make it back in plenty of time for Mal's arrival.

We spent the afternoon playtesting a few games including a couple of changes to Border Reivers - my first games design.

For those of you who don't know it, Border Reivers is a light civilisation/wargame themed around the border squabbles between the clans of Northern England and Southern Scotland in the 13th to 16th centuries. Each turn, you can plays cards, recruit more cards and armies (through gambling some of your funds on a die roll) perform an action with each of your armies and then claim income from your settlements. Armies can build fortifications, settle down to create new settlements, mine gold from a mine location or move.

Two of the biggest problems I find with the first edition are the recruitment die rolls and uneventful turns.

At the beginning of your turn, you get to roll a ten-sided die twice per city, once to recruit a new army and once to recruit a card. If the die result is less than the amount of money you gambled on that die roll (e.g. a result of 0 will always get you a reinforcement even if you spend 0, a spend of 9 will guarantee you a reinforcement and a spend of 4 will get you a 50% chance - 0, 1, 2, 3, 4), you get the army or the card of your choice from a deck of cards. You lose the money whether successful or not. Since you can have up to three cities, you could be doing up to six of these rolls at the beginning of each turn. But it gets worse! A couple of the cards give you an extra roll for armies and an extra roll for cards, so if you had all three cities and all six cards, you'd be getting a staggering 12 reinforcement rolls a turn. I can't ever see that happening, but certainly three cities was not uncommon in the games I played. Most of those rolls you wouldn't spend money on, so it would be a lot of die rolling, hoping for 0s.

The other big problem was uneventful turns. In the game you had very few armies (by design), so there were often turns when you didn't want to move them unless you got another army or a particular card. So you'd make your reinforcement rolls - fail, not do anything and then claim your income and that was your turn done. Not much fun :-(

I like the rest of the design of the game, but I think in hindsight (and based on the feedback I've received) these are the two biggest problems in the game.

I'd had a bunch of ideas that might help fix these problems, but I've not tried them out as yet, so when Mal came round for the afternoon we wanted to give it a try. Mal and I have played a lot of Border Reivers over the years, at first I always used to win, but recently Mal's started beating me :-(

Time to change the rules ;-)

In his scientific way, Mal had wisely suggested we try one of the changes at a time, rather than making sweeping changes to everything. So first of all we tried a fairly simple change:

Cities give you one roll for army reinforcements and a free card every turn.

What I had hoped was that this would reduce the number of turns in which you had nothing to do, as you would always be able to get a card each turn. Since cards allow you to attack your opponents indirectly (stealing their income, ambushing their armies in the field or causing their settlements to rise up against them) or aid with direct attacks (reducing the effectiveness of their fortifications) I had hoped the game would be more aggressive as a result.

Initially, things seemed to be going well, we used the cards a lot and did start attacking other other fairly early. The game see-sawed a bit, like it often does and there were lots of nail-biting fights.

However, after a promising early start the game didn't go anywhere. Fights in Border Reivers are brutal, the most likely conclusion is that everyone dies :-) As a result by the time you had broken through your opponent's outer defences you almost certainly didn't have enough troops remaining to attack his city. This was additionally hampered by the fact that he was getting a card (or more) each turn, and hence would almost certainly have a militia card ready to defend his city from attack. The game continued like a couple of punch-drunk boxers unable to land a blow on each other for way too long (maybe an hour and a half - usually our games lasted twenty to forty minutes). Eventually, we gave up, convinced it was never going to end :-(

Mal mentioned that this just went to show how well balanced the original version was.

I think the next thing to try is replacing the die rolls with a fixed cost for armies and cards - this will definitely fix problem A and might help to fix problem B if the cost is low enough, but clearly there is a point where the cost is too low!

More Advertising

Until now my advertising has been limited to three places:

• BoardGameGeek
• Boardgame News
• In the Greater Games Industry Catalog

Each of these has their pros and cons as you'd expect. BoardGameGeek has a huge number of hits each month and is mostly targeted at the customer. The downside is that one of their revenue streams is to get people to pay money to 'join' the site, and this allows them to block all adverts from the site (I do this!). Since the most hardcore users are likely to be the ones who join, they're the least likely to see my ads, but the most likely to buy games :-( Plus, it's expensive.

Boardgame News comes in a bit cheaper, and in previous campaigns I've had more enquiries from people who saw an ad there than those who saw the same ad on BGG. Again, it's mostly targeted at customers, and the more hardcore ones at that.

The Greater Games Industry Catalog is as you'd expect from the name targeted at industry - shops and distributors. It's pretty cheap to get a page ad in there and they give you a listing every quarter for free so that's good. I've no idea if advertising in there has helped at all though - I've not had anyone mention they've seen my ads in there.

Now that I've got a pretty good distribution network, my next aim is to get more shops stocking and customers buying my games. How to reach that audience? A good question.

A couple of my distributors offer services to their suppliers to market games to their customers (the shops). So customers of mine want me to be a customer of theirs too. Weird.

Alliance Game Distributors the largest distributor in the US have a monthly trade magazine, Games Trade Magazine which they send out to their customers - the US shops. I can give them a wad of cash to place an advert for one or more of my games in the magazine, which would hopefully lead to more sales to the shops and then more customers noticing the games in the stores. It's pretty expensive though.

ACD Distribution, another large US distributor are offering me the chance to place flyers in every order they ship for a few weeks. I can even make the flyers like posters so they serve a triple purpose: raising awareness of my games with the store staff, giving the store owners something to decorate their store with and raising awareness of my games with customers in the store. It's a bit cheaper than the Alliance option and it hits both the shops and the customers. Sounds good. But to be most effective the posters need to be put up in the stores and I've no control over whether or not they will.

Just to make things even more bewildering, I've no experience designing adverts or posters so I've no idea how to make them look good, or even what information to include. I've asked for a back issue of GTM to get a better idea.

Any suggestions of which route is the best to go down, or what information to include?