Two Thirds And Two Thirds

So we are very nearly two-thirds of the way through the FlickFleet Kickstarter campaign and we are just over two-thirds funded. Which is alright I think, according to Kickstarter themselves 98% of campaigns that reach 60% end up funding, so I'm still optimistic, but the last week or so have been very flat and a test of our nerves.

We've now had a few days where the total was slightly negative and lots where the total was barely above zero - we're really hoping for a big jump on the last few days (which it seems most campaigns have).

Running a Kickstarter campaign that doesn't fund immediately is incredibly stressful, especially watching the pledges come in and then get cancelled. I wouldn't recommend it for the anxious.

Still there are some signs of hope, I'm being interviewed by Paul Grogan of Gaming Rules! while I'm in the US this week, and hopefully Geek & Sundry too. The podcast interview with Coaching for Geeks goes live next weekend and we've got a decent number of people who are following the project and will be notified at 48 hours before it closes.

The marketing funnel (I hate myself for saying that!) stats for the project are currently:

Watched the video: 1,598
Watched it to the end: 888
Following the project: 603
Backed the project: 214 (including 73 followers)

So there's 530 people who are interested enough to get a notification, but haven't yet backed.

Fingers crossed!

Stay On Target!

We’re now on day 12 of our 30 day Kickstarter campaign for FlickFleet. After a strong start we’re now in the doldrums. The daily pledge total is usually around £250-£400 (we need £246 on average every day to fund) and once it was as low as £45, so we’re limping towards the line, but it’ll probably go to the wire. Most people I’ve spoken to are convinced we’ll fund (or at least that’s what they are telling us!) and Kicktraq and Backerkit’s trend analysis both have us funding too. The only concern is that Kicktraq’s lower limit from its projection cone is now under our goal £10,787 vs £12,000, and it’s heading lower each day (even if their trend is to £18k!).

Things have slowed down a bit

I’ve spoken before about my concerns about Kickstarter (Exhibit A & Exhibit B) but it turns out the biggest problem I’m (and Paul said he is) experiencing is actually the worry about will we fund. Frequently checking the total has become compulsive behaviour, which can’t be healthy. We’ve had quite a few cancellations and no information from almost all of the cancelling pledgers to help us understand why they backed (often at a high level) only to cancel hours or days later.

The one exception to that was a guy who backed and then in response to my thank you message told me how cool the game looked and how much he was looking forward to playing it with his kids. A few days later I got another message from him to say that he was cancelling that pledge because budgets were tight at this time of year. He still loved the game and the campaign, but just couldn’t afford it at the moment. I really appreciated the explanation and tweeted as much.

The story has a happy ending! One of my twitter followers (who henceforth shall be known as Legendary Steve) paid his pledge as a random act of kindness - he was blown away (as was I!) by the generosity :-)

Fingers crossed we can keep the momentum through the slow middle period that everyone experiences and enter the exciting final couple of days at least close enough to the target to make it over the line...

Off to a Promising Start

We're just under 5 days into our FlickFleet Kickstarter campaign and it's pretty intense. It seems to be going well so far (just over 40%) and there have been a couple of surprises.

First up is the deluxe editions are way more popular that we were expecting - I hoped we'd get a few pledges at that level by the end but they all went withing 15 hours! Crazy. After discussion with Paul (who will be doing the laser cutting) we've just added a few more with a later delivery date (though still ahead of the standard copies).

Prototype deluxe ships

The other thing is the number of backers we're getting directly from Kickstarter. It's over 40% which really surprised me, especially as we've not made any top picks lists or anything.

Anyway, it's all going pretty well I think, but I could really do with some sleep! Hopefully I'll get a decent night on Tuesday when I'm away for work (and getting interviewed by Gabe Barrett from The Board Game Design Lab for his podcast!).

We're Live!

After months of wrangling with the Kickstarter page and trying to get to grips with the concept and best practices of crowdfunding, FlickFleet is finally live on Kickstarter.

We're about 6 hours in at time of writing, with 20% of the target pledged - huge thanks to all the early backers - Paul and I really appreciate your support.

Please take a look at the page and share with anyone you think would enjoy it.

Right, I'm off to bed now - I've not slept much in days and today's excitement has done for me!

Three Days!

I’m currently on holiday (writing this while The Toddler naps) so I’ll keep this brief!

FlickFleet is coming to Kickstarter on Thursday, hopefully about 4pm UK time. It’s our first time on Kickstarter and despite the slow growth of our mailing list and a number of very excited people by far the biggest risk is that we won’t have enough backers to hit our target.

If you are intending to back it (thanks!), please do so early to help give us the appearance of momentum which might encourage others to join in. If you don’t wish to back the project, please share it with one or two people who you think might be interested - it might be the difference between success and failure!

Thanks for all your support!

What Have I Got to Show for 15 Months?

I’m shutting down the Sole Trading company ‘Jackson Pope trading as Eurydice Games’ and transferring my assets to Eurydice Games Ltd. ahead of the FlickFleet Kickstarter in a couple of weeks time. It seems like a good time to take stock of the first 15 months of Eurydice Games.

I started the company in August 2017 with a £1,000 ‘investment’. I say investment in quotes because it was money I was putting into the company and at risk, but I wasn’t expecting a great return from it, I certainly wasn’t treating this like a stock market investment - but I didn’t want it to be a vanity project where I threw money at games that no one wanted to buy or play.

Fifteen months in and I have just under £600 in the company, so from a cash flow point of view it’s been unsuccessful. if you consider the £355 of Zombology materials I still have in stock then the company has made a loss - I’ve spent a year turning £1,000 into £930. Oh, and I’ve worked probably 150 hours of my free time for no recompense either. So woefully unsuccessful.

So why on earth am I carrying on? The one thing those numbers don’t take account of is FlickFleet. I’ve spent nearly £500 getting FlickFleet ready for market, and obviously FlickFleet hasn’t yet had a chance to recoup any of that. If you treat that as value (R&D investment?) then things look a little rosier: £1,000 to £1,420 in fifteen months, which is a pretty reasonable rate of return. Of course, if FlickFleet fails to fund and we pull the plug on it then that's wasted money, so I can't rely on it.

We're now 10 days from FlickFleet arriving on Kickstarter, so I don't have long to wait to find out...

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! FlickFleet is Coming!

This week has mostly been marketing. Which I am notoriously bad at. I’ve been trying to drum up interest and build up my mailing list ahead of the FlickFleet Kickstarter on 8th November.

A FlickFleet game in progress

I’ve written a press release and I’m halfway through distributing it to a load of board game websites (and a couple of local press that might be interested). I’ve also been arranging a load of podcasts and interviews to try to involve as many people’s audiences as possible. We’re also planning to get some flyers printed that we’re hoping to distribute to a number of UK games shops. Excitement is building. I hope it’s not too slow for a successful Kickstarter...

The limited company bank account is finally set up (this was one of the things that blocked earlier Kickstarter launch dates), so now we just need to get internet and mobile banking set up and we can start using it.

I’ve also been getting more feedback on the Kickstarter page and updating that and getting a couple of outstanding tasks around production worked out too.

It’s all very busy, and at this point it’s hard to tell whether it’s working or not. I guess we’ll know a couple of days into the campaign!

The Keyboard That Launched 1,000 Ships

I'm no Helen of Troy. Let's get that out of the way to start off with.

Last week was a good one. I've updated my Facebook and Twitter banner images with a FlickFleet pre-launch banner and also officially launched the Kickstarter campaign (coming 8th November) on Facebook, Google+ and twitter. Several people have said they're in, which is great - especially the new ones, but we're still some way from the 120 backers or so we need in the first couple of days to make it look like the project is going to succeed. The next 3.5 weeks are all about trying to drive the number of early backers up.

We've approached a couple of people about levelling up the box design, so hopefully we'll have something prettier ready for Kickstarter in November. And we're also working on a new version of the video with the real music track at an appropriate level and a couple of still images with the game name and details.

To finish off the week I went to Newcastle Gamers for the first time in months and played a bunch of games. We started as a group of four playing High Society, HMS Dolores and Kingdomino and then Drew left and we were down to three. I offered Las Vegas, Zombology, Hanabi, and For Sale to the other two guys and they chose Zombology (at this point unaware I was the designer and hand-crafter of the game). We played and 2/3 of us won with Tea. They asked for another game and the same 2 of us won with Tea again. At which point they wanted to confirm the science of tea, so we played a third game and again the same pair won with Tea! Crazy. Anyway at that point I wanted to head off so I revealed I was the designer and hand-crafter behind the game and they both bought a copy! I'm down to just two copies at home now!

This week I need to focus on getting the final video up there, picking a box artist, and sharing the press release with as many people as possible - we need to get people's eyes on the project! Any help you can provide sharing the project with people you think would like it is much appreciated - thanks in advance!

Kickstarter Voice

You get a wide range of companies and people on Kickstarter, whether doing games or something else.

There’s the large and successful companies with their videos that are incredibly polished, full of rendered animations plus high quality photos and copy. At the other end of the scale there are projects that are something that’s been cobbled together by someone by themselves - video on a laptop or iPad and fairly simple text and basic photos.

With FlickFleet we’re trying to tread the middle path. I don’t want to invest tens of thousands of pounds in the advertising and content of the page, but I don’t want us to appear too homebrew either. We’ve not got a massive fan base ready to pounce on the Kickstarter, so we need to look professional enough to be credible to people who don’t know us.

The Kickstarter page taking shape

I’ve got experience hand-crafting games and getting games professionally manufactured for me and a back catalogue of five games that I’ve published in various quantities that speak to my credibility.

Here’s a preview link to the Kickstarter page (with rough draft of the video and box art - still works in progress). What are your thoughts? Does it come across as credible? Too homebrew? Too professional? Do we sound like people you would trust to invest in?

All feedback gratefully appreciated!

Tabletop Gaming Live: Fears Unrealised

Back in June I ran a Hand-Crafting Games seminar at the UK Games Expo. I'd pitched it as a chance to watch me make a copy of Zombology live while I talked about my experiences running two games companies, but it became apparent before the event that I wouldn't be able to finish making a game in time (it takes 40 minutes when I'm focussing and I only had an hour, but that was only 50 minutes once 5 minutes had been shaved off either end to allow people coming and going). On the day I gave people the choice of watching me frantically crafting in an attempt to finish or to focus more on the talking and they chose the latter, so that's what I did and in the 50 minutes I managed to make half a box and cut out a few cards. I waffle a lot it turns out.

Alexandra Palace is pretty!

Shortly afterwards, the guys from Tabletop Gaming Magazine approached me about repeating my seminar at Tabletop Gaming Live, a new convention they were running in London in September. I leapt at the chance.

As we liaised via email in the run up to the show I told them I'd struggled to get much done in the hour at the Expo, so they gave me two whole hours of their single seminar track! Wow!

The show was on the last couple of days, so I've spent most of my weekend there. London, it turns out, is a long way from Newcastle, so first I arranged with Paul (my FlickFleet co-designer) to stay at his Saturday night. So after The Toddler was asleep I set off, arriving at Paul's just before 10pm. We had a brief chat and then I headed off to bed as we'd set our alarms for 5am. On a Sunday. Joy.

Up, showered and breakfasted we set off at 6am for the 3.5 drive from York to north London (did I mention it's a long way?). The first differences I noticed between this and the Expo were the little things. As a speaker I had a parking pass for free parking in a secure car park abutting the venue (my car was literally 10 feet from the venue wall). This was great. At the Expo I'd ended up parked a good distance from the venue, so I'd carted my bag of tricks (which weighed a ton!) around all day - no fun at all. My hand was killing me before I'd even started the cutting. Yesterday however, we went in blissfully unencumbered - safe in the knowledge that it would only take a few minutes to get all my stuff from the car before my seminar at 2pm.

I spent a few hours wandering round the trade hall, chatting to people I'd previously only met online, introducing myself and my games to a few shops who were there and having a chat with Caezar from Alley Cat Games about the Kickstarter consulting he does. It was all good. Plus it was a great opportunity to hang out with Paul, who I don't see anywhere near as much as I'd like any more (we used to live just round the corner from each other, now we're 100 miles apart).

But the time for my seminar was approaching and I had some concerns.

At the Expo (a much bigger show) I'd managed to get nine people to my seminar. Two of those were mates I'd know for years, one was a Zombology customer and another a guy I knew from twitter. Tabletop Gaming Live was clearly a much smaller show and Sunday was apparently much quieter than the day before. Would anyone come to my seminar at all? The seminar space was in a massive room, of which about a quarter was set aside for the seminars - the rest was open gaming and a cafe. Would I be stood up there, mic'd up, chatting to Paul as the sole audience member while loads of uninterested people around the room were wondering what on earth was going on? A serious risk.

I was also beginning to regret the two hours slot. 2 hours is a long time. A very long time. Especially when you're at a convention looking to try and play and buy games. If an audience turned up, how long would I be able to hold their attention? 30 mins? An hour?

As it turned out I needn't have worried. There must have been 30-40 people at the start and even at the 1.5 hour mark when I finished making the game (I actually finished it!), there were probably 15-20 people still there. A good proportion of those subscribed to our mailing list and I sold seven copies of Zombology (I only sold one at the Expo seminar - to the guy I knew from twitter) - so it was a huge success.

Then I had the 6 hour drive home, via York to drop Paul off. A great, but very tiring day!

Solid Progress at Last

Since returning from our holiday a few weeks ago I’ve been struggling to make decent progress on FlickFleet. We’ve taken some impromptu holiday, had friends to visit and weathered a long baby cold which led to sleepless nights and hence curtailed evenings.

This week I had a work trip to Manchester that was supposed to include a couple of nights in a hotel (it ended up being only one as a storm blocked all trains out of Newcastle on Wednesday evening).

With six hours of train travel and an evening in a hotel I managed make a huge amount of progress. I’ve now finished the Kickstarter page first draft and we’ve a rough cut of the video too. I’ve written a press release and am about halfway through updating the website with changes reflecting the move to a limited company. I’ve also finally completed the bank account application for the limited company too.

Kickstarter preview is ready!

The next step is to get some eyes on the Kickstarter page and get some feedback and finish off the website changes and make those live.

Finally, next weekend is Tabletop Gaming Live at Alexandra Palace in London. Paul and I will be there on Sunday (with FlickFleet and Zombology) and I’ll be repeating my hand-crafting seminar from 2-4pm. I’m hoping that with a bit longer I can answer more questions and make more of the game without having to rush the final bit. If you’re going, please come along and say hi!

An Unconventional Kickstarter

If you've been a reader of this blog for a while you'll know I'm very wary of Kickstarter. So why exactly are we Kickstarting FlickFleet?

The short answer is we can't afford not to. Zombology has broken even now, but I've still a decent stock pile to sell through, and a large chunk of the money I've recouped on Zombology sales has been invested in FlickFleet development - I have less cash on hand now than I started with. And FlickFleet is a far more expensive game to manufacturing than Zombology. Zombology is just a card game with a box, 108 cards and a rules sheet. FlickFleet has acrylic ships, wooden bits, ship dashboards, dice, a rulebook and a box.

I think FlickFleet is the most fun and approachable of the six games I've published, but if there's one thing Reiver Games taught me, it's that I don't want to be getting a bank loan to fund a large print run of FlickFleet to find out I've judged it wrong again and I'm left with a big pile of stock and little money coming in while we haemorrhage money through warehousing costs and bank loan repayments.

A photo for the box back

Kickstarter gives us a chance to judge the size of the market for FlickFleet and size our print run accordingly. It also lets us change the shape of the print run as the campaign becomes more successful.

I'm hopeless at marketing, so my best guess is that we'll fund somewhere between 50% and 125% of our target. We're setting that low in an attempt to increase our chances of success - but that brings other challenges. To reduce the target to the minimum, we're aiming for a hand-crafted run of 500 copies (half the minimum order of our professional manufacturer). So to do this we'll need to pay the kickstarter cut, then buy the raw materials for 500 games and we'll need to do the laser-cutting ourselves, so we also need a laser-cutter.

In the unlikely event that something miraculous happens and we're much more successful, the Stretch Goals are aimed at improving components for everyone (not adding in expansions and extra bits we haven't had time to properly test). And at some point the time and effort it would take us to make the hand-crafted boxes and dashboards, plus bag all the wooden components and laser cut the ships would be prohibitive - so we'll have to switch over to professional manufacturing (of at least the box, dashboards, rules and wooden bits - the status of the laser-cutting is still under investigation).

Have you seen a kickstarter that switches from hand-crafted to professionally manufactured as a Stretch Goal?

Moving Goalposts

I’m back from my two week blogging hiatus! During that time I’ve had a week long holiday, an impromptu camping weekend and a visit from my FlickFleet co-designer, Paul and his family.

Progress on the FlickFleet Kickstarter has picked up in the last week, but in total has been slower than I’d like, hindered by some terrible nights’ sleep while The Toddler had bad cough and fever.

But now that the holidays are over and The Toddler is on the mend, things are looking up. This weekend, during Paul’s visit, we discussed the kickstarter in some depth and then spent Saturday night with my mate Wilka taking some photos of the game and its components and recording the footage for the kickstarter video (with a new shorter script crafted minutes before Wilka arrived) and a videoed play-through of the game.

All the FlickFleet components

The kickstarter page is taking shape finally, it’s mostly there now, pending a few images of the game, a few more reviews and some images for the stretch and social goals. I’ll be soliciting feedback on it shortly.

We had hoped to bring it to Kickstarter last week, but we’ve clearly missed that. I’ve pushed it back to the 24th, but we’re not going to be ready for that either - so we’re now aiming for mid-October. Hopefully we’ll hit that one! But as everyone says, it’s better to wait until you’re ready than rush out a half-finished campaign to hit an arbitrary deadline you’ve given yourself.

Still disappointing though :-(

Holiday

I’ll keep this brief this week - I’m on holiday with the family in Northumberland - north of Newcastle where I live. Before I left I made some progress on the Kickstarter page for FlickFleet, finished a first draft of a script for the Kickstarter video (and recorded a very rough test to see how long it was - answer: too long).

While we’re away I’m hoping to get some games in with the family and when I return both Paul and I will be back from our respective holidays, so we should be able to make decent progress on getting FlickFleet ready.

Do you have any thoughts on the video (obviously the quality will be much better on the final one!)? What should we cut?

Kickstarter - The Rollercoaster

We’re hoping to bring FlickFleet to Kickstarter in September. The original plan was to launch on Tuesday 4th, but with out of sync family holidays and a lot going on in August, I think it’s going to have to slip back to later in the month. I’m still hopefully that we can launch in September though. The video is one of the main stumbling blocks - I’d like it to feature both of us, which means finding a day that we’re both available and so is my mate with all the kit.

The source of my current worries

So we’re still several weeks away from launch but the emotional rollercoaster has already started. Some of this is similar to the other games I’ve published as either Reiver Games or Eurydice Games: will people like my game? Can I find enough customers to make it, at least, break even?

But Kickstarter brings a couple of new dimensions to it - the month of unknowns and the debt.

Every previous game I’ve made I know exactly what I’m getting into at launch, either hand-crafting or ordering a fixed number of games at a fixed cost. I know how many hours of crafting are on the horizon and how many copies I need to sell at what margin. It could be terrifying, risky or fairly safe, but I know what it is. I know how much money is at risk and I know what my crafting future looks like. With Kickstarter however, until the campaign closes you’ve no idea what you’re on the hook for. How many backers will I get? How many copies will I have to make? What will my margins be? All of this is up in the air until the campaign closes. It’s even worse for us as we’ve set a two stage campaign - to keep the target low we’re planning a small hand-crafted run. But there’s a stretch goal to get the boxes, rules, dashboards and wooden pieces professionally manufactured and assembled. If we get close to that we’re still on the hook for hand-crafting everything. For a lot of copies. Even if we hit the stretch goal we may need to do the laser cutting ourselves (I’m still investigating options for a very large run of laser-cutting, but one of the reasons we're doing the laser-cutting ourselves is to keep costs down - there doesn't seem to be any economies of scale for laser-cutting). I’m not sure what my preferred outcome is - scrape over the funding target, just hit the professional stretch goal or something else.

In addition, there's the fact that you owe a lot of people a lot of stuff. I'm okay with the idea of crowdfunding - it makes FlickFleet a possibility, but as I've said before I'm uncomfortable about taking people's money up front. They're paying for a copy (or two!) of the game. They know it'll be a while. They must be comfortable with that or they wouldn't back it. But I've never taken money for something that's not ready yet. Even pre-orders for my previous games were just a request - I didn't take any money until I had a game ready to ship to them. I lost a few pre-orders that way, but I was more comfortable with that than owing someone for something that's an unspecified amount of time from completion. I'm hoping the discomfort around owing people games will encourage me to crank them out as quick as possible.

Exciting times. It’s not keeping me up at night yet, but it’s certainly occupying a lot of my thinking during my evenings and weekends.

Crunch Time

We're hoping to Kickstart FlickFleet in September. There's still loads to do though, so that timeline is getting tight and Paul's currently out of the country on holiday and I'll be heading off on holiday at the end of next week.

We've set up the limited company and are now getting the bank account and related guff together, while working on the Kickstarter page text and images, scripting the videos and the box art. It's all feeling pretty hectic now.

I've also been trying to build up some Zombology stock as there may well be another stocking order shortly from Travelling Man (York is getting very low on stock) and I'd like to have a decent pile ahead of the kickstarter so we can focus on FlickFleet afterwards (assuming it funds). We're offering Zombology as an add-on which allows you to get it with much cheaper shipping.

I thought my laptop power lead had died this week, which limited my options at home (lots of those tasks are hard/impossible to do on an iPad or phone), but it seems to be working fine here (I brought it to work this morning in order a replacement power lead for it). Maybe the power socket had broken - who knows.

Here's the next iteration of the box art, it's coming together slowly - what do you think?

Latest iteration

Previous iteration

First concept

Let’s Get Limited

My first games company, Reiver Games, was legally a Sole Trader - the company didn’t exist as a legal entity, it was just me, using a trading name. Had anyone sued me back in the day it would have been my personal assets (house, car, etc.) that would have been at risk.

Eurydice has been exactly the same until now - while selling a small number of hand-crafted games I thought the risk was quite low, but with Kickstarter coming up in just over a month I’ve decided to do things properly. I’m going to form a limited company (a separate legal entity) and incorporate Eurydice Games Ltd. Paul, my FlickFleet co-designer and long time Reiver Games play tester is coming on board too as another Director.

I need to get the company founded and a bank account set up as well as get the Kickstarter page together and finish getting quotes for manufacturing and shipping the various different manufacturing options. Paul has done a first draft of the Kickstarter page, so that’s coming together nicely.

Time is progressing apace, I’ve lots to do, and a holiday to take, plus I need to get Zombology back in stock too (I keep running out :-) ). Must crack on...

P.S. Don’t forget we’re running a scenarios