Dividend

My first board publishing company started strong, but ended up a financial disaster. 

I lost my initial ‘investment’ and 1/3 of the Life Insurance money I put in when I tried to go pro.

I started another. Some people never learn.

This one is going much better.

Thanks to Kickstarter and the popularity of FlickFleet, Eurydice is doing much better than Reiver Games ever did.

After the last Kickstarter we had enough cash in the company that I could withdraw my initial investment.

And now Paul and I are taking a small dividend.

Which game's money are we paying ourselves in?

We’re profitable because we don’t pay ourselves salaries for the many hours we work in our evenings and weekends.

We’ve earned a modest payout.

This one is doing much better.

Maybe I have learned something...

 

Done

Paul shipped the final rewards for our third Kickstarter on Friday.

One month early.

Paul and his family have their living room back.

All gone now.

Some of it shipped late due to COVID-19 related acrylic shortages.

But it's done now.

Now we can focus on what comes next.

We've a few games in the pipeline.

None of them ready yet.

They need playtesting.

But I can't meet anyone. And I hate solo-ing games.

This is the hard bit. I've been keeping busy until now with the books. And the accountants. And Kickstarter. And the website. And the marketing.

Now I need to focus. 

And do the thing I hate.

I can't wait to be able to playtest in the flesh again.

Independent

If I had to describe Eurydice Games in a word it would be Independent. Not in the Indie sense. Though we're that too.

Independent in the sense we do everything ourselves.

Self reliant. To a fault.

Not because I'm a control freak (though I probably am). But because it's free. In money, if not in time. And we started with very little money.

It opens doors. 

We design the games ourselves. No royalties.

Paul makes the games by hand in his garage. It means we can do small runs: 200-400 copies. Which costs a lot less than the 1,000 minimum order of your standard Chinese factory.

And ships them himself. So no freight and fulfilment charges.

I do the website. And the graphic design. And the marketing. And the social media. And the bookkeeping. So no contractor fees.

But things are getting missed. 

Due to lack of time. We have jobs. And families. 

And now we have some money.

Independent doesn't scale.

Time to lose control.

Letting Go

I'm a tolerable graphic designer. Or passable maybe. Adequate.

I really enjoy doing it, but I don't have a flair for it.

Until now, to keep costs down, I've done it all myself.

The website.

C-

The game boxes. The rules. The cards.

But it's homemade. And it looks it.

Thanks to the success of our last kickstarter we've finally got some cash in the bank.

We're thinking of investing it in some professional graphic design.

Make the website and the games look much better.

They really need it.

I'll miss it though.

Website

We need to up our game to be more successful.

One part of that is more website sales.

Our website is largely based on my previous game company’s one. It’s pretty dated.

A bit 00s!

I’ve created it by hand using HTML and a little bit of JavaScript.

Like the last one it had PayPal buttons for payment. Again pretty dated.

As part of a larger effort to create a better website, I’ve integrated card-based payment using Stripe as the (default) option. And done some re-design.

It’s still using a button per product though - no shopping cart. But it looks much nicer.

And the processing fees are cheaper.

We had our first Stripe sale last week. It works!

It’s a first step.

Next we need to completely overhaul our website so it doesn't look so homemade. And dated.

Scaling

For the last two years the vast majority of our sales have been through our three FlickFleet Kickstarters. And the subsequent pledge managers.

Like over 95%.

Kickstarter FTW!

Our Kickstarters have been huge. And getting huger. For us.

But they are still small fry in the Kickstarter tabletop games space (£18,000 versus $10,000,000).

We have only one retail stockist as our small hand-made runs have too little margin to sell to retailers, let alone distributors.

We sell some through the website, but only a little.

If we want to continue growing, and I'm convinced FlickFleet has great potential, we need to do better in all of these channels.

How can we get more website sales? Get the cost down enough to sell into retail? Have Kickstarters that are 10 times more successful?

I'm thinking about these questions a lot.

One

Can you describe a game in one word? 

Tactical?

Could be a game you’re designing or a favourite. 

Hard isn’t it? 

Theme probably isn’t a good choice. Egypt. 

Yeah that’s not exciting me in the slightest. 

Mechanics probably aren’t the way to go either. Auction. 

Could be one of hundreds. 

Perhaps emotion is the way to go. How does the game make you feel? Tense. Brutal. Unforgiving. Chaotic. Hilarious. Spiteful. Anticipation. 

How would you describe your game in one word? Or your favourite game?

If you’re designing a game, can you make a one-word design brief? Something to hold in your head while you playtest and hone it?

Growth

I started Reiver Games in 2006 with £1,000 of our family savings. That's a lot of money. I was lucky that we were able to gamble it - but it’s not enough. I turned it into £4,800 in two years. That wasn't enough.

I 'invested' £12,000 of my life insurance in Reiver Games. That wasn't enough.

I got a bank loan to cover Carpe Astra, another £13,000 I think. That wasn't enough,

The bank loan repayments killed Reiver Games. That and a lack of sales. I lost most of my 'investment'.

£30,000 in total. Not enough.

So I did it again.

I started Eurydice Games three years ago with £1,000 of our family savings again. But it's not enough.

Kickstarter is a game changer. We've been able to slowly change that initial £1,000 into tens of thousands of pounds of assets. Without the major commitment. Without the bank loan.

In our first year we sold £1,217 of Zombology. In our second we sold £12,857 of (mostly) FlickFleet and Zombology. This year our orders have more than tripled. 

Doing alright!

Though due to supplier woes we've not been able to 'sell' half of that.

3,167% growth in three years. Happy with that.

Small Fortune

Want to make a small fortune in board games? Start with a large one.

Linnaea Mallette

That's the joke. 

But I've done that. I got MS. My life insurance paid out. I wanted to go pro. I paid off most of our mortgage (on a tiny 1-bed flat), put some aside to live on and 'invested' £12,000 in Reiver Games. And I threw away two years' salary and pension contributions. To end up with £4,000.

We don't do it for the money. It's not going to make us rich.

I don't want to be rich anyway. There are way too many people in poverty to make coveting personal wealth something I'd be ok with.

I want to make things. Things that make other people happy.

I want people to share moments of joy using the things I've made.

Parents and their kids. Friends. Families. Sharing a moment of joy. Our creation the catalyst.

That sounds pretentious doesn't it?

We get messages from our backers and customers. About how much they love the game. Them and their kids. Them and their mates at Games Night.

That’s worth a fortune.

Consequences

Due to COVID-19 people are flying less. Which is great for the planet. 

But it means a lot fewer international flights. There's less room in the holds for international airmail. Prices are going up. By up to 35% for heavier packages. 

US postal prices had already jumped a couple of months ago. 

We've already taken payment for our Kickstarter - we'll have to swallow the increase for now. 

It’s getting expensive

How much business will we do outside Europe when shipping as almost as much as the game itself? 

Brexit is not going to help as European customers will have to pay import taxes. 

We're going to have to look at what we do and make some changes. 

Soon our website prices need to go up. If you live outside Europe and want to take advantage of the old prices, they'll remain on the website for another week, then we'll pass the increases on.

Contract

Last week was rubbish. This one was better.

I've designed lots of games. Most of them are rubbish. Or broken. Or at best mediocre.

A few, I believe, have merit. I've invested my time, my effort and my money in self-publishing those. Self-publishing. It’s a bit of a vanity project isn’t it?

I've also signed and published other designers' games. Under contract. Games I felt were good enough to invest my time, effort and money in. Objectively. I didn’t have an emotional connection to them - these weren’t my babies.

US Army / Public Domain

I've never had a game published by someone else. Signed a contract with another publisher. Had someone decide my game was good enough for them to invest their time, effort and money in. Crossed that hurdle.

I'm not sure why that seems significant. But it does.

I've been publishing games since 2006. Six titles. Thousands of sales.

A few years ago a (non-industry) friend got a board game published. I was proud and happy for him.

And a tiny bit jealous.

This week I signed a contract. From a publisher. Might I cross that hurdle?

Nadir

I ran another board games publisher once. Reiver Games. It failed. Over weeks. And then months. And then fatally.

I spent those weeks and months a failure. Watching the bank loan repayments and warehousing bleeding my company dry. Unable to create the sales I needed to keep it alive. Each day despondent, trying ideas that didn't cost much, watching those ideas fail. The money seeping out week by week.

It hurt.

That's how last Wednesday felt too.

I love Kickstarter. Without it, FlickFleet wouldn't exist and Eurydice Games wouldn't be anywhere near as successful as it has been.

But I hate Kickstarter. The minute your campaign finishes, you're in debt. Way before you get the money, you owe hundreds (or thousands if you're lucky) of people. They've lent you their hard-earned cash. And you owe them. That weighs on me - I hate being in debt. What if I get hit by a bus? What if Paul's house burns down? 

Those debts weigh on me. I'm sure that's why we've fulfilled early until now. The weight of those debts pressing us to get the rewards out and the debts paid as fast as we can. I hate Kickstarter.  

Fulfilling early is unusual. We've done it twice. It has become part of our identity - the crazy guys who hand-craft games in their garage and fulfill early.

But a supplier let us down on Wednesday. The order was eight days late and when I finally got through to them, it was delayed until next month. We'd miss a deadline. 150 debts that we'd pay late. Not early.

It’s my fault really. I should have baked more slack into the project. I didn’t.

We've lost our identity. Now we're just crazy guys. Late like everyone else.

We told our backers Thursday, once we'd had a chance to explore some other options. They were very supportive. I love Kickstarter. The community it creates around your project. 

The ad went live on Wednesday too. It didn't lead to any sales either.

Serendipity

Sometimes you get lucky. 

Back in June I barely left the house because my MS made me vulnerable to COVID-19. Paul was laid up with it for three weeks. Our website was shut since we couldn’t ship anything. Oh, and the conventions we were hoping to sell our left-over stock at were all cancelled. 

Things looked bleak.

Then I saw a post on LinkedIn for advertising grants worth £3,000 for small businesses affected by COVID-19.

It took ten minutes to apply. I wrote them a sob story. All true of course.

And we won!

Our ad runs this week in the Metro newspaper in London and south-east England.

Never thought we'd do a print ad

I’ve no idea what to expect. It’s completely untargetted but they print over 400,000 copies. Four hundred. Thousand.

I’ve spent the week making some first edition stock in case we get some orders.

Getting Personal

Through all three of our Kickstarters we've offered standard and deluxe editions of whatever FlickFleet material we are crowdfunding. The games are small hand-made runs (I don't want to be sitting on thousands of games in stock that drains our account through the cost of warehousing), so how do we make the deluxe ones deluxe?

The contents are almost exactly the same - the deluxe game has an extra set of dice, and everything deluxe has a little shiny sticker on it. But that's hardly earth-shattering. 

The biggest difference is that the deluxe ships are all laser-etched as well as laser-cut. It allows us to add details and the names of the ships (which can be useful in bigger battles).

Plus it looks really cool!

The etching takes a lot of time and requires a lot more work from Paul (to ensure the ships with the right names make it into each box). So they cost more.

But we wanted to make them more special - really worth the extra cost. We number them (x/400) and write a little inscription on the inside of the box lid. And we both sign them. I've no idea if that's a selling point or if people appreciate it, but it makes them more unique. 

We also offer the chance to personalise it too. Have John* or The Smiths* inside the box lid. About a third of deluxe backers take us up on that. Usually with something like those above. But some people have fun with it and that makes me happy. Here are a few favourites from this campaign*:

The Imperium Triumphant!

To Bill And Ted, may all your battles be epic!

To the everlasting glory of Queen Jane and the Smith Star Empire

By Grabthar's hammer!

We also make them first and deliver them first too.

We must be doing something right. Over two-thirds of our backers in the last campaign wanted the deluxe version.

*Names changed to protect the innocent.

Fulfilment Begins...

I got nothing Eurydice Games-related done at all last week as we had five days camping in Scotland and then on our return we were getting ready for and then having my eldest daughter's birthday celebrations (with no party :-( ).

With my week off behind me, my focus is now on fulfilling our latest Kickstarter. The supplier orders are all in progress, the printing has arrived and been delivered to Paul, but we’re still waiting on acrylic and wooden bits. 

Paul’s been able to make a head start on the laser cutting regardless as we have plenty of acrylic earmarked for unfinished base games and expansions, so he’s been making the add-ons from that while he waits for the new order to arrive (though we have no black, so the legendary pilots haven’t been started yet). 

I’ll be making and sending the game-only rewards from my house, so I’ve 26 games to make over the next month or so. The first couple of rewards have already gone in the post :-). Meanwhile Paul is doing the rewards that include expansions and/or add-ons - He’s making great progress on the add-on cutting and already has all the games and expansions ready to go. 

The other thing that will be filling my time while Paul continues his Herculean cutting task is spreadsheets. I need to get all the orders from Kickstarter and Gamefound and combine them and get the shipping addresses into the right shape. I’m approaching halfway through that task with a good few hours still to go. After that it’ll be catching up on the books and invoices - fun!

Spend, Spend, Spend!

Last week was all about spending the money we got from the last Kickstarter. The printing was ordered, proofed and then collected and delivered to Paul on Friday. The acrylic for the ships has been ordered too, as have the wooden bits and baggies. We still need a couple of other orders placing: some more deluxe stickers and some more packaging materials, but the major things are now underway. 

A car’s load of FlickFleet printing!

I met Paul on Friday evening for half an hour’s socially distant chat and to hand over the printing in a motorway service station car park. It was great to see him in person for the first time in months and months. We got to catch up, but also to do some scheming about what projects to work on next and how to spend the money we raised during this most recent Kickstarter that we haven’t already spent or earmarked for posting the rewards. 

But this week I’m camping in Scotland again, so it will all have to wait for a few more days!

Production Begins!

With the pledge manager almost completed we’re now in a position where we’ve a pretty good idea of what we need to make to fulfill this latest Kickstarter. 

Last week I was getting quotes for the printing, the wooden bits and the acrylic. Two of those have now arrived and the printing has begun. The wooden bits order should be placed and paid for shortly. 

The outlier in all this is the acrylic. And there’s a risk there. Every shop on the planet seems to have put up acrylic till screens recently, so there’s a chance the acrylic supplier we use is either short on stock or swamped with orders. 

Hopefully we’ll find out shortly that neither of these are the case! In the meantime, I have a lot of orders to go through, invoices to create and games to make and Paul has an awful lot more laser-cutting and bagging to do when all the bits arrive.

Past Jack Says: Tough Week

I usually write my blog posts on the weekend or before work on a Monday. I’m currently in Scotland in a tent though, and have been since Friday, so this one was written last Thursday on a train. 

Last week ended up being very stressful. I did manage to get the P&P files finished and posted, but that was the least of our worries. We found out on Monday that our 11 year old car had probably been written off in the shunt that my wife received on the previous Friday. 

With the holiday looming we needed a replacement car pretty quickly (ours didn’t look badly damaged, but apparently the reinforcement beam behind the bumper had caved in). So I ended up taking a decent chunk of the week off work trying to rapidly find and buy a replacement car. 

Could have done without that. 

Anyway, as far as The Box of Flicks goes we’re still on track. I’ll be closing the pledge manager tonight when I get home (hopefully everyone will have placed their orders by then - at time of writing there’s still 33 outstanding. 

Once we know exactly what’s been ordered we can go ahead and order the acrylic, wooden bits and dashboards and get cracking on the production. The next target is all the deluxe rewards by the end of September and there’s rather a lot of them! At least all the games and expansions are done and it’s just the add-ons we need to do.

Print and Play Week

The print and play pledges from our recent Kickstarter are due this Friday. I’ve done the dashboards (corrections pending) and the rules (with a proof-reader). 

I’ve got three nights to lay out all the ships on the acrylic sheets, record exactly how many wooden bits they need and then write up the instructions and send them all out. I need to do it by Wednesday as I’ve got Games Night on Thursday hopefully and we’re going camping on Friday. I think it should be fine time-wise, but ask me again on Thursday! 

The good news is that almost all of this is stuff I need to do for the full print run too. 

In the meantime, Paul has been busy designing the etching layer for the ships and laying out the ships on the big sheets of acrylic we need to cut (multiple sets at a time). When I get back from camping the pledge manager will be closed so we will know how many copies of things we need to make and we’ll be able to place the orders for the bits we need. 

We’ve a few busy weeks ahead of us!

The Busy Time

With the Kickstarter all wrapped up we now enter the period when I’m very busy (Paul’s very busy period is pending the acrylic for the add-ons arriving).

I’m currently doing the pledge manager, dashboard graphic design, rules graphic design and the orders of bits and acrylic.

The graphic design is top of the list as we have to provide the Print and Play files (including the dashboards and rules) by the end of July. And I’m away at the very end of July, so I have to provide them by the 29th.

The first new dashboard design in progress...

We can’t place the orders until the pledge manager is finished (3rd of August), but I can be almost ready to go before then since the pledge manager is slowing down now and, unlike Kickstarter, we aren’t expecting a last minute rush of orders.

Then it’ll be catch up on the books. We’ve had a lot of orders through the pledge manager, so there’s a decent backlog of work piling up there :-(