Another good Diggity review

Endymian (Ian Stedman), who's also a proud new father, reviewed Diggity over at The Gamer's University, cross-posted to TheGameCrafter.com.  Quite a positive reivew; he seemed to like it all except the art, which I'm working on now.  I'm glad his group enjoyed it!

More on the CE mark

Wow, there are a lot of skeezy CE Mark firms, eager to collect fees.  I've been wading through it some, and it sounds like my company can self-certify my product.  What this seems to mean is that Plankton Games declares its product safe officially (there's a form for this) and then it assumes all liability for the product, and then it can use the mark.  This is a good source; I'm looking for others.

Disclaimer: I'm NOT an expert - please do your own research. 

CE mark for European market?

As I'm getting closer to printing, I'm worrying more about what's on the outside of the box.  I've posted before on ISBN/EAN issues, but now I'm looking at the CPSIA regulations for the American market and the CE mark for Europe. I think I can avoid most of the CPSIA regulations by designating ages 12 and up for Diggity (and the game probably warrants that rating, although younger kids who are good with games can play - my 11-year old does).  The CE stuff is new to me - looks like the testing regulations are trickier, and I may have to do it in Europe.

Anybody have experience with these, or some resources they could point me to?

BGDF contest - entry in!

Got my entry in for the BGDF contest this month.  I spent about four hours on it this afternoon, plus another one last night before bed.  Fun stuff, but it's really hard to get a good set of rules in under 800 words.

We'll see how I do - I didn't print it out and playtest it this time, but I don't think most folks do, so hopefully I've managed to imagine most of the potential problems and avoid them.

Dice!

Polyhedral dice are just way cool. I knew this when I was 13 or so, and the knowledge persisted until maybe 26-27, but when I started teaching and had kids, I got away from my childhood D&D roots. In the last year or so, I've been playing some again, and I'm going to start a new campaign with my group in the next couple of weeks. In preparation for that, I decided, on a lark, to buy the Chessex Pound-O-Dice, and opening it today was really fun - all the different colors, shapes, styles, etc. Some are pretty hideous, some are cool, but it's still really neat to be holding this many at once. It awakened something I haven't really felt since 1983 or so.

If you were ever a D&D nerd back in the day, I'd recommend this product - at about $18, it's an easy rush.

BGDF July contest

The new BGDF Design Showdown for July is up, and it's much less restrictive than previous ones.  You need to have some theme related to summertime, and you need to have "time as a resource."  I'm not sure what that last bit means, but I'll try.  I noodled over a good idea last night before falling asleep, and I sketched it out on paper while waiting for my daughter's band concert tonight - hopefully it'll work.

Yoggity photos!

Here are some images showing the new artwork for my game Yoggity.  The art is by Jason Greeno (at GreenoDesign.com) - he did a really great job.  The copy of the game here was produced by the new TheGameCrafter.com post-merge with SuperiorPOD.  It's the only one in existence, and it's been to New Mexico and back in my suitcase, so it's not 100% pristine,  It's a little glary because I took the pictures at 1:00 pm - couldn't get a good one from directly above because the sun was so high. The game isn't yet for sale - it's my entry into the Rio Grande game competition, so I haven't published it yet.  Depending on how the competition goes it might be available around December 2010 or maybe next year.  Anyway, enjoy, and click on the images if you'd like to see them bigger.

Even more contests

The forces behind Protospiel have announced a game design contest.  It's described here.  While this is exciting, and Diggity might be eligible if I don't publish it beforehand, the prize doesn't seem like it's worth the trouble.

If you win, you get your game "published."  I put this in quotes, because:

1. The print run is pretty small (500 copies)
2. You don't actually get paid for the game, since all proceeds go to the publisher, other than 24 free copies to you.

The free copies aren't nothing, but they're not much.  You could try selling them yourself, but you'd be competing with the actual publishers of your game, which might limit your ability to sell them.

Furthermore, in order to enter, you need to pay $5 and submit three copies of your game that you don't get back.  Assuming you'll spend some money producing the copies, you're actually out something like $50-$60 to enter after printing and shipping (assuming you use something like TheGameCrafter.com to produce your copies).  All for a shot (and possibly a small one) at a net 21 copies (24 minus 3) of your game and no cash reward.

Still, winning is fun, and winning could lead to publication elsewhere, or reputation-building.  I'm just not sure the return-over-investment makes it worth it.

Slow progress

I sought my first quotes for Diggity back in December, although those were more exploratory than definite.  I got an artist signed on in May, and I've been collecting printing quotes for many months now.  I don't have the art yet (hopefully soon), but I've got (at last) some good printing options that I think I'm nearly ready to run with.  I'd like to get this process moving along faster, but it seems like it's stuck in molasses - whenever I have a good chunk of time, I'm waiting on folks; whenever it's time for me to do something, I have a million other things going on.

I guess this week I'll be working on some of the dull but necessary parts - founding an LLC, setting up a separate bank account, checking into a business license, maybe pulling the trigger on an ISBN/EAN.  Not the glamorous part, but required.

Nothing new under the sun

I just saw a picture of some folks playing a mining card game that looked a bit like Diggity, and after some research, I realized it is called - Saboteur.  I've read the rules, and the game is really nothing like mine, other than the mechanic of using cards to build a map and the thematic elements.  It involves secret roles and bluffing, and the play looks totally different - more like the traitor/werewolf style games that are so popular these days.

But it's a bummer to have something look similar - I'd rather have mine be completely unique, but of course that's not possible.

Getting games to distributors

James at MinionGames.com recommends Impressions Advertising (http://www.impressionsadv.net) as both a stepping stone to distributors and a fulfillment service.  I'll have to look into it more closely when I get nearer to having a product, but it looks like it could well be worth it.  I've looked around for fees, and they appear to charge a $250 setup fee plus 18% of net revenue from distributors.

That sounds like a big chunk, but remember that you're getting 50% of retail from distributors, so 18% of that 50% is really only 9% of the purchase price, so you're really getting 41% from them.  If that makes any sense.

If I'm able to get my game produced for $3-4, and the MSRP is $16-20, then I'd get 41% from Impressions, or in the neighborhood of $6.50 to $8.00 a game.  With advertising, setup, and other costs, that's enough to break even if I can sell out my print run, although not enough to make much money doing this.  If they've got a reasonable record getting stuff placed with distributors, then it could well be worth it.  Especially if they've got connections in other countries.

TGC + SuperiorPOD: Official Announcement

They've announced it officially; SuperiorPOD and TheGameCrafter have joined forces, with the web side managed by TGC and the production side mostly by SuperiorPOD.

Of course, readers of this blog knew this back on July 6.  Quite the intrepid neo-journalist I have become, right?  Trust Plankton Games Journal for all your trivial insidery game-self-publishing news tidbits of interest to tiny audiences.

Hopefully, this will mean more options for game production and better bulk discounts for micro print runs.

Fun - the key ingredient.

A great post by Brett over at Brettspiel.com on one of the big pitfalls with game design.  The resulting game has to be fun, regardless of how cool or innovative the rest of your stuff is.  Fun is even more important than all that.  I was reminded of this while playing LCR with a group of friends recently.  From a design perspective, the game is, well, totally lame.  You roll dice and move chips around, and it's all totally luck-based and meaningless.  But it was fun.

The other thing I'd add is, what you think will make it fun is often not what makes it fun, and when you play your game, you shouldn't ignore what people are enjoying.  This happened to me with Cult - the thing people like the most is not the carefully designed game structure, the multiple strategies you can pursue, or the variety of special action cards.  The thing they like is the titles and realms, which are just silly, and don't actually impact the game much at all.  But if they can be "Flurb, Blood-Spattered Pain Warden, God of the Small Intestine," they love it, much more than anything I actually did in terms of design.  People even switch one meaningless title to get to a funnier meaningless title, all the time, even though it has precisely zero impact on the game, and yet they laugh hard while doing it.

What's the lesson here?  Brett's gotten to most of it, but I think you also need to think of the game not just in strategic terms, but also in social terms.  LCR is fun because you play it with other people, and the outcome is unknown, and there's not a ton of thinking - it taps into the core strengths of gambling, and allows you to be social while you play.  Cult is apparently fun (at least to some players) because some of the cards are funny, not because of the game itself.

Follow the fun.

Getting into stores

This is a little ways down the road, but I found myself at our local Hobby Lobby, and I got to talking with the manager there.  I asked him how they get the games they carry (which included a lot of games similar to those I'd be competing with).  He said they are ordered mostly by the national office in Nebraska, but that they sometimes took products from local folks if they thought they'd be able to sell them.

Fluxx was there, at a $16.00 price - that's maybe the closest to what my game will be, since Fluxx is cards only and includes 100 cards.  I think I can make this work at a $16 MSRP, so hopefully that'll work.

Lots of the games had the European CE mark, which I've now figured out what is.  I have to figure out if I can qualify for that, and what it means.

Promotional copies

An interesting thread over at BGDF about places to advertise your game, with a list of five on-line boardgame reviewers.  I think it will likely be worth sending out some promo copies to people if they actually come through with a review or commentary.  And it would be better, of course, if it is positive.  The promos are relatively inexpensive - if I get my printing costs down to $3-4 per game, and I can ship for maybe $4, then I could send out 10-12 promotional copies for under $100 - those are some workable numbers, but I'd have to limit it to sites with an appreciable readership, of which there are few.

Another indie publisher

I've run across a guy, Johnny Wahl, who's farther along than I am self-publishing his own game, called Conquer the Kings. It's a chess variant that supports up to four players on a new board, with piece placement up to the players. Looks like an interesting game, although I'm not enough of a chess player to know how it would go.

More interesting to me is the production and marketing. He's gone pretty high-end with the board and box, printed in the U.S., and he's ordered standard chess pieces from China. The artwork is neat. He's got pictures of the production run, which is really interesting. It looks like (from one of his picture captions) his initial print run was 500 games, and I bet they cost him a lot with those numbers and parts - probably at least $15 a copy, maybe more, which would make the game very difficult to sell through distributors at his $34.95 retail price. But chess is a huge market, and he might find enough folks to buy up those 500 directly without having to go through distribution.

The website and publishing project comes across very much as a labor of love, which is neat. He's living the dream, as I hope to do, although I'd like to do so in a way that has at least a chance of financial success. Wahl has also got an interesting post up on his testimonials page - basically a kindly-worded rejection letter from John McCallion, boardgames editor for Games magazine. That piqued my interest, because Matt Worden (of MWGames.com) recently got a mention from John for his game Jump Gate, sold through TheGameCrafter.com, but with far better artwork and game design than other games available at TGC.

I wonder if I can get my games reviewed in Games? Sounds like great publicity, and it sounds from both of these tidbits that Mr. McCallion actually does take the time to look at the things he gets sent, even if they're not in professional packaging or available in retail stores. Intriguing.

Another contest

Trask over at LivingDice.com reports on a new contest sponsored by Blue Panther LLC.  I haven't been able to find the press release or any other information at Blue Panther's website, but from what Living Dice reports, they're looking for multi-component games that are short (30 minutes or less) and make use of some of the different components Blue Panther can produce (mostly custom dice and wood products, but also cards).

The winner gets published; the runner-up gets a game prototype realized by Blue Panther.  They don't say what the terms are (e.g. royalty, number produced, etc.) for the winner - maybe that will come in a future posting.  The contest has a relatively short time horizon - entries due by August 10, winners announced by August 31.

I'm not sure if Blue Panther pre-prints a large run of their games, or whether they do something closer to print-on-demand with their products.  It looks like they're pretty well set up to do POD, although the cards might be tricky to do that way, since there's generally such an economy of scale with printing.

Interesting stuff - I'll look for more info.

Update:  Here's Blue Panther's original announcement.

Tasty Minstrel

Michael Mindes over at Tasty Minstrel games posted an interesting defense of a decision to sell one of TM's products, Terra Prime, at half-price through a game enthusiast site called Tanga.  I hadn't heard of Tanga before, but I've looked into it just a little bit, and it sounds like an interesting idea - kind of a Home Shopping Network for games and related stuff along with a community component.

I'd suspected that Terra Prime wasn't doing as well as Tasty Minstrel's other release, Homesteaders, because Michael has started giving out only Terra Prime, not Homesteaders, for his free game Friday giveaway.  He confirms this in his post, indicating he's still sitting on 800-1000 units in inventory with very slow sales.  I'm not sure how many he ordered to start, or what his cost structure looks like.  I know he used Xinghui for manufacturing, which produced cheap but apparently flawed products, and for a game like that to make economic sense, he'd have to have made at least a couple thousand of them.  The print run was 2,000 for Homesteaders, so it's probably the same for Terra Prime, although I can't find where Michael's mentioned the figure specifically.

This was both disheartening and inspiring. Disheartening in that he seems to be living one of my worst fears with this, which is having a significant portion of his product currently unsold and selling very slowly.  Inspiring in that he actually has moved maybe 1000 or more copies, half of those through distribution, within half a year.  That's pretty great, although it would be better were it to continue.

I'm guessing he doesn't suffer as big a markup through Tanga as through retail, although I haven't found anything with their terms yet.  Regardless, at some point, it's going to be worth it to move/liquidate some stock and recoup some of the investment, and the exposure from Tanga may (as Michael guesses) move sales elsewhere as more games get out in the hands of players.

Food for thought, and thanks to Michael for being willing to discuss his business openly.

Gentoo Rules

This was my entry (the winning entry) for the June BGDF game design showdown. The contest required a deck building component and also a slippery slope component, where a player who was ahead might tend to stay ahead.
(c) 2010 by Dave Dobson

Gentoo

A game of penguin procreation

Components:

• 12 Nesting Stone tokens 
• 20 Penguin tokens 
• 90 Gentoo cards 
• 20 Fish tokens

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Object:

Hatch as many new penguins as you can.

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Setup:

1.    Place six Snow cards in a Player Pile in front of each player. Any extra Snow cards will not be used.

2.    Shuffle the rest of the Gentoo cards. Flip the top four face up in the center of the table. These are the Choice Cards.

3.    Place the rest of the cards face down in a stack in the center of the table. This is the Draw Pile.

4.    Place the Penguin Tokens next to the Draw Pile.

5.    Each player flips their top three cards and places them in a row. These are the player’s Cards In Play. They will all be Snow cards at the start.

6.    Give each player three Nesting Stones.

7.    Give each player five Fish Tokens. These are used to pay for Choice Cards.

8.    The player who has been closest to the South Pole goes first.

Game Play:

Each player’s turn has two phases:

Phase I: Common Area

1.    Draw – flip the top card from the Draw Pile and add it to the Choice Cards in the center of the table. There should now be five cards there. If you run out of cards in the Draw Pile, shuffle the Discard Pile and use it as the new Draw Pile.

2.    Choose – You may choose one of the Choice Cards to add to your hand. Take the Choice Card and add it to your Used Pile next to her Cards in Play. You may not use this card this turn, but it will come into play later when the Used Pile is shuffled and turned into the Player Pile. Some cards have a cost shown as fish icons on the card. If so, you must pay the required number of fish tokens to choose the card. Eggs - The player may only choose an Egg Card if he or she has the required number of Nesting Stones indicated on the card.

3.    Discard – If there are more than four Choice Cards showing, pick one to discard. Move it to the Discard Pile.

Phase II: Personal Area

1.    Flip – flip the top card of your Player Pile and add it to your Cards in Play. If you have no more cards in your Player Pile, shuffle your Used pile to use as your new Player Pile. When you do this, restore your fish tokens back up to five tokens.

2.    Play – you may play any one of your Cards in Play. Choose a Card in Play, places it on the Discard Pile, and follows the instructions on the card. Hatching an Egg – you may hatch an egg only when you have both an Egg card and a Hatch card showing in your Cards in Play. Turn both of them in and collect a Penguin token. When you hatch an egg, you must give one of your nesting stones to another player. If you have no nesting stones, you can still hatch your egg.

3.    Move to Used – If you cannot or choose not to play a card, then if you have more than three Cards in Play, choose one of them and move it to the Used pile.

After these two phases, play proceeds to the next player.

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Winning the Game:

The first player to collect five penguin tokens wins the game.

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Cards:

·         Snow – Cannot be played. You may move it to your Used pile if you have more than three Cards in Play.

·         Egg – combine with Hatch to produce a penguin. Each Egg shows the nesting stones (3, 4, or 5) required to collect.

·         Skua (1 fish) – discard any Egg currently visible on the table (Cards in Play, Choice Cards, or atop a player’s Used Pile).

·         Stone Thief (1 fish) – take a Nesting Stone from any other player.

·         Good Nesting Site (1 fish) – reduces the number of nesting stones required to take an Egg by one. Discard when Egg is collected. Does not count as your played card. Limit one per Egg.

·         Hatch (1 fish) – Use to collect a penguin. Requires an Egg in play.

·         Leopard Seal (2 fish) – force another player to lose one penguin token.

·         Vicious Peck (1 fish) – blocks a Stone Thief card; you play this card out-of-turn to keep from losing your stone.

·         Confusing Blizzard – Reverse direction of play

·         Gone Fishing – The next player loses a turn

·         Thaw – if you have a Snow card in play, melt it. Discard both the Thaw and the Snow cards.

June BGDF Challenge Results

Looks like my entry, Gentoo, narrowly won the June BGDF design competition. Woohoo! This is the third month I've participated, and I've enjoyed it each time. This was certainly the biggest field of competitors - 11 entries and lots of good ideas.

This is my first entry that I actually printed out and playtested, which was fun. It worked pretty well after some iterations and rule changes. I think the requirements of the contest hurt the game a little bit, since I was required to include some elements that I'd otherwise avoid.
I'll get the rules up soon and comment some more.

RPG map-making on the fly and on the cheap

I made this map for an upcoming RPG session.  I like how it came out - I'm no artist, but I was able to use some terrain generation stuff in the GIMP graphics software to do a bunch of it.  I used a shaded version of actual terrain as an overlay for the mountainous bits, and I think it looks OK, even though it doesn't exactly match the outline of the island.

Anyway, pretty good for a few hours' work.  I may post a how-to later if anyone's interested.

Xinghui

James at MinionGames.com reports a bad experience with Xinghui games here and here.  They were the very low China #1 price on my earlier summary of game production quotes, and from other reports they've been quite low on nearly all bids, but the products are reported to be shoddy and low quality, so it looks like in this case you may get what you (don't) pay for.

TGC Sticker issues

One of the coolest things TheGameCrafter.com does is let you print stickers that you can then affix to their 1.25" tokens.  I've been using those for Yoggity.  My new set has a slight glitch, though - if you can see in the picture there, the art is just a percent or two bigger than the spread between the stickers, which means that the registration isn't exact, and the stickers shift a little from the top to the bottom of the page.

I used their templates and suggested safe zones, so all my art is on the sticker, but it's still a little dorky looking.  There's a close up of one on the top vs. one on the bottom below.  It looks worse for the paint buckets than for these pieces.

Not a big deal. I've reported it to TGC in their forums, so we'll see what comes of that.

CloudBerryGames

I've learned of a new site, CloudBerryGames.com, that looks like an effort to bring together designers, artists, and others to help games get designed, completed, tested, and produced.  They make their money by charging a small subscription fee to designers.  They say they'll actually publish some of the games submitted on the site, which would be cool - I bet the economics don't work for that until/unless they grow really big, but it's an interesting idea.  I haven't looked too deeply into it, but I'll look more later.

They just put up a blog post that markets them as a way to prevent idea theft - interesting, since most serious designers have moved past that particular fear so common in newbies.

TGC outsourcing to SuperiorPOD?

So, some customers at TGC have been getting shipping notifications from a Jeff Valent with regard to their orders.  See here. That would seem to explain the TGC "move" and all that - my guess is they've either merged with or outsourced their printing to SuperiorPOD, which is run by Jeff Valent and is located in New York.

I don't think that's necessarily a cause for concern; I've gotten good products from both companies, as I described here. My order was extremely delayed (and communication very limited) with SuperiorPOD, so I wasn't too happy with that, but that could have been a one-time thing, or TGC may help them fix it.  TGC's web interface and web site (and I think business model) is way, way better and easier to use than SuperiorPOD's was, and their customer service has been great for me.  They seem to have retained their employees through the transition, too, so that's good.

Interesting, though - I wonder why TGC chose to keep this secret?

Yoggity Quick Peek

Here's a quick peek at the new Yoggity components fresh out of the box.  My crappy webcam doesn't do them justice, but they look great.  More later.

BGDF design contest thoughts

Just finished reading and critiquing the BGDF entries for June.  Some good ones there.  And some not-so-good.

I've been enjoying this a lot.  This is my third time participating, and I've looked at some of the previous months too. The contest is an interesting mix; the entries seem to come in a few basic archetypes.  Here are some examples:

• Complete and Clever - a couple games each month manage to be both fully described and really clever - those are the ones that are the most fun to read.
• A Million Pieces and a Sliderule - a lot of the designs are just fabulously, needlessly complex, with eight kinds of resources, six different decks of cards, a board, and rules that require counting all these pieces and producing amortizations to determine income.  OK, not that bad, but some are close.
• Just Add The Actual Game - The desinger lays out a set of game mechanics in broad strokes, invokes a huge imaginary deck of cards or pieces each with individualized parameters, costs, and special powers, and then never tells you what any of those cards or pieces actually do or say.
• Huh? - often the rules are internally inconsistent, refer to parts not in evidence, or directly contradictory.  Or, they just don't make sense, like the words don't make sentences that you can understand.

Some of this comes from the very low 800-word limit from the rules - I've hit it nearly every time and had to cut out what I thought was vital stuff.  It's great practice for streamlining rules, but I think maybe 1000 words would let you define the concept just a little better.

I would have thought that there would be more entries that were near-direct copies of existing games or mechanics, but that's not actually so common - the contestants seem to think (probably rightly so) that voters will place a special emphasis on originality.  Even if they can't write comprehensible rules, they avoid a direct rip-off of an existing mechanic, which is interesting.

TGC now printing more stuff in color

I got my new version of Yoggity with the art from Jason Greeno (GreenoDesign.com) from TheGameCrafter.com, and it looks pretty great.  Something I didn't know - they are now printing rules in color (looks like color laser printing), and they're including two stickers, both in color, one stuck to the outside of the box and one inside.

I think the colors on this run seem less dark, too - my older stuff from them has always come out darker than the images I submit.

This is the first game (of about 12) that I've ordered alone, and it came with the shipping stuff and priority mail tape all over it - not ideal, but the game components look really good.  They use an outer box if you order more than one thing at a time, so your game boxes stay more pristine.

Pictures of the new version soon.

Eleven entries!

The June BGDF design showdown received 11 entries!  I'm not sure why it was so popular this time - maybe because some versions of the theme (deck building) could lead to a CCG-style game, and I hear those are popular.  This leads to two concerns - one is that I'll have stiff competition; the other is that I now have to do a critique of ten other games to assign my votes!  That could take a while.

New Facebook game - LuckyTrain

The company my brother works for just released their first product, a Facebook-based social game called LuckyTrain.  It's a pretty clever thing - not a single-player quest game like all of the MafiaWars clones and their ilk.  They've got some interesting ways to use the social networking built into Facebook.  I'll be interested to see how it does; I've been in on the beta testing, and I enjoyed it.

Dixit wins

Looks like Dixit won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres prize at Essen. I reviewed it here.  I certainly wouldn't have thought of it as a best game from a design point of view. The game works well; the concept is intriguing, and it's fun.  I wonder what criteria they were going on. Measured from some angles (graphic design, quirkiness), the game is clearly exemplary.  The art is just really, really cool, and you get to think in a fun, metaphorical way while playing. From a game design perspective, it's very much like Dictionary or Apples to Apples, although with a few twists. There's not much there, although it's fun.  I think Apples to Apples and Dictionary might have more replay value, although it depends on the audience.

Anyway, a good game.

Mr. Watson, come here, I need you

Interesting flash game up here at the NY Times - you can play Jeopardy against a computer opponent, Watson, created by IBM. They've stacked the deck some in the human's favor - you get to go first, and play or pass on each question. I ended up winning 65-6 (yay, recall of useless trivia), although I deserved two more points (I didn't know how precisely to phrase the answer to the Before and After questions, so I mis-answered the first one).

It often seemed like the program was doing little more than a Google search on the question terms, although I'd guess there's a good bit more to it than that. A lot of the questions had some misleading or extraneous language, and that sometimes threw the computer off the scent. It has to be processing commonalities pretty well, and it's understanding the language well enough (most times) to discern the question. It did quite well at the "before and after" questions, too, and I'd think those would be the hardest, algorithmically.

Anyway, a fun diversion. It's going to be a while before we have to worry about Skynet terminating us in front of Alex Trebek, though. Something like this could be turned into an interesting one-player trivia game, though, and that's a difficult thing to make.

Slowness at TGC

TheGameCrafter.com's move to a new physical location (WI to NY) has led to at least a 3-week delay in order processing, if my experience ordering a Yoggity prototype is any guide.

I also have a customer whose order was delayed, and who has received a bent card in his Diggity set when he finally got it.  If it were me fulfilling the orders, I'd have sent him a new card right away, but relying on TGC means that his experience, already drawn out, will now have to go through another round of back and forth to get his game into shape.  And of course this reflects on me, even though I'm not the cause of TGC's current troubles.  I hate that - when I was getting started selling Snood, I tried to be as responsive as possible to customers, and I think that's part of what helped to build word-of-mouth on the game.

Still very happy with TGC overall, and hopefully this is a one-time hiccup related to the move, but it's frustrating relying on others.

June BGDF Showdown entry in place

I finished my June BGDF Game Design Showdown entry today - I think it's a good one, but it was a tricky assignment this time out - the theme wasn't specified, but the mechanics and structure were quite closely regulated.  We'll see what the voters think; it's hard to predict how the voting will go and how the other entries will look.

I'll let y'all know which one mine is when the voting is done.

Profile of a start-up company

Dominic Crapuchettes has an autobiographical post about his game company up at BGG (link here, via BoardGameNews.com).  Interesting stuff - he's made the big time (carried by Target) and has $1.5 million in revenue, but still isn't breaking even.  Some different choices than I'd have made (e.g. running up all the debt on credit cards), but I might not have lasted as he has.

A very interesting read.

Inevitable Kickstarter project complete

The Inevitable guys have finished their fund-raising drive at Kickstarter.com, raising a total of $9,435.  About $2,650 of that was from people who pledged more than you needed to pledge to get a copy of the game (including four at the $500 level).  I posted previously on their efforts here.

They'd promised a print run of 100 for $3000 raised, so I imagine they're well past the costs they'll incur for 100 games.  Something like 87 of their 100 games are spoken for at the site, going to pledgers, but they'll likely be able to produce an additional couple hundred games with the funds they've raised (if that's what they decide to do with the extra money).

An unabashed success, leading to a game with a big following and positive cash flow before it is even printed.  Sounds like a great outcome - my congratulations to them.

Game production costs summary

The graph at left (click it to make it bigger) shows some results from quotes I've gotten for my card game, Diggity. I thought it might be useful to other game designers and people contemplating publishing their own games to see what I've learned.

Tuck and Setup refer to box types - tuck boxes are one-piece boxes with a flap that tucks in, like a regular playing card box, while setup boxes are usually two pieces (base and lid) with an internal platform for holding the contents in place.

These numbers are tricky to compile and to compare - even though I send the same specifications to each printing company, I don't always get the same results back. For example, some of the quotes include different kinds of boxes, or different box materials, or different card sizes, or different paper stocks and paper coating. Some of them include shipping; others do not, and I have to estimate it, which I've done here. I have only included printing and shipping charges and setup costs where appropriate; no other charges like import duties, file preparation, shipping of samples, etc.

I often got multiple quotes for different quantities from the same company; these are connected by lines. I sometimes got quotes for different products from the same company, e.g. tuck box vs. setup box (a two-piece box with a bottom and a lid). In this case, I've grouped them with a number; e.g. everything marked "China #1" comes from the same Chinese printer, while "China #2" would be a different Chinese printer.

I'm still pursuing bids, and I will not necessarily go with the lowest bidder here. There are a host of other concerns, such as product quality, the component materials, the box type, my estimates of other costs incurred when dealing with the company involved (which are higher overseas), the professionalism I perceive with the company, and others. I'd love to have a "Made in America" on the label, too, if I can afford it.

For a look at how this plays out in terms of actually making the economics work, see this post and this post.

Alien Frontiers - another Kickstarter success

Back at the end of April, I posted on another Kickstarter donation campaign, this one for a game called Alien Frontiers.  Well, they're over $11,000 with just under a couple weeks to go, marking yet another successful use of Kickstarter for pre-sales.  About $7500 of their pledges are at their basic, $50 level, which gets you a copy of the game.  They report here at BGG  that their print costs are going to be probably in the neighborhood of $15,000 (my guess is that after shipping and other costs this bleeds up toward $20,000) for 1,000 copies, so a $50 sale price per game with $15-20 production costs is probably a good target for them, although a bit steep for the retail market.  I haven't seen much on the game yet, but it does seem to have a ton of bits.

I'd be interested if they manage to sell out the 800+ copies that aren't yet spoken for.  I'd also be interested what ratio of their funding comes from anonymous donors.  I asked a couple folks about this for earlier Kickstarter projects (see here and here), and it seems to be actually about a third to a half of the buyers in these things are unknown to the organizers - a far higher ratio than I'd have guessed.

It looks like Kickstarter is a great way to leverage game production.  My earlier misgivings seem nearly entirely unwarranted in the light of these three projects.

June BGDF Challenge

I guess I was going to run into Dominion sooner or later.  The June BGDF game design showdown is up, and it relies on Dominion's deck-building mechanic pretty heavily.  I haven't played Dominion, but my impression is that you've got a limited number of resources which you spend to buy cards; some cards give you more resources or moves or abilities, other cards give you points.  So, it's a tradeoff between stuff that will help you play and stuff that will help you win.  Sounds interesting.

The other part of the challenge is that they want a slippery slope feel.  This is where getting ahead gets you further ahead, and getting behind gets you further behind, or, in other words, a positive feedback loop.  This kind of thing has a tendency to end games fast and/or make them pointless to finish, but part of the challenge is to have a slippery slope tendency but not to have it ruin the game.

This is going to be hard to do, and hard to judge, since the rules submitted for these things are usually incomplete, making it hard to imagine the final game.  Since game balance is key here, and since that usually comes from iterative playtesting and tweaking rather than from rules, it's going to be tricky.

I'll see what I can do.

Yoggity Art revealed!

I mentioned in this post that I'd gotten some new art created for my unpublished game Yoggity.  The artist is Jason Greeno of Greeno Design (GreenoDesign.com).  You can see some samples of the art at the Yoggity page here - I'm really happy with it.  I'm getting a mock-up made by TGC, and I'll post actual snapshots when I receive it.

I've entered Yoggity in the Rio Grande Game Design Competition, and if I don't succeed in getting it picked up by Rio Grande there, I'll look to producing this as the second Plankton Games title sometime in early 2011.

Valley Games reveals some of their inner workings

Torben Sherwood is part of the new game company Valley Games, which is publishing a number of new titles, some English-language versions of German games, and some classics (e.g. Titan, which I first played in 1987).  He's got a couple of posts (here and here) up at LivingDice.com.

These are interesting, but there's not a lot to go on here; there are few details, and a lot of skimming over the challenges they faced.  The second article is more focused on what game designers do wrong when presenting their games to a publisher, and (more relevant to me here) some of the procedures and challenges they go through during production.

It sounds like they've had some good response at various conventions (e.g. Essen, BGG Con, GAMA) - that may be something I'll have to invest in once I get up and running, but I'm nowhere near the size they are now (17 published titles listed on their site).

Another Yoggity test

I played Yoggity with my parents today, and they seemed to enjoy it.  They've played most of my game designs going way back to my still-talked-about-and-mocked Roy Rogers game, which I made in about 1981 at the age of 12 or so. It nearly always ended in a near-infinite loop of being sent back to the ranch (start) - you had to roll a six and then a three or something to get through one part of the board.

So, I think they liked it - my mom won, 44-40-40, although my dad had a chance to get 2nd place outright at the end. There was a lot of trading and cooperation, and one vicious cancellation of a Bland Corporate Logo order that might have won me the game.  Good fun.

Production costs and financial returns

Seo at BGDF has a good very brief run-down of the economics of publishing.  He's left out shipping and marketing costs, which can easily eat up the meager 1/8 of the final sales price that the publisher eventually sees, not to mention the difficulties of getting distribution, the very real risk of not selling out your print run, which leaves you deep into negative territory, and paying yourself something for the effort and investment you're putting in.

How the later commenter sees this as a very good opportunity for self-publishers is beyond me...

Two tech tools

Both from PurplePawn.com.

Not cool:  Yoyn - There is nothing in this demo that shows me how a game can be played better on this platform than with cardboard pieces.  Rolling the die to roll a virtual die is strangely cool, but also pointless.  There has to be a better way to use all this technology.  And the background music for the video is maddening.

Cool: Lego Robot Chess - ironically, still mostly pointless, but makes up for it in style points.  The pathfinding algorithms must have been a bear to write.  My favorite parts:  1) The pieces going diagonal and backing out of the way to allow a piece to move diagonally through them; 2) the reveal, midway through, of the scale of the board, and 3) the animated parts of the mega-pieces, like the knight's rearing horse with animated forelegs, and the queen thumping her checkmate challenge at the end.

Both of these have an insanely low effort-to-utility ratio, but the lego chess is cool on a number of levels, maybe even for this low ratio.

More manufacturer options

David MacKenzie of Clever Mojo Games (the ones doing Alien Frontiers on Kickstarter.com) recommends Panda Games Manufacturing (an American company which works with Chinese manufacturers) and Xinghui (a Chinese company) in this BGDF post.  There, is that enough links? :-)

I've gotten a quote from Xinghui which was very reasonable for my project - probably the best overall pricing, although it didn't include shipping, prep, and other expenses which (thanks to Dan Tibbles' excellent talk) I now know to expect from China.  However, Tasty Minstrel Games had some production issues which Michael Mindes describes at his blog (and which are confirmed by seo/Seth at BGDF).  Not to say Xinghui should be judged by this one experience, but it's a data point, at least.

Nine links - I think that's a record, especially for a two paragraph post.  Har.

Grid Game

Eric Martin at Boardgame News links to a flash game called "Grid Game" (located here).  It's a fairly hypnotic thing to try once or twice, and it's interesting how it creates order out of randomness based on only a few simple rules.  Very elegant.

I don't think it has a lot of game value, though.  Like Bejeweled and a variety of other recent games, you make a single play that triggers others, and your eventual score depends on how all the triggering events stack up.  I suppose if you were some kind of Rain Man you could look at the board and see how your move would cascade through the playfield, but I doubt most folks can do that.

In Bejeweled, a whole bunch of your score comes directly from the random number generator - what jewels get created and fall onto your board.  That's always frustrated me with Bejeweled and similar games. This Grid Game is more deterministic than that - you have all of the information you need to predict what will happen, but the complexity of how it plays out is beyond the scope of what people can reasonably imagine.  Your score just happens to you - you don't earn it.

Assuming I wanted to turn this into a game, rather than a toy, how would I improve it?  If you reduced the board to a much smaller size, say 5x5, then it would become more reasonably predictable, and there could be some skill to playing it.  Designing some pre-set scenarios with specified maximum scores would be fun, too - you'd need to puzzle out what move gives you the best score.

Story Arc

Jonathan Degann has an interesting post here from 2003 at the now defunct Games Journal about the concept of a story arc in a game.  He makes some interesting points - games that have you constantly doing the same thing over and over are harder to like, while games that have some kind of story built in have an advantage.  I don't know that I'd agree that it's always better to have a story arc, but it can help.

Some very popular games have this kind of thing - chess, for example, plays out as an extended drama, with characters leaving (and later entering) the mix.  The game always goes through this story, with progressive limitation as pieces are removed, while the ones that are left gain expanded power because the crowding goes away.  Monopoly has a structural story built in - at first, nobody has any properties, and there's a race to gather them.  Later on, the game moves to a trading phase, as players try to collect sets.  Then, there's an end game, where it becomes kind of like an extended version of Russian roulette, seeing who's going to land on the hotels first.

However, even games without this structurally demanded story arc can be really fun, and they often create their own plotlines as they go.  As a kid, I heard my relatives discuss their bridge games endlessly, and that game doesn't have a built-in plot - you bid, you play the tricks, you score; repeat.  Same thing with nearly any game with dominos.  Basketball is 40 minutes of doing the same thing over and over, but games are really exciting to watch, and the score (and the fouls) become the story as leads grow and shrink.  Many pub games - darts, pool, foosball, etc. - all are very fun but are by nature completely repetitive.  Plenty of card games don't have a plot, either - see casino, poker, cribbage, Uno.  You would be hard-pressed to find any kind of plot here other than the changes in scores, but they're still fun.

Diggity, as a card game, is less about story than most games, but I think it still has one.  The basic plays are repetitive (every turn you add a mine card to the table), but there's an overarching story there - the tools come and go from turn to turn, people have to decide to use them or not as the gold comes out, tools get stolen, the lead changes, people sometimes gang up on the leader.  Shakespeare it aint, but there's still some drama there.  I'll need to think about my other designs and see if I can add some to them, too.

Kickstarter as pre-ordering framework

I've been toying with the idea of using Kickstarter.com to fund part of my first print run - not so much to ask for donations for a commercial enterprise, but merely to give friends and family a way to pre-purchase the game.  I think I may do it, although it feels a little hitting up your friends for something they don't really want, like when your kids go around selling candy bars or coupon books.

A couple of the earlier versions I commented on (Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands and Inevitable) approached their pitch less as mere pre-ordering and more as artistic patronage, where you were getting a chance to support the hopes and dreams part beyond just buying a game.  I was wondering if a simple pre-order thing would work.  Via Trask at LivingDice.com, It looks like we've got a test case - GamingPaper (site here) is looking for funds to print up an 8.5x11 version of their product in what is essentially a plain pre-order scheme.  They do have other rewards for various donation levels, but those rewards are already available as products they sell - the 8.5x11 version is the only new product.

In this case, there's no artistic vision to support (although the Kickstarter video playfully suggests there could be), since you're basically buying 250 sheets of graph paper.  I'll be interested to see how they do.

TheGameCrafter moving to newer, better facilities

Print-on-demand publisher TheGameCrafter.com has announced (see here) that they're moving from Wisconsin to New York, where they hope to add items they don't currently provide, like tuck boxes, game boxes, thicker game boards, and other unspecified cool stuff.

That sounds great; with the move, it also sounds like a sale of the company, although they have not announced that and I have nothing to base that on.  But it seems like it would be very hard on the owners and employees to pick up and move, and they'd have no real reason to move to some place where labor and real estate are potentially more expensive just to expand their range.  I've been really happy with their management, customer service, and employees - I'd hate to see any of that change with the relocation.

But if they can add more custom items (like the boxes and better boards, but also maybe some printed chits and/or tokens), that would really provide a terrific way to produce print-on-demand games that aren't limited by their current range of customizable products (only cards, boards, and stickers for disk tokens).  A real printed game box (rather than the current featureless white corrugated carton) would be the biggest step towards making this a real option for marketing professional-seeming games.  I hope that happens soon.