Ending

The pledge manager for the Box of Pirate Flicks closes in about 24 hours.

Last chance to get heavily-subsidised international shipping on all things FlickFleet.

Then I’ll be ordering all the things we need to make 1,200 boxes worth.

Or maybe 1,500.

I need to decide on final numbers.

Hence closing the pledge manager.

I’m also getting a new Coalescence prototype together.

This one was too small!

And finishing off The Planet My Destination.

Then we’re off to the National Space Centre for their To Boldly Game event.

It’s a busy time!

Culmination

I have two games nearing completion.

The Planets My Destination, my second roll and write.

And Coalescence, a dexterity game of solar-system building.

TPMD has frequently got great feedback. 

I’m finalising the graphic design now.

I might just release it on the website.

Rather than crowdfunding.

Rocky ‘Roid made very little money after ad spend and Gamefound fees.

Coalescence has been 4 (5?) years in the making.

It’s worked for most of that time, but was missing the spark that makes it super fun. The highs and lows.

And it was nigh-impossible to manufacture.

I think I might have cracked both.

Needs a new prototype. 

And more testing.

I’m working on both.

Might even enter Coalescence into the Cardboard Edison award…

Christmas

I’m taking a break now for Christmas.

Heading to Bristol to see family and in-laws.

Will probably take some prototypes along with some games though.

I’ve levelled up Coalescence a bit.

Hope you all have a great Christmas/Happy Holidays/winter break/summer break as appropriate!

See you in 2024!

Fauxmas

Paul and his family visited for the weekend.

Celebrating an early Christmas with friends.

Paul’s still a bit under the weather after last weekend’s stay in hospital, but on the mend.

We played loads of games.

And talked Eurydice.

Scheming.

Planning.

A bit of game design.

Might now gave a viable way of making this

And sorted the names for the FlickFleet  pirate ships.

The Box of Pirate Flicks rules are with the proof reader now.

Next up is the dashboards.

That’s this week’s task…

I’m hoping to tease them in the FlickFleet Facebook group as I go…

Feedback

I have three games that I ought to be playtesting more widely.

Jotunsaga, about Vikings hunting trolls.

Colony, the new roll and write that’s only a few weeks old.

And Coalescence, which has been years in the making.

The next step is to get people playtesting without me there explaining the rules.

To do this I need to send physical (or at least digital!) copies of the games to people.

Troll is still sharpie on blank cards. Needs some work before it’s ready to send out.

Coalescence is a real pain to manufacturer. 

Needs a 5-layer board and 3D-printed planets.

So Colony was first out the door.

I already had everything I needed!

I’m off on holiday this week. Need to work on the others when I get back.

Personal

This has been a week of two halves.

Like a football match.

During the weekday evenings I was populating the fulfilment spreadsheet.

It’s slow work.

Especially for the deluxe backers because I email them to see if they want their boxes personalised.

It’s worth it.

Some of their choices are very entertaining.

On the weekend I put that to one side.

Paul and his family visited for the weekend.

First time since Feb 2020.

We hung out. Played games. Playtested Coalescence and schemed about Xeno Wars.

It was great.

Oh, and there was some football on too.

Changing Tack

I've been trying to get coalescence ready to submit for the Board Game Workshop competition (which was due to close last Friday, but now closes next Friday). The stumbling block has been finding time to record a video (which needs to be done after the kids go to sleep) and then to edit it as well.

Last week I had a crazy idea of doing a micro-Kickstarter for some exclusive FlickFleet content (extra ships with new names and possibly even a new ship type or two). I say micro-Kickstarter as I’m not intending to do a video, or to commission new reviews - so all that’s required is pricing up the new content and doing a basic Kickstarter page.

The goal of this would be two-fold: make some more ships for fans of the game, who would really like them and to use Kickstarter as a marketing platform to help us the sell off the leftover stock from the last Kickstarter that we can’t take to conventions and sell through that route.

This week I’ve decided that I’m best off focussing my very limited lockdown free time on the Kickstarter rather than the competition, so I’ve been working on that a bit in my evenings. We are lucky that we have a lot of the assets already in place, plus a load of great reviews so there isn’t a huge amount to do.

We’re hoping to run a short (7-14 day) campaign before the end of this month, so if you are interested in (more) FlickFleet, or you know someone who might be, please keep your eyes peeled or subscribe to our quarterly email newsletter to ensure you don’t miss out.

A Blast from the Past!

Last week was a strange one. I went through all the books to double check everything and spotted a couple of people who were missing rewards, so Paul will be sending those tomorrow. He’s also started cutting more ships so he has stock for when I re-open the website in the next couple of days. 

I think I’ve also found the last Kickstarter backer - who hasn’t yet provided a shipping address. But despite a conversation on Twitter I’ve still not got an address to post his rewards to. 

The weirdest thing about this week was being contacted out of the blue by a publisher potentially interested in reprinting one of my old games. He’s had some ideas to improve it as well. Very early days, so it might well lead to nothing, but I was pleasantly surprised. 

This week I also need to update the website to make the games available for sale again now Paul and I have a solution for the deluxes (we both sign the boxes for the deluxes, but with the lockdown I can’t get down to his house to sign them, so I’m sending him some signed labels instead). 

I signed 350 labels for deluxe games and expansions!

There’s two other things to do too: I’m a judge in the Board Game Design Lab competition, so I have 10 games to judge this week and I’m hoping to submit Coalescence to the Board Game Workshop’s competition. 

It’s going to be pretty hectic!

A Good Week!

Things are finally on the up! Paul is now well enough to return to work and on Friday posted all but two of the remaining rewards for the Kickstarter (the last two will hopefully go this week).

With Paul able to post games again, I’ve spent the weekend working on the website, preparing to opening it up again and make the expansion available for sale.

A deluxe expansion photo for the website

We now need to work out how to sell the remaining stock left over from the Kickstarter now that our plan of attending the UK Games Expo has been stopped by COVID-19.

Paul and I also had an online games design meeting when we discussed the next FlickFleet Kickstarter, Coalescence and TU:S. Feels like things are moving again!

On The Up!

Things are starting to look up. Paul is recovering from suspected COVID-19, so much so that he's parcelled up all the Kickstarter rewards now for taking to the Post Office, so Kickstarter fulfillment is getting closer.

I've also managed to find some time for both making FlickFleet first edition copies (we've still got a few of those to sell) and playtesting Coalescence with Daughter the First. I'm also considering entering Coalescence in the Board Game Workshop's competition (deadline for submissions: 5th June) to force myself to make progress and get some feedback. Just thinking about entering has spurred me on a bit - I've written the rules down and started drafting a video script in my head. So it's working so far.

I entered FlickFleet in the Cardboard Edison competition in 2018, and although we didn't win (or get shortlisted) we got some really useful feedback and it spurred me on to get the rules written down and formatted, so well worth doing!

Ding! Ding! New Round

This week I've finally finished off the new deck of goal cards for my Coalescence prototype. It's taken me weeks and weeks due to a lack of free time during lockdown, but I've finally got it done.

All the previous versions of this game (or at least the ones with goal cards) featured goal cards hastily scribbled on scraps of paper torn from an A4 sheet. And only about 8 of those. This version has 25 cards (the number I traditionally fit on a sheet of A3 card) printed on thick card. I've got a wider range of goals and also several with two different flavours of the same goal, which might work, or might not.

I've also taken this opportunity to practise my graphic design skills:

Prettier than hand-scribbled text only!

The next step is to try them out and see if the new ideas work or not...

Moving Forward and a Flashback

After a worrying couple days last weekend when we heard that both Paul and his wife had suspected COVID-19, and then they went ominously silent, we’ve heard that his wife is back to working from home and Paul’s OK. He’s been wiped out for a couple of weeks now but he’s not been to hospital so it counts as ‘mild’. His condition is slowly improving.

My Coalescence prototype was also slowly improving last week, I've been working on digital goal cards (with new goals and more options), so I hope to be able to finish them off in the next couple of weeks (free time is still very limited) and then print and cut them. Daughter the First played a few games of it at the start of the lockdown and has been asking to play again.

We’ve also been using the weekends stuck at home to sort out some of the piles of stuff left over from our move last summer. The garage in particular is full of moving boxes destined for the loft that we wanted to sort and not just squirrel away. This weekend, while going through boxes I found one containing a lot of Reiver Games prototypes including the final Border Reivers one from 2004:

An 16-year old prototype!

There were also a couple of games I had in progress when I shut it down in 2011 and a Carpe Astra prototype too. A proper blast from the past!

Isolation

We’re now at the end of our two weeks of quarantine and can do our own shopping (the UK lockdown prevents us from leaving the house except for that and one exercise session by ourselves once a day).

Despite the fact that I’m saving 60-80 minutes a day on commuting I’ve actually got less time for Eurydice stuff as I’m taking longer lunch breaks to give The Wife a break from looking after the girls all day and the kids are going to bed later so we have less evening available.

I have managed to playtest Coalescence a few times with Daughter the First though and am looking forward to iterating the scoring cards when I get a chance.

I’ve also held my first online Games Night last week too, we used Google Hangouts for video chat and played a couple of games of 7 Wonders and one of Tsuro using the iPad/Android apps. 7 Wonders went pretty smoothly once we got used to the AI and the round timer, Tsuro was a massive pain to set up online games (can’t cancel accidental ones, the friend codes didn’t always work, difficult to work out what you need to do and in what order). Carcassonne has worked pretty well during the test the week before, but there are apparently three different versions (old iOS, old Android and new Asmodee) and we’re not sure if there’s any cross-connectivity between them. So it might only work when everyone has the same version.

We want to try Race for the Galaxy too as that’s a favourite, so hopefully we’ll have a few options for the next several weeks of distant gaming.

This week I'm mostly sending messages, it's time for our monthly Kickstarter update and also our first quarterly email newsletter of 2020!

Yay! Boo! Yay! Boo!

It’s been a mixed week.

Yay: Paul has sent all but 12 of the rewards due in April now, four of those are to friends that we will deliver by hand, one is still waiting on a shipping address and the other seven will go early next week.

He’s got everything he needs to start sending the first twenty-odd October rewards too.

Boo: Paul’s garage door is broken. He needs to open the door to run the extraction hose from the laser cutter outside while cutting, so until it’s fixed we can’t make any more games. It shouldn’t get in the way of the October deadline, but will delay the last few rewards at least a few weeks.

Yay: I went to my third consecutive Newcastle Playtest last week with Coalescence again. It’s getting better again - making solid progress. We also had some good ideas to improve it further. I’m really glad the Newcastle Playtest is running again. I didn’t make it along at all last year (work travel or hand-crafting FlickFleet always got in the way) and it eventually petered out. I restarted it in January and we’ve now had three good back-to-back sessions :-)

Coalescence taking shape (pun intended!)

Boo: I also took along the other game I’m working on which had had its first test with Paul a couple of weeks ago. I’ve totally broken it! Time to roll back a load of changes and try to approach it in a different direction.

Designer Diary: Coalescence

As I mentioned last week, I’ve started designing games again after a crazy year of construction last year.

The first of these is Coalescence - a game of solar system engineering.

The theme for this one came first (I think it’s unique too!) - you start with a solar system at the proto-planetary disc stage (an amorphous disc of gas and dust) and take it to a finished solar system with planets and moons.

I first tried this game out with Paul towards the end of last year. At that point I was thinking of an action selection game with hidden goals that partially overlapped so there could be one or many winners.

As is often the case, that first game didn’t go very well (way too short and it didn’t feel particularly interesting).

The next step (at the end of last year) was to turn it into a dexterity game where the board mirrored the gravity well of the solar system - a layered board where things naturally fell towards the centre of the board:

The first dexterity prototype

I took that to the first session of Newcastle Playtest in early January. The dexterity element brought an immediacy that had been missing and also an element of chaos, which suits the theme of trillions of pieces interacting through gravity as they spiral round the new born star.

There were however a number of things that needed attention: the board was made of layers of 5mm foam core stacked on top of each other - the resulting steps were so high it was pretty much impossible to flick away from the star. That version was the first to feature the hidden goals, but they were very binary - by halfway through the game you knew you had won or lost, which made the rest a bit pointless. And there was no story for why you were doing it.

A couple of weeks ago I took a new prototype along Newcastle Playtest:

The second dexterity prototype

This one was made from layers of card so the steps (5 instead of 2) were easier to cross. I’d swapped out the wooden cubes for the gems in Incan Gold which had a much more interesting shape and added a time limit to the game rather than playing until you ran out of rocks to flick. I made the board bigger and I also came up with a story hook:

Captain, there is a new solar system forming in Sector X/A9-4. I don’t need to tell you how tactical important that location is. We need that system to be perfect for us to colonise. Your mission is to go there with a stealth ship and a fleet of mass-driver drones and give things a nudge so it ends up how we want it. Like everyone else we’ve signed the galactic treaties that forbid this, so your presence and actions must go undetected - this is strictly on the quiet. Of course we expect everyone else to do the same, so expect inference too. Get this right and your career will be stellar.

The final change, suggested by one of the playtesters, was to have hidden scoring criteria instead of goals. So you would spend the whole game trying to get more points rather than you play until you met your win condition and then lose interest. It was much better all round.

Next up is to swap the six hastily scribbled hidden scoring cards for a wider selection and then work on balancing them properly.

Like the sound of this? Let me know in the comments or sign up to our newsletter to stay informed.

Designing Again

Last year I spent making FlickFleet copies. It was all-encompassing. We needed to make about 300 for the first Kickstarter’s rewards and each one was entirely hand-made. At the beginning of the year my half of the construction (making the boxes, cutting the dashboards and packing the contents in the box) took me about 25 minutes per game. 

I work full time and have two young kids so my chance to do this is in the evenings after the kids are asleep and we’ve tidied up for the day, so I started somewhere between 8:30 and 9pm. My youngest sleeps terribly so to survive I need to get to bed pretty early - ideally 10pm. As a result I ended up spending three nights a week making games for most of the year.

As a result of that and wanting to spend some time with The Wife after the kids were asleep, I did pretty much nothing last year except making games. In 2012 I set up a playtesting group with another designer. Last year I didn’t make it once (and he’s moved on too, so it petered out). We have a local games club that meets twice a month. I didn’t make it to that either. Nor did I do any real games design either. Even after Paul (who works 3 days a week and has an older kid) took a load of the manufacturing off my plate.

This time we’ve managed to reach the scale where we can get the dashboards cut for us and the boxes manufactured too (they’re finally turning up at Paul’s today!), so Paul is going to do all the construction (which is laser cutting the bits, bagging everything and then putting stuff in the boxes).

I’ll finish off the remaining stock from the first Kickstarter, do the books, website, marketing and admin stuff.

This frees up a lot of my time (especially good as I started a new job last week!) and as a result I’ve been in the mood for designing again. I’ve restarted the playtest group, started work on two designs and almost made it to Newcastle Gamers (the bi-monthly games club) this week, but was foiled by a truly terrible night’s sleep the preceding night.

I’ve got two ideas on the go at the moment: Coalescence: a dexterity game of solar system engineering and a multi-session game set in the FlickFleet universe that Paul and I came up with over breakfast on our recent trip to York.

I’ll be sharing more about these two games over the next few weeks.