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It's been a mixed week.

The boxes have arrived. 

Paul's house is rammed again.

One of many stashes!

We're just waiting on the delayed baggies before we can start making everything again.

And start fulfilment.

But most of the week has been fixing my error.

Last week I found out that we'd overcharged 150 people on the latest Gamefound campaign.

My mistake.

I reduced our prices, and missed the pledge level itself.

So I took some time to find out exactly who was affected and then emailed them all.

Offering a £5 refund, or a £5 add-on.

It's taken a long time to update the spreadsheets with those answers and issue the refunds requested.

But it's all my own fault.

Our customers are awesome though.

Everyone's been nice about it.

Some offered it as a tip or a charity donation.

We're lucky to have them!

Learning From My Mistakes

One of the advantages of starting a second board game publishing company is that you have previous experience and in particular, lots of previous mistakes from which you can learn (if you didn't you still be running the first one!).

I had a lot of successes with Reiver Games and I'm proud of what I achieved, but the errors outweighed the successes over time and they came to define the company and eventually kill it. According to Carol Dweck, how you respond to failures is a key part of your mindset - some people treat failures as judgements on their abilities, others as lessons from which they can learn. I like to think I'm in the second camp, but you never know.

So what went wrong with Reiver Games? It was all going well while I ran the company as a hobby, hand-making games, it wasn't until I made the leap to professional publisher that things started to come off the rails. I can think of five major mistakes that I really don't want to repeat:

1. Jumped to professional too soon
2. Artwork is critical to retail success
3. Carpe Astra rushed out
4. Taking a bank loan
5. Losing momentum/motivation

Jumped to professional too soon

When my Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis led to my life insurance paying out I had a choice to make, keep working in full-time employment, running Reiver Games as a hobby in my spare time or invest heavily in Reiver Games and go pro. I chose the latter, far too soon. I had maybe ten true fans, and a whole heap of people who had heard of Reiver Games - enough to be able to sell 300 hand-made games within a year, but not enough to sell 3,000 games through retail channels. I should have waited until I had more experience and a better market presence. This time round I have no plans to go pro - I've a family to support now, I can't afford to go without a salary or take a big pay cut.

Artwork is critical to retail success

When you're making games by hand and selling them at conventions and games clubs you've a lot on your side - you're selling the games, and people like to support the little guy or the designer of a game who's excitement about their project is so palpable. When you're selling through retail channels no-one is selling your game. The store will stock it (if you're lucky!), but it will just sit on the shelf amongst hundreds or thousands of others - the staff won't know how to play and won't be pushing your game over any other game. So your game has to sell itself, whether through hype, word of mouth or shelf presence. A beautiful box will really help here, as it will draw people in to learn more. With both It's Alive! and Carpe Astra I got a friend to do the art, and he did me a great deal, so it was very cheap. But he didn't have board game art experience. I loved the art of It's Alive!, but the box was weak, so the second edition had a new box, which was weak in a different way. The art for Carpe Astra was also weak - especially the box. But when it's a mate doing it dead cheap it's very hard to ask him to redo it, especially when you can't clearly articulate what's wrong with it. This time round I'm not aiming at retail, so I can side-step a lot of this, and I'll be mostly selling the game face-to-face with people who have played it, which makes the box art less critical to its success.

Carpe Astra rushed out

If you want to make a living selling board games through retail channels you need to sell a lot of games. Let's say you want to earn £30K. The usual pricing for retail is that you sell to distributors at 40% of retail and aim to get it manufactured at 20% of retail. So your profit is 20% of retail (if you sell them all!). It's Alive! retailed at £15, so my profit should have been £3 per copy (I overspent, it was nearer £1.50). If It's Alive! was the only game I made I would need to sell 10,000 of them every year. That's excluding money for warehousing, attending conventions and advertising. One way to make things easier is have multiple games, that way you can do several smaller runs, and it makes it easier for shops or distributors to place an order with you. To try to get to this point I rushed Carpe Astra out. It had some nice ideas, but it wasn't ready for prime time, and as a result I was left with a lot of games that I couldn't shift. I should have had the balls to delay its release until I though it was ready, rather than rush to be a 'multi-game' publisher. This time round I'm not trying to go pro, so I'm very happy to only have one game on the books at a time, or even none if I've not got the next one ready to go.

Taking a bank loan

A couple of things went wrong with the launch of Carpe Astra, as well as rushing the game out before it was ready, I'd hit several delays when trying to get It's Alive! to market. I'd taken the £4,250 I'd made on the hand-made games and invested £12K of life insurance to fund the £13,500 cost of It's Alive! It's Alive! was months late, so when I wanted to launch Carpe Astra (too early!) I'd not recouped enough of the It's Alive! investment to fund the £10K cost of getting Carpe Astra manufactured. I could have waited, building up funds and giving myself more time to improve the game, but instead I went to the bank and got a loan. For the next three years I would be paying the bank £330 a month. In a good month I'd bring in a lot more than than, but in a bad one I'd bring in a lot less. So my cash on hand slowly dwindled and eventually I ran out. This time round I'm going to be very careful about recurring monthly expenses. At the moment it's just the bank account fees, that don't start for 18 months...

Losing motivation/momentum

It's easy to be excited and motivated when everything is going well, less so when sales are slowly tricking in and your bank loan and warehousing costs are draining your bank account before your very eyes. How you perform under those circumstances says a lot about your character and your likelihood of success. I'm sad to say that I lost faith and gave up - I was spending my days largely watching television on one, then two, then six hour 'lunch breaks', supposedly researching game ideas based on my favourite TV shows. I was pretty pathetic and had I manned up and hustled at that point it might have still been possible to turn things around. I didn't and I paid the price. Reiver Games went under. This time round I hope I'm a better man, I've seen what that leads to and know the warning signs to watch out for. The reduced pressure from not trying to make it a salary paying job will also make it less demoralising if things don't go to plan.

I really don't want to make same mistakes again. This time round I'm taking some things from my day job to help me keep on top of things. I'm adopting a process of continuous improvement and taking regular checkpoints when I ask myself what's going well, badly and what I should start doing that I'm currently not. This step back will hopefully let me spot problems before they become too entrenched and fix them, leading to more success than last time...

Stocking Orders

Today is all about the stocking orders. I've got a stocking order for It's Alive! and Carpe Astra from a new UK distributor, a case going to a shop in Australia, and the Texan distribution I've been dealing with are also taking some Carpe Astra. I had to wait in for a drug delivery anyway today, so being in for the couriers is no big deal.

My trip to the box-makers yesterday went fine (they made some up for me while I was there), and it wasn't until I got home that I realised a problem. The bigger cases for Carpe Astra mean I need a bigger box. I got some bigger boxes, but when I got home and started checking the shipping prices (which require the size and weight of the parcel you're sending) I noticed that the larger box I'd bought to fit six cases of Carpe Astra was so large that its volumetric weight (cubic volume in cm^3 / 5000) was over 31.5Kg, which made it too heavy for many of the cheaper services I'd been using. Since I've already quoted several people shipping prices I'm just going to have to swallow this :-(

I'm going to go back to the box-maker today (the drug delivery has just arrived and the stocking order collections are all this afternoon) to swap some of the new boxes for the ones I used for It's Alive! which fit 4 cases of Carpe Astra quite snugly.

Talking of stocking orders, I've a few overdue accounts now from distributors. A few became due yesterday (the ones who collected at Essen among others) and I'm still waiting for the cash. Hopefully, it'll turn up in a day or two.

The individual pre-orders have slowed down now, I'm still waiting on 40-odd, I don't know whether they've even received the email, changed their minds or are just waiting for funds to become available. A couple of customers have had to cancel their orders as the credit crunch bites. What will become of the other forty? I've no idea...

What A Fool!

Over the weekend I've mostly finished the last batch of Border Reivers (I just need to cut out the tiles), and I've started making It's Alive! The delivery that I though was the first print run turned out to be the wooden pieces when I went to collect them from the depot (having not been in when the delivery was attempted). This is great as the wooden pieces were the things I was most worried about, I thought there was a real chance they wouldn't arrive on time, but they have. The down side was that when I collected the parcel I found out that the large sealed box containing 24,000 small wooden discs had been opened by customs when it entered the UK and then no-one had thought to re-seal it. The wooden pieces were loose inside the box, and the box was open. The first thing I did on arriving home was to weight it to check they were all there, and the weight was about right, so hopefully I've not lost to many.

Over the weekend I've started making boxes. I drew out thirty-six boxes (to make forty as I've four boxes that the blind-playtesting prototypes went in), and then cut out the trays. At which point I realised that I'd messed them up and I had drawn them too small. D'oh! What an eejit. I've written off nine sheets of card (which fortunately doesn't cost too much and can be recycled), but more important is the time wasted. I think I'm going to aim to take thirty copies to the Expo now.

Almost There...

Yesterday I received the proofs of the first print run from the printer. The first print job is the cards, player shields, player guides and slabs - basically all of the game components. The artwork looked really good, a little darker than I expected but not really a problem.

There was a problem however. I've been exhausted the last couple of weeks, I'm up until around 12 - 1am working on the It's Alive! graphic design, and then have to get up at 6:30am to get the bus to work. I'm wrecked, and it told in the artwork. I'd accidently left crop marks on both sides of the artwork, and I'd done the wrong sort of crop marks on the cards. D'oh! My printers will accept amendments to the artwork, but it costs £24 + VAT to re-submit new artwork. Sadly, I had to do it. Still, the good news was that it gave me a chance to tweak the player guides to make them more legible. £28.20 over a run of three hundred games is less than 10p added to the cost of a game so that's not a major problem - plus I'd left a little slack in the budget in case of emergencies.

Gtting the components proof back from the printer also means I can mock up a game for the back of the box photo. All the artwork is one-sided so that added a challenge to the framing of the photo, but The Wife came up with something nice. I'm sending the second print job (box labels) off tonight.

Just to whet your appetites, here's the artwork for the box front:

And the back. As usual, you can click on the images to see a larger version.

The Woes Of Indecision

I've been trying to get It's Alive! ready for a launch in early June at the Uk Games Expo 2007, a new convention in Birmingham.

However, I know this deadline is quite tight. Before I can go to a convention I need to: get the finished artwork from the artist; do the graphic design; sell some more copies of Border Reivers so that I've got the cash to pay for the artist, printing and components; and then assemble a bunch of copies to take with me. I estimate that It's Alive! will take around an hour and a half to construct a copy - so that's no small feat.

The UK Games Expo would be the first convention I've attended where I've had to pay a trader's fee for a stand, and while I think I'd sell enough copies of It's Alive! and Border Reivers combined to make it worthwhile, I doubt that if It's Alive! wasn't ready it would be worth it to pay the price if I only had Border Reivers to sell.

So I've put off booking and paying for a stand until I'm more sure that I'll definitely have It's Alive! ready. I contacted the organisers again to tell them I was still interested and to check they still have space - and they don't! Damn. By sitting on the fence I may have missed the boat. They've got a waiting list of traders and they are going to try and re-arrange things to make more room, but I may very well not get a booth.

The moral of this tale is to just go for it - then I'll force myself to get it ready in time because I've already paid.