Community

I love the feeling of community.

I’m stuck in the office all month for February.

So I’m playing games every day in lunchtime games club.

We’re a small community of gamers at work.

I design games.

So we started a community of board game designers in and around Newcastle.

It’s doing the best it ever has.

My sister-in-law and her husband have been visiting this weekend.

We’ve been hanging out and playing games all weekend.

I love that feeling.

Being amongst my people.

One of the reasons I love conventions.

The sense of belonging.

We have a FlickFleet Facebook group.

This week we were asked for a FlickFleet Discord.

I don’t really use Discord.

But I’ve set one up.

If you’re looking for a FlickFleet community.

Gaming Extravaganza

It's been a great week for my gaming. Monday went exactly to plan with me printing and cutting out all 350 cards for new Codename:Vacuum, and hand-scrawling a quick board too - for the first time in two years I had a Vacuum prototype. Admittedly, Monday ended slightly worse with my dentist extracting a wisdom tooth that's left me eating very gingerly all week!

I got a lunchtime gaming session in at work on Wednesday (Coup) and then at Games Night on Thursday we played Vacuum! The lads had all played Vacuum before many years ago, so it wasn't complete fresh to them, but they'd all forgotten how to play.

It was, as I expected, fairly broken - we hardly got off Earth due to a poorly shuffled deck and a far too slow explore mechanism, so there was no colonisation of the Solar System or vast space battles. There were a couple of other things that clearly didn't work as intended, so the rules were evolving as we played. In a perfect world the game would take around 15-20 mins per player once you know it, so I was reasonably pleased with just under 2.5 hours (including set-up and rules explanation) for a four player game where 3/4 of us were effectively beginners. Hopefully that will significantly shorten with experience (and rules that aren't in flux during the game and cards which accurately describe what they do!).

I was frantically scribbling notes during the game, so that on Friday night I could spend the 3.5 hours of train journeys to Bedford updating the cards and working on an improved board. Of course I now need to print and cut out another version!

Saturday I was in Bedford seeing Terry, Andrew and Graham who I used to game with weekly when I lived there during 2008-11, the latter half of my Reiver Games days. There were eight of us in total, so we started off with a couple of games of Zombology (five of the eight owned a copy), playtesting the new rules with large groups. It went well, with a couple of late wins and I ended up taking a couple more pre-orders from David and Richard, both of whom have bought a Reiver Game in the past I think. That's now five pre-orders from seven possible customers in the last month or so. That kind of conversion rate is filling me with a greater optimism than I previously had, if I can get to thirty-ish I may well push the button and make another hand-made run of a hundred or so. The clock is ticking though, The Wife and I are expecting a little sister for The Daughter at the end of May, so the amount of time I'll have for hand-crafting games in the evening will be severely limited by extra parenting duties and sleep deprivation!

After Zombology, we played another eight games, of which four were new to me, so it was a great day's gaming as well as a great chance to catch up with friends I see far too infrequently.

Saturday evening was also spent on trains (and replacement bus services) so I got a chance to do more work on the Vacuum board. I think the board brings a new element to the game that focuses you more on the exploration and conquest side of the 4X game, so I think that part is working as intended, what I need to do now is print out another version and see if my changes fix the issues we found. Thursday's playtesters are at least interested to play again!

4,000 Plays!

I joined BGG back in February 2006, when I was considering publishing Border Reivers. I finally got around to publishing Border Reivers in July that year, and started recording the games I played on BGG in August that year. In fact, Friday was the tenth anniversary of my first recorded game on BGG (it was one of five plays of Border Reivers that day at The Cast Are Dice in Stoke on Trent, the first convention I attended as a publisher).

Over the last ten years I've managed to rack up 4,000 plays on BGG - my 4,000th was Zombology at our lunchtime games club in the office last Wednesday. It's nice that the 4,000 are bookended by plays of games I've designed :-)

That's an average of 400 games a year or over one game a day for ten years! In fact, it's actually more than that, seeing as I didn't record plays of prototypes during my Reiver Games days and I only started recording mobile plays with humans a couple of years ago.

Clearly board gaming is a huge part of my life. There are six games I've recorded at least 100 plays of: unpublished prototypes, Carcassonne, Race for the Galaxy, 7 Wonders, Magic: The Gathering and It's Alive! and to be honest the numbers for Magic, unpublished prototypes and to a lesser degree Carcassonne are actually much higher than that, as I played them a lot before starting to record games. I've played over 500 different games during that period.

Here's to loads more gaming in the future!

In other news, I've been recently frustrated that Zombology is only available really in the US and Canada at the moment through Drive Thru Cards. There have been a couple of occasions when I could probably have sold a copy if I had one on me, and saying 'you can get it in the US for $12 plus $16 shipping' is not going to lead to any widespread adoption. It turns out I'm still rubbish at marketing though, so if I was got to do a reprint I'd need to seriously up my game at promotion, and maybe go down the KickStarter route, despite my previous KickStarter reticence.

Hmmmm.

Out of the Closet

I started working for my current employer back in 2001, when it was a smallish independent company. I was working for them when I started designing Border Reivers and several of my friends and colleagues were among the Border Reivers playtesters. In 2005 I left the company and it was during my years in the wilderness that I finished Border Reivers, set up Reiver Games, self-published Border Reivers, went into full-time publishing and eventually gave it all up for a salary.

After a couple of years out of software development I came back for a summer as a contractor while winding down Reiver Games and eventually I rejoined as a full-time member of staff in 2011. Since then I've been running a weekly Games Night (known as Wizard Night in the office - one of my colleagues thinks we all dress up and play D&D), largely populated with friends who are current or former colleagues from my current employer.

In August 2012, my employer was bought by a large American corporation, and I've spent the last week in Milford, MA visiting the corporate head office for a meeting.

As part of that meeting we had a networking exercise where the 65 attendees had to provide a unique fact about themselves and then you were tasked with finding out which unique fact belonged to each of your 64 colleagues. I chose 'I have designed three published board games' as mine, since most of my corporate colleagues didn't know about my inner geek - it doesn't come up in conversation much.

Ok, so that's a slight stretch, the three games were all self-published, and Border Reivers and Zombology had a very small print run. But it's technically true.

As a result of discussions around my games publishing past (and current!), I found three gamers out of the group (including my boss's boss!), got invited to go and play Netrunner in Boston one evening (which unfortunately I had to miss due to a prior dinner engagement), played Netrunner in the hotel bar with a colleague and sold and delivered my first copy of Zombology to the US to another colleague.

My secret is out!

Off the back of this I've been invited to Tabletop Manchester if I'm ever staying the night there on a Monday night by my Netrunning colleague and have been approached by another colleague about an educational board game design project he's been considering for a number of years!

Finally, in the taxi back to the airport from the office I got chatting to my driver and it turned out he was a keen gamer and game artist (with 33 games listed on BGG) who had been to Essen a couple of times and GenCon too.

I also got to spend the hours of 3:30-6:30am most mornings working on the Print on Demand version of Zombology and getting the art uploaded and a proof ordered. For a business trip it was surprisingly game heavy!

A Friend Who Games

I'm notoriously bad at keeping in touch with people: I'm hopeless at keeping in touch with the friends I went to school with; I'm not in touch with anyone I went to university with; I've had many jobs over the years, and the only former colleagues I'm still in touch with are the guys I used to work with in Newcastle (and now work with again mostly).

There is an exception to this rule of rubbishness however. When I lived in York I met many friends through board gaming. Paul was one of my key Reiver Games playtesters and I used to attend his games night twice a week for many years. Despite leaving York in 2009, we've kept in touch and we see each other every couple of months either in York or Newcastle for hanging out with our families and late night gaming. We had planned to meet up for the Easter weekend in Newcastle, but then I was invited to a wedding in York.

It was Dave's wedding, another gaming friend from our time in York. Dave and I had got on famously after originally trying to arrange a game of Space Hulk together. After a year or two, Dave moved to Plymouth - which, as far as I can fathom, is about as far from York or Newcastle as is the moon. Dave and I have met up about four or five times in the eight years since he left York, but as a gaming buddy we stay in touch if only by occasional emails. Another gaming buddy who I've managed to stay in touch with.

When I pulled out of having Paul and his family up for Easter due to attending Dave's wedding, Paul invited us to stay with them in York instead. So instead, we had a long weekend of gaming (in an awesome confluence of events, the bathroom is being replaced at the moment, so instead of four days at home with no facilities to wash ourselves, we got to be at a friend's house - with a shower!).

We left Friday morning and we hung out with Paul's family on Friday afternoon, Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, and with Dave and his wife and friends all day Saturday and Sunday morning. Plus I got late night gaming in on Friday and Sunday with Paul and Saturday with Dave. It was an awesome weekend, and I start the month of April with eighteen games played in the first five days including three towards my ten plays goal!

Tomorrow is Newcastle Playtest, I'm hoping to take along Zombology, Dragon Dance and possibly some hand-scribbled cards for a new version of Border Reivers.

Coincidentally, Terry, Andrew and Graham, my gaming buddies from Bedford (which I left 3.5 years ago) and I are still in touch too. Via twitter, the occasional convention or games weekend. A gaming friend is a friend forever!

Minneapolis: Work and Play

Hello from sunny Minneapolis!

I'm over in the US for a week to attend a conference for work. It's going to be a long week, I'm working morning till night three days and all day for two more (no time for sight-seeing!), but I'm not letting that stop me get some gaming in. My boss, Ian and I flew over together. Ian is a Games Night regular, so I brought my iPad loaded up with games and we play a few on the way over. I imagine we'll play a few on the way back too.

But that's still not enough, no, no. So I've arranged with a couple of guys on BGG to head over to the  FFGEC on Tuesday and Wednesday nights for some more gaming! It's alright, they both promise they are not axe-murderers.

I dropped Fantasy Flight an email to see if any of their design team fancied meeting up, but I've not heard anything since a 'I've forwarded your message on' email from their Customer Care team, so I'm assuming that's not going to happen.

Clearly, I'm developing a gaming problem again.

In other news, we tried out the new version of Codename: Vacuum one lunchtime last week. I want to make some more changes (as with the last new version a couple of months ago, the first stab at major changes often needs some early changes to fix unintended behaviour). But, in essence, the new, more complex, bits work. One of my playtesters was very excited about them. But then, he is quite excitable!