Wannabe

In 2006 I started self-publishing board games with Border Reivers.

In 2008 I became a hobby publisher, hand-crafting a 300 copy run of It's Alive! by Yehuda Berlinger.

In 2009 I became a proper publisher, getting a professional second run of It's Alive! done, followed by Carpe Astra (with Ted Cheatham) and Sumeria (by Dirk Liekens).

It went badly.

I lost a ton of money and wound up Reiver Games in 2011.

Eurydice Games was always intended to be different.

The name (suggested by Derek Hohls) was a clue - don't look back, do things differently.

We've spent the last 8 (or nine if you include Zombology!) years self-publishing small runs of FlickFleet and the roll and writes.

It's been different.

No professional runs.

Lots of Gamefound/Kickstarter campaigns.

All games we've designed ourselves.

There's been a few games I've wanted to publish on others' behalf though.

Sadly, none of them have got anywhere.

So we're still a SELF-publisher. 

Or a wannabe publisher.

That might be about to change.

Fingers crossed!

Origin: Jack

I’ve always made games.

It started out as board games as a kid.

Then for a long time bits of computer games.

Then I had an epiphany.

Playing Mighty Empires. With Dunc and Tim. The best men at my wedding.

We played all weekend. Like 36 hours all weekend. Stopping only to sleep and eat.

A random event took the winner from 1st to 3rd place. He didn’t recover for the remaining 12 hours.

Then we ran out of time. And stopped.

“I can do better,” I thought.

So I did. Border Reivers. Took 20-45 mins to play.

Similar feel. Could be pretty swingy.

It sat unloved on a shelf for a couple of years.

Then I made 100 copies by hand.

And sold them all over the world.

Yehuda Berlinger sent me a game which I published as It’s Alive!

I made 300 copies by hand.

Sold them all over the world.

Then I won the lottery. Of sorts.

I got MS. My life insurance paid out. We paid off most of the mortgage on our tiny flat, and I went full time.

At times it was glorious. I made four games. Three professionally in factories. I had distribution on three continents. Sold thousands of games. Went to Essen twice and the first three UK Games Expos.

At times it was grim. The MS caused vision problems and I couldn’t drive for a while. It caused incredible fatigue. New symptoms every few months. I was glad I didn’t have a day job. And, once the 2009 financial crash hit, I watched my company die by a thousand cuts as overheads far outweighed sales.

Then I won the lottery again. Of sorts. I managed to get on a clinical trial for a new MS treatment. My MS has been in remission for fourteen years. Years!

I’m so lucky.

Three months after shutting down Reiver Games I started designing games again.

Then I co-founded Newcastle Playtest.

We played Zombology every month for years.

I decided to start another company to publish a small hand-made run of that.

Eurydice Games. Don’t look back.

Then Paul had the idea for FlickFleet.

We designed it together. He joined Eurydice Games. We kickstarted it (just).

The rest is history.

If I won the lottery a third time, with all that financial freedom I’d still make games. Ditch the day job and do what I love.

I spend a lot of my free time on Eurydice Games.

And I love it. The game design. The graphic design. Playtesting. Iterating. Demoing to people who love it. Even doing the books doesn’t sap my enthusiasm.

I’m lucky to be here. Doing this.

The Art of the Matter

Back when I ran Reiver Games I made four games. The first Border Reivers was a hand-made limited edition, and I did almost everything myself, including the art (except the box cover, that was an original painting by my dad, a retired art teacher and artist). It was ... basic. Very basic. But back in the days when a self-published game was a fairly novel item, it was enough to get me by, and didn't put off the 100 customers to whom I sold a copy of Border Reivers too much.

For my second game, I got a friend who was a computer games artist to do some really cool Frankenstein-themed art, and because he was a friend, I got it dirt cheap. It still added a £1 per copy to the total cost though, a not insignificant amount. While I loved the art on the It's Alive! components, I was less enamoured of the box art, and it received some criticism from punters, so when it came to making a second print run, this time aimed at shops at distributors, I asked him to do another box. Sadly, I don't think that box was any better.

My third game was Carpe Astra, and again I got the friend to do the art, again at mate's rates (though with a print run of 2,000 I could afford to pay a bit more this time, despite the fact I was aiming to sell to distributors and hence was pitching at 40% of retail for a manufacturing and art cost. Again I was a bit mixed on the art, I loved bits of it, but I think the box art could have been better, especially with the target market in mind.

For my final Reiver game I splashed out and hired bona-fide board game artist Harald Lieske to do the art. Harald's done the art for several games I own (Vikings, the Spiecherstadt, Puerto Rico) and several other famous ones (Dominion, The Settlers of Catan), so clearly a big name with loads of board game experience. He knows what looks good on a box and how to do all the art ready for printing. I was doing a relatively small print run (3,000 copies), so my budget was limited (but many times what I'd paid for the previous games!). We eventually reached an agreement where he'd meet my budget in return for simpler art than he was originally planning. I was delighted with how Sumeria turned out, it's still my favourite art associated with one of my games by quite some distance.

What brings this to mind is two things: Zombology and Kickstarter. With Zombology (which I've finally finished - one of my goals for the year ticked off already!), I went back to my roots and made a short hand-made print-run doing everything myself including the art and cutting out boxes and all the cards by hand. Actually, that's not strictly true, I took some of the icons from Game-icons.net, either as was, or slightly tweaked.

But the point still stands, the art is mostly mine and pretty basic, this is not a beautiful game. While I hope it's not so distracting as to put off the 28 customers I need to cover my costs, it's not winning any art awards.

In these days of Kickstarter, games need to be beautiful to attract punters, and despite the vast wealth of games on Kickstarter, generally the art is of a very high quality - it's almost expected. My friend Tim's game Toast is a great example of that. To set up a games company these days you need to either be a great artist (Daniel Solis, I'm looking at you), have a wealthy good friend who's an artist (do they exist?) or to fold a large art cost into the manufacturing cost of the game. I can't help but think that life would have been easier as Reiver Games or Zombology would have sold faster if I was a great artist or if I'd set up a partnership with a wealthy, games-loving artistic genius.

As I continue with my own game designing (and conceivably self-publishing), I want to work on and improve my artistic skills. Practice might not make perfect, but it's definitely going to improve my skills, which can't hurt in making my games easier to sell.

In other news, January was a staggeringly good month, 59 games played, Zombology construction finished and a weekend in Coventry with Tim and a weekend in York with Paul. I wish February would be as great, but a work trip to Boston, MA is going to get in the way of things, so I'm not expecting much. At least I'm hoping to finish off the print on demand version of Zombology as I planned in my 2016 goals.

Run Sizes

I've been thinking about the size of runs that I've been doing. I did one hundred copies of Border Reivers and three hundred of It's Alive! When I made Border Reivers I was fairly happy that I could sell fifty copies, but one hundred was a push - I had no idea whether I could sell that many. I did, in less than a year, but the construction was punishing. I spent three hundred hours making the games, plus probably another hundred or more on the artwork. It's Alive! was an easier game to sell and manufacture. Having to pay a designer royalties and an artist for the artwork, I needed to make more copies to amortise the cost across them. Due to the quicker construction time I felt that I could make more copies in a reasonable time, though until I got some of the boxes professionally made it was very slow going.

In terms of raw sale potential (if I sold every copy at full price), the Border Reivers run was £30 * 100 = £3,000. It turned out being considerably less than that once I'd paid PayPal fees, convention fees, given a few copies away, wasted a few copies through cocking up construction, and given play-testers a discount. Still, theoretically £3,000. It's Alive! has a raw sales potential of £4,500 (£15 * 300). I'm thinking that aiming for a run size of £5,000 for hand-made runs is a reasonable target. The bigger, more expensive games will have shorter runs, which is good due to the higher cost in terms of construction time. The small, cheaper games (which take a lot less time to manufacture) I can do more copies of. Until now I won't have had enough cash to fund a run of this size, but It's Alive! should leave me with enough funds to do it.

I'm seriously considering a professional run of It's Alive! for after I've sold out of the hand-made run of It's Alive! It's proved itself as a popular game (inside the top 1100 on BoardGameGeek now) so I'm more confident about investing a large sum of money in it. I'm thinking of a run of 3,000 copies (which I will mostly sell through shops and distributors with possibly a few more at Essen and BGGCon next year if all goes to plan). That would have a sales potential of £45,000, but I would only see a fraction of it as I'd have to sell at a significant discount to shops and distributors. It will cost me a lot of money to pay for up front though, and I'll have to work out ways to contact shops and distributors and interest them in the game, otherwise I'll be significantly out of pocket.