Away (Team Bingo)

I’ve been away again.

My second camping ina forest trip in two weeks.

I’m back now.

I spent the few days in between trying to get up to speed on Away Team Bingo.

Over 100 followers now!

While covering shipping as Paul was also away.

He’s back now too.

So I get a reprieve.

And can focus on the ATB Gamefound campaign page.

There’s several bits still to do.

And just over a week in which to do it.

It’s getting close now!

Need to get more photos up.

A couple more sections.

And hopefully some reviews.

Time to crack on!

Interruption

Last week I was ina camping pod in the forest.

Next weekend I’m camping in a different forest.

I have five days to make as much progress as possible on the Away Team Bingo campaign.

And Paul’s also on holiday.

So I’m shipping the website orders.

These are some of the orders going today!

With the stock he gave me a couple of weeks ago.

While stocks last.

I’m running very low on a few things already!

Progress

It's been a week of great progress.

Paul has parcelled up and shipped three pallets of games to GamesQuest.

On their way!

Two will cross the Atlantic by boat and then go via road to their US hub.

Then be broken down and shipped across the US and Canada.

The third will be broken down and shipped to the EU from their UK hub.

That's over 85% of the rewards of the last campaign shipped.

The last few will probably go in the next week or so.

Meanwhile I've been doing the proper rulebook for Away Team Bingo.

My next print at home roll and write game.

The low ink rules are finished!

Now I can send it out for review.

Last time I tried this I got no reviews back.

Hoping for better luck this time...

Confluence

Lots going on this week.

I met Paul last Wednesday and he came up Saturday with the last of the non-EU deluxe rewards.

I’ve got to ship them this week.

Before my daughter’s birthday party on Saturday and then my parents visit for a week on Sunday.

We played a couple of prototypes 

that are improving too

We’ve also got an advisory board meeting Wednesday evening.

And the Rocky ‘Roid Gamefound campaign is only a couple of weeks away.

And the Expo is only 3 weeks away too.

Lots to do.

And not much time to do it.

Best crack on.

Shipping

Xeno Wars is now shipping.

The non-EU playmats have all gone.

Simple orders to the UK have gone too. 

We’re ready to send the non-EU international simple orders.

But there’s been a ransomware attack on Royal Mail, so they aren’t shipping internationally at the moment.

Hopefully they’ll fix it soon.

Or we’ll need a backup plan.

In the meantime, it’s great to see peoples’ excitement when it arrives.

Wooooo! by Kris Mackie via Facebook

Thanks for sharing!

Progress

Paul has been sick between Christmas and New Year. 

He’s still not right now. 

But he’s getting better. 

The last few non-EU playmats shipped this week. 

Freeing up valuable space in his house. 

Next up is starting to tick off the deluxe rewards. 

Meanwhile I’ve been cracking on with the scenario booklet. 

The Rift

Testing the scenarios. 

Tweaking them. 

Testing again. 

I’ve almost finished. 

Next up is some more coding on our internal tooling. 

To save me time that I can then spend on game design. Or graphic design. Or Gamefound pages.

Consequences

Due to COVID-19 people are flying less. Which is great for the planet. 

But it means a lot fewer international flights. There's less room in the holds for international airmail. Prices are going up. By up to 35% for heavier packages. 

US postal prices had already jumped a couple of months ago. 

We've already taken payment for our Kickstarter - we'll have to swallow the increase for now. 

It’s getting expensive

How much business will we do outside Europe when shipping as almost as much as the game itself? 

Brexit is not going to help as European customers will have to pay import taxes. 

We're going to have to look at what we do and make some changes. 

Soon our website prices need to go up. If you live outside Europe and want to take advantage of the old prices, they'll remain on the website for another week, then we'll pass the increases on.

No Take Backsies!

The prevailing wisdom when fulfilling a Kickstarter (i.e. Jamey Stegmaier) is to expect about 1% fulfilment errors - games that fail to arrive at the backer.

With just over 300 backers we would therefore be expecting about three. This week we got our first two returns, one from the USA (insufficient address) and one from France (not collected). This is a first for me, despite eight years of selling games over the Internet.

I’ll be looking to get those both back in the post this week. Hopefully we’ll not have any more, but at least with a signature required and tracking for international parcels and the return address on the box we’ve got a decent chance of not losing the games themselves, just the postage.

I’ve got a very busy week at work this week, hosting visitors all week, but I’m hoping to get 6 of the last 9 Bomber pledges in the post today and then the last 3 early next week.

Our move is hopefully a week or two away now, so there will be a shipping hiatus while we pack everything up and then settle back in again.

FlickFleet in Flight!

As I mentioned last week, we’re now shipping FlickFleet. On Saturday Paul posted 28 of the 30 copies he’s done (he’s hand-delivering the last two to friends) and over the weekend I made another 11 copies of my bits and added the bits Paul gave me last weekend to them and I’ll be posting those during my lunch breaks this week.

Paul’s postage piles!

The first and last groups of games were always going to be the tightest - the first because we had to order everything and get the laser cutter set up and running properly; the last because there’s well over 100 of them. I’m delighted that we’re on track still - so many Kickstarters deliver late, to be making all the games by hand and still hitting our deadlines is a real achievement, and it’ll set us up nicely for future Kickstarters - we’ll have a reputation for trustworthiness in terms of delivery that can only be earned by coming through on your promises.

The next challenge will be that we’re moving house in the next few months which will obviously be disruptive - I want to get as many copies shipped before the move as possible to minimise the disruption. Back to the crafting board!

Shipping This Week!

This weekend Paul and I and our families met up for a joint long weekend. We ate and drank well, hung out and chatted, played with the kids and got some gaming in, but most relevant to this blog is the FlickFleet progress. Paul had spent last week frantically laser cutting deluxe sets and I was measuring and cutting box tops. Each FlickFleet deluxe edition is signed, numbered, enscribed with a message and optionally personalised.

I brought 30 finished boxes with the rules and dashboards in on holiday and Paul brought 45 deluxe games’ worth of ships, wooden bits and dice, plus two standard copies for the two backers at the Uprising Hero (first to ship) level who got a standard copy as well as a deluxe one.

During the weekend Paul and I numbered, enscribed and both signed those 30 finished boxes, plus we numbered and signed the 48 box tops I’d brought with me that were cut but not assembled yet.

That will allow me to ship the 45 games’ worth of bits as I make the boxes for them, and Paul to ship the 30 boxes as he cuts and bags more bits, we expect to ship all the Uprising Hero pledges before mid-March, so they should arrive by the end of March as promised on the Kickstarter.

I also made a jig for the box top blanks last week too, which I think will significantly speed up making them as I put the measurements on it once, rather than measuring every sheet. I’m going to make one for the box bottoms this week and time it to see how much time it saves - it felt like quite a lot, but I don’t have the data yet! I still have 345 games worth of box blanks to make, so a saving of a minute or two per game will save many hours of work in total.

It’s really exciting to be shipping the games this week - our baby will be in peoples’ hands shortly - I hope they enjoy it as much as we and the reviewers do!

Ship It!

I'm writing this blog post in the Departure Lounge of Bristol Airport, shortly before a work trip to Boston that will eat up the whole of the coming week. Why Bristol? We came down here for a school friend's party and spent the weekend with my parents (I'm coming back here afterwards and The Wife and The Daughters are staying the week). So I'm away from home for 11 days.

That gets in the way of a whole bunch of Eurydice Games things (I can't make games while on the road!) but it isn't a total wipeout as I'll be awake with nothing to do during the jet lag hours of 2-6am while in the US. I'm planning to spend those hours finishing the first version of my Eurydice Games website, tweaking the Zombology files a little before ordering the print run and doing a laser-cutting file for a prototype of a new game idea I've had.

Last week has been focused on getting things ready, not done :-/ I made some progress on a few things - I got a proof done of the new artwork by the printers:

There was a problem with the cards (printed on the wrong stock), but the box and the rules were fine and having those done, in combination with the cards from the previous version, meant I could price up shipping costs (one of the last remaining unknowns).

Shipping prices have increased hugely in the 11 years since I started Reiver Games (I know, inflation!), and the small and fairly cheap (£10) game means that shipping makes up a significant proportion of the total cost:

• UK: £3.70
• Europe: £4.40
• Aus & NZ: £5.95
• Everywhere else: £5.50

I also told HMRC that I was starting a company and applied for a company bank account. I was hoping that the bank account would be completed before I left so I could order a few things while in the US, but it's not completed yet, so it'll all have to wait for my return unfortunately. Progress in August is going to be less impressive than last month, especially since we're off on holiday for a week shortly after we return from Bristol. 

Stocking Orders

After a couple of days that have been spent mostly in the car in sweltering weather (for the UK, so about 23 degrees!) I'm now at home for the day. I've got most of my pre-orders shipped, except for those that are being collected at the UK Games Expo this weekend, and today is a stocking order day. Six of my eighteen distributors have placed orders already. Two are collecting at the Expo, three are going out today and one is amending their order so that it better fits in shipping boxes. This was something I didn't realise I could do. When they send me a purchase order telling me what they want to buy, I get back to them and tell them how to amend their order so that it fills shipping boxes. Since it's an American customer paying in USD, and I pay shipping this is quite important to me.

I'm going to chase my other distributors now the games have arrived to see if they want to order, hopefully I can get a few in time to ship early next week.

The stocking order process is fairly complex. First I send them some information to solicit with their customers and then hopefully they send me a purchase order, expressing an intent to buy a certain number of games. There's often a lot of chasing between those two steps though! In return, I draw up an invoice for the sale which I send back to them. I also need to keep a copy of the invoice for my records, and record the invoice in my VAT Account.

I then need to arrange a courier collection for a day that I'll be in. I use Interparcel Ltd. as a courier aggregator. Couriers are expensive. However, if you do a high volume of business with them (usually tens of parcels every month) then they will start to discount the rate you are charged for the shipments. I tend to go through periods when I send 10-15 parcels over a few days and then very little for the next several months until my next game comes out.

Courier aggregators like Interparcel work by dealing with lots of couriers and lots of customers. With lots of customers, they get a great rate from the couriers and can pass that discount on to their customers minus a small percentage for themselves. With lots of couriers they offer several options for each parcel and you can choose to send each parcel with whoever is cheapest (generally DHL for UK and Europe and UPS for everywhere else). The receipt needs printing out and adding to my records and my VAT account.

When I go to York to get games I also tend to get a few shipping boxes at the same time. These bigger boxes (51cm x 41cm x 42cm) can hold 8 boxes of It's Alive! (22 Kg!) or 4 boxes of Carpe Astra/Sumeria (15Kg). I get the boxes flat-packed from Zetland Boxes, so on shipping day I need to build the boxes, fill them, attach the labels and the wait for the courier - who is often early, so the preceding steps are generally done early in the morning to ensure I'm ready when they arrive.

Shipments going outside the UK also require me to provide proof that they are leaving the UK (for VAT purposes) so that I can zero-rate the purchases, which generally means keeping a copy of the courier's airway bill with the invoice. Shipments going outside the EU also need four copies of a customs invoice, detailing the contents and their value which all need to be signed and given to the courier when he arrives.

It's a complex process with lots of little steps, I have to be quite methodical to ensure I don't forget anything.

In other news, It's Alive! has finally sold just over half the print run, two days before it's nine-months old. That seems pretty good to me, but admittedly I don't really have any idea!

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...

Aaaahhh!... Panic Over!

Today I'm trying to finish off the box design. I need to send it to the printers along with the rules tomorrow. I've also got a friend visiting this weekend, so I really need to get both finished today. Still, I'm hoping it won't take that long. I've got a starting place (the It's Alive! box design has all the important stuff on it) and I'm definitely getting the hang of Adobe InDesign now.

Back to the title. I've been chasing a couple of shipping companies to get proof that the games I've sent via them have shipped outside the EU, so that I can zero-rate the sales for VAT. In fact I've already not charged the customer VAT so if I don't get the proof the VAT is coming out of my pocket. Obviously I don't want that to happen, so I chased the shippers for the documentation. One of them replied with:

Games? What games? We've not received anything.

Aaaahhh! I sent them weeks ago. The customer has already paid me. Where the hell are they? Check with the couriers. They were apparently delivered on the 11th September. Forward the information to the shipper:

Oh! Those games. Yes, they were received and sent on. Here's the paperwork you asked for.

I swear I've visibly aged today.

In other news, it looks like the German distributor I've lined up will take some stock at Essen. Hopefully they'll take whatever I've got left, so that I don't need to send anything back to the UK.