Star Traders on Board Game Geek!

The Galaxy Corporate: Star Traders now has a page on Board Game Geek!

I'm very excited. I can get the PR machine rolling with a presence on a rather large gaming site. Not quite sure what the next steps are, but so far I've done all right making this up as I go along.

I submitted picture links and the big zip file, so the page should get fleshed out soon. Time to take more pictures, I guess.

Meanwhile, work is going full steam ahead on Siege, and I've started Battles since that seems to be coming together in my head. The trade show is three weeks away, so I need to start putting together a plan of attack.

Anyway, go play my game. It's fun. :)

So far so good

Galaxy Corporate is being downloaded and looked at. I don't know if anyone's actually putting it together yet, but I've been getting a few comments based on looking through the pdf files, and it seems to be passing the "first impression" test. That's a nice validation. Putting together the actual pdfs was a frustrating process, and it feels nice that they're not being dismissed for looking stupid.

The Boardgame Geek page still isn't live yet, but once it's approved I'll see if I can't get the game reviewed. Maybe I'll put together special handmade copies to send to the reviewers so they don't have to go through the trouble of assembly.

6 weeks until the trade show. So far so good.

Forces has promise. The glue I used for the tiles didn't hold, so the backings kept coming off, making the game difficult to play. But it's not bad. I think it'll be a nice little strategy game. All I need to do is nail down the details like board size and tile quantities. I also may play around with other tile types, too - see, the tiles actually shift the board around when they get played and they each do it in a different manner.

Maybe by the time the trade show rolls around I'll have quite a few different games to bring with me.

Galaxy Corporate is live and has been downloaded a few times now. Now I just wait for reactions, if there are any. The Board Game Geek page still isn't live yet, but I'll post a link to it when it is.

So now I'm back to designing. I'm very excited to get back to Siege. First, though, I've got two family games to work on.

Some of you may remember Pognop, a game I'd worked on for a while. It got an overhaul and is now called The Great Sailboat Race. I need to tweak a few things still, but I think the new incarnation works. Then there's a game that crept into my head last night that I'm calling Forces. I'm making a testing prototype today and hopefully I'll have it done enough to feature it in a blog post this week. It's a very simple abstract tile-laying game.

I like that I'm getting surprised by new game ideas. I was worried for a little while that I'd have Galaxy Corporate and the fantasy games and that would be the extent of my design work. I'm glad I can still come up with new ideas. :)

The Galaxy Corporate lives!!

The print and play version of the game is now live:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40952290/Star%20Traders.zip

Enjoy.

The print and play version should be finished today. All the components are done. I just need to give the rulebook a slight revision.

While I do enjoy graphic design, I get very frustrated. I always get annoyed at my own limitations, and that couples with my impatience. While I learn a lot every time I work on a project, it's still slow going. I designed some color cards for the game that won't make it into the print and play version because they don't print very well. I don't understand how to design for print instead of screen, so while my stuff may look good on the monitor, it doesn't come out that way on the printer. However, when I get around to doing the web site, it should be much less frustrating.

Most of the print and play version is going to be black and white. I originally wanted to include full color options as well, but I just can't put together anything I'm happy with in a reasonable amount of time. The black and white stuff looks decent enough for now. It's at least functional, and that's the most important part of design anyway. The nice thing about print and play games is that you can immediately upload new files when you make revisions, so your players can get the new stuff right away. So when I do have the new designs ready, I can update the game immediately.

I can't wait to let this out to the public. It's about as done as I can make it, I think. I'm happy with the way it plays, but I've only played it so many times. There could still be issues I didn't notice, but that's the way it is with most games. There comes a time when you say "I believe this works" and put it out there. I believe my game works, and it's fun. I enjoy it. My family enjoys it. My friends enjoy it. I'm not sure if it'll be a big hit or a big bust, but I believe in it. And going back to my earlier comments, if an issue does come up, I can correct it right away without having to spend money on a "second edition" printing.

Another reason I'm happy to be just about done with this is I want to get back to development. I'm working on a family game that's coming together nicely - just needs a little more tweaking - and a heavy strategy game that really has me excited. There's also a fantasy adventure game to introduce the other brand property I'm working on, but that one's a story for another post. Not to mention about three other games waiting in the wings. Being a one-man show is hard, but the trade show is still two months away, and I can get a lot done when I really put my nose to the grindstone.

Oh, and I met with the lawyer on Saturday. He's filing the incorporation papers today, and trademarks will happen as soon as I'm official. And then I have to sit down and refresh my memory on copyrights. Not to mention patents. Star Traders may not really need one or even be eligible for one, but I'm pretty sure my strategy game will.

Break's over. Time to finish the rules pdf so I can publish the game.

The Galaxy Corporate

Here's how it is: Earth got used up, so we terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths, some rich and flush with the new technologies, some not so much. Central Planets, them was formed the Alliance, wager war --

Oops, sorry. Wrong awesome sci-fi franchise...

The private sector was the first to colonize the moons. Man was ready, but their governing bodies weren't. Tourists paved the way for the discoveries that would provoke the great exodus with civilian-funded science. The space travel lines didn't care why you went or how long you stayed out there, as long as you could pay.

It was mining at first. Terraforming didn't come until later, and that was when Earth knew traditional government was done. The asteroid belt and moons of Saturn and Jupiter turned into feudal states with private companies providing food and shelter for its workers. On the whole, it was much like the gold rush or railroad race in the old United States, only over a much greater distance. Earth needed what elements and compounds it could get and was still working on international law, let alone interplanetary law, so it looked the other way for a time. By the time its gaze did swing to the space rocks, it was too late.

The corporate colonies went and declared their independence from any national rule. The irony is the first Corporate War was what unified the planet, right before it destroyed all traditional forms of government.

The corporations won their freedoms and the galaxy became an unchecked wilderness where money ruled the day. As harsh as life became, science and industry of all kind blossomed. Whole planets were terraformed for farming. The asteroid belt became an infamous birthplace for mercenaries and private armies. All this before discovering faster-than-light travel.

Things calmed down, then. The galaxy opened up and there was less fighting over more space. Suddenly there was plenty for everyone, but people always wanted more. Space may be infinite, but so is greed.

Such is life in the Galaxy Corporate.

---

I'm not going to go into too much detail, but the Galaxy Corporate is something I've been working on for a while. I think it's ready. Or ready-ish, anyway. Like all the offerings at Woodbine Street Games, it tells a story with its games. Right now I've got three games planned for the setting. Galaxy Corporate itself is a game in three parts: The first part is the core board game called Star Traders. It will eventually have two expansions, Hostile Takeover and Capital Investments. I'd been considering developing everything and then releasing it as one big game, but the price point would be too high for an initial product offering. With my limited resources and exposure, I think it would be better to do the base-set-and-two-expansions route. Star Traders is tentatively done, and I'm currently working on Hostile Takeover.

The other two games, Siege and Battles, are two-player strategy games that will also be expanded to share the systems with the fantasy setting I'm working on. I'll go more into those later, but I'm really excited about Siege.

The current plan is a free print-and-play version that I'm actually calling the "print and playtest" version. I don't get out much, you see, so I've only really playtested the heck out of Star Traders with friends and family. They love the game, but they're biased. I guess you could think of this as its beta period while I put the funds together for better components and a print run. During this time, I'll be leveraging Go Fund Me, which is like Kickstarter but with no time limit and looser rules. I admit I'm a little skeptical about it, but I'm looking into it. I'll let you guys know when we get going. Hopefully I'll have the pdfs ready in a week or so. I'm doing a no-frills save-your-toner black and white version and a full color version that will resemble in part the finished product.

So there it is, the initial plan. Still terrified, but it's going away as I take action. The goal is to have a bit of word of mouth by March so I have a better footing on which to meet the retailers. I have a big idea for an April Kickstarter campaign, and I'd like the retailers to be a big part of it. More on that later.

I've got work to do.

The best laid plans....

Still terrified.

I've done a lot of the pro and con thing and came to the conclusion that I should be publishing the games as well as designing them.

I'd say that part of it is that I'm lazy, but it will actually be more work to do it with my own company than it would be to work with an established publisher. I think the biggest reason is that I'm trying to build brands rather than just games. The company's positioning statement (tagline) is "Where games live." To me, that means more than just publishing the game. That means supporting it through any means necessary. In the case of the games I shall speak about later on, that means developing the game worlds through expansions, other games, books, comics, etc. I'm a storyteller, and I'm telling a story through the games that I hope the players want to become part of.

So to best preserve the intellectual property as I see it, I need to do this myself. Not all on my own, mind you. Woodbine Street Games is a company, and "company" intrinsically implies more than one person. I will and do have help bringing these games and worlds to life, but if they were to be published by a different company the final say would no longer be mine. If my product is going to fail, I'd rather it be my doing than watch helplessly as it gets distorted.

Although, looking at all the small publishers out there, I don't really see that happening. The hobby games industry is generally populated by a very wonderful, creative, and friendly lot. We're all in the same boat, and we're all more or less cut from the same cloth so to mix my metaphors again: birds of a feather and all that.

At the moment I'm feverishly getting things ready for the GAMA trade show. I had a game come out of nowhere last week and it came together pretty quickly, so I'm trying to add that to the things I'm getting ready. I didn't think I'd be ready to work on it for a while yet, but somehow my brain worked out the kinks and handed it to me on a silver platter during my morning commute. There's a lot to do with it, but my wife and I are already having a lot of fun playtesting it. So I'm piling that on top of getting my first product ready to show around, putting together (yet another) business plan, and researching the hell out of the publishing business.

Not to mention putting a website together so I have somewhere I can refer people.

There's a lot of work to be done, but I'm energized. It's the fear talking, but it's a good kind of fear. I haven't felt this way since the first day of college. I would say I have no idea what I'm doing, but I do. It's more accurate to say I have no idea what to expect and that I've never done this before. This is going to be a fantastic adventure, and hopefully the blog will turn out to be useful instead of just my rambling.