June 2021 Update

Hi all,
On about the 5th of May, I realized I never sent a May update, my apologies for that. Welcome to June.

For regular readers of this update, you will know that my two known publishing events for 2021 have been moving slower than I had hoped, so to be honest there was not a bunch of news to report last month. This month is a bit better.

I have three updates to share.

I've been working with Mark from Word Forge Games over the last few weeks on the upcoming Pocket Landship Kickstarter campaign. I believe he is now getting a few new art pieces made for the game, working on the Kickstarter page, etc. This campaign will be for an (I believe) 18 card expansion for the game, plus a re-print of the base game.

For those of you on BoardGameGeek, you may have seen a poll on the Pocket Landship game page about the name of the expansion. The winner of the poll, and the likely (though not 100% definite) name of the expansion: "No Man's Land". This has a bit of a double meaning; the first meaning is the historical WWI meaning. The double meaning is that since the enemy in the game appear to be sort of robots.

"No Man's Land" relates to that -- these enemies are not human/men.

I will let you know when a firm Kickstarter date exists.

now has its own BoardGameGeek page:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/338763/count-nine-estates

So, that is a step in the right direction. And, it shows a published year of 2021. :)

The design work (my part) for this game has been done for a while, and I think all the art is done. ButtonShy Games is having a great run of successful Kickstarter campaigns. That is great for ButtonShy (and the designers and backers of these games), but it seems that the cost is games like this one (which will not be Kickstarted) are moving to publication slower than hoped.

I have been enjoying participating on ButtonShy's Discord server over the past many months. A highlight recently is that Jason Tagmire (ButtonShy) held a small game design contest there a few months back. A few weeks ago, he went through each contest submission (there were only a handful) and critiqued them in great detail from his (a publisher) perspective. It was great to get a peek behind that curtain. So, thanks Jason.

I entered my game depleted in TheGameCrafter's Solo/Duo Design Challenge (1 and 2 player games). The public voting is over, and the game did not fare very well, but I learned a lot. The finals judging will (or at least, can) look at all the games, not just the semi-finalists, so there is still a slight chance depleted will catch the eye of the judge (Gabe Barrett) who is looking for games to publish.

TheGameCrafter contests have a public voting phase, but with 138 games entered, I don't think there is much playtesting going on. Probably a bit on Tabletop Simulator, but I would guess not much. With that many entries, there is just no time to actually play the games, which is a shame. So, the public voting is probably more of a "beauty contest" on the game's store page, video, photos/images, art, etc. That isn't a bad thing, since hopefully the contest judge will look more at the actual gameplay, but it is different than BGG contests I am used to participating in. So, like I said, a good learning experience for me.

That's all for now.

I hope what I am doing with my blog, website, and this news update is entertaining and/or valuable to you. If you have any feedback, please let me know.

Take care,
Scott