Envelopes of Cash: The College Football Recruiting Game

Awards Season
11 months ago – Mon, Jan 15, 2024 at 05:26:04 AM

Hello EoC fans.  When I was about 35,000 feet above Greenland, flying home from Italy where I'd been studying Italian and trying to avoid real life, I got a cool email from BGA, which started like this

Hi,

Wishing you a fantastic New Year filled with joy and success!

For the first time we are organising the Board Game Arena Awards! They celebrate the best games on our platform that were released in 2023, and we couldn't be more excited to have Envelopes of Cash among the nominees in the "Hardcore Games" category (category based on BGA tags).

What happens now?

Voting Period:

BGA players will be able to vote for their favourite games on BGA:

• Start: Monday, January 15, 1:00 PM (CET / UTC+1)
• End: Monday, January 22, 1:00 PM (CET / UTC+1)

EMBARGO: no communication until the opening of the votes, so Monday, January 15, 1:00 PM (CET / UTC+1)

Now I am finally able to tell you the news and ask you to please go and vote for EoC.  I doubt we will win given the other Core Games that were released in 2023 (Ark Nova, currently ranked 4th of all timeon BGG among them, and many of the others are great games by great designers too), but it would be nice to show up not at the very bottom of the list.

How to vote:

If you are already on BGA, just head to https://boardgamearena.com/awards and scroll down to the Hardcore games section.  It'll look like this once you've clicked EoC as your choice.

I've purchased and played many of the other 9 games and have zero illusions of winning.  Even avoiding last place will be difficult.  But if you have a spare vote for EoC, I'd encourage you to toss it our way.

If you do not have an account on BGA, they are free and easy to get.  Use this link: https://boardgamearena.com/?h=3ld8 

Happy new year, Tanti Auguri, and of course ABC,

Andy

The long-promised financial reckoning
11 months ago – Fri, Dec 29, 2023 at 04:31:58 AM

Greetings to the Envelopes of Cash family!

I wish you all the best of this festive season, especially to those who celebrate Bowl Season. Sadly, it turns out my YouTube TV subscription doesn’t work here in Italy, and I am not savvy enough to spoof a US IP address, so I am going without much football at the moment. Still I hope to figure something out for this coming weekend.

This update is the long-promised “how to lose a small fortune in board games” post. I recently finished paying The Brothers Perry (the excellent team that developed the BGA implementation of the game), and also coughed up the cash for the last of the logistics charges (freight from China/shipping to customers) from Ark Transport and so, with a small amount of potential sales yet to come, I think the time is ripe to show y’all, my backers, the butcher’s bill.

Please note that there is some clear “learn by doing” baked into these losses. I would probably have been able to make this game with something like half the cost in contract labor if I had not had several artwork stumbles along the way, including having my original partner in the game, who was contributing labor (as I did) in exchange for half ownership in the project, back out when she determined we would not make a lot of money and then demand $25,000 to use the 10% completed artwork or to destroy it all and start over. Obviously, I declined that demand for money an ddestroyed the artwork. We parted on poor terms, but even with all of the costs that resulted in the interim, the total artwork cost was $17,411, of which I would guess $2 or $3K was unnecessary in retrospect. 

I have found it difficult to work with artists, both people I know in real life and remote contractors, though some were more difficult than others. The main issue, I think, has been that I was doing Envelopes of Cash as a labor of love and was willing to throw everything I needed to put into the project to get it to work. The artists I worked with were often juggling their day jobs, school, personal lives, a busy pub crawl schedule, etc. And so the mismatch of commitment was an issue that led to a lot of our agreed-upon internal deadlines being missed. The game shipped 12 months later than promised. Four of that was because the manufacturing process took a lot longer than promised, but the other eight months flowed essentially from the mismatch in my expectations for the art timeline and the time it took for the actual art to be delivered at sufficient levels of quality.

In consulting we have a (dumb) joke which is that you can have any project delivered quickly, cheaply, and done well, but you can only have two out of three on any one job. Here I think we ended up with a mishmash of some things done reasonably quickly and well, but expensively; others done quickly and inexpensively, but not all that well; and then a few slow, poor, and more expensive than planned debacles that I have to take the blame for myself. I have never been happy with the game’s cover and the cover is probably the single most important aspect for selling a game to strangers, but faced with eight months of art delays and payments to many artists to try to get it right, two of whom basically absconded with the payments without contributing much, ultimately Rese (who has been a rock throughout the process) and I decided to go with what we had from Miah, even if it was not quite what I wanted, rather than delay things further. Live and learn.

I dd some advertising and used other forms of marketing that were, in retrospect, not useful. The best advertising I did was via the fabulous “Split Zone Duo” podcast [info here:  https://www.splitzoneduo.com/   thanks guys!] and the best “earned” publicity was by convincing Mark Bigney of the fabulous “So Very Wrong about Games” podcast [info here: https://www.sowronggames.com/ thanks guys!] to review a pre-production copy and then, on his own volition, sing the game’s praises and eventually show the game to his co-host Michael Walker who also said nice things, again without financial inducement. 

Less useful were payments to other boardgame influencers for video content. For Skybirds, I will definitely get one well-made how-to video, perhaps again via BGG, and then use podcasters who do not take money, but will accept a review copy, and count on them liking the game enough to at least encourage folks to try it out.

I did other forms of marketing that did not help with sales but resulted in a better product, namely paying Board Game Geek to produce an excellent tutorial video and paying the Brothers Perry to produce an excellent digital implementation. Thanks to those expenditures anyone who hears about the game can find it, can learn it quickly, and can play their friends in person or online, wherever they live. These things probably helped sales a little bit, but nowhere near their cost, so this element of the costs, around $10,000 in total, can only be fairly described as Vanity Purchases, because they provide me with great pride in the work that was done, and happiness when I see over 200 games of EoC being played online as of December 29, 2023, but they were not useful for directly generating more than about $1,000 worth of sales, so not necessarily the best use of marketing funds.

That said, for Skybirds, if I can negotiate a reasonable price, I think the plan will be to release the game on BGA right around the launch of the crowdfunding, to help spread the word about the game prior to release and therefore, perhaps, generate more interest on the launch.

The final big-ticket items were manufacturing and logistics. Manufacturing costs were very reasonable, and a big shout out belongs to Mike Trias of Koalatie games [info here: https://koalatiegames.com/ thanks Mike!] who connected me with the folks at Gameland. Mike is also the designer of two music-oriented games, Upstages, which you can buy today (https://koalatiegames.com/upstaged/) and DJ Icon, which is soon to be crowdfunded (https://koalatiegames.com/icon/). Mike saved my ass. I had been working with LongPack games at the recommendation of Juli Bierwith, one of the designers of Mantis Falls [info here: https://distantrabbitgames.com/mantis-falls.html, thanks Juli!], who signed up to be my mentor through the Tabletop Mentorship program [info here https://www.tabletopmentorship.org/, thanks guys!], and they were great to work with, but it became clear to me that there was no way I would hit their 1,500 minimum in volume. Gameland was willing to come in with a 500 unit minimum and as it stands today, I’ve sold just over 500 copies, with the remainder (about 85) available for sale at https://eoc.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders. Gameland’s price was reasonable and while there were some production delays, I do not think they were egregious. I will be working with them again on Skybirds, unless somehow demand booms past 1,300 on day one of crowdfunding! (Inshallah, but Notgonnahappen). Also, since I’m using this section to shout-out people who helped me, I would be remiss if I did not mention Dan Halligan, the designer of the truly fantastic game Obsession [info here: https://www.kayentapublishing.com/, thanks Dan!] who took a lot of time to explain stuff to me purely out of his sense of kindness to strangers.

That left logistics, which was the thing I understood least going into the project. The original fulfillment company, FunAgain Games, got out of the logistics business before EoC was ready to ship. Ark Transport was a great replacement firm and they have been super communicative about everything as we went. But there was no way to know, at least as a novice, that some of the design of EoC was going to drive up the cost of logistics a lot more than was reasonable to plan for. The main issue is the game is just too damn large. It’s a table hog, which I don’t mind so much (perhaps because we have a big table), but it’s really quite heavy, and the box size, combined with its weight, led to outrageous prices to ship the games to backers in the US and abroad. The cost of shipping to Europe (all 9 of you!) gobbled up any chance of those sales making a profit – I’ve raised the shipping price for foreign orders to $60, which may seem outrageous, but that’s actually what it costs to send this beast of a game overseas. I also raised the shipping cost within the US to $25 which reflects a blended average of shipping costs from Cleveland. If you live close to Ohio in a city or suburb, you’re paying a bit more for shipping than what it costs me. If you live further from Ohio or in a rural area, you’re paying a bit less, but on average, $25 is about what it costs. Needless to say, given what I charged y’all for shipping, a lot of the game’s losses can be attributed to underpricing that component.

One final confession, which is when I first set the funding goal for EoC, I knew I had lowballed myself. I did this on purpose, and somewhat at the advice of many folks, to ensure that I could say the game funded at several multiples over our target and did so within a day or two. I also knew I would have the game manufactured even if we only hit the 1x mark, and eat the loss. As you’ll see below, sales have been quite a bit higher than the original (fake) target, which is very gratifying. But next time, I am not going to worry too much about goosing my numbers and instead I will aim for the crowdfunded revenue to actually hit something close to the anticipated costs.

With Skybirds, I hope to bring all of my education to the process to make the game more likely to be run as a break-even endeavor. The game is much smaller in size and will be much lighter in weight. I will price shipping more accurately based on discussions I’ve had with Ark Transport. I also plan to have the game’s artwork 100% finished before I even begin any marketing, so that I can more accurately promise when the game will be manufactured, freighted from China, and shipped to customers, and to have that process all cost less. Importantly, if the price of development is right, I’d like to have Skybirds available for play on BGA concurrent with the crowdfunding and then set my target for funding to be around what will be needed to turn that pre-existing digital game into a physical game. If we fail to fund, the game can live on BGA until people find it and want it enough to give the crowdfunding a second chance. 

I also hope to keep the price of the game under $40 if at all possible (with lower shipping because of the game’s size), so that people won’t need to think quite as hard about springing for some cardboard and play-with-able art). And because Skybirds is a historically themed game, there won’t be the need to do portrait work after-the-crowdfunding, which made EoC viable but also slowed things down considerably, and ultimately led to the need to bring Rese in to save the day by completing the portraits.

I will spam you one or two more times to encourage you to sign onto the mailing list for Skybirds or perhaps to sign you on automatically but then give you a chance to opt-out. I do hope you’ll check that game out, and spread the word, but I also know a card game about World War One aviation is a different (sky!) bird than a board game about the economics of college sports.

A few more paragraphs before I show you the numbers. The first is re: crowdfunding. I used Kickstarter for my initial launch, and used Indiegogo and Backerkit for post-funding sales, plus allowed direct purchases via PayPal. Backerkit was also my fulfillment choice. I am thrilled that Backerkit has now decided to expand into crowdfunding itself, and my plan is to run Skybirds 100% within the Backerkit environment. Their tools for managing sales are easy to understand, and because it will all stay within one platform, it should avoid people having to fill out multiple forms on different sites.

I want to extend a great thank you to all of you. Those of you who backed the project in its first week and allowed me to breathe easy knowing that it was going to happen, you are much appreciated. Those of you who sponsored a card and submitted your photos, and for the handful of folks who let me use their faces as example art before we launched, you are now all in the game and seeing your faces makes me smile. I hope you enjoy seeing your faces when you play, whether in person or online.

And finally, I also want to thank my wife Melodi, who let me undertake this silly project with our community property, knowing it was probably going to be more of an expensive hobby than a financial boon to the benefit of our heirs. It was the former, for sure. Now that it is done and I know the cost, I can say it was worth it to me, but I also know it was 50% from her and so I thank her for this very kind three-year gift from her to me. Melodi also helped playtest the game, helped me communicate with artists when I was out of my depth in terms of art vocabulary, and generally proved a kind and gentle helpmate in a process she was only interested in because I was interested in it. Since I am writing this note from Italy, I think I can say it this way: Ti amo, amore mio!

And now, with all of the ado taken care of, I present, a sea of red ink! In total, to date, the expenses for EoC total $78,678, divided by year and expense category as shown below.

Revenues were also in the five-figures, but alas, not nearly as high.

The result, therefore, is a financial loss, of course, broken down by year as follows.

In essence, EoC cost me $12,000 per year, or $1,000 per month, for the three years it took for the process of learning, producing, and selling the game. That is an expensive hobby, but I suspect golfers or yacht-owners spend more. And in total it is a cheaper midlife crisis than, say, a Ferrari. And it is tax deductible, so the folks in DC and Sacramento will provide a subsidy. So while I would have loved to have made money and to have had fun, at least I had fun, at a manageable cost.

As I’ve mentioned, I have somewhere on the order of 85 copies of the game left, and I am now charging appropriate amounts of shipping. I estimate that if/when those 85 copies eventually sell, they will contribute around $6,500 in positive cash flow, which would lower the loses to under $30K, and would also bring the 4 year total down to under $7,500 per year and under $625 per month. So if you know folks who might like a copy, by all means please encourage them to shop at https://eoc.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders. Or buy them a copy as a gift! Either way, you’ve all already done me a great service by buying the game at least once, and I thank you greatly. Helping to sell the project out will just be icing on a very sweet cake you have all given to me.

Thanks, and Always Be Crootin,

Andy

Digital Update: EoC is GtG!
12 months ago – Mon, Dec 18, 2023 at 09:17:51 AM

Envelopes of Cash has been officially released on Board Game Arena:   https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=envelopesofcash.  (If you need an account, use this link:  https://boardgamearena.com/?h=3ld8)

I've set up a tournament for anyone interested in playing competitively.  https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=258519.  By default BGA tournaments require an ELO (a skill ranking) of 100 to participate, but I can invite you directly if you're under 100 (like at zero) to override that setting on a per-person basis.

(The promised Accounting Update is still in progress.  Waiting for one or two more invoices to straggle in before I share the cautionary tale with y'all)

Ciao da Bologna, Italia!

Andy

Starting to wrap things up
about 1 year ago – Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 07:08:43 PM

I have been informed that everyone who ordered the game prior to Thanksgiving should now have gotten it. If that is not the case, please content me ASAP at [email protected] and we can see what's what. There are around 90 copies still available for sale from  https://bit.ly/LATE-EoC, and they will  ship within a day or two of your order, if a Christmas gift or other holiday present would help you out.  Please note that in the spirit of generals always fighting the last war, I have increased the shipping costs to try to actual capture what it has cost to send the game to y'all.  Part of the deal when you backed me was that I would gamble that I could properly estimate shipping costs, and if I was too low, I'd eat those costs.  Well, it turns out, I had a lot of chewing to do, especially for the dozen or so of you in Europe.  Woah, Nelly!!!  Anyway, the shipping prices are now more in line with those costs and if you get sticker shock, I apologize, but imagine getting it 500 times in a row and you can share some of my pain.

I have promised before, and I repeat the promise, that once I have the final costs in hand, I am going to publish a financial update, to show you all what it costs to dip one's toe into the self-publishing business.  For those of you who do not like negative numbers, it will not be pretty, but I think it will be I informative for many of you, and it will help me to work through it to try to run the Skybirds campaign more profitably (or at least less unprofitably).  But lest you feel too bad for me, this has been a three-year project in which I have learned so much and gotten so much joy from the process, that I think of it more like a hobby, and when amortized over those three years, it is my hope that the losses will feel like a cheap form of entertainment.  Sort of.

As for the new stickers, they are set to arrive tomorrow and so for anyone who wants a copy, you'll need to send me a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE).  I will take one set to the post office to let you know how much postage will be needed on the SASE, but you're going to need the envelope to be fairly big to avoid folding, b/c the largest sticker is about 5 x 10 inches.  To be real though, while I have 50 sets available for anyone who wants them, it will probably be easier for you and about the same cost to just print these three files to sticker paper:

Page 7: Token Page Sticker 

Page 13: Dice Page Sticker 

Page 20: Text Page Sticker 

Or just get a nice glossy printout of the entire rulebook, and go sticker-free!

On the digital side, after weeks of silence, BGA has finally gotten back to me to say that Envelopes of Cash is going to be released sometime in December.  Date unknown.  It will be released as part of their Advent Calendar of New Games, where every day one new game will be featured.  You can read more about it here:  https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=33599.

I am going to be out of the country doing an intensive language class from mid-December through mid-January (so yes, I will be watching the CFP at some crazy hour via some crazy method), so if you have any issues with your games, best to let me know before the middle of December, or else wait until after I return.  When I do return, I will probably have one more request for you all, which is to sign up for the Skybirds mailing list, but then I think you can finally expect this update flow to slow down.

May you find happiness and joy in the upcoming (bowl) season.

ABC,

Andy

Update to the Update
about 1 year ago – Thu, Nov 09, 2023 at 10:40:41 AM

A kind and curious backer asked me to post what those three additional rulebook edits are.

1) There is a messed up example on page 13 that I am very ashamed of.  The version you have in print suggests the ECs should be put in November, but in fact, they belong in October.  I am waiting for the professional art version of this fix, but here's my amateur attempt to replace that example.

There is an error on page 7 for the token counts.  The game shipped with 30 or 35 ECs per color, not 40.  On the other hand, you got 50 $BB, not 48.

And then finally, the text related to two examples on page 20 has been updated.

None of these alter the rules, per se, but rather are designed to make bad examples/info less confusing/more accurate.

ABC,

Andy