Take it out for a spin!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Apr 07, 2022 at 10:19:09 AM

Last night I gave a demo to two backers and in the course of our play through, I realized that neither of them were aware that all of you have access to the game right now on both Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator (TTS).  TTS requires a paid subscription (unrelated to Envelopes of Cash) and so if you're a member of that community, I'll assume you know what to do and just give you the link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2715972217

Tabletopia, though, is free, and not too hard for a newcomer to get used to, though it can be a little clunky if you're new to it.  Ideally at least one member of your group will have a little experience so if that is not the case but you are interested in taking the game out for a spin, get in touch with me (Andy) and I'll try to help you get started.  In any event, to play the game, one person in your group will need to go to the following URL: https://tabletopia.com/games/envelopes-of-cash-eh978h/play-now 

Once there, you'll need to open seats for the number of players you want to include in the game.  Then, you will see a symbol towards the bottom of the screen that looks like a triangle with a missing side, and if you click that it will copy a URL that you can then email (or share via zoom, or text or discord or whatever) to your opponents -- but be sure you've added the right number of seats before you click the button or it won't work.

That's pretty much all there is to it.  Once every is there the host can click start and then everyone will need to click ready, and you'll be sent (slowly) into the game itself.  As long as players do not choose the color White before they enter, everyone should be placed properly around the table, and you'll be ready to go, with the recruits already randomly distributed across the country and the deck shuffled and ready for the initial choosing of you "Secret Stash" of 4 cards.

As I said, figuring out how to make Tabletopia deal cards, flip tokens over (pro tip -- the 3 and 5 denominations of the envelopes are on the backside of the 4s and 6s, and the 1s and 2s have 2s and 1s on their reverse sides), and roll dice can be a little tricky, but there are tutorials for that or you can just sort of hack your way through it.  But there's no reason you have to wait until the fall to play EoC if you're ok with a digital implementation of the game.  It's not the same, but it's a good way to get a feel for how the game plays and to teach your game group so you're ready for the real thing.

As it happened, your game designer came in a respectable second in the play session.  But a good time was (hopefully) had by all.

Enjoy!

(and of course, Always Be Crootin!)

Andy

The Card Orphanage
over 2 years ago – Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 09:11:58 AM

We are about 50% of the way through the Kickstarter campaign and about 60 of the 120 base cards in the game remain available for adoption.  Today I wanted to call to your attention some of the cards that have already gotten their core composition developed, so if you did want to adopt the card, you'd have a sense of what your face was going to be put onto.  Or even more to the point, if you know someone else who might want to adopt a card, you could share this update to encourage them to jump on this opportunity to forever be the face of one of these cards.  In other words, this is a great update to forward along to someone who you think might be a potential fan of the game if they knew more about it.

For starters, no one has yet adopted any of the 8 "Meeting Room" cards.  These cards all play the same role in the game, doubling the value of a recruit at a given position.  So for example, the Running Back Meeting Room card reads like this:

We now have artwork for all 8 of these cards ready to go, and so, for example,  the picture that will go onto this card will look something like this, but with faces added.

So, this would be a great card for a group of three college buddies, or a family of three to adopt, or just for an individual to adopt to be immortalized alongside two nonspecific faces.  Same deal for Linebackers, who will have a meeting room like this.

So there will be 8 cards with that same sort of vibe, and they all could use a nice person to adopt them.

Many of the "Coach with ___ Roots" have been adopted, but the Coaches with Iowa Roots, LA Roots, Michigan Roots,  Montana Roots, and Oregon Roots and Polynesian Roots all remain available.   In each of these cases, if you were interested in adoption but wanted to relocate the coach within the region, it may be possible.  For example, the Coach with Alabama Roots has been renamed the Coach with Georgia Roots, at the request of the adopter, which worked just fine because Georgia and Alabama are in the same region.  So if you're from Minnesota and want to snag the Iowa Roots coach, or your from the Bay Area and want to take that L.A. Roots card, it's there for the asking as well.  Here's the art we have laid out for these cards.

Obviously there are lots more -- from the Accounting Wizard

 to Efficient Travel Arrangements

 to the Pipeline to the League, 

and so if you or someone you know might want to be emblazoned on a game card, this is the time to act.

I know it's a little weird to send this update out to people who already have backed the game, and I apologize for what seems like a pure attempt to upsell you.  Of course, if you do want to upgrade your support, that's allowed, but what I'd really like to ask of you, if you can, is to think of a friend or a colleague who might also like the game's concept and to let them know about the Kickstarter campaign and specifically to let them know we have many cards available with real estate set aside for them to become their very own game card.  The full list of cards, both adopted and still in the orphanage, can be found here: Adoption List.  The adopted cards are clearly marked.

In exactly a month, this campaign will come to a close.  We're on pace for a really great result and I appreciate every single one of you for being here, for your support, and, if possible, for your continued help in spreading the word.  It's really exciting to know we've locked in out manufacturer, put down a down payment, and we're in the queue.  It's now all about doing everything possible to make the game as popular as possible so you'll be able to find more opponents, form online leagues, etc.  Thanks,  and always be crootin!

Andy

Another quick, but very awesome update
over 2 years ago – Sun, Apr 03, 2022 at 11:04:15 AM

We hit our first stretch goal

As part of the process of locking down our manufacturing deal, putting down the deposit, etc., we were able to reconfigure some of the costs of the components of the game.  One benefit is that we're able to add the deluxe board to every game without having to raise the price.  But another benefit is that we have been able to lower the thresholds of both of the stretch-goal game expansions.  So officially as of today we have unlocked out first  stretch goal, Head Coach cards.  These were originally conceived of as being playing card-sized cards, but in collaboration with Gameland, our manufacturer, we discovered that by making these thick cardboard tablets, rather than playing cards, we'd actual make them cooler and cheaper to make (cards are usually cheaper but in our case the upper limit for one sheet is 120, so the 121st card added a lot of cost).  We figured out a way to make these cardboard, rather than cards, and voila, the price got a lot lower. As a result, we're able to bring down the thresholds, and all backers will be getting six thick, two-sided cardboard tablets with coaches on either side.

So what are Head Coach cards exactly?   At the start of the game, players can draft or randomly deal them out, and each will provide a unique benefit to each program, making the game less symmetric.  We've already got three of the twelve coaches adopted, but there is room for nine more adoptions.    The Patriarch of the Program and the Offensive Wunderkind have been claimed, and one person has purchased a card but has yet to reserve ones, but if any of the rest of these strike your fancy,  now you know these are certain to be in the game.  The gray lines indicted they will be the reverse of the white lines above them, and the (M) and (F) indicate we're envisioning these as male and female versions of the same concept.

What's the next goal?  Recruiting Goals.  If we hit $25,000 (down from $30K), we'll be able to add secret starting goals each program will receive so they can score 10-20 points at the end of the game for filling out their recruiting class per their targets, determined randomly at the start of each game.  If we don't hit this target for this campaign, this is likely to be released as a small mini-expansion sometime in the future.  But it would be great if we could sell enough to simply include it with the base game from the start.

Very short (yes!) update on manufacturing progress
over 2 years ago – Sat, Apr 02, 2022 at 07:57:08 PM

No music!  Fewer words!  Just wanted to tell you we have put down a 30% deposit to produce (at least) 500 copies of Envelopes of Cash, with the deluxe version of the board (with the slight indentations for tokens to rest where they belong without moving).  Will have more to say soon, but figured you would all appreciate this good news in a "fun sized" package without waiting for a longer update on freight, etc.

More Musical Metaphors
over 2 years ago – Thu, Mar 31, 2022 at 12:48:02 PM

Another Update from Andy. Someday I do hope that we’ll get you an update from Miah on art stuff but she’s head-down drawing stuff so it’s only Andy with time to chat about game design (and music). Today’s musical metaphor is being employed to talk about what kind of game Envelopes of Cash actually is.

“But it’s a Euro, we know that!” you might be saying, “It’s right in the ad copy.” Yes, and that’s true, but Euro covers a lot of ground and EoC is positioned in a particular piece of that landscape. One way to describe a game is to talk about the theme, but that’s the part you all already know – the game is designed to capture the essence of the college football recruiting process, and provide a real strategic experience that feels authentic, but without getting bogged down in minutiae that would make it unpleasant for a generalist board gamer to play.

Another way is to talk about the mechanics the game uses, and for some of the backers of Envelopes of Cash, the terminology we gamers throw around when we talk about mechanics might be a little foreign, so it’s worth a moment just to explain.

If you’ve ever heard of or played the classic game Carcassonne, then you’ve encountered the game mechanic known as “tile laying” in which players draw tiles and then make choices about where to place them on a board of some sort, scoring points based on their choices. If you’ve played any game where you have “meeples” (the generic term for wooden tokens designed to represent people) or other sorts of tokens that you put onto spaces on a board, and the space you choose determines whether you get a certain resource, you trigger an action, you score some points, etc., then you’ve experienced a “worker placement” mechanic. I think my first encounter with worker placement might have been the Uwe Rosenberg classic, Agricola, which is a vicious game in which your small medieval German farming family is always about a minute away from starvation, unless you can get your sheep economy rocking, then you’ll eat mutton like it’s going out of style.

Neither of those mechanism are featured in Envelopes of Cash; instead, the main mechanics are a version of “pick up and deliver” and “set collection,” by which I mean a big part of the game is getting envelopes (pick up) and bringing them to recruits (deliver) and then at the end of the game, a large portion of your points will be based on how well you did in compiling a well-rounded roster (did you collect the full set). Pick up and deliver games are commonly set in a trade/colonization theme within the Euro genre, so you might see a game like the somewhat legendary Merchants and Marauders where a one part of the game involves getting goods from one port where they are plentiful to another where they are in demand. Another game with this mechanism is Macao, by Stefan Feld, which was in fact the original inspiration for Envelopes of Cash. In Envelopes of Cash, the payoff for each delivery is that you land the recruit for your program and you add their star value to your point total (adjusted by game modifiers, etc.).

Set collection is probably even more obvious from its name. Many games ask you to collect items. A game like Stone Age (which also uses worker placement) asks you to try to get all 7 of the different card symbols and if you do, you receive 72 or 49 points at the end of the game. Saint Petersburg asks you to collect unique Aristocrat cards, and rewards you with the sum of the number of unique cards (i.e., if you have 5, you get 1+2+3+4+5=15) up to 10 (which nets you 55), after which you get 10 points apiece for each additional one.

In Envelopes of Cash, the payouts from set collection can total 64 points, split into two paths worth up to 32 points each. One rewards breadth using a scoring system patterned on the lines of Stone Age – you get approximately n^2/2 points for each unique position you recruit, up to all 8 which gives you 32 points if you land at least on QB, RB, WR, OL, DL, LB, DB, and K/P. The other rewards depth, giving you points based on how many recruits you can get from one single region of the country. This scoring system is more in the style of St. Petersburg, and it also hits 32 by the time you get to 10 points.

But it’s not even mechanics that I really want to talk about in this update, though of course I did just do exactly that. Rather, I want to talk about where a game is trying to sit within the arc of Euro game development. Some games want to be really path-breaking, creating a brand new concept no game has every used before, or creating a whole new subgenre.  (you may see ad copy touting how "innovative" or "Revolutionary!" they are going to be.)  Others want to take some recently invented concept and perfect it. Some games are just me-too games, really blatantly imitating whatever the flavor of the month is and just basically saying, “well this is exactly like that game about Space Exploration that you love, but we put it on a farm.”

Envelopes of Cash is none of those. And now it’s finally time for the musical metaphor. Envelopes of Cash is sort of Electric Light Orchestra of Euros. ELO was a great band, but you can’t help listening to ELO without thinking they all they really wanted to do was write great Beatles songs. And in fact, a song like Mr. Blue Sky feels a lot like what the Beatles might have written if they’d stayed together long enough to be putting out music in 1977. It’s not like you can listen to any individual ELO song and say it’s a total rip off of any specific Beatles song, but it also feels like if you took all the elements of their music away that owed a huge debt to the Beatles, it’s not clear what would be left.

That’s how I made Envelopes of Cash. Many of the games I mentioned above as sharing mechanics with Envelopes of Cash are in fact the inspirations for Envelopes of Cash.  I wanted some set collection, so I looked to games like Stone Age and St. Petersburg and started with their scoring systems, and then adjusted as I went. I wanted a card & dice interaction that drove something like pick-up-and-deliver, so Macao inspired the spine of the game, but because Macao has a very different market system not found in Envelopes of Cash, the system evolved away from what Stefan Feld did in in Macao to what EoC now has. The card draft components of EoC are really a blend of the system found in Uwe Rosenberg’s underappreciated classic At the Gates of Loyang, a game about selling vegetables, combined with mechanics from a non-Euro game called Michigan Rummy that my family used to play on rainy days at the beach in the summer.

So if ELO is an example of what it means to be Beatlesque, the Envelopes of Cash is Euroesque. (And by the way, when looking for a good link to the word Beatlesque, I see ELO was not ashamed of their roots, as this link says they were formed “explicitly with the intention of "picking up where the Beatles left off," so there's no reason for me to be ashamed of this game being Euroesque either!)

To change the metaphor completely, I feel like what I have done is make a really good stew, but rather than starting from scratch, I used leftovers from several great meals people ate a few days ago. That is, these are not innovative mechanisms. These aren’t even very 2020 – it’s more like a lot of 2005-2015 games that I just adore, thrown into the stew pot, and what emerges is good comfort food that, if you are a veteran Euro player, should feel very familiar and easy to pick up, but at the same time I hope the mélange feels fresh because of the admixture. And then of course there is the theme, which for a Euro is fairly radical. There really just are not any Euros about college football recruiting, and so even Boardgamegeek.com doesn’t know what to do with us – we’re really a game with a blend of economics and sports and, well, sportsgeekonomics is not a recognized game category yet.  So we're listed as falling into "Sports: American Football / Gridiron, "Theme: Mystery / Crime," and Theme: School / College / University"  To which I guess I can see it but also, no, not really.

But many of you reading this update are not veteran Euro players, so whether the game is an homage to past games or not doesn’t mean much to you. Probably you’ve not played dozens of games of Stone Age or hundreds of games of St. Pete’s or Macao. And for you, I think Envelopes of Cash can play an even more valuable (and at the same time fun) role, which is to introduce you to all of these mechanics which are common to Euros, not just from ten years ago but today as well. Some of the very popular Pandemic cooperative games involve pick up and deliver. The current “it” game, Ark Nova, features set collection leading to end-of-game points. These games are using these old-school mechanics in new and interesting ways, and Envelopes of Cash is not trying to do what they do, but for a newcomer to the genre of sophisticated “hobbyist” board games, it is my not-so-humble hope that you might come for the recruiting, but get hooked on the mechanics, and then find your way in to the rest of what this wonderful little hobby has to offer. It’d be like getting into ELO before ever hearing any Beatles music, and then finding out there’s this whole world of music that inspired ELO to explore as well.

That’s the kind of game Envelopes of Cash is – it’s a stew. It’s ELO. It’s an homage of a sorts to everything that Andy fell in love with when he discovered German games, as distinct from the American Avalon Hill-style board games he already loved, and what Andy brings to the design process that adds value, other than being a well-curated “greatest hits” of elements of games he loves, is that Envelopes of Cash immerses its mechanics far deeper into the theme of the game than many of the games which inspired it because his work has led to him becoming more knowledgeable about the college football economy than most economists or board gamers and probably more than anyone who claims to be both. Virtually nothing in the game St. Petersburg really has any connection to court life under Peter the Great. In contrast, I hope you find there is a real feeling that when you play Envelopes of Cash that the reason why you do X, Y, or Z is related to recruiting athletes, and even if it’s a little weird that there are cards or dice or turns at all (because it’s a game), that if you squint just a little you’ll feel it does capture the theme far better than many a Euro.

Ok… so maybe that tells you a bit more about the game you’ve purchased, and hopefully some of it is appreciated by some of you. Next update we’ll bounce back to logistics. I think we’ll give you some details on the precise contents of what we’re ordering, and how we’re planning to make sure it gets to you, and how we’re really going to try to have that happen in 2022, “supply-chain” willing!

Finally, apologies for drifting into/out of the third person in this update. It came naturally and it didn’t seem worth the time to figure out which way to iron out the discrepancies.