Envelopes of Cash: The College Football Recruiting Game

Logistics 2: Analog Boogaloo
over 2 years ago – Thu, Mar 31, 2022 at 03:24:32 AM

Another update from Andy.

There’s a line in the Velvet Underground* song “I’m Waiting for The Man” about one of the rules of being a heroin addict: “First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait.” Coming to this exercise in board game publishing from a day job where the everyone works around the clock if necessary to meet crazy deadlines, whenever I have to interact with any other industry, it’s always a little jarring to me how slow-paced normal work schedules are. Oh, you want us to install that sink? Sure, we can do it in six weeks, etc.

* Yes, I know that technically this is a song credited to The Velvet Underground and Nico, but I am pretty sure Nico had nothing to do with this particular song.

So, I know I said I would have some positive news on logistics last weekend or by the beginning of this week and here it is, Wednesday afternoon in California, which under no definition is the beginning of the week, but as Lou Reed intoned, “he’s never early, he’s always late; first thing you learn is that you always gotta wait.” And so it took a little longer to get comfortable that the good news I wanted to share was really going to happen, but now I am comfortable telling you all that we have located our publisher and we are on the cusp of signing paperwork and sending in our deposit to reserve our spot in the production queue, even before the Kickstarter campaign finishes. The advantage of doing this is that we should be able to cut about a three weeks to a month out of the time between when the campaign closes and when the game is in your hands.  In this way, I think the heroin addiction metaphor still works for a lot of gamers, in that the wait from when you back a game on Kickstarter until it arrives and you can finally get your fix is a sort of agony. Sadly, you’ll still have to wait for that “dear dear friend” of yours, by which I mean Envelopes of Cash, but you’ll get your fix a little but sooner.

Moreover, and this is the actual news that I wanted to share in this update, we’ve been able to swing it so that the Envelopes of Cash board will be produced in a deluxe two-layer format. Those of you who are heavily into the gaming hobby will know that in the last few years suddenly a lot of games have featured cardboard with little divots cut into them to make piece placement a bit easier. For example, here’s a player board from the game Beyond the Sun, and you can see that the spaces for the cubes and the discs are somewhat indented so the pieces slot neatly into the correct spot and not slide around with a slight jostle (though of course Andy is perfectly capable of bumping into the table and making tokens fly into the next room).

This effect is achieved by layering two pieces of cardboard on top of each other, where the lower layer is a full, uncut board like you’re used to, and the upper layer is thinner and has cut-outs where the pieces should go.

Well, the plan is now that the Envelopes of Cash map will be somewhat jostle-proof because we’re going to make it so that the State (and Border State) tokens and the Recruit tokens will slot into the board, resting just a smidge below the board level on each state and recruit space.

There’s a lot more going on here at EoC World HQ and our various satellite offices. Things that we are working on include: finalizing tweaks to the board, to the tokens, and to the cards. The latter process involves a lot of artwork and also, as mentioned in a past update, some mathematics to perform the final point balancing to ensure the game better encourages the use of “hard to play” cards by rewarding their play more.   One thing I am really eager to update you all on us the state of our Adopt-a-Card program.  The response to that has been very rewarding and many cards have been adopted.  There are two people who have yet to reply to my requests for their info -- please check your messages -- but everyone else is in the process of getting drawn onto cards.  Next week I may update you all on a few orphan cards that could really use an adoption, just to see if any of you might want to upgrade or might perhaps know someone who, for example, could see him/herself as the perfect face of the Tech Bro Millionaire.

On the logistics side, we are still working with folks in China and Oregon to make sure that when the Kickstarter closes you will have as easy a time of getting your information processed as possible and then making sure you get exactly what you ordered as rapidly and at as high quality as possible. There are tons that I want to share on all of these, but let’s save all of that for another day, shall we?

Final fun fact about VU's "I'm Waiting for the Man." The main character in the song tells us that he has “twenty-six dollars in my hand.” The song came out in 1967, so in 2022 currency that’d about $225. So I think it is somewhat comforting to know that if you are jonesing for Envelopes of Cash right now, for one thing, there are two online implementations you can use for free (see links below), but for another, the $65 you’ve put down for your hit is far less expensive than Lou Reed’s 1967 heroin in 2022 dollars.  And isn’t that good to know?

In any case, if you do want to get a hit right now or any time before the game arrives in physical form, you have two options. You can play for free at Tabletopia. The player who wants to start the game should go to https://t.co/Nd7s0Vehwj and from there that player can invite the other players (or can launch and play solo). The other option is Tabletop Simulator (which has had some issues of late so if you don’t want to use, that’s ok). You’ll need at least one of the players to have a subscription to use this content, I believe, but if you have that, the link is  https://t.co/2VCVuJTka4.  

Until next time, always be crootin!

Andy

Happy Friday! Rulebook Concepts (from other games) and a Resulting Addition to the EoC Rulebook
over 2 years ago – Fri, Mar 25, 2022 at 06:15:14 PM

This is Andy with a game-related update for you on this Happy Friday! edition of an EoC update.

Having spent dozens of sessions teaching the game to new players, I've also recently gone to a couple of conventions where I got to see professional game teachers -- people who go from convention to convention simply teaching new games for a living --  and I realized  the rulebook captured almost everything I like to tell people when I teach the game live, but there are a few common things that new players always want to know, in virtually every game of any level of strategic complexity, especially the first time they play, which is "what is a good plan for the whole game" and "what is a good first turn."  And then specific to some games, including Envelopes of Cash -- is it bad that my turn was so short?

Recently, I was taught two great games by some of these professional game teachers.  The first was Maglev Metro, a game by Ted Alspach and published by Bezier Games.  You may know some of Alspach's other games such as Suburbia or the Castles of Mad King Ludwig.  (Btw, Alspach is an American despite the French sounding company he runs and the Euro-style games he makes.)  In any case, I had a great instructor teach me the game at Dice Tower West and he emphasized to me that it was ok that my turns would be incredibly short, especially at the beginning, and that this was a feature of the game, not a bug. He emphasized that the game was designed to build to a crescendo, but as a result early turns were basically just building blocks towards the big turns later in the game.  Knowing that in advance, I was not worried that my early turns felt like I was not doing much, and it made it feel ok to be thinking ahead and not really getting any points, per se, at first (it's not really a "get points during the game kind of game, but you know what I mean).

The second thing he did was gave us good tips for what to do on our first turn.  And he explained -- if you're going to do X, then start with Y.  But basically everyone should do Z.

I also learned how to play the board game of Anno 1800, designed by the very prolific Martin Wallace (though based on the old video game by Ubisoft) and published by Kosmos.  There are so many Martin Wallace titles I am not sure what he's most famous for, but I suppose the Brass games are maybe his crown jewels.

Our teacher there also made it clear it was ok to have short turns.  He didn't quite make it clear to us at first (though he helped us figure it out as we went along) as we were running out of time in the game session, which is that  the game has an ebb and flow to it that means at first you like getting more cards but at some point you want to stop getting lots of cards and start shedding them.  Or at least you should consider that as part of your strategy because if no one ever empties their hand completely, the game never ends.  We, as newbies, had to end the game by agreement when we ran out of time because none of us mastered that pivot from growing our hands to shrinking them.  And it struck me that I bet a lot of newbies have this same problem.

Well of course, I've since bought both games (if I play a game and like it, it's super hard for me not to buy it soon thereafter) and when I started studying the rulebooks to see what I could learn to improve the EoC rules (as I do with every set of rules I look at), I noticed that both Alspach and Wallace (or their editors and assistants!) had added these little section of advice.  First, from Maglev Metro:

Elsewhere in Maglev Metro, there is mention of the turns being "quick, tactical moves" but it was my teacher who really emphasized that it was ok not to do too much on any one turn, in service of the longer-term play,

Just as an aside, did anyone other than me start thinking of the Leonard Cohen song "First We take Manhattan" when they saw these rules?  "They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom For trying to change the system from within I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"  I mean, newbies are supposed to start by playing the Manhattan side of the board, and once they master that, as a reward, they get to flip the bored, I mean board, over and take on Berlin.  Okay, maybe it was just me,  Anyway...

In Martin Wallace's Anno 1800 rules, though he really wants to make sure you know he expects you to experience a lot of "I guess that's all I do this turn" kind of turns, and there will e a LOT of them before the show really gets rolling towards the endgame when people start to think about shedding cards.  Here's how he puts it.

It strikes me that a lot of Wallace's play-testers were playing his game wrong at first, sort of like my group at DTW, at least wrong from how he thought they would play after 10 games, and he wanted to make sure they got to that level of 10-game expertise faster so they wouldn't give up on it as being a game that never ended and your hand just got bigger and bigger and no one could ever end the game.  And then secondly, he did also want to remind players that ending the game (and getting the 7-point bonus) was not necessarily always the best thing to do, especially if everyone else was already fighting over that.  When everyone zigs, maybe zag.

And then, later in this same section, Wallace also clearly addresses the "WTF do I do on my first turn?" questions he was getting in his playtest sessions.

Alspach's version seems very matter of fact.  To me, Wallace's seems a little bit defensive, like he's trying to justify his design decisions to make a game that can take a while to get started, and maybe take a long while to reach its crescendo before it ends in a sudden burst of excitement.  Like he's worried you'll think that was not intentional.  

And this brings us back to Envelopes of Cash.  Envelopes of Cash plays very differently when the dice are generous from when they prove stingy, and as a designer, I am ok with that.  When the dice give you many 4s, 5s, and 6s, especially early on, you can have bountiful, full turns from the start using many of your 9 possible actions on every turn, and you can have very high scores.  Experienced players will get the hang of the game and will be on the alert for a good first set of dice and adjust accordingly.  A crap first roll may be a harbinger of the second kind of game, where you instead need to play a lot of short,  strategically oriented turns without using a lot of the 9 possible actions, gearing up for two or three big months of WHAMMO where you really bring down the hammer of your strategy and get to flex your tactical muscles using combos and such.  When the first type of game happens, I can sit back and watch as players play and everyone has a rollicking good time from the start.  No one looks to me to ask, "are we doing this right?"  But in the second kind of game, people wonder exactly that, is this game working ok.  And like Martin Wallace seems to e saying in his rulebook, I also feel a little defensive when I say it, but yes, dang it, it's on purpose!  Sometimes the game challenges you by asking, "can you make the most of a cornucopia of resources?" but sometimes the game challenges you by asking, "can you make the most of a trickle of resources?"  And to be a great Envelopes of Cash player is to know how to plan for the potential of either possibility arising during the game set up, and then to adjust on the fly as it becomes clear which kind of game it's going to be.  And since life is not always a purely yes/no binary, sometimes you can make it a more bountiful game by your choices, as well.  That is, you can play a role in determining which kind of game it is going to be for you, with good choices leading to a more bountiful flow as the game goes in, even in spite of lousy dice rolls.

So to this end, on the back game of the current version of the EoC Rules, I have added a little strategic advice for the big picture, as well as tactical tips for what to do on turn one. I also have taken the opportunity, for a second spot in the rulebook, to remind players that it's ok to have short turns if they are in service of the greater good of a really fun turn in the future.  And the tone may be a little defensive, but I decided that if as prolific a designer as Martin Wallace can sound defensive on page 14 of his rulebook, I can sound defensive on page 20 of mine, gosh darn it!  And so if you go to the current rules, on page 20, you'll find the following.

So, that's your Friday update with lots of links to other cool games and their rulebooks, and some insight into what you can expect as you develop mastery in Envelopes of Cash.

What's coming in our next update?  More Logistics!  We finally have some answers to Logistics Question (2), which is who will be manufacturing the game, and the subsidiary issues around how many units we will be ordering, etc.  It's really good news, and I'm hoping to get it formalized enough to share over the weekend, or by early next week at the latest. And don't worry, it's really good news.  We're quite happy here at EoC World HQ.

and remember, always be crootin'

Andy

Short, visual update
over 2 years ago – Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 08:20:04 PM

Andy here again -- quick update.

We're doing a bunch of logistical stuff in the background here as we let March Madness hog all the airspace.  We hope to be back up doing some marketing once the Sweet Sixteen narrows to the Final Four, and in the meantime we're working to get nearly final prototypes into the hands of more bloggers, podcasters, and video reviewers to get the word out about Envelopes of Cash.  At the same time, we've been working with manufacturers and fulfillment companies (and yes, I know I promised an update on both manufacturing and fulfillment but I don't know the final-final answers to either of these issues yet, so I am stalling on the update until I can tell you for sure which direction we're going).  As part of that, we're working to finalize things like the game box and it occurred to us we probably needed a company logo to put on the back of the box.   So Therese Ureta, our second-in-command illustrator, sat down with some vague guidance from Andy and came up with this very nice looking logo that we've decided to go with.  And thus, here is your update for today, behold the Envelopes of Cash, LLC company logo.

Looking forward to giving you more game-related updates soon.  In the meantime, always be crootin!

Andy

Logistics Update 1
over 2 years ago – Sat, Mar 19, 2022 at 08:53:14 AM

In our last update, we promised (threatened?) that the next update (i.e., this one) would be all about logistics. But first just a quick update on where the campaign stands. We’re over 135 backers now and with an average pledge of over $100, that means more than $14,000 has been pledged. What’s been particularly encouraging is that even though we are in a marketing lull for the next few weeks (because we do not want to be competing against the March Madness focus on basketball), we are still getting several orders each day and so the slow but steady climb towards our first Stretch Goal has continued apace. We do plan another push once the mid-week games portion of the tournaments comes to a close and it’s our hope that will help push us towards those goals.

Okay, now let’s talk a little logistics. There are 3 major logistical decision left to be made as the Kickstarter campaign pushes towards completion in early May: (1) once the campaign closes, how much of the process of managing the Kickstarter pledges will be handled in-house vs. being outsourced to a Pledge Manager, (2) how many games will we manufacture and with which manufacturer, and (3) how much of the process of fulfilling your orders (i.e., getting product from the factory where it is made to the place where you live) will handled in-house vs. outsourced. Today’s update is going to fill you in our how we’ve decided to handle the first of these three questions. The TLDR version is we are going to use a Pledge Manager. If you know what that means and you don’t find every word of these updates to be utterly fascinating, you can probably stop reading now. If you don’t know what a Pledge Manager is, it might make sense to read through the rest, fascinating or not.

Given the campaign’s success to date and the slow but steady growth we’re still experiencing, it has become clear that when May 4 arrives and the campaign closes, we do not want our loyal customers to experience a complete amateur hour even if the game itself is about the systemic, um, “workarounds” to college football’s amateurism.  Having now gotten to see inside the crowdfunding process a little, it’s sobering to see the skills needed to do this process well and with the really great support we’re getting from you for the game, we do not want to fail to live up to your appropriate expectation of professionalism in our delivery of what has been promised.  And so, in answer to the first of the three questions above, we’ve decided to work with a Pledge Manager.

Pledge Managers are firms that take the data from a completed Kickstarter and handle the process of confirming with everyone that they are listed properly for what they ordered (and giving them a chance to add more stuff if they want), triple-checking their address information to make sure it arrives, and providing a good way to communicate with the company (i.e., us) even after the Kickstarter campaign is over. There are many good options, but we are probably going to work with BackerKit, a company which we here at EoC World HQ have used many times as customers. What that means for all of you is that when the EoC campaign closes on May 4, you will get charged for your pledge by Kickstarter, but your information will then migrate over to BackerKit which will handle the process of making sure you get exactly what you paid for, giving you the chance to add additional Add-ons (like if you decide you want to adopt another card or get a few more posters of the card you already adopted). You can also add on an additional game to your purchase. You’ll also be able to book a tutorial or a fully curated gaming session through the Pledge Manager, if that strikes your fancy.

The prices of these late-adoptions and additional games will be slightly higher than those during the actual campaign, as we want to reward our supporters who took the plunge with us during the Kickstarter itself, though if you are interested in buying games in bulk, the retailer packages of 6 or 15 games will remain available at very attractive discounts. EoC is cheaper by the half-dozen.

BackerKit (or whichever firm we ultimately choose) will not charge you, the customer, anything for this service. They do charge us, Envelopes of Cash LLC, for their services, but having assessed the services they will provide to us and to you, we’ve decided the fees they charge are reasonable for the convenience you will receive compared to if Andy were keeping all of this info in a spreadsheet by himself, etc. As Clint Eastwood said in Magnum Force, “A Man’s Got to Know His Limitations.”

If you know folks who may have been leery of backing this project either because they thought we might not use a Pledge Manager or, conversely, because they were afraid we might use one and would let late backers pay less than the original Kickstarter prices, you can let them know we’ve resolved both of those issues. We will be calling in the professionals to make sure the pledges are handled appropriately, but there will be a small price premium charged for buying individual games and adopting cards during the post-Kickstarter add-on period in the Pledge Manager to make sure that the Kickstarter prices remain the best deals available.

We hope that answers any questions any of you had regarding logistics issue (1). We plan to address questions (2) and (3) in forthcoming updates, though to break things up a little, it’s our hope to talk about a game feature in the next update before turning back to the more mundane business aspects like manufacturing and freight.

Have a great weekend, and Always Be Crootin!

Andy

Point Salads and Prototypes
over 2 years ago – Thu, Mar 17, 2022 at 05:42:12 PM

This is a game-content update from Andy to let you all know what’s been going on here in EoC World HQ, with respect to the actual contents of the game you've backed, even as our first wave of marketing draws to an end.  We’re at 129% of our target and if you’ve tracked our trajectory that means that if we were to stay the course, it would be unlikely we will hit any of our stretch goals. But we do plan to have a second wave of marketing focused on the last weeks of the campaign, and the hope is we will be able to get to at least 200% of target and unlock one or more of the Stretch Goals.

But let’s talk about the game itself and where things stand. At conventions like GAMA, where I was Monday/Tuesday, I get asked by other designers or game manufacturers whether the game, which I was carrying around as a prototype, is “finished” in the sense of the game itself. And my answer is “almost.” If you’ve read the rulebook, you can see the rules are fairly well laid out and have been edited and proofread a fair amount. But in my experience, you can never proofread something too often, so that process is continuous – we take a step away, we come back and read a page or two on a given day, we find a typo, etc. But that’s not what I mean by my “almost” answer.

What remains to be done to make the game final is that I have left one element of the “point salad” of the game open for rebalancing.

Quick aside – if “point salad” is a new term to you, it started as a bit of a derision tossed at certain Euro games that offered many choices of how to score points to win, trying to insult what I consider a great feature in a game – choice – as if it were somehow a bad thing. But I think a lot of Euro players recognized the concept as accurate for many games, after all you can score points in Envelopes of Cash by (a) recruiting athletes, (b) putting cards into play, (c) card usage during the game, (d) marketing campaigns, (e) End of Game cards, (f) End of Game points for variety of positions recruited, and (g) End of Game points for the depth of your recruiting in one region of the country. And so it is a bit like a salad of many different ingredients tossed into a single bowl and you get to choose whether to emphasize tomatoes or carrots or beets, etc. (Never go heavy on beets!)

Anyway, given all of that, I have waited until the last possible moment to make the final change to ensure all of the different ways to score points work together, which they all do … except one. The one is points from cards played during the game. The cards currently give a player between 1 to 4 points when put into play and I am going to increase that range so that the cards that are more difficult to get into play will score as many as 8 points, in order to encourage strategies that focus on using those more difficult cards. In the grand scheme of things, an extra, say, 4 or 5 points for a card shouldn’t change the game, but the point value on a card is an early means of motivating players’ planning. I want people to see more value in those kinds of strategies, and also to get more benefit if they succeed in getting a hard-to-play card out into the world.

So, as we’re finalizing the cards’ artwork, putting the Adopt-a-Card supporters portraits on cards, filling the poor un-adopted cards with their orphan artwork (sniff, please help to adopt an orphan), etc., I will be running numbers on spreadsheets to finalize the rebalancing of the card values. You should expect the 1 star cards to mostly stay at 1 star, but most of the 2s, 3s, and 4s, will increase on the order of 100%, with some exceptions.

Other small tweaks: We’ve added one extra space between the where the Blue player starts and the first Midwestern recruit, effectively making that player start farther away than any of the other players .  On the map, Yellow starts farther from its first possible recruit than do Green or Orange, but Blue will now be one farther than Yellow and thus starts two farther than Green or Orange do.  We also switched the effects between the Booster-driven Pipeline and the State NIL Law cards because they got confused in my head at some point. There are a few other tiny tweaks to card effects. And then the one other relatively major rule change we made about a week before the Kickstarter launch is that we have made it an option that players can collectively choose, if the wish for a more active start to the game (though a little less strategically challenging), to receive one envelope per turn of their player color, which then guarantees them 12 envelopes over the course of the game and ensures they will always have one envelope to use, even if they use all their dice to bank future income. But that’s really it, game-wise. If you’ve already played Envelopes of Cash online or at a convention, the game you receive will play almost identically, save for these small changes.

Artistically, we’ve also converged to something close to final as well. One cool new item, hot off of the digital paintbrush of Miah Rose Serdone, our lead Illustrator, is that players will have a choice to use the very geometric player symbols currently in the game as their player symbols, or to flip their tokens over and use much more creative and (in my opinion) fun school mascots instead. So the Green player can be the Green Box, or the Green Duck.

 The Yellow Player can be an O or a Tiger, etc.

And then of course, about half of the cards still need artwork, and about half of the ones with artwork need their artwork to be finished, perhaps by getting a head or a face, etc. That illustration work is ongoing even as I, Andy, focus on the card rebalancing discussed above and prepare for addressing a great number of logistical aspects required to actual physically produce the game.

Which is probably a good time to stop this update for now, since whenever the conversation turns to logistics, things can get pretty yawn-tastic, so I’ll wait until next update to talk about things like how many units of the game we will be producing and how we are thinking about whether to use a Pledge Manager or not. Stay tuned for that update in a day or so.

In the meantime, please keep sharing the KS link: https://bit.ly/EOC_LIVE

Always Be Crootin,

Andy