Envelopes of Cash: The College Football Recruiting Game

Small update on the process of finalizing details with the manufacturer
almost 2 years ago – Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 09:26:27 AM

Hello EOC backers, this is not the update I wanted to give you to say we are officially "in production" but it is a step in that process.  I have been working with my excellent partners at Gameland to finalize all of the components.  We have officially received permission to have our customized dice at a reasonable price, so the dice will be colorblind-friendly, with numbers (rather than pips) and then a non-color-based symbol designed to match each die's color to the envelopes of cash and the recruits.  It won't be a large symbol, but if you have good eyesight other than issues distinguishing certain colors, we will have you covered.

Second, Gameland has offered to make the game sleeves for the 99 of you who purchased sleeves.  This is a small change from the original plan, which was to have Sleeve Kings send either 120 sleeves (if we hit a high enough #, which we did not) or two 110 packs to Gameland for every order, and then to have Gameland package them together before shipping them to our Oregon warehouse.  Gameland wasn't keen on the logistical issues and has offered to match the Sleeve Kings price to provide 120 sleeves themselves.  This avoids the extra expense I was going to incur (because we did not hit the minimum for a custom order) and makes Gameland's life easier, so it's win/win.  One of the 99 customers ordered 2 sets of sleeves for a single game (I  know who you are and I just send you a set of extra sleeves separately), but for the other 98 of you, this is going to be a better solution and it didn't end up costing more than the original plan.  Which is good because my goa is to get my financial loss down under 5 figures when the final reckoning occurs.  (Yes, it's clear there wil not be a profit on this game but it's ok as the net cost to me to get my game out to the world will be worth it.  still, if I can get the loss under $10K that would be great.)

With the sleeve count so close to 100, I have finalized the order to have 100 copies made with sleeves for the 99 (out of 450) of you, and there will be one extra set (I guess that'll be my copy), but otherwise, the bundled Sleeve option is now at an end.  I have turned off the ability for any new orders of sleeves via backerkit.  Though (in the spirit of always be crootin) there are still plenty of copies (see below) of the game itself available via backerkit or at envelopesofcash.com.

Also, you can still order sleeves directly from Sleeve Kings, just make sure to get the "Sails of Glory" version, which is perfect for the game (75mm x 50mm).  Sadly, you will need to buy 2 packages of 110 to sleeve the 120 cards, but they are not very expensive and at least the shipping costs won't double for a double order.

Art-wise, we are down to what I hope is the final requested edit from Gameland -- some of the token files need to have better die cut lines added.  My hope is Rese (who has taken over the lead artist role completely) can get that done when she is back to work tomorrow (Manila time, this afternoon California time) and then we can get final sign off on all art assets.  

As hinted at above, I have finalized my decision to set the game order at 600 rather than 500.  THis means there are 150 copies not yet spoken-for.  I will be wiring the purchase price to Gameland the moment we finalize the art, net of the 30% deposit I sent in May.  The per-unit price is the same (we would need to hit 1,000 to lower than) but when these 450 copies finally get sent out to you sometime in the middle of 2023, my hope is that you all get excited and share that excitement via social media and such, which in turn may generate more interest in purchasing the game.  Rather than limit the upside to just 50 copies, I decided to have 150 available.  Otherwise, the minimum order for a 2nd printing is 500, and the odds of THAT much buzz-driven demand seem low.  If we blow through the 600 and I do need to order 500 more, that would be a wonderful problem to have.  But I wanted to allow for a little bit of word-of-mouth sales in mid-2023.

Finally, I am going to begin the process of spec'ing out the posters for the 50ish of you who adopted a card or purchased a poster.  As I've mentioned before, these will be sent separately from the game from a US-based manufacturer, but I am waiting until the artwork is truly final before I start that process.  It will be a matter of a few days, I hope, and then I'll post an update for just the poster process.  Ideally that update will also be the one I get to tell you that we've officially been approved and manufacturing has begun (or at least that we're in the queue), and I very much hope and expect that update will come before Christmas.  Inshallah!

That's all for now and always be crootin,

Andy

The Long and Winding Road That Leads to Your Game
almost 2 years ago – Sun, Dec 04, 2022 at 10:53:19 PM

Let’s just jump right to the good part.  As of today, I have finally submitted all* of the art files to Gameland. You may remember about six weeks ago I said we had under 10 hours left to go to finish everything. Well that was true, but I jinxed the team because the art staff had a bit of an HR hiccup, and those last 10 hours did not get done until this week. I won’t bore you with the details of why the final strokes were so hard, but suffice it to say that any frustration you may have felt at the delay is only a small fraction of the frustration I have been feeling here at EoC World HQ, waiting for what seemed an eternity for a day or two’s worth of work that never seemed to get done.

*Ok, when I say all, there is one file I held back because of a very tiny art tweak I've asked Rese to make, but it will get submitted by tomorrow, even if the tweak does not occur.

Mercifully, the work has finally gotten done with a big thanks to Rese Ureta, who stepped up to take on the lead artist role for the final batch of work and did a fabulous job as a solo artist to get the dang thing done.

Believe it or not, this was the final element we needed to do, to get the orange die to look orange.  Here's the final asset art for the orange die.   

We do not know if we can pull off the 3-tone version above to make the faces look like an envelope, but if we can't then the single color version below is how the dice will look.  You'll notice in either case we have added a color-blind icon for those who may need that to distinguish the colors of dice or envelopes form each other. 

So, the art assets are now in Gameland’s hands. We should have been at this spot in July or August, and then also there's no good reason we didn't hit this target  at the start of November, but stercore accidit et tempus fugit as Pliny the Younger probably once wrote to Trajan, and thus we are here in early December, finally ready to shift from game/art design to manufacturing.

At this point, things will soon be out of my hands in terms of timing, other than to promise everyone that whenever Gameland needs us to approve something, I will do my best to never have that approval take more than a day. The very first step in the process will be to alter any art assets if Gameland flags an issue for us, and that will require Rese to step in again, which may take a little longer, but she is also committed to pushing any requested revisions through to completion in an expeditious manner.

How long it takes to manufacture that game, to do any quality assurance work, and then to get it onto a ship to head to the warehouse in Oregon from which fulfillment will happen, is an open question for me, but I will do my best to keep you all informed whenever I get an update in the process.

One thing I do have more control over is the poster production process. Now that all 120 cards plus the 12 head coaches are finalized, I am going to be submitting the artwork to a poster company to send them out to everyone who either adopted a card (you get a poster of it for free) or who paid separately for a poster. I need a little time to arrange for that to happen, but I am going to try very hard to get it in process next week, so maybe???? you’ll get those before the CFP championship game. I can’t promise it but that is my goal, to get those done and shipped in December. More as I know it.

Other than that, all I can say is thank you all for your patience, and always be crootin.

Andy

I can almost taste it, baby…
about 2 years ago – Sun, Oct 23, 2022 at 07:25:05 PM

Long ago, when I was a recent college graduate, I ended up in one of those weird jobs you talk about for the rest of your life, working for a very sketchy advertising firm. Among the highlights of my short career in advertising was writing the copy for, and getting to help with the filming of, a commercial for a “Paul Revere and the Raiders” greatest hits album, and got to meet Paul Revere Dick himself, the namesake of the band.  Among other things it did leave me with a deep appreciation of their 1960s pop output, including the Top Ten hit, “Hungry” composed by hall of famers Mann & Weil. If you know the song, you’ll know there’s a bit of a break in the middle where Mark Lindsay, the bands lead singer, oozes out the lyrics, “I can almost taste it, baby…” and then later in the song “I can almost taste it, now.”

Which is a long way of saying that Envelopes of Cash is ALMOST done.  So close, I can almost taste it now!

What’s left? We have just three Adopters who have yet to give us final sign off on their artwork (Derek D, Chan C., and Duane M. … check your emails), though if they don’t get back to us by the end of the day Monday, we’re going to push forward this week.

There are also a couple of small tweaks I need to make to the rulebook (the procrastination of which is being facilitated by my decision to stop to write this game update instead); laying out the Head Coach and Recruiting Board cards onto a punchboard templates because they are being delivered as chunky cardboard placards rather than as cards; and then, possibly, to make a player aid if there is extra space on the Head Coach punchboard sheet. Oh and then I have one question in to Gameland about whether I can afford a slight improvement to the dice (see below) related to an accessibility issue.

That is it. The double-layered map is done, 118 of the 120 cards and 11 of the 12 Head Coaches are finalized (the missing 3 being those mentioned above), all of the tokens are done, and we are probably going to submit all of the artwork to the manufacturer this coming week.  Admittedly, this is three or four months behind my hoped-for schedule, but we will finally be in the hands of “the professionals” involved in the process: Gameland to make the game and Funagain to get it from Ningbo, China to you, wherever you are. I’ll be involved, of course, in making sure it all comes out of the machines as intended, but the hard work will be in the hands, finally, of people who have done this sort of thing before.

The idea of a change to the dice was spurred by the fact we finally have gotten the colorblind accessibility onto all the other art assets where the color of the envelope token, envelope on a card, envelope on a state (representing the cost of the recruit), and even the regions on the map now have a symbol indicating the color.  They look like these:

So the question for Gameland is just to see how much it will cost to take our six standard dice, which will match these six colors, and add the symbol to each face to help facilitate matching dice to the rest of the game for the people for whom colors are not easily distinguished.  If it's doable and not too expensive, I will.  If not,  it will be a gap I can only apologize for in advance.  TBD!

So we're almost done.  Don’t expect the game any time soon, though, I’m afraid to say. It was my hope you’d get them around Thanksgiving, but if we’re four months behind, that’s feeling more like it’s going to be Spring Football, and not Championship Week, that ushers in your chance to get Envelopes of Cash to the table.  But progress, nevertheless, is progress, so let us celebrate that the end of the beginning is upon us.

To share a few more of the images, here are some cards we finished recently.

Craig Norris adopted the Hedge Fund CEO.

Laura Ingram adopted the Coach with Iowa Roots to honor her gather Pat.

And

Dwayne Pate adopted the Color Commenter Alum in honor of his brother (David) and sister in law (Allison):

Card 58

Finally as a shout out to our artists, Here is Miah on “Playing the Angles” and Rese on “Social Media Director.

So, of course I’ll update you when we actually submit our final art and the manufacturing process, but I hope this encourage you as much as it should: we really are close.

Sales-wise, we are still hovering a little under 500 units sold, so there is time for you to refer any friends to the Backerkit site to buy a few more copies before we close things off, which you can still do at  https://bit.ly/LATE-EoC.

Thanks for all of your support, and always be crootin!

Andy

Hello from the SHUX gaming convention .. a request for each of you within this update.
about 2 years ago – Sat, Oct 01, 2022 at 07:58:54 AM

Hello, everyone, I wanted to give you an update on the game, and then also let you know how yesterday went after a full 12 hours of game demos here in Vancouver, BC, Canada at the very large SHUX gaming convention.

But first I'd like to start with a request which we can file under "always be crootin."  I think it is time for Envelopes of Cash to have a visible User Rating and Weight Score on the boardgamegeek (BGG) website.  In order for this to happen, some critical mass of BGG users have to rate the game.    Six people have done so (myself among them) including one person who rated the game as a 2/10 because he/she disapproved of the topic.  So, there's nothing I can do if NCAA President Mark Emmert is shit-posting on BGG under the pseudonym "JustHereForTheFun" but anyway, he apparently did (spoiler: it's actually someone wh claims to be named named Ellen Humphreys so it's probably not Dr. Emmert, but technically I can't rule it out).

In any event, six votes are not enough to have the game's average rating show when people look up the game  More importantly, the system does not tell people the game's "weight" until enough BGG users have assessed it, and the weight of a game, i.e., it's complexity, is important to people who think about how the like to play games, etc.  

I would like to remedy this by asking as many of you as possible to go to the BGG site and rate EoC, even if you have zero idea (yet) whether you like the game or not, and what level of complexity you would assign to it.  I don't want to ask you to give it a 10 just to goose the ratings up -- even I only rated it a 9 because while I have played the game over 200 times at this point, and still love it, there are 10s in my collection I like even better.  I would ask that if you do not have a rating in mind, you consider a 7 or 8, as games that are considered extremely good end up with average ratings in the 8+ area, and games that are considered very good get in the 7-8 range.  6 and below games are the ones that quickly hit the bargain bin.  And while I don't plan to have any extra copies to sell once we get the final count and ship them to you, I'd like people to think of this game as at least a 7.

As for weight, I personally think the game is about a 3.2 on BGG's 1-5 scale for complexity.  So I would ask you to mostly pick 3 unless you have your own opinion for that, in which case, of course, do that.  To give you some perspective, the games that inspired EoC the most are Macao (dice/income system and the basic card framework) and At the Gates of Loyang (card drafting) and they are rated on BGG as a 7.4 with 3.14 complexity (for Macao) and a 7.4 with 3.12 complexity (for Loyang).  And that's where I think this mashup (which also throws in some Stone Age elements as well, rated as a 7.4 with only 2.47 complexity, but think of the Stone Age elements as adding a little more weight to the Macao/Loyang mix, goosing it up from 3.1 to 3.2)

Anyway, if you'd be willing to either sign into your BGG account or make one, and then go to the EoC page at  https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/355467/envelopes-cash, you can then vote for both the rating and the weight by clicking on the stars in the "My Rating" section of the game's header (bottom left of the header).  if you click on the 8th star it'll rank it as 8 stars, etc.  Then, where you see the word Weight (to the right), click on the words "Complexity Rating" and then say "Go to Poll."  You can then choose a number 1 through 5 and it's my hope that most people end up saying it's a 3 and of those who pick a different number, more say 4 than 2.

Please recognize your rating will not be set in stone.  Once you get the game and play it, your assessment will be more informed.  My hope and expectation is that even if it feels like it's a "4" in complexity to you on Day 1, it becomes a "3" or even easier with a few plays under your belt, and that as it grows on you your 7 rating needs to be upgraded to an 8 or 9 or 10.  But for this initial effort to just get enough votes in for the two ratings to show up, If you can pick something in the 7-9/and 3-4 range, I'd appreciate it.   THANKS!!

Ok, as for an update, the art team has made certain promises to me that if I told them to you, you would all be celebrating that we are quite close to done.  Suffice it to say, I think their optimism will not survive contact with this weekend's work backlog, but even if we add a week or two, we are closing in on having a first draft of every single portrait done.  They will then circle back to people who asked for reasonable, minor tweaks to their portraits, and we'll be wrapping up the final tweaks to the rulebook as well, and then this baby is going to print.   I am cautiously optimistic that the game will be in the hands of Gameland before Hallowe'en, and at that point then, we just sit back and wait.

What this means is that sometime in October, I will be making the final call on the number of units I purchase.  We are still just a shade below 500, so right now, I would say I'm like to make 500 exactly or perhaps 550.  if you know of anyone who might want a copy, the next two to three weeks are really the last chance to guarantee they can get one.  This is going to be a small print run and the odds of a second run are very low.  FOMO time is here.

Next, I did want to say that yesterday at SHUX was the best of my many experiences of taking EoC to a convention.  We had a prime spot on Indie Avenue, the nice folks there let us make a square table (EoC works so much better on a square or round table than a rectangular one) by pushing two rectangles together, and even though my expensive sign contraption managed to self destruct immediately (and cut my finger in the process), my good friend Jim came to the rescue with tape and some ire and we managed to post the sign nonetheless.  So far since I got to Vancouver, 4 demo games have gone down, and a special shout out to Eli, Jim's son, for having played in 3 of them (winning one, quite handily I might add).  Eli also helped teach the game yesterday during the afternoon when my energy flagged for a bit.  Between the exposure here at SHUX and another nice mention on the SVWAG podcast (which you can hear here https://www.spreaker.com/user/10238956/episode-232-what-a-campaign-needs, EoC is discussed as the 3rd game they played last week, from 9:14 until about 14 minutes in), the game has sold another 9 copies, and so we are inching ever closer to the 500 number of units sold.  Thanks to you all. 

And then, finally, I wanted to recommend to everyone to read (or re-read) this excellent piece of journalism written by Stephen Godfrey, describing how a "bag man" operates.  It will give you a great deal of context to what is going on underneath the cards and dice of Envelopes of Cash.  Nothing could put you in the mood to give the game a try, other than perhaps reading one of my updates.

https://www.bannersociety.com/2014/4/10/20703758/bag-man-paying-college-football-players

Always be crootin,

Andy

Brief but Nice: Officially Online
about 2 years ago – Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 06:45:08 AM

Very happy to announce that Envelopes of Cash is now officially published on Tabletopia.
Obviously, once the artwork for the cards is finalized, we will update, but the game is now playable and easily reached at: https://tabletopia.com/games/envelopes-of-cash.

If you're new to online gaming and want a quick tutorial, I'm happy to give you the 10-minute tour on the house, if we can coordinate our schedules.  Ping me at [email protected]  I sometimes also offer free curated tutorials on weekends or evenings, especially if my wife Melodi is out of town.  There's also a couple of paid-for tutorials available if you want the full rent-a-limo treatment at https://bit.ly/LATE-EoC but ping me first and see if I have time for a freebie; I'd rather get you and your group going on the game online while we wait for the artwork to get finished than squeeze you for more cash.  However, if you know folks who HAVEN'T backed the game, tell them about the pay-for-it link.  :-)

after all... always be crootin, right?