Testing… can you hear me? I am at the gym and I’ll be here for the next 30 to 45 minutes and figured I would try something out. I am nearly whispering using voice to text… so the people around me might be concerned, or annoyed by me, so we’ll see how this works. But I wanted to use this time to talk about what’s going on in the world of Button Shy, and maybe do this again if it works out.

Today is a really interesting one as we launched our new Kickstarter campaign for what we call our Spring Collection. And includes four games (Astro ROVE, The Rise Of A Jarl, Everything Machine, and Shaper) and we’re about 12 hours into it.

A multi-game campaign has its positives and negatives, and we know the standard struggles. If you haven’t run one before, you likely backed or saw one. The biggest struggle is making each game stand out among the crowd, which is a crowd that you created by bundling a bunch of games together. It’s also tough to really say something interesting about any of games in most social spaces where there’s only enough space to mention the group of games. So your marketing may appear as quantity over quality, and the entire campaign you will fight to prove it’s not that.

But those are the normal struggles. This time we have additional struggles as we have a few big changes to our product model that everybody knows and loves. We decided earlier this year to stop hand assembling games. Long story, but we’ve sort of outgrown it. It was getting very time consuming and at our size we are struggling to sell in certain markets without boxes. Unfortunately there’s no affordable way to hand assemble a box. Our wallet line has just grown to the point where it needs to be mass produced, and we’ve accepted that.

That’s great right? Well, yes and no. It’s quite a consistent line of games, so any change is tough. While the change here is pretty necessary for survival and growth, that doesn’t mean that all of our fans are going to like it.

 

So we found a way to get the best of both worlds. Put the games in boxes, but offer empty wallets as a sort of deluxe add-on item for the people who want them. And also make the boxes big enough to fit the wallets inside.

Along with this, we found a pretty awesome replacement for the wallets with these cool envelopes that hold the games inside. They are very much inspired by manual library catalog systems, and I think they scratch a similar indie itch. We haven’t really shown off the backs yet, so here’s a peek of both sides:

 

And finally to complicate things even more, international shipping has just become more and more difficult over the last few months, to the point where we can’t offer it directly from us in all regions. The prices were ridiculous before and will jump 8% (as of next week (which causes its own issues after we just collected $17,000 for shipping a Kickstarter campaign). There are also other complications in regions like the EU which has gotten more strict in its import requirements (we received a whole mail bin of packages back recently, marked as “Denied at border” with no other details. That’s an easy $500 out the door, and a whole lot of stressful uncertainty.)

So with that in mind, we had to kind of limit our direct to consumer international shipping and start looking for partners. Those deals take a long time and we couldn’t really hold off on US sales as we have a lot of things that ride on the timing of selling / receiving games. With the Board Game of the Month Club we have deadlines for monthly games. But we also have staff that needs to be paid, so we need to make sure the process is moving forward for our new games. So we launched today’s campaign with limited international options, and a plan to have answers as soon as possible. We were able to fully lock in Canada today, and have made progress on other regions as well. Great news, but it’s still not ideal.

Enough about today’s struggles. Let’s talk about what going on in the rest of the world of Button Shy.

The new 18 card games (formerly known as Wallet Games and now known as Micro Games) will have quarterly campaigns. The next up is Summer and we will be teasing it all very soon. But it leaves a lot of time in between campaigns. The in-house team here has been working on some small projects that we want to get out there , and they are more in line with our early wallet games - with hand assembly and more experimental concepts. While we said we’re finished with assembly, we plan to do this on a much smaller level that is reasonable for our team to handle. And we have lower expectations for how far and wide the games can reach.

So we’re working on something that we are calling “modular games” for now. And these break a lot of the rules we have for the wallet line.

BROKEN RULE #1 - COMPONENTS

The first rule that we break is that players will provide their own dice and cubes. Each game may use dice, cubes, or both, and the player will need to provide them. If you played our games Chain Mail, or The Final Lightyear, you’ll have a taste of this. We probably would make some cube and dice kits at The Game Crafter for those that want to buy them, but a lot of you either already have the components, or have access to them.

BROKEN RULE #2 - PACKAGING

The next rule we break is that they will not have any packaging. The cards will likely be in a clear sleeve and will not be set up for sales outside of our website. This means players will need to get crafty with their packaging, just like they’ve done with our wallet line for years. And like Chain Mail, we could always make a cool box at The Game Crafter.

BROKEN RULE #3 - RULES

Another rule we break, and this one is a little bit of a doozy, is that they will not come with printed rules. Not that we’re entitled to do so, but we’re taking a little tip from CCG’s where the rules are all online. They will be formatted to print, but in order to fully realize this model there is no great way to supply printed rules.

BROKEN RULE #4 - PLAYABILITY

And here’s the final rule that these games break. Our games normally must be playable on their own outside of the box. We’ve broken that rule with expansion collections, but this breaks it as part of the model. Each module will be one part of a game, but you will need two parts (or in some cases maybe three) to play. So imagine a fighting game where you need two heroes to play. We would just sell heroes individually and you would need to make sure you had any two. We don’t have a fighting game planned, but it’s a very basic idea to show the concept. We would have to make sure that we always have a few in stock to really make all of this work, but it opens things up in a really interesting way.

It allows us to make parts of a larger game, but keep them fresh and affordable and always playable.

It also allows us to quickly get you something small and new, instead of waiting for a whole big game to come together.

All of these broken rules sound pretty intense, but it opens up so much interesting (product and game) design space that we are unable to find with our standard games.

We have two games that we’ve made significant progress on in this model so far. We have a few others that are in early stages. I can share that one of them is solo, and one of them is two player. I think the next post here might be a bit of a design diary on one of them. We’ll see about that tomorrow. But in the meantime very curious about your thoughts.

Thanks for reading everyone. I didn’t get a ton of dirty looks here at the gym, so maybe I can keep working out some games while working out.