Post #7 Preparing to face uncharted waters (and how it went)

This blog is doing double duty since I never posted it before or even right after the Strategicon convention on Labor Day weekend. We showed up, set up our area, which was very well placed, put up our banner and got ready and waited. As you read the second half, which is actually the first half since I wrote it two weeks ago, I can say that much of the stuff we took was not needed. We had a group of four players within a half an hour and they played through a full game which was really great. There were a couple of mechanics that we changed so it was worth it. Later on, a couple showed up and we sat down and played with them so they could do a four player game. Again, good experience just logging more hours and more players. Unfortunately, Saturday was a complete bust for us. For one thing, our timeslot started at 12 o’clock noon and by then the convention has been going on for 24 hours. There were a few people who came by and said that they were interested but they had commitments and would be back later. Unfortunately we also had personal commitments and had to be out of there right at 4 o’clock. We will definitely do that con again, but I don’t know if we will be taking One Letter Better. We have several projects we’re working on and one of those might end up being the one we go with.

Another big win on top of the play testing was the Brew Pockets. They worked really well at keeping the cards organized and confined to a reasonable amount of space. Cesar‘s mom is making us up about a dozen of them so we can take them out when we do play testing. Plans for this coming weekend include working on a new game called Deep Salvage and doing a how to play video for One Letter Better. So thanks for tuning in and now you can read the blog from two weeks ago about how we were getting ready for Strategicon.

“Failing to prepare is basically preparing to fail, or as I like to say miss fortune favors the hill prepare. We are less than a week away from Strategicon Gateway, the first time we will have gone to a game convention and did a demo of a game. We are excited beyond words that we get to actually have people come and play test our game, One Letter Better. We just had Game A Palooza a week ago but we’re almost starting from scratch. It’s starting to remind me of the first time my wife and I went on a cruise. You cannot imagine the amount of crap we hauled onto that ship and probably 60% of it we never wore.

We received 10 copies of our game from The Game Crafter nearly 5 days sooner than expected. A big hats off to them for under promising and over delivering. The downside? Our game has undergone a whole slug of written revisions since we placed the order about a month and a half ago. There isn’t much we can do about it at this point except make some Demo decks and have them ready to go. We have a banner, I came up with a spreadsheet program for getting sign ups from folks for our contest, we’ve got score sheets, pencils and by the time next Friday comes around a whole stack of T-shirts with our logo on them. That’s probably about as prepared as we can be. Oh, I almost forgot, I’m making a set of flashcards to make it easier for us to explain the rules of the game. As much as I’d love to do blind play testing, (and that’s certainly not off the table, no pun intended) I think in order to give more people an opportunity to play we’ll need to explain the directions to them. Cesar has a lot more experience with play testing than I do but with two tables going it’ll probably take both of us to get the job done. I’m happy to say that perfectionism is a disease that for all intents and purposes I left behind at least a decade ago. I know things are going to be perfect, will make them as good as we can and what doesn’t work will improve for the next time.

Cesar came up with the idea of modifying the deck for players who are English Language Learners and for travel and One Letter Better Junior Travel Edition was born. We only have a rough idea of the rule changes we’re going to make and I’ve designed our own font so we don’t have to pay anybody to use theirs but there’s too much going on for the convention to really work on it very much right now. That’s a huge problem for me because I suffer from, in addition to ADD… SOS… Shiny Object Syndrome. I would like nothing better than to tear into Nandeck and get this game up and running so I can start making changes. However, if I do that something will not be ready for next Friday and that would upset me and possibly my partner and possibly ruin the playing experience for the people at the convention. Therefore, preparation for Strategicon Gateway is taking priority.

So here’s a problem with letting your blog sit for days and days when it should be posted…(Longer than that, actually, see notes above) Some of the things I wrote about earlier are no longer true such as I have most of the deck for One Letter Better Junior designed. I didn’t use Nandeck this time, a decision I might regret later but it seemed pretty straightforward to lay out the cards and there aren’t nearly as many of them as there are for the original game. And other than that, everything is pretty much the same. There’s a good chance you’ll be reading this blog post about preparing for the conference when we’re actually there (or long after … yes, this is like breaking the fourth wall … Just call me Wade). I mean, it’s tomorrow and I’m still dictating this into my phone as I drive to work the day before. As much as I hate driving to work (I normally take the train) it gets me home almost an hour earlier at night which will give me some time to finish up some T-shirts and hopefully get a decent amount of sleep.

In addition to everything else, we are trying out a new idea in addition to our game at Strategicon. A few weeks back Cesar and I were playing one letter better at one of our favorite hang out, Hamilton‘s Family Brewery in Rancho Cucamonga which has mostly outdoor seating. It was a nice day but there was a little bit of a breeze and that sort of reeks havoc on a card game. Well, we scoured the Internet and all of the card holders they have for sale put the cards upright facing the player. This works for most card games but not for ours or any other rummy style game where you lay the cards down face up and players can either play off each other‘s cards or in our case actually steal them. So we designed a contraption that is strips of felt sewn together to create pockets for placing the cards in where you can stagger them and still have them viewable but keeps them from being blown all over the place and getting disorganized. This is one of the challenges with One Letter Better, it can consume an extremely large amount of table space. We called our creation Brew Pockets in honor of the brewery where we came up with the idea. We don’t know if they’ll actually work but we will give them a try this weekend and I’ll report back next week hopefully on how things went. (Yes, spoiler alert, they work 🙂

At any rate, we have done a lot of things to get ready for tomorrow and whatever doesn’t work will probably be more do more to our lack of experience than lack of preparation. But that’s OK, Strategicon does three conventions a year and the next ones in February. So whatever doesn’t work this time around will just improve it, come up with some new ideas and do it again. We have a solid half dozen games in development at the moment so there’s no doubt that we will have something to show at the next convention. We are even toying with the idea of putting on a One Letter Better tournament. Hopefully we can do some smaller ones before then to see if it’s actually a good idea.

There are still a few items to be checked off the list before tomorrow morning but nothing that we can’t handle. I’m hoping I remember to make some notes this weekend, relying on my memory is something I try to avoid these days. In the meantime, hopefully you enjoy a nice holiday weekend with friends and family and in the meantime go out and make someone smile.