Post #20 The Road to China and Back
It’s been a very long time since my last blog post and to both of my readers, I apologize. My creative ADHD took a while to go around the loop and come back to blogging. On the upside, this is post #20, so that’s a milestone of sorts.
A lot of things have been going on with Cruise Monkey Games. We’ve decided to shelve the idea of the escape game boxes for now. We just don’t have the resources required to make them happen the way we wanted to. In addition, things have been moving along well on the Game design front.
As you might have guessed from the title of this blog, we’re actually in production with One Letter Better in China. We started the process in January of this year and most likely still have another couple of months before we have cards in hand. We knew it was a long process when we started. And, since this was indeed our first rodeo there were a few things that didn’t go as planned that fell on our shoulders (actually mine, since it was a graphics issue). Let me say that the company we chose to work with, Hero Time, has been outstanding. They have helped us with everything from getting the artwork straightened out to lining up the shipping right to our doorstep here in Southern California. They are definitely a team oriented company. We’ve dealt with four or five different people there for different phases of the project and the handoff from one to the other so far has been extremely smooth. At the time of this writing we are somewhere in the actual production queue. Once that’s complete, everything will be packaged up and sent on a boat to the port of Los Angeles and then on a truck to my house. I have a new appreciation for what people who run Kickstarters go through when it gets to the fulfillment phase. We haven’t done crowd funding at this time but we do have a decent number of folks who are very eager to get their hands on their own copy of One Letter Better. We’ll be starting the actual presale process in a couple of weeks.
We’re making a very long trek to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on June 22 for their Poly Con event. The challenge: drive is over three hours one direction. The very upside is that a number of players that we’ve had in our tournament down here in Los Angeles actually attend school up there. (Our philosophy is sort of, “try something at least once”.) College students are definitely a strong demographic for us. They’re fearless and they are very smart. Cesar and I admit that we probably couldn’t beat some of these kids at our own game. I’m sure I’ll do at least a full blog post, if not two, after the event.
We’re taking a look at next year already. We feel it’s time to get into the deep end of the pool with One Letter Better. We’ve applied for a spot at PAX West in Seattle this year. I haven’t heard back from them so I don’t know where we stand. Would love to do PAX Unplugged in December but airfare is a king’s ransom that time of year (Los Angeles to Philadelphia). We’re thinking of applying for their showcase and if we’re chosen, well, that’s why there’s credit cards. Dice Tower West happens in Las Vegas in March of next year. We can actually make that drive in less than three hours so very doable. If sales of OLB really take off and we pay off some of our start-up costs, we might take a shot at GenCon or Origins next year. That’s not the deep end of the pool, though, that’s the middle of the ocean. It’s where the big kids play and we’re pretty sure we can hold our own. Okay, got about thirty minutes left on my train ride to LA so have a great day and be nice to someone. It’ll blow their mind.