Hey !
Convention season appears to be in full swing, which is both
a wondrous and exhausting time for board game publishing. On the one hand, conventions are a great chance to go hang out with awesome people and play a ton of games, but they are also an ideal opportunity to go hawk your games and attempt to build interest in future projects. This second aspect is not really my strong suit and the whole process leaves me quite spent.
In the last month or so I've gone down to St.
Louis for Geekway to the West and over to Columbus for Origins. I didn't
have a booth at either because I didn't have any of my games to sell (all the retail copies of Forge War got bought up by distributors pretty quickly), so I decided to attend largely as just a player of board games and not a publisher.
GenCon is approaching, though, and I really need to go into publisher mode and try to get the prototype of Gloomhaven in front of as many people as possible to prepare for the upcoming Kickstarter.
So yeah, let's talk about that for a second. I
recently wrote a blog post about my current plans for Gloomhaven. Essentially, I'm hoping for a launch in September, but I will admit that that date is a little terrifying for me. It seems so close and there is so much left to
do.
Of course, I'm not planning on having everything done before September. The target date for everything being sent to the printers is December, but there's still a lot of stuff that needs to get done before September and, really, before GenCon at the end of
July.
I really want to have a finalized prototype of the game with the completed design for all the cards, dungeon tiles, player mats, everything
for at least 1 or 2 scenarios by GenCon, plus molds for at least the 4 starting hero miniatures. I want it to look awesome, and that's going to take some work!
Right, and speaking of GenCon, it's been a ridiculous, bumpy road trying to get some booth space.
For a long time I didn't think it was going to happen, but talking to a publisher friend at Origins seems to have finally yielded a significant prospect. I'm not sure of the booth number yet, but I'll definitely have that info in my next letter. I'll be demoing Gloomhaven all convention, so you should stop by!
I won't be selling any copies of Forge War, but I'm hoping that having a permanent demo space inside the convention hall will make it easier to hook up with fans and also podcasters and other media people to demo the game for them.
Seriously, you should come by the booth and say "Hi." And also check out the game. Like I said, it's going
to be awesome.
Something else I've started to do to build up excitement for the launch of Gloomhaven is that I'm posting finished artwork or design elements every Friday on BGG, Facebook and Twitter. Last Friday I revealed the Quartermaster hero class. I was expecting a slightly more enthusiastic response than I got, but I'm hoping the Friday posts pick up more steam as we get closer to the launch.
Look for them! Marvel in them! Retweet them (if you're into that)!
The other big news is that I'm reprinting Forge
War and I'm shipping a couple pallets over to Europe to sell at my booth at Essen. Yes! Booth at Essen! It's going to be crazy. I just hope it's more of a good kind of crazy and not a disastrous kind of crazy. I really have no idea what to expect, but I think a lot of people in the EU will still be interested in getting their hands on Forge War since the initial EU distribution was not that extensive.
Also, in case you're interested, all the artwork on the Races of Gloomhaven page is now finalized. I'll be sending out more info on the city itself in the next month, so look
forward to that to!
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