Propaganda Update

It's been a while since I've worked on the Propaganda board game I've been developing. Last October I did a round of serious playtests with my at home printed copy and it went really well. Feedback was good and we found and patched some rule loopholes, exploits, and balance issues.

I haven't yet pulled the whole company into this yet. Radian-Helix is busy enough with Morningstar and maintaining the old mods.

I still don't feel the ending is particularly interesting or rewarding, unless you are the victor. Which is the #1 issue that's left to solve.

But -- several devs have said that this game has serious hit potential if it is marketed well. Devs that range from small time kickstarter victories to AAA devs at major institutions. 

The game has 200 Cards, all with a mix of my own hand painted art and some AI art from Dall-E -- which is a major source of my reticence to share almost anything these days with the vitriolic, borderline fanatical hatred of anything AI Art related pervading ideological lines on the internet (what is more apropos than that for a game about Propaganda?) 

The art is hand painted and kitbased from multiple layers of generated material. It is fully a synthesis of me and the Dall-E 2 program. None of this is "stolen art" or whatever that group FEEL is true despite being factually a lie. Again, the game is about propaganda. I'm aware of the irony of avoiding controversy on this subject.

Most gamers honestly will not care -- I took special effort to hand paint these, as far as an early draft goes, so that a human hand was involved in absolutely every image. It's a prototype after all, nothing final. Still, the vitriol gave me pause. 

Here is the pricing model for printing a rough draft at The Game Crafter. These are the theoretical numbers with no negotiations, at a boutique one off print shop dedicated to printing prototypes. They're in no way reflective of the print & logistics costs of a full supply chain of a serious business decision. 

In talks with some artist friends of mine, we're looking at around 125-175$/card. Which comes out to around 25,000$ or 35,000$ for all 200 cards to be remade from scratch. Not every card in that set has some AI generative kit pieces in there, some I did from scratch by hand. But to keep it reasonable, those are the numbers we came up with. Would take about 5-7 months. 

Meanwhile, I also have to find the logistics to have these shipped to my distribution partner, or, we give my fiancee a full time job at Radian-Helix and she handled label printing and mailing of boxes. Which is further expenses that are hard to calculate. 

Some of these elements, like stickers, posters, and even game boards and custom components, we can now make at home on the Rotatrim and Silhouette machine. 

I'll be making those for sale on our website as Morningstar comes up from the depths of Stealth Mode as well, for Patrons and future backers, as well as the merch shop. 

So the merch I can handle here at home, which is cool.

https://www.drinktokens.com/antique-bronze-page.htm

I've also been looking at custom coins for a Special Edition Game Box. These would be all metal and look super slick:

Obviously, these also aren't final designs, but for the prototype these are pretty neat, and would fantastic on metal coins. 

At the site linked above, those are going to be ~650$ for 250 coins, the minimum order quantity. There would be 2 coins per box, so 150 Special Edition games.

The Special Edition games also couldn't then be shipped from distributor either. So we're getting hit with shipping on the coins to the house, the game + box to the house, and finally shipping to the end users. Yikes. :p 

Needless to say, a lot of this is a little over my head as a business owner and game dev. I could use some guidance from wiser, more experienced board game business owners who know what pitfalls to avoid and may have established deals with manufacturers and logistics warehouses. 

To accomplish that, I've been looking around to the various Conventions where prototype games are exposed to fellow devs and potential publishers. 

The big ones, ironically, are happening right now this weekend. Gen-con in Indianapolis and Protopiel in Ann Arbor. 

There is one in my area, roughly 2 hours away in Mesa: https://maricopacon.com/ 

This one in Maricopa I can attend and plan to attend in person. Several folks at Tucson Comic Con said I should go, including the owner. 

A lot to look forward to now that the house move is over. 

If you are interested, I have the latest revision of the rule book to look at attached here.