Noble Knight Games

I had never been a vendor at a convention, so I didn’t know what to expect. Chris warned me that STAPLE! kind of spoils vendors for other conventions because it is such a cool experience. He was not wrong. My vague plan was to roll in there with copies of House of Whack and The Stork and see what happened.

Before I left home, I created a little hand drawn sign which had the prices on it. Under The Stork I thought about adding the phrase “It Will Alter Your Life”, but then thought it was silly and hyperbolic. But, of course, that was the Cuckoo trying to thwart me. So I went ahead and wrote it in red. I think it made all the difference because I ended up selling 30 copies.

I didn’t have a fancy sign like a lot of the other vendors. I didn’t even have a table cloth. Apparently that didn’t matter in the end. I set up a demo of House of Whack and a pile of The Stork and my little sign. To my left was Big Head Press with graphic novels endorsed by Alan Moore. To my right was David McGuire, the soft spoken creator of the Grastrophobia web comic.

I wasn’t really sure I could suddenly become a marketing guy who sat at a booth all day, trying to get people to buy my stuff. But I engaged most of the people who walked by, starting conversations with them, giving the elevator pitch for both products. A guy bought House of Whack just because I started talking to him about board games in general. The Stork was the easiest sell of anything I’ve ever done. For one, it was $1. Secondly, when people grokked what it was about, they bought it, sometimes before I could even finish describing it.

I met all kinds of cool people and made potential contacts. I wasn’t even trying to network with anyone, but people would just hand me their card and tell me who to talk to in order to get House of Whack in their store.

All in all, it was a fantastic experience.

Tomorrow night is the STAPLE pre-party at Austin Books and Comics. I’m going to roll in there like I know what is going on. But I don’t know what to say to a room full of indie comic writers. I’ll hang out there until I feel awkward and then bounce over to Reed and Laura Lee’s housewarming party.

Saturday is all about STAPLE. Got to get up early, drag some products over to the convention center, check in, find my table and act like I know what I am doing. My plan is to set up House of Whack and invite people to play. Also, I will trick people into paying $1 for The Stork when it is actually worth $1.45! Ha ha! No idea what to expect. I’ve never done an expo for reals and I don’t know if I can deal with sitting at a booth all day.

After that, there are several events that I will attempt to hit, depending on my energy level. My friend Jonathan is having a birthday party, there is the STAPLE BBQ dinner and the STAPLE after party. It will be at a club with a DJ, so I don’t know.

Sunday evening brings Fiction Circus. It’s a thing.

Monday = take a breath.

Tuesday is Boards ‘N Brews. That night’s double feature is Dungeon Lords and Cosmic Encounter.

Wednesday = dork around online.

Thursday promises an interesting mixer for the Austin Geocachers Meetup, followed by my friend Reed’s band, World Racketeering Squad at Headhunters.

Friday = video games.

Come Saturday and SXSW will start to ramp up. While I am not attending the insane industry fame fest proper, I will be checking out peripheral parties and events, like the one put on by io9 and Gawker media. MC Frontalot and Stormtroopers!

Sunday finds me hanging out with friends.

Monday there is a Meetup for all the Meetup organizers hosted by the Meetup bigwigs in town for SXSW. Supposedly we will be discussing strategies. My meetup is awesome, so I’m not sure what I will take home from it except maybe some beers in my belly.

The rest of the week is a question mark. Chances are I will check out a few SXSW things, but more likely stay at home.

Then there is a big lull the following week right before PAX East. I’m really looking forward to it. By all accounts, this looks like it will be the geek convention suited for me. I probably won’t do GenCon again and I’m not sure I’ll ever do a ComiCon or E3. But PAX seems like the perfect blend of those things.

Jeff pulled ahead of everyone on the score track and took home a copy of the game. Good times!

I received an email today that just sent me over the edge of bewilderment and anger. It was from someone I hadn’t heard from in over a year. The message simply said “Can you afford to begin paying for my contributions to our game yet?” And he’s talking about House of Whack.

Just to contextualize, I had started working on the game a few years before I met this guy. He was really interested in it and helped playtest it extensively. We talked about ideas for the game, some of his ideas found their way into the game, most did not. He contributed a few pieces of art for 3 or so cards, which he was credited for. But at no point was there ever an agreement that he would be financially compensated for playtesting. In fact, he explicitly said he just wanted to help out and wasn’t interested in money. There was no contract or legally binding agreement stating he had any stake or co-ownership of the game. I am very grateful for his support and enthusiasm for the game and I say as much in the credits of the manual.

But it was never “our” game and that’s what infuriates me about his email. It was my idea. I made every single prototype card (hundreds and hundreds of them) through every iteration of the game. I did all of the graphic design and 99% of the original artwork. I created the game mechanics. I wrote and re-wrote the rules countless times. I put thousands of dollars of my own money into the production of the game. I put years of life into making House of Whack happen.

How much time and resources did he contribute to the artwork? Virtually none. He contributed pre-existing photos which I then incorporated into the card design. He did not invent any game mechanics, he wrote no rules, he invested no money. He did come up with some ideas for cards. Yet he feels that in comparison to my contribution to the game, that he can go ahead and refer to it as “our” game and ask for compensation.

Here’s a real example of how this collaboration worked. One day he said, “It would be cool if there were a labyrinth in the game.” I agreed. So I thought about a way to create that. I designed graphics for the rooms, mocked up the cards, came up with game mechanics and playtested them. This ended up becoming the Hedge Maze in the game. I then showed him the finished product. He said, “That was a really cool collaboration we just had.” In his mind, his making a statement about a labyrinth was somehow equivalent to all the work I did to make it a reality.

He had zero game design sense, no conception of balancing mechanics, and would come up with utterly impractical and nonsensical ideas, even for House of Whack. Once we were tossing around ideas for a play variant involving ghosts. I wanted to call the ghosts “revenants” as they were seeking vengeance. He wanted to call them “detectives”. I suggested that the word “detectives” might be confusing as people generally have a particular idea of what a detective is and they won’t necessarily associate “detective” with “ghost”. His response was that, since it was the House of Whack, things are not as they seem, and, in this world, “detective” was synonymous with “ghost”. His idea was that when a player got killed they would come back as a ghost and have to solve the mystery of who killed them. I said it would be kind of obvious as the player was right there when it happened. He said the player would have to pretend they didn’t know who the killer was and conduct an investigation. That’s fucking nonsense.

And so is this “our game” bullshit. I had LOTS of people help with the game and I feel like I have acknowledged them all appropriately. But none of them would ever suggest that they put enough work into it to call it their own creation, much less ask me to retroactively pay them for volunteering.

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Visit Gizmet Gameworks right now!

This is event ID BGM01104 on Thursday, the 14th at 1:00 PM. There is room for 6 players, so be sure to sign up ASAP!

I will also be available to demo the game in the open gaming area.