How To Stay In The Game

Overcoming Your Setbacks

There's no getting around it. Just when you see the finish line, it turns out it's a mirage and the end is really no where in sight, or so it seems.

Ever get the feeling that succeeding and meeting your goals is an illusion? Don't despair, you are not alone. Most of us set goals and often find ourselves in the middle of the desert with no water in sight.

Yes, life is tough and often the unexpected hits you right between the eyes more often than not. Here's where the line, 'Believe in yourself,' comes in. Or to be exact, believe in your idea.

Ideas come to us in so many ways and by so many means. They come to us in dreams, in the shower, during moments of reverie, upon awaking, in the news, via images or comments we've seen or heard throughout the day. Sometimes good ideas just happen to us while we are in the middle of something else.

Believe in Your Idea

The important thing is to recognize that the idea is good and marketable. Don't worry about how you're going to get there, just start moving towards your goal, one step and one day at a time. You're going to come across problems and obstacles, of course, because there's no easy road to success and in reality the road to success is usually paved with epic failures.

The difference between people who find success and those who don't is in how you process your failures and setbacks. Do you give up on an a good idea because it is difficult to achieve? Because you've stumbled into an obstacle that at the time seems insurmountable.

If this sounds like a pep talk to myself, well, you could be right but it is far more than that. It is a process of reaffirming everything you believe and everything that you are hoping for in your venture. Because getting to the finish line is half the fun. Finding your way through the labyrinth is part of the journey.

This past week I cheerfully opened my email as I do every morning, only to find an email with hard news, to say the least.

One of the parts to my game (Millennium) had just been discontinued. That means that supplies of this particular part are low and once those parts are all gone, they are no longer available. And that means I will need to find a similar part to take its place, or eliminate the part and its mechanics, along with its intended effect and re-do all the artwork and instructions that went along with it and so on.

A small nightmare. My first thought was that this was an inevitable end to Millennium because this part is integral to the game and in many ways the game is structured around this particular part, which happens to be multiple parts. In this case, a set of five train cars.

Quitting did cross my mind, but not for long.

Sure quitting is an option. Sometimes quitting is necessary because it will save you countless of man-hours and dollars spent for almost nothing to show for, except for an extrapolation of an idea, which might lead to something better than your original idea.

Hmm, not a good trade off after six months of hard work. So it's back to the drawing board to see if I can save Millennium. For now, I will exchange the wooden train cars with flat tokens. That will have to do unless The Game Crafter keeps these parts, which they will not.

What to do? Don't panic. It's not the end of the world, although it feels like it at times, but it is an opportunity to make the game even better. At least that is what I'm telling myself.

I'm not happy replacing these parts with tokens but it will have to do because I checked with TGC and in fact they are going to discontinue these parts. Lucky me. Good thing this is just a prototype.

I'm still ordering the prototype this coming month to see how it all plays out and I hope to find a better solution. Although I know that not having these parts diminish the game in so many ways. I mean the parts were very crude wooden parts anyway with no detail and ideally I want metal parts with great detail, similar to the Monopoly game. I know, dream on.

I could set out to cast these metal parts myself (by the thousands) if I need to but it's way to early to tell. Once I get the prototype in house and play-test it, I'll have a better idea whether to find a die caster to make these train cars or just scrap the train idea altogether.

I doubt that scraping the trains is a good idea. I'll just have to dig a little deeper and either find these parts elsewhere or manufacture them myself. It's a heck of a spot to be in after eight months of work.

No worries. I'll figure out something great.

Fingers crossed.

(This is where I sob and utter the dreadful words,  Good riddance cruel world!)

Video Teaser Secrets - A Crash Course

Video teasers for your board games are important because you need to bring viewers and players into the world you have created. Once we put gamers inside the this new world, we must give them an emotional reason to stay there and an end goal to accomplish.

Think of board games or video games just like a movie or a good novel. We need to immerse viewers, readers, gamers into an unfamiliar world and we must strive to give them something or someone to root for.

Millennium Promo made with Filmora

Teasers are all about teasing viewers or in other words, enticing them with a scenario they want to be in and take part of or a character they would like to play or pretend to be.

It's a tall order for a short 30 second teaser, but it is precisely the teaser's brevity that really helps hook viewers because when a teaser is done right, it leaves them wanting more.

How do viewers get more? They visit the game website, they become curious, intrigued, and inspired to buy the game to see how it all plays out. The bottom line is simple. They know something about the beginning of this game and after seeing the teaser (or a longer video) they become more curious and consequently they need to experience the ending of the game. It's like an itch they need to scratch.

Let's break down the process of

creating an effective

30 second video teaser.

1. Your opening image or text should provoke questions or make viewers curious to find out more.
2. Follow with images that build your story.
3. Introduce your hero and his or her quest.
4. End your video in a fresh or unexpected way.
5. Don't give away the ending.
6. If possible include a free promo offer.

Like I said, this list is a tall order to fit into a 30 second teaser but it can be done, of course. First gather all the images you're going to use (about 15 to 20) and upload them to your favorite video editor. I recommend either iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, or Wondershare's Filmora.

Get your images in sequence and set the timing of each image accordingly. Give viewers enough time to process an image (about 1 or 2 seconds). Based on these time limits, 30 images would run for about 30 seconds. Although, most images should run for less than a second.

Make sure that your sequence of images tell a story or part of your story to be exact. Your story line can be linear or random. The point is that by the end of the video, viewers are intrigued enough and inspired enough to click for more because you have teased them just long enough for them to want to know the rest of the story or the end of the story.

Keep in mind that it's all about emotions. Your video should strive to evoke emotions and to provoke questions. You must keep your story a mystery. Reveal too much at your own risk. Remember this video is just a tease. It must raise questions, not provide answers.

Too many details will ruin your video. Keep it vague with a sense of mystery. Provoke thought and inspire viewers to click for more because they need closure.

For an in depth overview about producing effective videos, visit
Book Teasers Pub for much more.

The Secret To Branding Your Board Games

Okay, let's keep this simple and to the point.

Branding is Positioning. Period.

Positioning is how consumers perceive and relate to your product or service.

BAYER aspirin is known as, The good for your heart medicine.
TYLENOL is known as, The strongest and safest pain medicine.
TIDE is known as, The most effective stain remover.

Each of these products is known for something they do specifically. Getting specific is the secret to strong branding because narrowing your market is far more effective than trying to be all things to all people. (Write that down.)

Book publishers have mastered the art of branding and the use of trade names with imprints. Imprints are segments of a publishing company that focus on a particular consumer demographic.

For example, Viking is an imprint of Penguin Group. Viking's brand focuses on consumer demographics for those who prefer good non-fiction such as biographies, historical, and contemporary stories.

Great! So how do you apply branding to board games?

If you plan on being a board game publisher, you must develop a mission statement of sorts for your games. For example, in my case (since I cannot speak for other publishers) when I started planning for Starship Games, I was focused on branding futuristic games or board games with space themes.

My reasoning behind this was that I wanted to put a positive spin on the future of Earth. I think most of us are cynical by nature and pessimistic by habit, so I wanted to turn that around and market games that focus on good and positive things as opposed to just war and destruction for the sake of sensationalizing events on a battlefield.

In fact my first space themed game was Warpd! This is a time-travel game with a positive twist. While this game is still in the development stages, I believe it will be more popular than Millennium, my second space or future-themed game.

While I love the Starship Brand (which happens to be the name of my graphic design business) I thought it was not specific enough and the word STAR reminds consumers of Star Wars, which is totally way too fictional and far-fetched for my taste so I changed it to Terra Nova Board Games.

What I like about Terra Nova, which literally means New Earth (Latin) is its inherent positive message. So there it is. You can't get more positive and more hopeful than a new Earth.

Of course, during the Apocalypse there is widespread destruction. That's the nature of the End of Days theme but the outcome, the end game (if you will) is the re-building of Earth into something new and better than before.

Let's keep in mind that the Apocalypse or Revelation (revealing a mystery) is historically Biblical. Obviously this is a heavy topic and should not be toyed with in my opinion. My goal then is to present these events as accurately as possible without going into detail. Why? because the details are too frightening and off-putting.

New logo (unfinished)

These are games, after all, so I must keep them historically relevant but relevant on the light and bright side.

Millennium is all about surviving a nuclear war. The details about nuclear war or how we got to that point are not relevant to this story. They are a part of the story (background information) that is left off screen because in this case, less is more.

Notice the tag line for this new logo. The dawn of a new age in gaming.

The purpose of your tag line is to sum up the mission of your brand. In this case, the tagline plays off the image, the dawn of, or something new in gaming.

If your branding does its job, it should convey to consumers that you have something different and something new to add to the gaming industry. Otherwise why would consumers bother looking into your games if they don't offer something they have not seen before.

So branding with the name Terra Nova, now serves a more specific purpose. It's all about a New Earth. That's the end game and Millennium is a good place, a good name to start with because we are not far from the start of the new Millennium (2000). Seventeen years into the 21st Century.

As you can see, your branding must encompass a wide spectrum of ideas but it must focus on a small segment of the population so it is distinctive enough to stand out, seem meaningful, and get noticed for the right reasons.

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I would love to write about your branding experiences here so if you have any questions about branding your games or other products, send me an email and I'll write a post about your branding idea and how to fine tune it for maximum effect.