In an NDA-friendly nutshell, Ford Motor Company showed up and invited everyone to pitch games that fulfilled very specific criteria. The three winners got three thousand dollars each, and my game was one of the three winners. I’m not gonna lie, it feels weird thinking that I just won three-thousand dollars for making a game.

I’ve been thinking about why I won. There were some great games up against me. Honestly, I think it was my presentation. I printed my cards out on cardstock, the Heroes and Weapons were light blue decks, the Culprits and Catastrophes were pink, and The President was yellow. The font was professional and the text was properly spaced. and I brought a sheet full of 40 card artworks I paid $120 for, just to hammer home that I was serious about my game looking spick and span. Most of my competitors were using hand-drawn cards or, even worse, scraps of papers.

Update: I talked to the prof, and he says the reason I won was because of how flexible I demonstrated the concept was. How you could basically delete the entire game’s content and replace it with an entirely original frame narrative with all-new keywords. Considering I added that in last-minute, it’s nice to hear that helped. 

The other reason I won, IMO, was that my opponents forgot a few of the requirements. Ford said they needed a game playable by 2-5 players, and several of the other games were not two-player compatible (granted, neither was mine, but that’s why I added a 2-player variant in the ‘alternate rulesets’ section). Ford said the game needed to stimulate natural conversation, so half of my opponents made codeword-based games. This was the wrong call on their part, codewords are the exact opposite of natural conversation.

The real question is what happens next. I’ve spoken to the other two winners, they’re buying iPhones with their winnings. I want to invest it into this game, because everyone is telling me this game is amazing. Most people seem to think I should start a Kickstarter, and I’m not against the idea in theory. So I guess let’s cover that option first.

Option 1: Self-publish. In this day and age, self-published board games are downright commonplace. More than any other creative industry, the board game industry has loads of support for the developer who wants to skip the rat race and market to consumers directly. My battle strategy would probably look like “create a public domain prototype (not a normal step, but mandatory in this case because the 66 cards in my Ford prototype are required to be public domain) –> market it through the Daily SPUF, reddit, twitter etc –> people fall in love with the free version hopefully as hard as all my playtesters do –> create kickstarter and make money –> use money to pay artists and, uh, I guess that’s it until –> use an online card-printing company so people can order decks printed on demand and sent to their house. ”

Pros: I make way more money than option 2. I retain full creative control. I have many different groups who can market for me, from Mom and her businesspeople to my internet circles and UCSC. Also, I can technically skip the part where I earn startup money because the costs are extremely minimal for this particular project.

Cons: Fuckton of work. High chance of failure due to the nature of the industry. Will never reach as many customers as option 2.

Option 2: Pitch game to a publisher. Use the extremely positive reception from my playtesters to sell the game to Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers. Far as I can tell, I basically hand them the game, they do whatever they like and I just get a slice of the sales forever.

Pros: It’ll be in Targets and Wal*Marts and shit for free. They’ll do marketing and other stuff for me.

Cons: I’ll have to explain the public domain thing. I will lose a bunch of creative control. I’ll make less money in the end of the day (unless it takes off beyond my wildest dreams. But even then I’m not sure how much money I’d get after corporate takes their cuts)

Other issues: Not sure The Just Us League title is going to pass legal, but I’m having a lot of trouble thinking of a name with the same punch. Heroes of Just Us is best but has the “Begging To If you Seek Amy” problem. As previously mentioned, the core cards are mandatory public domain since they won the contest. (I retain no rights to them, but Ford doesn’t either). My only option for selling is to make a bunch more cards and sell those as like “expansion packs” to the free-to-play base game, or to make dapper glossy artwork’ed versions and justify a price on those extra bits. Ford’s gotta be okay with that, right?

This is all something to worry about after the Greenlight pitches. Luckily I’m not even fussed about whether I win or not. Gimme a choice and I’ll take $3K and working on someone else’s game for the rest of the year.