baudot

Lyssan is about to move into its next stage of life as a game. The final hours are ticking away on it's kickstarter fundraising/preorder round. Once those are up, bankers do things, weeks pass, money appears, and I get to do the final round of haggling with printers to see how many copies can be made to appear on my doorstep for the amount of real money that appeared in my bank account.

Then art gets handed over to the printer. They reject it because it's too black or too magenta or the margins aren't wide enough in this one spot. We go back and forth for weeks, until everything's just so. And then they get all the money and I wait until early next year when a shipping container appears on the Oakland docks from Germany or China, half full of someone else's stuff and half full of my brand new game. Finally with all the art in. Finally beautiful. Finally all there.

Those pallets o' games come home with me in a UHaul, and somehow we get them up the stairs. They take up half the loft. I lure friends over with promises of wine and cheese and we spend the night catching up over those as we box up some 350 copies of the game to the kickstarter supporters. More go out to Alliance Games and ADC, who will sell them in turn to the mom & pop game stores across the country.

That's the view from here. Finger's crossed.



P.S. The first video review of Lyssan is up! Lance "Undead Viking" Myxter has done a half-hour expose on Lyssan. His conclusion? This is a game for people who like digging in for heavy strategy and backstabbing their friends. For that player, Lyssan is an "instant classic". His words.