More Colors, Free Money, New Stretch Goals, and More
almost 7 years ago – Wed, May 03, 2017 at 09:17:01 AM

A lot’s happened in the last week, so there’s a lot of news! Since the world’s patience for long Kickstarter updates is short, we’ll leap right in.

Five Colors for One Thousand Backers

We passed the 1,000-backer threshold earlier this evening, so every copy of The White Box will now have five colors of cubes, meeples, dice, and discs. Thank you!

On the Horizon: Color Number Six

To add a sixth color, we need 100 backers at the brick-and-mortar tier. We’re about one-third of the way to this difficult-but-achievable goal. You can help by alerting the owners of your friendly local game store in person, on Facebook, or wherever you see them.

Five Dollar Gift Certificates from The Game Crafter

The Game Crafter is a print-on-demand service for tabletop games. They produce a whole lot of very cool custom-printed components for game designers — cards, boards, boxes, chits, and more — in print runs as small as a single copy.

The Game Crafter will include a $5 gift certificate in every copy of The White Box, to give you a chance to try them out. This isn’t a stretch goal, it’s just something we’ve teamed up with them to give you. If that seems pretty great, don’t tell us, tell a friend.

Chat With Jeremy Next Wednesday

One solid feature of The Game Crafter’s website is a site-wide chat that lets designers talk to each other. The White Box creator Jeremy Holcomb is going to be there to chat with you next Wednesday evening. Log on at 8:00pm (U.S. Central time) on May 3. Come with questions! You’ll find chat buttons on the bottom of every page of The Game Crafter website.

Ordering Multiple Copies

We’ve gotten lots of questions about whether you can order several copies of The White Box to reduce the cost of shipping. We did some number-crunching, and are able to decrease the price of shipping on the third and subsequent copies of The White Box sent to a single address. For details see our recent FAQ answer on the topic.

We also try to remind everyone that to avoid shipping and handling entirely, you can alert your FLGS to our campaign, convince them to back it, and then buy from them.

New Stretch Goal: Letter Head

Having met four stretch goals, we want to introduce another, even though we’ve still got the sixth-color goal open. If we reach $50,000, we’ll add a free print-and-play version of Atlas Games’s word-forming card game Letter Head to every copy of The White Box.

Letter Head is a great little card game that’s especially interesting to game designers because of how open-ended and hackable it is. In fact, Atlas just ran a contest for new Letter Head designs and published the winners.

If we unlock this goal, there will be a download code in every copy of the first print run of The White Box, so this offer applies to campaign backers as well as anyone who buys The White Box from a brick-and-mortar backer. Not to mention anyone who buys from an Atlas Games distributor before the first print run is gone.

The White Box’s Stellar First Day
almost 7 years ago – Wed, May 03, 2017 at 09:16:21 AM

Wow — thank you, backers! Everyone on Team White Box is amazed at how fast this campaign funded, and I was certainly not expecting that we’d have achieved the first stretch goal within 24 hours of launching. 

What I’m most happy about, though, is that so many of you share our enthusiasm for game design.

Essay Titles

I want to share the titles of the 18 core essays (subject to adjustment) to give you a more concrete idea of the topics Jeremy has written about.

• 1. Welcome to the White Box
• 2. Protecting Your Ideas and Why You Don't Need To (or, “Why No One Will Steal Your Game Idea”)
• 3. Danger! Danger! (or, “Types of Games That You Should Likely Not Be Working On”)
• 4. Story or Mechanics? (Or, “Where Should I Start Designing?”) 
• 5. The Roll of the Die: Advantages and Costs of Randomness in Games 
• 6. Writing Effective Rules 
• 7. Bits Matter: How Components Make Your Game 
• 8. Game Balance and Why You Don't Care 
•  9. Bang for the Buck (or, “How Much Fun Do Players Get Out Of Your Game?”) 
• 10. Playtesting (or, “Hitting Your Game With a Brick Until it Bleeds Awesome”) 
• 11. Self-Publishing 
•  12. Designing an Effective Game Box 
•  13. The Lies Game Boxes Tell 
•  14. Icons and Symbols: What You Need to Put On Your Box If You Self-Publish 
• 15. Things That Will End Your Game Pitch 
•  16. How to Network at Conventions: Getting Hired in the Game Industry 
• 17. How to Sell Your Game (Or, “So Now What?”) 
• 18. In Conclusion

Our two stretch-goal essays will most likely be:

• A. How to Promote Your Game at a Convention Without Losing Your Shirt (with bonus mini-essay, “How to Demo Your Game”) 
• B. Designing for the Colorblind and Other Ways to Expand Your Game’s Audience

Technicolor

Looking forward, the stretch goals I’d most like to see us hit are the ones that add fifth and sixth component colors.

Reaching them will not be simple. They’ll take 1,000 total backers and 100 retail backers, respectively.

You can help us by spreading the word to (a) your friends who dig game design, and (b) the folks who own the friendly local game store you patronize every week (right?). Send them straight to the KS page here:

• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jefftidball/the-white-box-a-game-design-workshop-in-a-box

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Thanks again, everyone! We’re extremely grateful to you for supporting the awesomeness of game design!