There’s no denying that 2020 has been a stressful, challenging year for the world. Every rational human has been affected by the pandemic, whether through illness, loss, economic hardship, or the existential malaise that has permeated our collective consciousness. I have no desire to add to the numerous articles documenting these issues, but I do want to share the state of Cherry Picked Games. I want to commit to the public record our plans and desires looking forward. We’re a tiny board game company that depends on the support of our fans to create games we hope they’ll love. So, as much as possible, I’ll try to refrain from the “this would have been better in a normal year” mantra as I share the Cherry Picked experience. I want to describe where CPG is, from my perspective, so that our supporters know where we’re going, and any other indie developers can learn from our efforts.
We released Far Away in late-February of 2020. We had grand plans to tour retail stores and demo at the West Coast conventions like KublaCon, PAX West, and SHUX. With the obvious and necessary cancellations, CPG had to adapt to an online-only strategy of sharing our new game. I’ll be the first to admit, we, as a company, have historically not been good at this. The desire for in-person interactions is what got me into the tabletop gaming space. Social media has always been my kryptonite. Luckily, we’ve had the great fortune of bringing Emily into the CPG fold. She’s been amazing at engaging with the Instagram tabletop community and raising awareness of Far Away.
Our new social media push has led us to discover several new content creators in the tabletop media space. These great reviewers shared Far Away with their audiences (check out the “Reviews and how-to-plays” section of the Far Away page for a quick catalog for these pieces). All this exposure has helped make Far Away our bestselling game, despite my inability to personally pitch copies from a convention booth. It’s also afforded distribution contracts so our games can get to people all over the world. (I should also mention that Far Away is a much easier game to review, evaluate, and promote than Conspire. Despite Far Away’s eccentric dash of storytelling, it’s more conventionally accessible than a “book game”).
Coming out of the holiday rush has left our stock of games low. We only have around 150 copies of Far Away left (and under 250 copies each of our other three games). There’s a couple hundred more floating around in distribution and retail, but we’re on the path to sell out. So, what are we going to do?
Our initial thought for Far Away is to make a second print run and an expansion pack. The second print run would fix the errata and clean up some known issues (like the hard-to-differentiate creature tokens), but not be fundamentally different from the first edition. The expansion would add some more missions and possibly introduce a system for controlling the creatures in a non-role-playing manner. We honestly didn’t think the game would sell this fast without a convention bump, so we’re still very early in the conceptual design phase of everything (a fancy way of saying “Jake and I had a long phone call about this”). Regardless of the final shape of the expansion, we’ll go the crowdfunding route to produce it and round-two of the base game.
We should also address the dog in the room. We’ve been prototyping a new game: Hair of the Dog. We’ve been a bit quiet about it since we’d rather people find our finished games during the gift-giving season. Regardless, we’re hard at work on a 2-8 player board game about petting dogs in a dog-friendly pub. It’s intended to be a faster, lighter game, perfect for whenever we can return to our brewery-hosted board game nights. There’s an early prototype you can try out today. It’s early and may be radically redesigned before the crowdfunding drum is ever sounded, but we’d still love your feedback on it. For every completed playtest survey (linked to in the PNP download), we’ll donate $5 to The Humane Society. You can help dogs and cats by pretending to pet paper representations of them; how wonderful!
The timing of the two projects is still to-be-determined. If we’re able to settle on a core design for Hair of the Dog soon, we’ll bring that to Kickstarter first. If we decide that idea needs a lot more baking and the demand of Far Away keeps up, we’ll bump up the priority of that reprint. It’s seeming like we’ll do both in 2021.
We’re looking forward to next year. Hopefully, we can make the rounds and see some fans in person. If not, we have a lot of game projects to keep us busy. Although 2020 wasn’t the year we wanted, I’d be remiss not to point out that 2020 was our best year as an indie game studio. It’s been awesome seeing Far Away slowly climb the Board Game Geek ranks. We also are on Roll for Crit’s top-10 of 2020 list! All the press, attention, and pictures of people playing have made us glow with pride. It’s been great hearing about people exploring alien worlds during lockdown, knowing that we could help made their lives a little more enjoyable.
Also, Dance Gavin Dance put out a fantastic album. A true healing salve for any woes.
--Alex