No snappy or witty intro today; this one’s about some stuff that’s been weighing on me quite a bit lately. You may have noticed that after (exactly) one month of pretty regular updates to Disco Candyfactory, I stopped cold early in April.

Usually the blog is about inventing, creating, and testing a game prototype. This time it’s about making games and dealing with depression, not necessarily in that order. It’s probably the most personal post I’m going to put in this blog; my hope from the start has been to chronicle a creative journey that led up to a really great positive development, without getting too deep into emotional content. Today I feel I have to flip that script a little.

The main reason I broke from my writing pattern last month came from concerns about the impact Donald Trump’s tariffs would have on the board game industry. Those concerns, it turns out, were not unfounded. Since the start of the tariffs, particularly those in China, several publishers and retailers have closed up shop. More have had layoffs, and most have cancelled orders and delayed products. One of my old employers, The Op Games, revealed that they had nearly one million dollars in product on a cargo ship coming in from China that they had little choice but to send back; the import taxes (the ones Trump said China would pay) made the games too expensive to put on American shelves.

The state of the board game industry is, at the moment, an unstable shitshow fueled by desperation and anger towards a “politician” with no understanding global economics. Depression in the business is rampant, and the vibe of a normally jubilant community is overshadowed with fear and concern.

We’re all in coping mode.

There are, as you’d find after any sort of tragedy, different ways of dealing with it. Seven stages of grief and all. A month in, it still hurts for hundreds of thousands (honestly, more likely millions) of board game fans and creators, and there’s not a ton of light at the end of this tunnel.

It feels bleak, and that fosters misery and malaise. For me, it’s been a freezing bath of doubt, shock, low energy, and creative emptiness.

Shortly after my last post, I had an opportunity to actually demo Disco Candybar to a publisher. It went, in my own opinion, horribly, for several reasons. Before getting into those, let me just say that this did not help my shock and depression. What light was left in me for game creation was instantly snuffed out, with all the loud, sloppy farting sound that comes from air escaping a brightly colored balloon.

So why did the Disco Candybar demo go badly?

Timing was the most obvious reason. It was several days after the tariffs had begun, so nobody was feeling particularly positive to start.

On a smaller scale, we had about 30 minutes to look at and talk about the game. Subtract introductions for all the people in the call, and you get a little over 22 minutes to show the game and answer questions. With a project as ambitious as Disco Candybar, it has always taken about 30-40 minutes to really dive deep into its potential.

Even before the call began, I had a major question of whether I should demo the Prologue or the main combat scenario process. I opted for the Prologue, as it showcases the accessibility of the game and teaches the core mechanics well. It definitely falls into that 40-minute column though; there’s a lot of story mixed in with the tutorial scenarios, and shaving either of those out to get into 20-minute territory dramatically cuts out what testing has shown makes the experience so compelling.

There was a communication issue I created a while before the call in that I initially described the game as a “family-accessible adventure strategy game”. This led the publisher down a path of bringing their family games specialist to the review — comparing Disco Candybar against far more traditional mass-market staples like Clue, Monopoly, and Uno. My game was immediately going to be a miss (by MILES) for their category’s needs. It was very likely a waste of that department lead’s time from the first minute; something I could have saved them from by being much clearer about who this game was ultimately for up front.

Components were an issue. While much of the build is paper and cards (as outlined in Pieces That Can Get Lost: Costing) that could theoretically be sourced here in the United States, there are still a number of components that, despite their simplicity, were once best sourced in China. There aren’t great alternatives to that path, and that makes Disco Candybar more difficult to justify than it was six weeks ago.

There was a question about how much of the game content was actually complete in design and narrative. The honest answer right now is that, for what it could grow into, it’s probably only about 7% done. I’ve said before that the game is very ambitious, and that means that for me, it would be fairly untenable for me to build out the entire game without some sort of assurance that someone was interested in publishing it. The project is very far from “turnkey”, which at this point is make-or-break when publishers are having trouble projecting more than a few months out.

All in all, it was a recipe for disaster. I could have anticipated one or two of those items with a little more forethought, but never all of them together.

It shut me down hard for almost a month. I have a full working prototype of the Prologue, and I haven’t put it on the table in front of anyone, publisher or tester, in over four weeks.

That’s going to change this weekend.

On Saturday May 10th, I’m hosting some friends at my house to show off precisely what I’ve been brewing for the last few months. Disco Candybar is just one of several games I’ve been crafting. There’s one that plays in the super-streamlined abstract strategy category; simple components, immediately understandable mechanics, and straightforward scoring. There’s another that mimics a classic card game with some fresh twists.

(That last one was actually directly inspired by the crap situation the industry is in right now; it’s 100% just a deck of cards, so it could reasonably be produced with existing manufacturing infrastructure available in the United States. It’s also incredibly familiar within moments, so it can be taught and played from the minute it hits the table.)

Anyway, it’s a faint new glimmer of hope for me. Some could argue that it’s a shallow hope, since there’s not a lot of practical value in it — it’s not going to immediately put my game into a path to store shelves. Still, it’s something I need. It’s a coping mechanism. Manufactured hope stemmed from a little bit of denial. I’m not kidding myself, this is mostly performative. If we ever get back to normal though, it’s something that should be a regular occurrence for my creations.

If you’re reading this from the Seattle area and are curious to peek behind the curtain, by all means, drop me a comment; I’d love to expand my community of testing partners, and I want to keep sharing the stuff I make with people. On the most basic level, though, it’s for me and my mental health.

I need the reassurance that what I’m doing matters for somebody.

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