Not a huge post today, but still one worth sharing.

Labor Day weekend and the days that followed were a bit fortuitous not just for Disco Candybar, but also for my smaller project, which I’ve been referring to here as Goldbug. I wrote about the beginnings of Goldbug a while back, and I brought it out to play again with some friends at PAX West, where the tabletop side of things has been growing into something really impressive in the past few years.

(Sidebar to my friends in the tabletop industry, if you’ve never been to PAX West for the tabletop features, I really encourage you to try it out, even if it’s just a recreational, non-business trip. More and more of us show up every year, and those of us based in Seattle would LOVE to show you around.)

Anyway, a couple of friends sat down and looked at and/or played Goldbug with me while they were at the show. Across the boards, it got a positive response. It falls well inside the column of “dumb fun” games; it plays really easily with non-gamer friends and family, and still has just enough meat on the bones to feel like you can make some light strategic choices along the way.

Then, later in the week, I got word through the grapevine that it was likely going to get played and reviewed by a publisher I’d submitted it to months ago. With fresh notes in hand from the PAX demos, I was inspired to make some updates and upgrades to the prototype and print-and-play files. When I was done, the number of cards in the product (and its proposed expansion) had increased by 33%, and it went from accommodating up to 4 players to comfortably seating up to 6. While the card counts would increase cost of goods slightly (note that the costs math is not a direct 33% increase just because the components went up by that amount), the increase in player count is a huge improvement in the marketability of the game, especially given its likely broad appeal.

Goldbug has outgrown the two “standard-sized” deck boxes so often used by trading card game players, and has been transferred to a larger storage box. It’s likely to outgrow this box as well in time, but I imagine that being the sort of thing where it technically gets divided into two fully-compatible core products, rather than a main product and its little expansionist friend.

And so that’s that for now. Some testing leads to some theoretical improvements, and some encouraging, practical news moves those improvements from the “theoretical” column to the “executed” column. I’m still cutting out and sleeving physical prototype cards for my playable copy (38 printed sheets!), and I need to make the updates to my digital demo copy, but I feel good about the reinvigorated momentum on it all.

Wish us luck!

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