Tasty Minstrel Games is looking for Designs to publish in 2010

Thanks for taking on the inevitable onslaught of submissions. So many publishers have forgone open submissions because of the volume they get is overwhelming.

Your two upcoming releases look euro in style. So not to waste anyone’s time what are you not interested in publishing?

Welcome to the publishing business of the board game industry! I have a minor suggestion for your site that would help presuade people to buy your games... include pictures of the components or artwork included in the games. This is always a selling point for people, if they can see that they are getting quality materials that look nice, there is a bigger chance they will purchase the game.

Also, what kind of markating plan does your company have? Do you have advertising on other big board game sites(bgg, boardgamenews, etc), and how do people get to your site(other then this link on bgdf)?

Anyway, there's my two pence, and you might receive a submission from me in the next few months.

this sounds great
i made a game wiche i will send in a submishon
for i also know how to make web sites but am really fead up with doing it so
i use city max sign up pay a standered fee and put some ads on it and bamm money right their you can make like 250 bucks a mouth i heared from some guys that do it for a living
use it http://www.citymax.com/

I primarily ment your time since you will be the one sifting through hundreds of submissions once word gets out.

Ever pan for gold? It will be like that. Mostly sand and rock with something shiny every now and then.

Yeah, that's kinda my job... which explains why Mike wouldn't worry about wasting my time ;-)

If you send us a submission email and sell sheet we will look it over, but if we get a huge flood of submissions I cannot guarantee any specific time frame that we'll even be able to read them all. I will try to respond to each submission email in a timely fashion at least to let you know we got it.

- Seth

Oh, I learned something interesting at the KublaCon game design contest - when submitting a prototype to a publisher or a contest, it's a good idea to include multiple copies of the rules so that more than 1 player can have it in hand at a time!

Your process is admittedly different from other publishers. Hopefully the sell sheets will give you the extra information needed to cherry pick submissions to test.

I’m sure I’ll have something to submit after Protospiel this year. I better practice writing up my sell sheets so I at least get past stage 1.

Followed. I've got a game near completion and am thinking about submitting.

I assume the "michael" in your email address is meant to be all together, not separated by spaces or underscores or something. It's a little confusing. If I'm not mistaken, you should receive a sell sheet from me shortly.

Excuse me for being direct, but how can you possibly know that you'll have a good game in two months, if you have not even finished the rules and tested it?

Playtesting and revising will make up the bulk of your design time, if you really want to do it right and get published. I'm sure Michael is looking for a "finished" game, and not just an idea that he has to finish for you. And there's that saying about the last 10% taking 90% of the time.

Give yourself time to playtest and tweak your design--over several years, if you have to--until more than one group of playtesters gives you the impression there's not anything that can be improved and a publisher might be interested.

It's a rewarding process, even if you can't find a publisher, so don't rush it and sell yourself (and your game idea) short!

I'm with Jeff on this one. For me, anyway, the breakdown goes something like this:

Game Idea: .000001% of the time
Fleshing Out Into A Full Game: 2% of the time
Getting Everything Working Together Into A Truly Playable Game: 5% of the time
Playtesting and Revision Into A Fun, Potentially Publishable Game: 92.999999% of the time, or more (possibly an infinite amount of time)

Lots of good ideas that are very clearly good, fun games in my head and on paper turn out to even more clearly not be so once played enough times.

Hmm, I suppose so, I guess I just haven't seen it.

Don't get me wrong, doing psuedo-playtests in my mind (and solo playtests, if necessary) results in games that seem like they'd be fun and that should be publishable, and are absolutely workable: non-broken, can be played from beginning to end, and most definitely qualify as true games with at least a some level of fun.

It's just that once they're playtested by others enough times, that's when the "is it actually fun" and "would it actually be a good idea for a publisher to publish it" stuff comes into play.

All of this is certainly "in my own experience." I just haven't seen any completely fun and ready to publish first playtests so far, or even after a small amount of testing. This despite having played dozens (maybe up to hundreds now) of folks' prototypes, including dozens by well-known designers that went on to be published. Probably depends on the complexity of the game.

Either way, thinking "my game is done despite having never tested it, I'll just test it to prove it" is incredibly likely to be delusional.

Long before I started designing games to shop around to publishers, I made games to give away for free. After play testing them with the people in my gaming group, I always made sure to get the names of everyone who played so I could properly cite them in the Origins & Credits section of the rules. I didn't think that this was a big deal. I always saw it as simply giving credit where credit was due. Once, after I got everyone's names, Brandon came over and said, "I think it's so cool that you do that." He was referring to being diligent about getting names for proper credit. That's when I realized how important it is.

The point? I agree with Jeff. Typically you can't pay your play testers (and it may even feel awkward). You may "pay" them in pizza and drinks, but that's awkward in its own odd way. However, you can credit them with helping you. All it takes is a little bit of diligence and bookkeeping. As Jeff states, it has the added advantage of giving your play testers a sense of ownership in the final product.

If possible, I like to note and credit specific play testers with the changes or developments that their input and feedback caused. ex: "Thanks to Ben for the core combat mechanic." "Thanks to Carla for the great turn sequence questions. The streamlined flow-of-play chart was a direct response to them." Not only does it make play testers feel valued and respected, but it's very honest. I'm not taking credit for parts I didn't think of.

Very cool, Invisible Jon. I like the idea of crediting playtesters even for games you give away, and crediting them for specific ideas is a nice touch as well. Most publishers won't give you that much space in the rule book, unfortunately (they even cut out my "designer's credits" section from two game rule books because there wasn't enough space).

And GamesOnTheBrain--there's absolutely nothing wrong with working on something solo for a long time before feeling it's presentable to playtesters. When I think about it, one of my games went through years of mutations before I ever playtested it, because it just wasn't very good until I finally had that breakthrough that made it playable. My point was only that it's important to playtest, and you can never really tell when a prototype is "finished" until you've playtested it multiple times. I wish I could say that one of my untested prototypes "just needs to be playtested a couple of times before it's ready for a publisher." Every time I think that, I test the thing and realize there's a lot more work to be done! For example, I'm STILL working with that blasted Queen cube tower...