My oh my, what have we here? Crokinole!

This score/pieces box is pretty nice. Price is a little steep, but you need pucks anyway.

www.michaudtoys.org/games.html

I dunno, the cribbage boards are quite nice and very reasonably priced...

Gary Say wrote:

I dunno, the cribbage boards are quite nice and very reasonably priced...

You're right.

My board came with disks and a box that was fine, but if I was in a disk-and-box-replacing mode, the one I pointed out would be an improvement.

Got a chance to get back in the shop, where the sample version of the project was sitting in the wood shed for review by the students. This is the first copy produced by one of the shop teachers on the same toolset. A better craftsman for sure, but a first run through the process. This is it:

Not a very hi-rez image, so I'll give you the low-down. It is obviously a hand-crafted board, with places where the stain did not stick, and the outside edge of the round playing field has a bit of a ripple to it where the spin of the router wasn't perfectly true. There's the center drill hole in the middle of the goal (something I've seen in production boards as well and really doesn't matter) but the overall appearance and surface is very nice. One drawback -- it is frikkin' fast as hell. My first three shots put the puck in the gutter on the far side of the board! The teacher that was present indicated that the owner waxed it on a regular basis. I don't generally plan to be sober enough to play on a board that slick.

Pieces in the shop are proceeding, including the underlying plywood beneath the playing surface:

The boards in the back are the outside rails stained to an earthy purple color, so it appears each board will have a different color scheme.

There was a piece missing in the design -- no hook on the back of the board to hang it when not in use. I mentioned that to the teacher on hand (whose parents are Canadian ex-pats and hadn't had any experience with the game prior to this shop project) and he almost literally banged his hand on his forehead. "I was trying to figure out where I was going to store the damn thing." I listed off the reqs for him, inset, centered to match any image laid onto the board. It should be in the final products.

If the project boards are in the neighborhood if the quality of this board shown above I've got one hell of a Christmas gift coming. The teacher indicated that many of the students are remedials, gifted physically but not terribly interested in school work (even the shop work) but that he was confident I'd get a good quality board. He said that when they were asked about the bulk order for pucks (which would cost the kids maybe $5 per set) only about half the kids raised their hands, indicating that they had no intention of keeping the projects or playing them if they do. They may end up in the local Goodwills and I'd be curious to see where they price out. I raised the idea of perhaps inspiring the students with a measurable, green-colored indication of the value of their work, and the teacher on hand said he would be curious to see what the result of that would be. Naturally there's no way to predict quality or consistency on the products, but I may find myself in the position of reviewing a number of boards and purchasing them for various values. I would have a body of inventory for sale, and then would have to figure out how to ship the damn things. Shipping these things is not a trivial business -- may sell locally only. That would mean getting into the gaming business.

On that note, I just called Perry Cock's bluff at Multi-Man on Warriors of Japan. I may be the proud owner of 70 copies at wholesale, zero shipping costs. I can't help but think this would be a bad idea. I'd have to figure out how to ship those damn things too. I'd have to work up a business plan and total-cost analysis and consider putting them up on Kickstarter as a sale-by-proxy for Multi-Man, skimming a few dollars off of each sale on the way by.

I woke up to a normal day off. Remarkable what 12 hours can bring.

S.

very nice, as a follow up you could get them to do a Carrom board (the Indian style, not the American one)

Sagrilarus wrote:
On that note, I just called Perry Cock's bluff at Multi-Man on Warriors of Japan. I may be the proud owner of 70 copies at wholesale, zero shipping costs. I can't help but think this would be a bad idea. I'd have to figure out how to ship those damn things too. I'd have to work up a business plan and total-cost analysis and consider putting them up on Kickstarter as a sale-by-proxy for Multi-Man, skimming a few dollars off of each sale on the way by.

I woke up to a normal day off. Remarkable what 12 hours can bring.

S.

Alright. You can't just leave us with that... what?

Wifwendell, patron saint of Warriors of Japan ribbed Multi-Man for reprinting Warriors of God when WofJ has been languishing in preorder. It's close -- about 70 away, and when Perry Cocke of MMP replied to Wif he ribbed back -- go ahead and preorder the last 70 needed, I'll give you the retailer rate on them and it can go to print this winter.

So it got me to thinking -- their office is about ten miles from my house so I could avoid all shipping costs and get the games at a discount over the preorder cost. Put up a Kickstarter, and put my patented marketing bullshit on it and I bet I could get 70 sold and have the money in hand prior to having to pay MMP for the order.

What would remain is the time, effort and expense of packing and shipping (plus a cut for KS), and any copies I have left over would sell at 20% off retail at some point in the future. The game is small enough that having 20 or 30 in my garage wouldn't be a crisis.

Granted, MMP could do this themselves, but they're not. They look to CSW to do 100% of their marketing and at no cost. With a little prodding and an ad placed on Twilight Struggle's and C&C Ancients' pages on BGG they might just get enough interest for a $33 game (which is frikkin' cheap as hell at today's rates) to put it over the line.

For those of you who haven't seen it, it is a very visually attractive game, low chit count, low rule density. Play time is a bit on the long side though a game can end if one side gains a big enough lead prior to final turn. The art is by Mahaffey and he has done some very nice work to give it an Eastern ambiance.

So I shot a response back -- will you give me the retailer rate plus zero shipping (I'll pick up at their assembly point) if I order the remaining 70? Multi-Man doesn't bill until just prior to shipping, which means I could Kickstart this pig for about $2500. Multi-Man grade physical quality, tried-and-true Taiheiki quality game play, made in the USA. If I had a KS up now I could have an order to them prior to December 10th that would put it over the line.

I'll take two.

Got to see the progress on the boards this evening and talk to the shop teacher. There was one board that had been stained gray, looked like hell. The teacher said that with one coat it had looked like a bleached wood and had some personality but that the student couldn't help himself and gave it a second coat. Pooched it. So they grabbed a section of the scrap wood and played with stains for the rest of the class and he demonstrated how just changing application method changes color. He had a black-and-tan thing going that looked killer and I told him he should put an image of a glass of Guinness on the board to go with it.

Apparently 25 want to keep the boards and want to have Crokinole nights as a regular thing when the boards are complete. 25 more aren't interested in keeping them, and he said that more than a few of them are talented individuals. He's very optimistic about the final result.

S.

Please make that thing about Warriors of Japan a reality. I want that game so, so bad. I saw the other day that it only needs 50 more orders on the P500.

Starkweather asked if he should write something up for the newsletter and MMP said to hold off because something was changing. I haven't heard back from them so my guess is that they make make 500 its number and print. $33 preordered, so if you want in now is the time.

In case they did I checked the price of an ad-buy in Medieval Warfare magazine. $200-$400 per month depending on the size, which would reach 9000 readers in North America. Appears to be an academic issue at the moment.

MMP may have changes coming with Schilling's health. Don't know what it would mean (or does mean).

S.

To clarify: Are you suggesting we just order from MMP directly? It looks like a great game. I hope that Schilling's cancer has been successfully treated.

Don't know, expecting a change of some sort in its status. Wouldn't hurt to preorder just to keep the scare up.

Stopped in and saw the shop teacher today, asked how the boards were coming along. "Ninth coat" was his reply, and indicated that he has a design flaw that he knows about. He has to attach via screw with about 3/16ths of an inch to work with. He's doing that part of the assembly himself. He's hoping to have something to look in a couple of weeks.

There's flaws in some of the boards, to be expected for first projects for most of the kids doing it. The lines aren't perfectly uniform in thickness, and there are some places where clamps were compressed too hard and have put a non-breaking crease in the wood. Some of those could be lifted, but some couldn't. But all in all the boards look very nice, and some of the kids are talking about having a Crokinole Tournament. I haven't spent anything yet and I'm having a great time with it.

S.

Things are finally starting to look the way they should, and the boards have come out of their hibernation in the back room where they hid from dust as the varnish cured.



Sides are coming on, pegs in (quite tall) and they're starting to look like actual boards. Some have issues with their surfaces while others don't, as you'd expect from a high school shop class. But a couple of the boards I looked at looked very nice.



The teacher running the shop wasn't there today but the Principles of Engineering teacher was (this is the sponsor for the robotics teams) and he indicated that the price of materials was about $20 per board, implying that's what they would cost to purchase. I had been told $50 and my intention was to buy anything that looked good at that price, selling them to friends that had an intersest. I may end up with a trunk chock full of crokes, and at $20 a pop they'll go even if they have bumps in the varnish.