#702; The Manufacture of Anxiety

Comic Transcripts

EUGENE: What’s this I hear about you redeeming money? Redeeming it for what?
OTTO: Not in a transactional sense, but in a moral sense. [He hands HILDA a slip of paper] Thank you, here’s your receipt.

OTTO: All our money has a history. Bribes paid to politicians…hush money paid to victims…drugs and even human beings bought and sold…that money makes its way into our banks. It carries negativity with it. Someone’s starting a business, or buying toys for their baby? They don’t want Iran-Contra money. They want nice money. Money with positive energy.

EUGENE: So you’re…exchanging it for them?
OTTO: REDEEMING it. [To DAVE] Ah, yes. Looks like these dollars in your account were once used for a hooker binge on a CEO’s yacht. Right now I have Einstein’s patent office wages for a 15% commission – or JFK’s Pulitzer Prize winnings for twenty.
DAVE: Definitely give me JFK.

EUGENE: If what you’re doing was at all real, it would be called money laundering.
OTTO: Well since it isn’t, then it isn’t.

{{header: trade in for WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{alt-text: Peace of mind is really the only product in the world.}}

#702; The Manufacture of Anxiety transcribed by in

The past few weeks have been a frenzy of assembling the very laborious, very bespoke first print run of NOODLE BATTLE, the puzzle game I am releasing this weekend at PAX West in Seattle!

PAX has an event called the PNW Tabletop Game Market (Saturday night ONLY), which is a curated selection of short-run games from local designers. As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I applied for a space in this fall’s event mainly as a way to force myself to finish a new game. And here it is!

The drawings are all by Jason Poland, good pal and cartoonist of My Dad Is Dracula. Jason played an early version of this game at Alaska Robotics Comics Camp this spring, and really liked it!

So I said, “Do you want to help me make it?” And so he has! It was his idea to make all the characters fun little animals, and I think it adds a ton of charm.

Because this edition is limited-run, it has been incredibly labor-intensive to make! The boxes and cards were made by a game factory in the usual fashion, but separately. The blank tiles were made by a woodworker dude out of Connecticut. For each game, we have had to:

Cut a piece of plastic and install the box window
Paint all the tiles, hundreds at a time
Apply a sticker to both sides of every tile
Apply stickers to the box (we couldn’t get the box back printed in time, so the whole back side of the box is a sticker too)
Apply the “Nutrition Facts” sticker, which was a late suggestion by my kid that I just had to run with
Fold up the rule sheet (they come from the printer as big strips of paper)
Put all the components into the box and seal it all up

I knew it would be a lot of work and would require some inefficient, expensive compromises AND I WAS RIGHT. But the final product is turning out great, which is the important thing!!

I will have 50 copies with me (if all goes well) at PAX, and then between now and the holidays we will be putting together additional copies to round out this first edition.

I will announce additional copies on Patreon first, once they are available online!! And here too, naturally, before long.

You can also sign up here if you’d like me to email you once the game is available online!