#727; In which Friendship is pined for

Comic Transcripts

” You know who THAT is? That’s Bobby Pflugelblager”
“I don’t know who that is ”

“Bobby Pflugelblager is RAD. He’s SUPER active on the cracked.com fan forums, PLUS Drew Carey re-tweeted one of his twitpics like a year ago.”
“WHOA”
“He’s got a music-review tumblr full of SICK MP3s, AND he self-published a Kindle book of paranormal post-apocalyptic erotica.”

“I follow him on Twitter AND once got an @ reply when I found a typo on one of his zazzle shirts”
“That kid is INCREDIBLE! ”
“But what can you say to him, you know? ” I’ve been stalking you online, your last.fm is amazing and I think we would get along well together?””

“NO. We’re kept at arm’s length by the Kabuki of politeness. We have to ROLEPLAY as people who AREN’T invisible connected, pretending we ACTUALLY don’t know everything we know. And for WHAT? So we can talk about the WEATHER with someone we deeply admire?”
“Maybe just stand next to him and say real loudly to someone else “My favourite sexual position is with a werewolf in a crater.””

{{header: gaze softly at WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{alt-text: if you make a habit of saying this loudly whenever you enter a crowd, the right kinds of friends will seek YOU out}}

#727; In which Friendship is pined for 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!