#782; The Winning Catchphrase

Comic Transcripts

[[The candidate, a middle-aged man with a top hat and cane; behind him, several well-dressed ladies and gentlemen.]]
Candidate: If I am elected, let me make one thing clear:
Candidate: It will be an administration of SCANDAL.

Candidate: I promise you, the media will have to work OVERTIME to keep up with my illicit shenanigans. MISTRESSES. BRIBERY. INDICTMENTS 24/7.
Candidate: I will award lucrative contracts to EVERY crony I can get on the phone. I will make lawyers from EVERY regulatory agency work harder than they EVER have in their lives.

Candidate: BLOGGERS will wear their fingers to the BONE. Magazines and newspapers will run EXTRA EDITIONS. TALK RADIO will get so APOPLECTIC that cars will be driven off the road by the SCORE.
Candidate: I will require my own dedicated branch of the Justice Department just to CLASSIFY my crimes.
Candidate: They will probably even have to build a SPECIAL PRISON to hold me. It will cost MILLIONS.

Candidate: And so I PROMISE you
Candidate: I WILL CREATE JOBS!

{{header: report on WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{alt-text: The candidates debate. There’s a light that blinks yellow three times and then turns green. At the green, whoever yells ”JOBS” the loudest becomes president.}}

#782; The Winning Catchphrase transcribed by in

Candidate: And so I PROMISE you
Candidate: I WILL CREATE JOBS!

#782; The Winning Catchphrase 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!