#1013; The Longest Monday

Comic Transcripts

[[A senior with a top hat and glasses, accompanied by a younger adult wearing some kind of headscarf, talks to a scout of some kind holding binoculars.]]
Tophat: What’re conditions like? Any forecast?
Scout: Looking grim for early next week! Monday’s gonna be a big one!

Headscarf: A big storm?
Scout: A big Monday! The worst in years! Could be up to 97 hours long!
Scout: At least four sunrises! Early reports suggest the date MIGHT hit triple digits!

Headscarf: What can we do?
Scout: Get out your funny mugs! Bone up on your Garfield! Just gonna have to grit it out!

[[A young child brings news.]]
Tophat: Any indication about the weekend leading up?
Scout: May be as short as thirty-five minutes.
Headscarf: Oh god… we’re still rebuilding from TGIWTF!
Child: Almost a RIOT at the store! I got all the kitten posters I could grab!

{{header: brace yourself for WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{alt-text: Ain’t seen a Monday this long since the Great Long Monday of aught-seven. Eighty-one hours later there were still four days yet to go.}}

#1013; The Longest Monday 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!