#1082; The Lingering Icebergs, Part 2 (of 3)

Comic Transcripts

[[The characters from the previous comic have returned.]]
Dilettante: You claim to be followed by ‘icebergs’ – old projects that never got finished, and hound you like terrible ghosts.
Tophat: So cold. So forbidding!
Dilettante: What if the metaphor is what’s making it so bad?

Dilettante: Icebergs sink ships. Icebergs hide their size. Getting rid of icebergs is something a Captain Planet villain would want to do.
Tophat: That blue-skinned boy scout

Dilettante: So reframe it! What if old projects are actually coal cars?
Dilettante: Tow around too many of them and their weight adds up – but with a little sweat, you can shovel that coal into your engine and you get a huge boost of power to move forward!

Dilettante: Now old projects are sources of latent strength that can be tapped – IF you choose to pick up a shovel and do the work. OR, simply pull the pin that I’ve seen in movies, and leave them behind on the track.
Tophat: YES! Of COURSE!

Tophat: And then… burning all that COAL will MELT the ICEBERGS!
Dilettante: Well… on a long enough timeline and on a global scale, I suppose that’s kind of true

{{header: fire up some WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{alt-text: at this point, the fate of the world is a sacrifice I’m willing to make}}

#1082; The Lingering Icebergs, Part 2 (of 3) 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!