#1578; In which Trees are a Lot

Comic Transcripts

[[Two men, LENID and RINNY, are browsing a Christmas tree lot. Lenid looks admiringly at a big bushy tree.]]

LENID: What do you think of this one?
RINNY: Yeah! Looks great. I’ll get in line to pay.

LENID: Don’t you want to look at any others?
RINNY: WHY? This one’s fine! Good choice! Let’s get it and be done!
LENID: We JUST GOT here!
RINNY: And now we can MINIMIZE our time here to go enjoy the REST of our life!

LENID: Just take one walk around. See if there are any other contenders.
RINNY (rolling his eyes): Fine

[[Rinny walks among the other trees, dismissing each handily.]]

RINNY: No. No. No. Inferior. Inferior. Inferior… Actually, THIS one’s pretty. Let me see the one you chose again?

LENID: SEE? Aren’t you GLAD I made you look?
RINNY: I’m SORRY, trees! You all seem perfectly nice! But we INSIST on making all but ONE of you into LOSERS we have to ACTIVELY REJECT! We could have ben TEN BLOCKS AWAY by now but INSTEAD we’re gonna make you ALL feel bad!

#1578; In which Trees are a Lot 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!