#385; In which a Hard Road lies ahead

Comic Transcripts

[[Two men stand on a street. The one on the left is wearing a top hat.]]
GLEN: I need a way to become rich that doesn’t involve hustling suckers and idiots.
BARNES: What are your hobbies? What do you enjoy doing?
GLEN: Flying kites through outdoor malls. Sitting on rooftops watching traffic ebb and flow. Collecting loose nuts and bolts from junkyards, then spending lonely evenings trying to match them all up.

BARNES: Okay, well, here’s the thing. The best way to get rich is through REAL ESTATE INVESTING. But it’s got to be a PASSION.
BARNES: You can’t have a hobby and try to learn about real estate TOO; that’s not the way to build a successful career. You’ve got to LOVE real estate.
BARNES: So I’ve got to say, odds don’t look too good for you right now.

GLEN: I was hoping to perhaps parlay my expertise in ennui into some sort of lucrative public speaking profession.
BARNES: A noble goal, but who would you address?
GLEN: I don’t know. Kids?

{{header: get to work at WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{alt-text: everyone just trudging out of the assembly staring at their feet}}

#385; In which a Hard Road lies ahead 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!