#490; In which Parenthood is fraught

Comic Transcripts

HARRY: HEY! Turn off that TV! What did I say about contemporary children’s media?

HARRY: WHAT did Daddy SAY.
HARRY JR: It’s bad for my brain.
HARRY: That’s RIGHT. If you wanna watch TV, you can watch DVDs of 1980s Sesame Street, before it got all PC.
If you’re good, we’ll play a little SUPER MARIO ALL-STARS on the Super Nintendo.

JENNIFER: Oh, HARRY. Still trying to give your son your own childhood?
HARRY: I sure don’t trust TODAY’S culture not to mess him up!
I don’t want him becoming some texting-crazed exhibitionist Facebook-urchin with a narcissistic sense of entitlement!
I have to feed him SAFE cultural artifacts from MY childhood–the stuff that made ME into the decent person I am today.

JENNIFER: I thought your parents tried to raise you on Howdy Doody and Bosco drink.
HARRY: Ooh yeah and I HATED it!

{{Header: stick with WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{Alt-text: Harry quickly hides his iPhone. ‘Now, the Internet won’t exist until you’re in high school,’ he says, ‘but here’s a JCPenney catalog that came with the Sunday paper.’}}

#490; In which Parenthood is fraught 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!