#547; In which the Species is bettered

Comic Transcripts

CHUCK: Sometimes it feels IMPOSSIBLE to do anything healthy. Like there’s no way a society as complex and populous as ours can FUNCTION AT SCALE without inevitably filling our bodies and lives with cancer-causing pollutants.
BOB: Cancer’s the PRIZE, man. You MADE it. Nothing ELSE killed you.

CHUCK: But everything today is so ABERRANT. Our food has no nutrition. Our kids are hyperallergic. Everyone’s on psychiatric drugs.
BOB: Yet somehow we manage the LONGEST LIFE EXPECTANCY in human history.

CHUCK: A long life of WHAT? Diabetes? Wasting away to nothing as modern medicine pumps morphine into an ever-hollowing shell of what once was my life?
BOB: You’re right. Sign me up for smallpox instead.

{{Header: all-natural WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{Alt-text: Over the generations to come, some of us will die. Others of us will evolve into plastics.}}

#547; In which the Species is bettered 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!