#590; In which Excitement is tempered

Comic Transcripts

[[Man wearing piratey hat, coat and breeches watches woman in cap, long dress and apron hanging laundry on an outdoor clothesline]]
Man: Yeah! LAUNDRY gettin’ DONE!
Woman: We’re ROCKIN’ it We’re ROLLIN’ it We’re DRYIN’ it DENYIN’ it …the right to be wet anymore

[[Man continues to lurk behind laundress while supportively conversing about her work]]
Man: Lookit that FORM! Lookit that TECHNIQUE! Baby this laundry don’t stand a CHANCE!
Woman: Aw, P’shaw, B! Any dang fool can get on this train! It’s just clothespins and finger-squeeze! Old LADIES got this noise covered!

[[Man changes direction of his lurk and continues]]
Man: I can dig it. It ain’t the process, it’s the MEANING. It’s putting a hand in the windstream of that old, ancient interplay between fabric and moisture.
Woman: It’s like Don’t matter how rich you are. Your sheets still gotta get dry.
Man: Are we on a ley line? You got my toes trembling. This is METAPHOR-Y. This is LAUNDRY cranked to ELEVEN.

[[Man continues lurking in a supervisory fashion]]
Woman: So you FEELIN’ it then! You got it so deep in your bones that you’re fixin’ to grab up a pin and help a sister out!
Man: Well hold on I mean the scale goes up to 43

#590; In which Excitement is tempered 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!