#708; Everything needs a Metric

Comic Transcripts

RUDY: Nice haircut!
KEN: Thanks, you too! I love my barber. He just knows my hair. It’s amazing what he can do.

RUDY: Do you go to some expensive place? I can never justify spending more than about eight dollars on a haircut. Haircuts make me anxious.
KEN: Maybe it’s because you’re not getting sufficient haircut value! Here’s how I figure the math on the subject…

KEN [narrating an illustrated mathematical formula]: If you spend eight bucks and the haircut looks good for two weeks, that cut has a Haircut Value Index of point five seven.

KEN [still narrating]: But if I spend forty dollars on a primo haircut that’ll look good for two months, that has an H.V.I. of point six five. When you amortize the cost over how long you’ll look sharp, it’s not so expensive after all!

ARVID: I cut my own hair with an old steak knife that I dip in tractor oil ARE YOU TELLING ME YOU CAN PLACE A VALUE ON THAT
KEN: I – I do admit that the model cannot accommodate a divide-by-zero error

{{header: look great at WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{alt-text: most things you do with tractor oil don’t really fit into traditional ways of thinking about haircuts}}

#708; Everything needs a Metric 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!