I registered playcrumble.com and pointed it to the home page. So now when you tell your friends about crumble, you can say, "just check out playcrumble.com" instead of "just check out http://sites.google.com/site/crumblegame/".
The online software is continuing to improve. playcrumble.appspot.com provides a very cool interface as well as a fairly decent computer opponent.
The manufacturer I was talking with dried up, and the next one I spoke with did the same. It's amazing how difficult it is to hire someone to cut up little pieces of cardboard. But I'm not giving up.
The cool thing that happened very recently though, is that I've started playing in public. A couple weeks ago I met up with my friend Hunter at the Chess Shop by Washington Square Park and we played for awhile, and whole bunches of people stopped and asked about it.
Then last night Hunter, Adam, Camille and I went back and played more, and even more bunches of people asked about it. Everyone had something different to say. Some people thought it was beautiful to look at, lots of people asked what the basic idea was and how to play, and most people stood around and watched, asking questions, speculating about strategy, and just generally being really cool.
It's killing me that I don't have a manufacturer though. I wish one of these places would turn out OK. Not that I expect to make bags of money from a small, one person operation, but at least the people who expressed an interest would be able to take a set home with them...
Wanted to throw a couple of manufacturing ideas your way:
ReplyDeleteAre all the pieces rectangular? If so, you could just get some two-tone foam board/mat board/cardboard and a heavy-duty guillotine cutter and cut the pieces yourself, although that’s probably a recipe for a serious repetitive stress injury and possibly a missing finger or two. Alternatively, you could find a print shop that has a bad-ass industrial guillotine cutter and just have the print shop cut your foam board/mat board/cardboard to size. The only potential catch is that these industrial cutters usually have a decent trim size tolerance so smaller pieces won’t necessarily have the precise dimensions you need, not to mention print shops usually have a minimum cut size and may refuse to cut pieces smaller than n″.
You could also try and find a place that has a flat-bed cutting plotter – signage shops and packaging prototype business use them, though to be frank, I have no idea how cost-effective this option is.
Finally, you could go the laser cutting route. Here’s a place that actually uses game/puzzle pieces as an example of the sort of work they do. Plenty of info on the site, including pricing info. Supposedly, they can even cut paper and cardboard, although if you’re going to go with laser cutting, you could just as well use a two-tone acrylic for your material.
Good luck!