Card Rails Exchange Preorders, Game Design Updates, RPG One-pagers, and Travis PhDing

It’s summer. I’m in Texas, which means it’s beginning to get unfathomably hot and oppressive, so here we are. Lots to share in this update, but the big one is:

Card Rails Exchange, my 90-card all auction train game is available for preorder now.

Card Rails Exchange is all auctions all of the time! Players blind bid to win Railways they can invest in, so maybe they can win big at the end. But sometimes, losing a bid can be a better long-term investment. It just depends on what's in your hand!

Card Rails Exchange is a 3-5 player 90-card train game played in about 30 minutes. Exchange is about trying to balance the bid you're making with the cards in your hand, all so you can invest in the Railway card in front of you. Players get points based on the number of completed Railway cards and which investment cards they used to complete them! Most points wins.

Here are some nuts and bolts:

• 90 cards which includes rules cards

• Conveniently housed in a tuckbox

• Preorders will stay open for a couple of weeks

• Planning on shipping mid to late August (per arrival of copies)

• $22 - free shipping in US, extra outside

Here is the bad news (that everyone already knows):

• Shipping rates with the US have increased

• Shipping rates outside of the US have increased

• Production cost has increased

Because of this, I am increasing the cost and shipping by a buck or two each to help cover costs. To give you an idea, with the increased costs, if I sell at least 80 copies of this game (which isn’t guaranteed), I will profit $1.76 a game. And if it’s over 124, then it’s something like $2.04 a game. That’s not a lot of room for error when you are a one person, do this from your dining table, type of operation.

Game Design Updates

Despite my wild infrequency in the game design space, people do ask occasionally what’s going on with my games. So, I made a Press Pot Games Design Tracker.

I don’t necessarily expect people to try and keep tabs on anything due to my infrequency, but some people care. So why not?

Let me talk about some of the games on here:

• Card Rails Junction: Going to toss this on the back burner for a bit.

• Spirits: This is a 2 player game where one person is a spirit and the other person is in the attic looking through boxes of stuff. It is a small, 18-card asymmetric game where one person can fully communicate (the person) and the spirit can only through very limited interactions. The idea is for players to match symbols correctly, demonstrating some level of communion with each other. Focusing on this one next!

• A Cat, Adrift: This is a one page foldable RPG about playing. cat trying to make its way back home. This has turned into something a bit more nebulous to grasp than I originally anticipated, but I’d like to keep it in the small format it is. We’ll see where this one goes.

How are you advancing the revolution? A one-page micro world building RPG.

I put this out back in January due to reasons. It is currently part of the No ICE in California bundle on itch. Go grab a bunch of awesome titles.

Travis is concluding PhDing

As of Thursday, I have successfully defended my dissertation proposal! This means all I have left to graduate is conduct some research. I’m feeling optimistic about the process, especially because I have been reduced down to part time at my job (which is a whole other issue in itself). But this means I will have more time for all of this other fun stuff. It’s been an incredibly long and exceptionally rewarding 4.5 years, but I’m ready to move on. :)

As always, thanks for supporting small, indie designers.

Talk to you all soon!
Travis