Be It Resolved

It’s usually easy to make up goals and resolutions, and hard to even remember them let alone work on them a few months later. Except for the type where I work at them a little every week, I always have a tough time with these one-shots. But I’m willing to play! I divided mine up into easier and more difficult categories

Easier Resolutions
1) Continue my support of Gamestorm in the Portland Area. Organize either the annual the Friday night 2-Player Tournament or the Sunday morning Family Games focus or both. Even though I have plenty of friends to game with, going to a pay-for-it event still makes sense to me. It supports the overall hobby, opens it up to a whole bunch of new people and gives me a chance to find new play testers! While it’s a little like preaching to the choir, there’s some good crossover among the various game events, and it’s good to meet new gamers.

2) Get rid of 100 games from my collection. Take some to the Rainy Day Games auction like Dave suggested, or donate them to a library program, or sell them on Ebay or Boardgamegeek, but I need to get a good start on reducing my collection. I like the trade function on the Geek, but I do wish people would sort of check values on games before suggesting trades. It’s tough to stay nice and reply to all the folks who want to trade their $15 games for my $40 games.

3) Play games with 100 different people. This should be pretty easy really. Beyond my regular game groups that I dearly love, it’s always good to play with brand new groups or meet folks at conventions, etc. I need to do a little better job at getting names of folks I play with and saying thanks to them for playing, especially for helping playtest games of mine or games that Sunriver is considering.

4) Update my entire collection on BoardGameGeek. Here I might need some help from one of my more computer-savvy friends. For some reason, on both of our computers the section the Geek which shows My Collection says “Your user agent does not support frames or is currently configured not to display frames.” But I’ve never configured Internet Explorer to not display frames, and other framed pages seem to work fine. I’ve looked and looked, but haven’t found any setting I can change to get to that input window on the Geek. Any ideas out there?

Tougher Resolutions
5) Have a game of mine seriously considered or published by a company other then Sunriver Games. At Essen I chatted with Queen Games and Abacus Spiele about some of my designs, but I need to do the followup. These are games that Sunriver isn’t considering at this time, or they might end up being games that Sunriver would consider co-publishing if we were asked to by one of the European publishers. I figure this goal is pretty far out there, but I have to start somewhere!

6) Go as a presenter to a regional or national game conference or publisher conference. Last year I enjoyed being a guest at Dragonflight in Seattle, and I’d like to do something like that again. Gives me a chance to play Havoc with lots of new people, plus anything new that Sunriver Games is brewing. In addition, these conferences are good for playtesting other designs that may net be quite ready yet, and find people who are interested enough in Sunriver to sign up as future demo folks for us.

I’m kind of glad that Dave is going to track these lists, but I’m thinking I need to set up some personal tracking as well, since I know my own history with resolutions. First on the list is organizing my own game collection – it’s in enough different locations now that getting it down to 2 places would be a great first step.