We've announced Cthulhu Dice and Zombie Dice, two fast-paced dice games that have chewed on my brain for about a solid month now. Lots of planning, production, and print buying thought has gone into these -- my side of the development and playtest process was mostly to make encouraging sounds and participate in brainstorming -- and I think we've got two hits on our hands.

Zombie Dice was originally planned with a dice bag, but as we worked on it we slowly reached the point that we could pack a dice cup with the game.

I expect to see factory dice samples next month, but for now we're using laser-engraved prototypes that Will colored by hand. They look great, but I fully expect that the professionally-produced dice will blow our prototypes away.

I know, that was over a year ago.

I spend a lot of time at the office working on print buying; the occasional book (boring), many card games (eh), and games with completely new components (yeah!) all compete for my time with printer and factory reps. Diving into a project, brainsttorming solutions to problems, and figuring out tricks to shave pennies off the unit cost is a lot of fun and one of the tasks I enjoy the most during my day.

On the other side of the coin there's web-based marketing, which I don't actually touch on much at the office. I love digging through web traffic reports, figuring out ways to make an exit-heavy page keep people clicking around the site longer, and the social network side of web marketing is constantly changing and exciting. I wish I had time to spend hours every day working on this at the office, but basic management and emergencies eat up most of my time.

So if I had to choose only one to be my full-time occupation which would it be? Probably print buying, since that has the most direct contact with people and it's the job I have the most experience in. Fortunately, I don't have to choose just one since my career keeps me constantly bouncing from one task to another completely different task. But there are days that I think it would be fun to specialize in one type of work.

Okay, I'm home and pretty well rested. Who in Austin wants to try Revolution this weekend? Maybe a Saturday afternoon game.

Well, I guess it's not only me since Will helps (though I'm more likely to fall into a rant than Will is). One of the new projects at the office has involved creating a few short videos to post online and we posted the first video -- unboxing Frag Gold Edition -- yesterday as I was headed out the door.

What a great way to say so long to the office for a few weeks. We opened cases of Revolution this morning and drooled. I snapped a blurry picture of one of the boxes.



It's a good thing I own a camera. This phone sucks for photos.

I sat in a meeting yesterday in which we planned our demo events for GenCon. Frag, Munchkin Quest, Revolution, and The Stars Are Right will all get in-booth demos. And we should have all four games for sale at the booth.

Details need to be ironed out, and new promotional material created, but the planning meeting yesterday went better than I had hoped.

I'll be in the booth quite a bit this year -- running Frag and Revolution demos -- so I should be a little easier to find. Except for when I'm off for meetings.

I'm not sure what happened yesterday, but something had me feeling completely unlike myself. I spent the day tired, dragging, and stressed out over a printer issue. I'm feeling a little better this morning, but I can tell I'm not 100% because I've been putting off checking office e-mail . . . because of that damned printer stress.

Why can't a printer just follow the standard instructions? If we'd been given everything we expected then I wouldn't be feeling this way right now.

And that's the end of Vegas for this year. The GAMA show wasn't the busiest or best I've ever attended, but there was productive work done and I may have found a new printer who can get us better pricing on some games, so overall the week was a success.

It has been a very long time since I had to deal with calibrating monitors for print. It's still pretty simple, even if it's annoying. This should help with some color issues on a recent project, though.

While Steve and I were at Essen last year, we sat down and played a new game from Pegasus. Well, we're now getting close to shipping our version of The Stars Are Right to print.

I like to call this 25% game and 75% puzzle. Play involves collecting servitors and ancient ones and using the collected creatures to move the stars. It plays within about an hour and can be a real brain burner. Fun for those who love puzzles.

It feels good to know that Revolution is finally at print. This is a fun game, and I expect it to do very well for us during summer convention season.

But there's no time for that. No, it's time to get another new game off to the printer. And a lot of work left to do between now at the GAMA show. I'll be wearing the suit at the show, so I should be easy to locate.

Just swamped with finishing an essay for a book and getting some projects to print. A few reprints went in this week, another reprint goes in today, and two new games go to print in the next week.

Weekend plans? Do nothing work-related at all.

We'll see how it goes.

Over a month ago I sat down and mocked up a rough design for a new Munchkin website. The basic idea worked, but my web design skills are nowhere near my print design skills so the page design concept sat on my harddrive . . . until we hired our new webmaster.

For the last few weeks part of my time has been spent reviewing new pages, checking links, and overall trying to stay on top of the entire project as Russell, our new webmaster, took my rough concept and created an entirely new site.

On Friday, after one last burst of activity, we launched www.worldofmunchkin.com. The site's not complete, but it's better than it was and we now have a solid framework to build on.

Crazy day at the office, as I try to plow through 500+ e-mail messages and finally clear out my inbox.

We've got GTS in less than a month, so that -- plus summer releases -- is consuming a lot of time. I've been a bit stressed and crazy this week, but tonight should be a little relaxing since I've got a friend from high school visiting for the evening. He's in town for SXSW and free tonight so Gina and I are having him over for dinner.

Now, though, I have to work on . . . well, everything.

So far we've only sold three versions of the basic Chibithulhu plush but we've also shown a 4" mini and, now, and 20" giant.

I love this big guy, but I do wonder what a 40" version would look like.

We took Revolution to Toy Fair last week and the prototype went over very well. So well, in fact, that we're going to increase our order on the initial printing.

One thing that didn't go over well, though, was the cover. So we're working on it.

The game's almost ready for print.

It's almost like whatever I have won't leave me alone. Back, vile sickness!

Today's the day to make sure everything is ready. At the show I'll meet with buyers from some of the larger chains, different printer and manufacturing reps, and try to dig up as much info on mass market sales (and what the mass market buyers want) as I possibly can. Munchkin continues to expand into a larger market and I want us to stay on top of the changes as best as we possibly can.

Steve's annual stakeholders report is online. Anyone interested in the game industry may want to read this, since it offers some "behind the scenes" info on our operations.