I had a really nice surprise last week. I’ve been emailing reviewers about Fiendish Genius and had the loveliest reply from Adam Richards who runs the Punchboard blog. He said the email I’d written him was great and politely asked if he could feature it on his blog. You can read the post here, where Adam breaks it down and says why it’s good from a reviewer’s point of view, but I thought it might be useful to people out there if I added a few thoughts from a designer-publisher perspective. First, here’s the full email I sent to Adam:
Hi Adam
How are you doing? I hope all’s great your end. I really enjoyed your Digit Code review the other day – clear, punchy and engaging.
I’m reaching out because I have my first game coming to Kickstarter this autumn and I’d love it if you could review the prototype pre-launch.
FIENDISH GENIUS is a card game for 2-5 players. The players are supervillains competing to come up with the most outlandish plot for world domination. My aim as the designer was to make a game that would be fast-paced, fun and thematic while creating some really exciting tactical challenges. Players can win either by constructing a run of 7 Plot cards – telling the story of their fiendish plan – or by gathering 5 Genius tokens, which they do by adding to other players’ plots. This leads to a tight, highly focused game which plays in 10-15 minutes and can be enjoyed by seasoned gamers and newcomers alike.
People have been really enjoying the game in playtesting and I’m really excited about the prospect of taking it to Kickstarter. We’re aiming to run the campaign from the 30th September until the 23rd October, so I’d love to get some reviews lined up before launch and then a few more during and after the campaign. The game design is complete and the review version will have in-progress artwork and rulebook, with some final tweaks expected during and after the Kickstarter.
Is this something you’d be interested in reviewing? If so I’d love to send you a review copy. I’m hoping to have these printed by the end of the month.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Tom
I think this email includes some principles you might want to apply when reaching out to reviewers (and others) about your game:
Principle 1: Respect the work of the person you’re writing to
We’re all human, right? And in the board game world we’re usually, in the best sense, amateurs – most of our income comes from a job that isn’t related to board games. As Adam says in his post, most reviewers are reviewing games in their spare time. Most board game designers are designing in their spare time too. So obviously, we should respect that one another are offering our time and expertise. And actually even if we were all getting paid megabucks, we’d still want to respect one another’s time and expertise. So, how can I show respect a reviewer who I don’t know?
Easy. Take five minutes to read one article or watch one video on their channel. That’s pretty much what I did here (it might have been more like ten minutes as I liked the first review I read on Adam’s page). Then distil what you’ve learned into a quick, friendly sentence:
How are you doing? I hope all’s great your end. I really enjoyed your Digit Code review the other day – clear, punchy and engaging.
This hopefully signals two things to Adam:
1) I want to be friendly (by asking how he is. I’m following the same sort of social convention here that I’d do if I knew him personally – I wouldn’t just launch into a work pitch).
2) I have read his blog and there were things about it I liked.
Neither of these two things are very difficult for me to do but they help get our relationship started the right way! And if we’re being cynical, because I’m nice about Adam’s work he’s just a bit more likely to be nice about mine….
Principle 2: Respect the time of the person you’re writing to
I’m reaching out because I have my first game coming to Kickstarter this autumn and I’d love it if you could review the prototype pre-launch.
I’ve been nice. Now, let’s get down to business. Here’s what’s happening, and here, my new friend Adam, is what I’d like you to do. Simple and direct.
Style wise, both these first two paragraphs are equal in length. Paragraph one is three short sentences, paragraph two is one long one, either way they communicate quickly and move on so Adam isn’t spending loads of time trying to figure out what I want from him.
Principle 3: Have a clear pitch for your game
That’s this bit:
FIENDISH GENIUS is a card game for 2-5 players. The players are supervillains competing to come up with the most outlandish plot for world domination. My aim as the designer was to make a game that would be fast-paced, fun and thematic while creating some really exciting tactical challenges. Players can win either by constructing a run of 7 Plot cards – telling the story of their fiendish plan – or by gathering 5 Genius tokens, which they do by adding to other players’ plots. This leads to a tight, highly focused game which plays in 10-15 minutes and can be enjoyed by seasoned gamers and newcomers alike.
In this section I’m trying to give a really clear picture of the game and why I like it. It’s deliberately not written as marketing copy (though the marketing copy will contain some of the same points). Note the third sentence beginning with ‘my aim as the designer”. This does a few jobs – it says what my role is in the game, and it sets up a goal that I have – to combine the fun and the tactical challenge of the game. As a reviewer, Adam gets to decide whether I’ve achieved that goal; but I’m hoping here to a) excite him about a game that’s trying to achieve those design goals and b) help frame some of what his review might cover. In an ideal world, if the game is as good as I think it is, I’d like reviewers to say something like “Fiendish Genius is fast, fun and thematic while also posing some really crunchy tactical challenges”….so I want to help set that up at the pitch stage.
Principle 4: Be clear about what you want
People have been really enjoying the game in playtesting and I’m really excited about the prospect of taking it to Kickstarter. We’re aiming to run the campaign from the 30th September until the 23rd October, so I’d love to get some reviews lined up before launch and then a few more during and after the campaign. The game design is complete and the review version will have in-progress artwork and rulebook, with some final tweaks expected during and after the Kickstarter.
This bit gives Adam a sense of the timeframe and, crucially, the condition that the game will be in when he reviews it. Setting these expectations is really important – the last thing I want is Adam reviewing the game thinking it’s the finished product when we’re using a different manufacturer, different card stock and non-final artwork. Timeframe is really important too. People understand that this can shift but it’s much better to have something specific that you’re aiming for rather than say ‘can you review it sometime this autumn’.
Principle 1 again: STILL be respectful of their time
Is this something you’d be interested in reviewing? If so I’d love to send you a review copy. I’m hoping to have these printed by the end of the month.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Tom
This bit restates what I’d like, talks through the timeframe one more time, and importantly it offers Adam a bit of an offramp. I ask if it’s something he’d be interested in reviewing. Obviously I hope he says yes, but I offer him the chance to say ‘no, this doesn’t sound like my kind of thing’. Which would be a gift to me – I don’t want to go to the time and trouble of sending a review copy to someone who’s not going to enjoy the game, or who only reviews print-and-plays or fully published games. Because of Principle 5:
Principle 5: Respect your own time
I’ve saved the one about us, the designers, til last, but it’s REALLY important. Like the reviewer, I have very limited time too, and I’m writing to a lot of reviewers as well as doing all the other stuff that’s critical to getting my game out there. So, I need to be able to get my approach emails like this one out there and do it as quickly as possible. Here’s how I approach the challenge of doing this:
- Do my research. I’m not just writing to every reviewer out there. I approached Adam because he reviewed Sakana Stack last year, a game which I really admire and which has a number of similarities to Fiendish Genius. So I’d already read one of Adam’s reviews a while back, then I looked at his site more recently then spotted the Digit Code review I mention in the approach email.
- Prepare a template. I’ve sent versions of this email to a few different reviewers. The vast bulk of the email (the pitch and the ask) are the same for everyone I write to, though I might tweak specific things, like highlighting the fact that it’s tested well with ten-year-olds to someone who reviews family games.
- Be specific and person-centred. Because I’ve got a good template, and I know which reviewers I’m going to write to, I can be really specific about who I’m writing to in certain places on the email. So for example mentioning Adam’s Digit Code review is really important. It lets me prove to Adam that I’ve spent a bit of time getting to know his site. If I get to publish a second game, and Adam’s reviewed Fiendish Genius, I might want to include a note about something I really appreciated in his review. Or we might just chat – since our first email exchange we’ve struck up a really nice conversation about Cornwall for example.
This stuff is really important – it comes back to respecting the humanity of the reviewer. One of the things I love about the board game hobby is how it’s about bringing people together to play around a table. As stressed-out designers and publishers it’s super easy to lose sight of that and start treating everything as a transaction – I’ll send you my game, you’ll review it, we move on to the next thing – but if we want to really live our values in this hobby, we’ve got to treat everyone we come across – players, reviewers, other designers, publishers, manufacturers – like fellow players in this great cardboard adventure game of ours.
I hope you enjoyed this blog post! If you’re a designer, what else works for you when you’re approaching reviewers? If you’re a reviewer, what else would you like to see in an approach?