Hello! You’re receiving this newsletter because you signed up for updates on my party game, Best of the Rest. Thank you! I’ll be sending this newsletter, at most, once a month, and only to share updates on what I'm doing to get Best of the Rest out into the world.

Sorry, remind me what Best of the Rest is?

Best of the Rest is a party game that asks players to make impossible choices between their favorite things (what's better: New York City or french fries? Winning an argument or your favorite music in high school?). But before players make their picks, each player will try to guess what card the player next to them will pick and what cards won't get picked by anyone. Correct predictions score points, and the player with the most points after ten rounds is the winner!

The design of Best of the Rest came together quickly last spring. I had been thinking about other party games involving ranking random things and was considering how I would do things differently if I ever made my own (a topic for a future newsletter, maybe). And then the game came to me one day, basically in its final form. The first playtest was on my birthday last year, when I forced my captives(/friends) to try it (not joking). Since then, I've had dozens of others groups try it (almost always voluntarily). And the game has been a hit.

Since then, I've refined some of the rules, cards, and other components. And then I ordered some nicer prototypes. This winter, I had a handful made to give to friends and family to say (1) thank you for always supporting my weird hobby and (2) see? this hobby of mine isn’t an entire waste of time. The new copies were also a good way to get some more feedback on the game and troubleshoot any possible issues (or typos).

Thanks for your life story. What's next?

Over the last month, I’ve been taking steps to get Best of the Rest into more people's hands, like contacting manufacturers for quotes on how much it would cost to produce a couple thousand copies of the game, which will help me figure out how viable a Kickstarter campaign or other preorder approach would be.

I’m also continuing to send pitches of the game to board game publishing companies. Licensing the game to a publisher would mean less creative control and a smaller percentage of any potential profits, but it would also mean a lot less work for me and a much easier path to retail distribution of the game. Deciding between Kickstarter or continuing to reach out to publishers is one of the next big decisions that I’ll have to make.

And that brings us to now. Thank you for supporting this game (and me)! As someone who started making his own games a few years ago, it’s so exciting to share one of them with all of you.

Talk to you soon.

Robbie

If you have any questions or comments, please send them my way. If you’d like to try this game or any of the others I’m working on (there are many), I’m also happy to show them to you online (or in person if you're in Chicago!). Just let me know. And if you’d like to unsubscribe to this newsletter, there should be an obvious way to do that, but if not, just let me know too.