A long story made, longer

It must have been in February that my wife and I played Shadows Over Camelot. I guess my (I should really say "our," as my wife helped an awful lot) development our game went rather quickly. By April I was contacting Covenant Communications in hopes of being able to submit the idea to them, which we were able to do in May. After the Spring semester was over we took a trip to southern Utah (we have family there that we wanted to visit). On our way down we stopped by Covenant Communications in American Fork and I sat down with Phil Reschke. His first reaction ws one of surprise of what I had. That was quickly followed with a concern for the 3D miniatures that I had and the number of components. I had gone to my local hobby gaming shop, Phoenix Games, and picked up some D&D minis that I was using. It just made playing a whole lot cooler, but this was not a requirement for publishing. Anyway, I ended up sending him the game about a week later so that he would be able to share it with the committee who makes the ultimate decision regarding new games. Two weeks later they still had not reviewed it, so we decided to wait until November, as they already had the 2 games selected that they would be pursuing for publishing (he told me that they do 2 to 3 games a year). That way they could consider it for next year. Well, here it is November and, after contacting Phil via email, I got the following response:


Hi Mike,

Yes, things have been very busy. I would say that given the current economy, we won't be taking any complex, multi-component, unknown games to market for this next fall. We'll probably focus our game efforts on lower cost, lower risk games that appeal to a bigger segment of our market. Thanks again for letting us evaluate your game. I wish you well in all your efforts.


Phil


Needless to say, I was quite disappointed. I mean, I've (my wife and I) been working on getting this ready for the last several months. We have made many changes, making things less complex, reducing the number of components, and using more "standard" kinds of components. I'm not sure what I'll do with this idea now. I've looked into self-publishing a little bit, but I've got more to research before I could make a decision there.

Last night, after I informed my wife of the whole situation, we decided that we had other games that are less component-heavy. So, I'll be submitting a card game idea that we've put together. Hopefully I'll have it all ready tomorrow or Thursday. I guess we'll see how it goes.

You live and you learn.