Links: Munchkin Keeps on Selling, Fundex Doesn't Sell Enough & Amateurs Have High Hopes for Sales

We were surprised at the response rate. We had close to five times the sales that month that we would have had normally and the next month it continued to be extremely high as well. So that was the first part of May [2012] when that first ran and now that we're several months past that, we have reached a run rate that is much higher than it was previously with the Small World game...

It's almost 100% higher than what was. It reinvigorated not only new people but it also got the core people going, "That was really cool. Small World, I like playing it." And that's what brings new people into the hobby.

Here's the kind of really sad story you can hear sometimes from novice designers. At one of the game design/game publishing seminars at Gen Con, right at the end, someone raised his hand and said he and a group of friends had been working on a game for seven years, and it was a great game, and they had spent over seven years and a million dollars developing it including paying Marvel comic artists to do the art; and how could he get to talk to Fantasy Flight Games about it? The three panelists were taken aback – if I wrote in contemporary style I would say they were "stunned" – and said nothing for a moment. Because there's really nothing to say. These "designers" were in cloud-cuckoo land to spend so much time and money, and their game very likely wasn't particularly good, either.