Links: Sales in the City of Games, Cheating for Charizard, and Neolithic History Explored

I think the most important lesson from the years has been how much of a community this industry is. I started as an unknown designer and publisher, and over the years I have built up a successful company. I've learned by reading freely available content online and chatting with other people in the industry.

This isn't a competitive industry, everyone wants to grow together, I've made hundreds of friends over the years and look forward to every new encounter. If you're just starting on your own journey, then I recommend you reach out to people, start conversations on social media, say hello at conventions, and become an active member of the community.

What makes the Crowd Sale unique is that the entire process is handled by a single company, the Game Crafter. They host the actual crowd-funding platform, they manufacture the entire game here in the United States, and they fulfill all the orders! All I have to do is upload the files and build the page and launch. They do the rest.


One more very important difference needs to be mentioned. Crowd Sales do not have stretch goals. I hated having to come up with crazy stretch goals to entice backers on Kickstarter. Now I can simply design a complete game that has everything you need to play on day one. You might not think that sounds like too much fun for the backers. Well, Crowd Sales do something quite different that I absolutely love, and it is one of the major reasons I run Crowd Sales. Instead of stretch goals, the price of the game drops with every ten backers up to 100 backers and then again at 500 and 1000 backers! We are talking anywhere from 30-40% off the game. Now that is an incentive to back a project. It should be noted that all backers get the final, and lowest, price.

My second Crowd Sale was for the expansion to Desolate, and it did well with 144 backers and $3,186 in funding. I also sold quite a few other games in my library because you can link other games, so backers can add them on during checkout. I ended up making about thousand bucks in profits on that one. This is when I knew this Crowd Sale thing could work and I have not looked back. A thousand dollars may not seem like much, but remember I was only making a few thousand dollars on my Kickstarters and they required ten times the work.

In each of Clowdus's history games, you play as someone trying to elevate your culture. It's the stepladder theory of history. Whether you're the chief of a stone age tribe, the king of a mercantile power on the cusp of ironworking, or a petty lord desperate to escape the squalor of the 14th century, your goal is the same...


In the study of history, one of the first things you learn is that when you read a history book you're really reading two histories: the history the book is about, and the history of whomever wrote the book. The same is true here. When we play Neolithic, we glimpse our past. We remember that for the vast majority of human history, we wandered from place to place, gathering calories and living according to cycles of day and night, summer and monsoon, birth and death. It's also true, though, that we view all that time — hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years — through the lens of Enlightenment thinkers who offered particular opinions about our "innate natures". That we were warlike or peaceful. Socialist or market-oriented. Edenic or barbaric. Shrewd or simpleton. Settler or migrant. Those opinions were also loaded, informed by the rhetorical needs and goals of those thinkers. Because we haven't quite broken free of those arguments, we still think about prehistory on their terms. Even all the doublets I offered a moment ago are loaded in ways I can't see, so thick is the water I swim in. Instead, the more we learn about prehistory, the more we discover that the people we once were are much like the people we currently are. They experimented with a wide range of governments, trade styles, innovations, values, religions, civilizations. Some of them settled, some migrated, and some switched from settlements to migration or the other way around. There were doubters and followers and leaders and schemers, in all their variety. There was no singular trajectory.

TL;DR: When we look at Neolithic, we see a particular understanding of neolithic history, one which necessarily exempts a wide range of other interpretations.

The man, Vinath Oudomsine, 31, of Dublin, Ga., was sentenced to three years in federal prison on Friday, according to prosecutors, who said that he pleaded guilty last October to defrauding a loan program operated by the Small Business Administration.

In January 2021, Mr. Oudomsine spent $57,789 of loan proceeds from the program on the [rare Pokémon trading] card, a first-edition Charizard released in 1999 that features a dragon-like creature from the Pokémon franchise, court documents show.


Five months earlier, he had received an $85,000 loan from the program for his small "entertainment services" business, which prosecutors said that he had claimed had 10 employees and gross revenues of $235,000 during the 12 months before the coronavirus pandemic. However, prosecutors said, there was no such business.