A Debut(?) Outing

As a culture, we tend to pinpoint spectacular debuts as an extra special thing. Much is made of an actor or actress who garners an Oscar nomination for their first film role, or an author whose very first novel nets them a Pulitzer, or a rookie who hits a grand slam at his first MLB at-bat. A great work or performance, it seems, is made all the greater by the performing party being a novice.

When Galactic Cruise came onto the scene in March of 2024 when we launched our Kickstarter, and especially when it started to deliver to backers around one year ago, we were very pleased to receive the praise. So much of the praise was accentuated by the proclamation that, not only was this a great game, but from first-time designers!

Except...well...according to BoardGameGeek, we (at least T.K. King and I) are not, strictly speaking, first time designers.

Right there, alongside Galactic Cruise, is a 2020 title called Delivirus (and an expansion for it). It is a game with a single fan, no subscribers, and a whopping 3 ratings (one of which is from me and one of which is from T.K.'s wife, and both of which are 7/10s). That, according to the internet, is our debut game, not Galactic Cruise.

This was a game born from pandemic creativity back during those early days of COVID-19 quarantine. It was an idea that T.K. and I came up with in March of that year and put onto Kickstarter in May of that same year. That's right. We went from conception to Kickstarter in about six weeks' time. We did minimal playtesting (our family and friends liked it), we did zero marketing, and we did just about everything wrong. Beyond that, we were both absolute newbies in the hobby, having only really played Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride and a handful of party games (alongside all the "classic" staples of Monopoly, Clue, etc.) prior to designing Delivirus.

I won't waste too much time here with an overview of the game. In essence, it was a fish-through-the-deck game with some recipe fulfillment. It had some take-that elements. It was pretty luck based. It was certainly derivative, despite the fact we had very little from which to actually derive. But it functioned, and to us, functional was fantastic.

We launched the game, and it somehow funded.

We used a print-on-demand service to print a little over 100 copies of the game, paying just a few dollars less per copy than we had sold the game for, and we addressed every package ourselves and mailed them out.

And then no one ever really talked about it ever again. We occasionally chat about it, thinking back fondly about this mediocre-at-best game we threw together way-back-when. A few months ago, we played it with Dennis Northcott who told us in no uncertain terms that he was glad that GC was his introduction to our company, and not Delivirus. Otherwise, in the paraphrased words of Timon the meerkat, our trio would've been down to two. Luckily for us, we hooked him with a much more promising product!

Fast-forward a bit to when we were bringing Galactic Cruise to market. I had a feeling that once the game started getting more visibility, a lot of folks would say, "Hey, what's this other game?" but, to my surprise, no one really did. I heard the occasional YouTuber make mention of Delivirus, but the overwhelming majority of creators hailed Galactic Cruise as "these designers' very first game" (or some variation of that). Maybe that majority simply made a correct assumption: that we made a game and put it out into world, but it was obviously of a different caliber and production quality. We do a similar thing in other mediums, I suppose. For instance, I think most people refer to a director's first film as their first widely released feature film and not, say, a festival-only short film, or a feature film they made in college. If one were to ask what Jane Austen's first work was, most would point you to Sense and Sensibility and not her collections of juvenilia.

It could've easily been the other way 'round, though. There could just as easily been a parade of detractors saying that our first game was poorly made, under-tested, and thematically in poor taste (in our slight defense, we had no idea the severity of COVID-19 when we made the game). We live in an internet age where, like us, anyone can make anything and then make that thing public. That thing then gets to life in perpetuity forever (for instance, you can still visit the Delivirus Kickstarter page and see the stark difference between that and what we created thereafter).

I am thankful for what might seem like opposite things. I am so thankful that we made Delivirus. It opened the door for us into this wonderful hobby. It paved the way for us to learn how to craft a Kickstarter page, and how to deliver a product on the back end. We met lots of our playtesting friends during those early design days, and many of those relationships are still going strong today! I am so very glad that we made this product.

At the same time, I am glad that Galactic Cruise still got to be (or at least feel like) our big debut into the publishing world. We made mistakes, there were missteps, and we could've done things better, but we really couldn't have asked for a sweeter experience. The reception we've received from gamers and our peers in the industry has been overwhelmingly positive, and the success of Galactic Cruise (unmarred by the relative unsuccess of our previous game) has allowed us to publish board games full-time.

It truly is wonderful to have a job where creation of new things (like board games, and words like "unsuccess" in that previous paragraph) is at the center.