Squarehex 2021 Review and 2022 Plans

2021 Review

Considering the the ongoing impact of Covid, I'm pretty pleased with how things went in 2021. Sales of The Black Hack were solid, but we ran out out of print copies in June and so funded a reprint with a Kickstarter campaign. Stock of The Black Hack will go back on general sale in early January 2022 and we should have enough stock to last another 18-24 months. The Black Hack in PDF form clicked up enough sales to become a DriveThruRPG Adamantine best seller, which is quite an achievement when you consider that only 136 other titles have managed to reach the same status.

We ran 2 other Kickstarters during 2021. The first was an intentionally small project to print some Dungeon Geomorph mapping pads. The second (Dungeon Master's Little Black Book) was also intended to be a small project. However, it smashed its goal and went on to get over 1800 backers, which is more backers than we've had for any previous project. The welcome success of that project generated a lot of extra work. I did have another small project ready to go, but I had to shelve it to focus on The Black Hack reprint.

2021 saw a tentative return to conventions. Squarehex had a stand at both the UK Games Expo in August and Dragonmeet in December. We were anxious about returning the the shows, but thanks to the rules in place we felt safe at them. It also helped being part of an island block of stands with our friends at All Rolled Up and Patriot Games.

2022 Plans

The first job of the New Year is to put The Black Hack books and boxed sets back on general sale. At the same time I'll attempt to tidy the Squarehex webstore up a little. There's also a fair bit of admin work I'd like to do including a full stocktake and reorganising our storage, show stock, and getting new convention signage.

We'll be back with more Kickstarters. My list of potential projects now runs to several pages, and there are at least 8 that could potentially be selected to run this year. In no particular order they are:

• Another dungeon geomorph project
• The Lichway
• The Black Hack Classic Characters book
• A small notebook project
• A Black Hack adventure/s
• Another Little Black Book
• A game box project
• 2.5D Dungeons

I expect that we'll run 2 or 3 from that list and there's always a chance that something else will come along that manages to jump the queue. I'd also like to print some more mapping paper pads, but the rising cost of Overseas postage is making it increasingly hard to distribute them.

Italian fans of The Black Hack will be interested to learn that we have signed a license deal for an Italian Edition of the game. I'll share more details about it when it's ready to launch.

If they run, we'll be back at conventions in 2022. We've booked a stand at the UK Games Expo in June already. We also hope to be at Continuum (local to us in Leicester) in August, and Dragonmeet in December.

Thank you to everyone that supported our work in 2021, I hope we can tempt you back with something new this year.

The Black Hack 2nd Ed Reprint

The Kickstarter to fund a reprint of The Black Hack Second Edition hard cover rule books is now live. The project will allow us to print lovely, offset copies of the book with stitched binding and a black ribbon bookmark. Backers will not only save money on the retail price of the books, but they will also get a set of bonus booklets with their rewards.

Back at the basic hard cover level (£18) and you get a copy of the A5 124 page hard cover book, A7 16 page Arcane Spells booklet, A7 16 page Divine Prayers booklet, A6 20 page Lore booklet for writing notes/rules, A6 20 page Locales booklet for drawing maps and 2 double-sided, laminated Quick Ref cards.

There are higher level reward options too including a Boxed Set. And, for anyone that already has The Black Hack in print there's a low cost (£3) reward with just the 2 new booklets and the Quick ref cards.

You can find the project here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1730454032/the-black-hack-second-edition-redux/description

Squarehex 2020 Review and 2021 Plans

Considering the reality of 2020 for many businesses, Squarehex has had another relatively good year. The main downer was not being able to attend any Conventions. However, we did get some government support which partially made up for what we lost due to the cancelled events. We managed a couple of mini Kickstarters (Combat Counters and Keyboard Mapping Pads).

The main project of the year was The Black Hack Classic Monsters book. It did better than I expected on Kickstarter, which led to the book having some extra pages. To be honest I was quite glad to have the extra work over the Summer putting it together and then the fulfilment in the Autumn.

Ongoing sales of the rest of the Black Hack range have been strong throughout 2020 and we've had a few more stockists carrying our products. The main impact of Covid on web orders has been delays in the postal system. Thankfully, even with delays we had very few parcels that didn't eventually arrive.

For 2021 it looks like it will be Autumn at the earliest before even smaller Conventions can run in the UK. From a business planning perspective I'm making the assumption that there won't be any large Cons in 2021, but I hope that I'm proved wrong.

Brexit is also presenting a few problems for UK businesses. Sales to the the EU only make up about 20% of our business, and it looks like the main risk will be that export orders to the EU may get hit by VAT in some countries. It's too early to tell how much of an issue that will be, and what impact it might have on sales. The increased cost of postage to the USA and the current strength of the £ are bigger threats at the moment as the USA accounts for about 50% of our trade. The strong £ also reduces income from PDF sales as they are generated in $.

My main plan for 2021 is to keep my head down and bash out a couple of small Kickstarter projects before the Spring (Dungeon Geomorph Pads in mid January and a Zinequest project in late February). Then in the Spring I hope to have a new Black Hack project ready to go. Beyond that there are lots of other new things I'd like to get on with. Maybe I'll feel more bullish once I've had the jab.

The Black Hack Classic Monsters Book

The Black Hack Second Edition Classic Monsters book project is now live on Kickstarter. Classic Monsters is designed to support and enhance your Black Hack games. It features over 200 monsters, drawn from B/X and First Edition sources of the The World's Most Popular Fantasy Role Playing Game, all converted for use with The Black Hack.

Check out the project page here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1730454032/the-black-hack-second-edition-classic-monsters

Squarehex 2019 Review and 2020 Plans

2019 was a good year for the business. The two highlights for me were getting The Black Hack Second Edition rewards sent out to our Kickstarter backers and The Black Hack picking up a Silver Ennie award at GenCon. Ongoing sales of The Black Hack have been strong and we now have 2 distributors in the US (Exalted Funeral and Noble Knight) and in the UK Leisure Games are carrying stock. We should also soon have copies of The Black Hack in general UK distribution via Asmodee.

Once the main work associated with The Black Hack was over it was nice to get back to a few smaller Kickstarter projects to fund print runs of several notebooks and booklets. In addition to the Kickstarters I'm always on the lookout for small niche publishing projects. In the last few years I've had the pleasure of printing material featuring the creative talents of Kristian Richards, James West, David Black, Dyson Logos, Charley Phipps and Karl Stjernberg. In 2020 I'll be helping Fish in the Pot with the UK/EU distribution of their one page dungeon zine.

During the year we managed to attend 5 conventions (Hammerhead, UK Games Expo, Barrage, Chillcon and Dragonmeet). I hope to do a few more shows than that in 2020, but they are very time consuming and apart from the Expo and Dragonmeet the financial rewards are fairly small.

I start 2020 with a Kickstarter project (Combat Counters) to complete which should be finished by the end of February. Then I want to run a follow-up project for The Black Hack to fund a booklet of classic monsters which will be a useful supplement for GMs running modules from other OSR/original games. After that I would really like to tackle a reprint of The Lichway. I first talked about my plans for that project in 2015. Although that was a long time ago, when you consider the adventure was first published in 1978, it's still the recent past really. I have done more groundwork on the project over the last 4 years, but more importantly, my ideas on how to best present the adventure have evolved considerably. In between these major projects I should still have time for a few small projects to produce paper pads, booklets and more 2.5D dungeon expansions.

When I started Squarehex I set a very low financial bar for the business. Essentially, I wanted a hobby business that would allow me to print niche items with little regard for how commercially viable they were. That sounds more reckless than it is in reality as I've never lost money on a project. Indeed all my Kickstarters are planned so I know the exact weight, cost and postage for every item before I start. The business has now almost reached the point where it could be a full-time job. If you'd told me at age 20, 30, or even 40 that I could be doing this for a living at the age of 50 I don't think I would have believed it. Even though the pay is a fraction of what I used to earn in the corporate world, I think I'm now in that small group of people who get to do a job that doesn't really feel like work. Thank you to everyone that has supported our projects or bought things from us via the webstore or at a convention in 2019. I hope we can tempt you back for more in 2020.

Happy New Year!

Peter Regan

UK Games Expo

It's the UK Games Expo this Weekend at the Birmingham NEC. The Black Hack 2nd Edition has been shortlisted as Best New RPG. We're up against Runequest and Forbidden Lands. There's a Judges' Award and one voted for by the public. It would be great if we could win an award and if you'd like to support us you can do so by downloading the UK Games Expo App (Google or Apple) and voting for us. While you're on the app please lend your support to Paul Baldowski of Just Crunch Games whose Cthulhu Hack adventure Valkyrie Nine has also been shortlisted. It would be great to see one or both of these awards go to us small press publishers.

If you're going to the show please stop by and say hello. We're in Hall 1 Stand#256 (we're near LotFP, All Rolled Up, Melsonian Arts Council, Patriot Games and all the other best indy exhibitors).

In other news we've just had a small batch of mugs created featuring Karl Stjernberg's cover art images from the main rule book. The mugs will be released at the Expo and will cost £6 each. I've also held back a few that I shall add to the Squarehex site next week. Along with the mugs we should have button badges and plectrums if they arrive in time.

Last Weekend for Black Hack Pre-orders

Having finished sending all The Black Hack Kickstarter rewards last week, I'm now almost finished sending out the pre-orders. I'm going to leave the pre-order products up for sale until the end of Sunday so if you'd like to snag one of them now's the time to order.

After the pre-orders close I'll be putting up The Black Hack range for general sale, but the pre-orders will be better value and they are the only way outside of Kickstarter to get one of the exclusive copies of the book with a cloth/silver cover.

Here's a link to them:

https://squarehex.myshopify.com/collections/all/black-hack

Black Hack Late Pledges

We've had a quite a few requests from people wanting to join the campaign as late backers. We also have around 20 backers whose payments have not been successfully collected by Kickstarter who have been automatically dropped by the system.

In the past, to deal with these issues I've been happy to collect manual Paypal payments from people. However, given the scale of this project, it is not really workable and would probably lead to problems when it comes to the fulfilment stage.

To solve this I've set up 3 preorder products that essentially duplicate the Level 3, 4 and 5 rewards. The only differences being that they cost 10% more, and do not include access to the beta document. These preorder products will available until the project survey deadline (surveys haven't gone out yet), which will be in early August. Preorders will be posted after the Kickstarter rewards, but before the Second Edition products go on general sale. Any preorders that also include general stock products will be held until the preorder items are ready for dispatch. There are no add-on options for these preorders.

Here's the link to the product page:

https://squarehex.myshopify.com/search?q=black+hack+2nd

Last Chance to Jump on The Black Hack Kickstarter

We've got just over 2 days left to run on The Black Hack Kickstarter. The project has smashed its initial goal by over 800% and we've been able to add some nice extras and upgrades to the rewards.

You may find the project here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1730454032/the-black-hack-rpg-second-edition

The project ends at 8pm BST on Sunday 1st July.

The Black Hack II Kickstarter is Live!

The Kickcstarter for the Second Edition of The Black Hack is now live. This time along with an updated 20 page rulebook there's a 124 hardback with loads of extra content and a special black box with extra goodies.

Check the project page out here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1730454032/the-black-hack-rpg-second-edition

Dragonmeet Offerings

Dragonmeet in London is this Saturday 2nd December. Check the website here for details: https://www.dragonmeet.co.uk/

Squarehex will have a stand with all sorts of stuff. Here's a list of highlights:

• Black Hack T-Shirts £12
• Black Hack Hoodies £28
• Midderlands Book and Poster £30
• Little Book of Dungeons £5
• Character, Location, Plot, & Treasure Cards £10 per deck
• Black Hack Rulebook £4
• Black Pudding Zines 1, 2, & 3 £3each
• Dungeon and Character Sheet Mugs £6each
• Selection of OSR books
• Selection of Savage Worlds books
• Reaper Bones Minis
• Pads.Notebooks with squares and hexes

Some stock is very limited, so if you have your heart set on something please get to the stand early. I've got 10 Black Hack Hoodies and 30 Black Hack T-Shirts. If there are any left at the end of the show I will add them to the Squarehex site next week.

If you like OSR games then this year promises to have a stronger than ever presence.

Squarehex Black Friday Discount

From now until the end of Tuesday you can get 15% off any order placed at www.squarehex.co.uk by entering the code BF16

This is a great chance to pick up print copies of: The Black Hack, Cthulhu Posters, or just to restock your supplies of grid and hex papers.

www.squarehex.co.uk

P.S. I've had a bit of a break from gaming projects over the last few months, but plan to come back to them with lots of fresh ideas for 2017. I'll also have a stand at Dragonmeet in London on Saturday 3rd December. 

The Black Hack Print Copies Now on Sale!

With the Kickstarter rewards all now posted, I'm releasing print edition of The Black Hack for general sale. If you missed out on the Kickstarter or grabbed a PDF but would like a print copy of The Black Hack, you may find all the print items here:

http://squarehex.myshopify.com/collections/role-playing-games/black-hack

There is also a bundle deal that combines all the printed materials together at a special price here:

http://squarehex.myshopify.com/collections/role-playing-games/products/the-black-hack-bundle-deal

Last Few Hours of The Black Hack

There are just 5 hours left to get in on the Kickstarter. The project ends tonight at 8pm GMT. The most popular pledge level is £8 + postage and gets you all this:

• 2 Printed copies of The Black Hack rules
• 1 PDF copy of the rules
• 12 Printed character sheet
• 1 Micro-Setting Supplement - The Queer & Deadly Town of Sorrowset
• 1 Printed Mini-GM's Screen

The Black Hack Rules Preview

The Black Hack is a streamlined OSR RPG by David Black that is currently live on Kickstarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1730454032/the-black-hack

I was going to write a series of blog posts this week to show some of the mechanics of The Black Hack. However, David has put together a couple of preview pages that collate some key rules and give a much better idea of how the system works. They also serve as a preview of how the rule book interior is laid out.

The Black Hack RPG

Yesterday I launched a new Kickstarter campaign. It is for an OSR RPG called The Black Hack written by David Black. It is not to be confused with my own B/X Retroclone RPG FOSSIL which is still in development, but nevertheless I'm sure it will still be of interest to many of you.

Here's some blurb about it:

The Black Hack is a super-streamlined roleplaying game that uses the Original 1970s Fantasy Roleplaying Game as a base, and could well be the most straightforward modern OSR compatible clone available. If speed of play and character creation, compatibility, and simple - yet elegant rules are what you yearn for. Look no further!

The project hit its funding goal in just 12 hours and as I type has just past its second Stretch Goal. Here's a link to the project page:

ttps://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1730454032/the-black-hack

Over the next few weeks while the campaign is running I will be writing a series of blog posts that look at some of the mechanics used in the system. There is also plenty of discussion on Google+ where the game's creator David Black is always happy to answer questions about his game.