❖ Version History ❖

August – November, 2023
As if the circus was not already in town on the progressions of Phoenix Farm, one of the wildest and craziest aspects of the game has yet to even unfold in our storytelling. The key to this piece of the story is understanding something about my silly operation as a small business owner: Every single step of my role as the CEO of this company is simply my best guess as to how things are meant to be done.

Previous to Librarium Games its not like I came from another company, or even worked in the board game industry prior. I went to school as an Ethnomusicologist, and at the inception of the company I also worked at an Italian Restaurant. Almost everything we have ever done has been done from scratch, and up until Calendra’s release, just about everything that has happened up until right now was funded by myself (and whatever sales we’ve mustered up to this point in time). For full clarification, at this exact moment in the Librarium’s history, we are probably running at about a 20-30k loss. Now, that’s not the worst news, because we had a solid 45-50k of investment in Calendra’s existence… but it needed to sell more for any of this to make sense or progress forward.

So… in the background of everything you’ve been reading about Phoenix Farm, throughout the entire winter of 2022-2023, I had been wracking my brain about how on earth we were going to budget the release of Phoenix Farm. We (both the company and my personal bankroll) simply did not have the funds to make this game happen, and I was a bit frantic about it. I had applied to all sorts of shows for us to bring the company to for 2023, and I had been desperately trying to get the word out to other small business owners in the LGS / Brick & Mortar realm, mostly to no success.

Then came August of 2023…
Wowowow. I will literally never forget this month.

I think in the very last week of July, I finally received a very important reply to one of my trade show requests… and it was so completely not the one I thought it was going to be. In the last month of preparation for the Connecticut Renaissance Festival, one of the vendors for the show had dropped out, and we were given an opportunity to bring our company to the event… the whole event… which is EIGHT WEEKS LONG!

Now, of course, my immediate reaction was “hell yeah we are gonna do this!”~send.

But, also of course, my follow up reaction was approximately “OMFG HOW ON EARTH ARE WE GOING TO BE READY TO BRING THE COMPANY SOMEWHERE FOR EIGHT WEEKS OF SALES WHEN WE HAVE LESS THAN THREE WEEKS TO PREPARE!?!?” ~ try not to panic, panic a lot.

So, I did simply as much as I possibly could. And to be honest, its incredible looking back at this time.

in the course of the three weeks leading up to the day we opened the store for the first time ever, I somehow managed to assemble enough resources to build the store itself with six chairs, three tables, and our horrible looking walls (I will forever joke about our first shop being made with cheap carpets for walls, some string, & a staple gun hah). I also managed to craft up about x75 of my sketchbooks (luckily I had the prep ready to go), and in addition to this, Aya and I had been running her 3d Printer rampant with the task of making our magic dice models (we will go into much more detail on this adventure in our next episode of the Design Journal).

While I was frantically prepping all of this, my family was on fire as well. They insisted on keeping our vacation plans in place (a casual TWELVE HOUR DRIVE TO THE SOUTHERN PENINSULA OF MARYLAND TAKING PLACE 9 DAYS BEFORE OUR STORE OPENS); and very much unfortunately during this timeline, my grandfather, and absolute legend of a man died at 99 years old 5 days before the start of the fair season. Needless to say, the stress levels were at about the maxim.

But somehow… somehow we did it. We made it to the fair. And not only did we make it there, we had an incredible time. We made amazing connections with our fan base (take note of that unbelievable foil promo from Calendra that magically arrived at our store in the pocket of an original backer from the Kickstarter!). We also did some amazing work selling our products even though all the odds were against us (I swear to you, it literally rained every day of this season, and the morale was truly at rock bottom for some of this experience).

The very most important feature of going to the renaissance fair though, is that it filled our coffers with exactly the financial momentum that we needed, and it gave us an outrageously good opportunity to show Phoenix Farm to customers before it was available in the Kickstarter Campaign. We got absolutely great feedback, and we inevitably ended up editing about two to three of the core rules of the game as a result of the commentary from the people who had a chance to play the game during this time. Without them, this game would definitely not be as good as it has ended up being.

Between the great moments of feedback, and the incredible inspiration from friends and family that we got this couple of magical months, it is very important to remember that right now this company would likely not exist without this experience. I was so afraid of going bankrupt, or just stalling out the company momentum… but this genuinely lit the fire beneath me, and from this moment forward, it was all rockets go on making Phoenix Farm. We were going to publish this game, and the new objective was to guarantee getting it ready in time to once more return to this fair the following year, stronger and more triumphant than ever.

T-minus 10 months.
the clock had begun and ticked ever faster.

Be sure to tune in again sometime soon for our next adventure in the Design Journal, where we will dive into another one of our Phoenix Farm Accessories: the Magic Dice Rolling Jar.