One of the projects I am working on right now is making a limited edition of ten copies of a board game I invented. It is an elaborate fantasy adventure board game, and I have played over 200 hours of it (and kept results on a spreadsheet in Google Drive). It has been really enjoyable to play and develop, and people who play it have encouraged me to do something with it - mainly so they can have a copy to play with since they enjoyed it so much.
Anyway, I shy away from publishers because I fear giving up control of my ideas, and as an interim stage between having designed a great game and getting it out to a large audience, my friend Bob convinced me to make a small run of ten copies. Making that limited run has been a great process. I have learned a lot, and done a lot of work. It makes me consider sending out one of the copies to publishers, because I will have them anyway, and it is such as pain in the ass to make games by hand that I really would like to make an alliance with someone to get it the next stage.
