“Wake up, it’s 6 am, we’re closing now!” some big shaved man said and I took my stuff and got out. I followed the street signs towards Pardubice and thumbed the whole way, except for
“Wake up, it’s 6 am, we’re closing now!” some big shaved man said and I took my stuff and got out.
I followed the street signs towards Pardubice and thumbed the whole way, except for when I went into a gas station to buy some Mr Brown coffee, cookies and water. The sun was up and I forgot to write down the time and number of cars, but a guesstimation is that I walked an hour along the road and waved at 100 cars before a man stopped and took me to Pardubice.
He woke me up at the train station and I went into a shop to load up on water, bread and sausage and then I took the bus to Semtin. There was no one in the printing company of course, since it was the morning of Easter Eve, and Saturday as well. It was too cold to sleep and I didn’t think of getting my sleeping bag out so I sent sms:es and called Roman and Radim every hour. At 11:30, when the sun had just come to warm me some sleep, Roman showed up, unlocked the house and let me rush into the toilet.
We sat working next to each other. I wrote my blog and wrote people in universities and on gameboardgeek.com. I wrote to my BA thesis supervisor to ask if he would like to be MA thesis supervisor as well (he never replied). I had a long chat with my good old friend from Japan, Johann, or as we called him during the Waseda year: the Businessman. He had a crazy proposal. If I could send him all the images from my game and give a piece of information for each image, then he would arrange so that if someone took a pic of a character in my game and sent it with his mobile, then he would get a reply with info connected to the picture, at no cost. I don’t know how many are running around with camera cell phones in Europe, but if someone does, then this feature could actually be really helpful. Let’s say you’re looking for where to produce ” A”. Instead of using my extremely user-friendly Reference Sheet (which some players find intimidating since it’s full of Japanese characters), just take out your mobile, “snap”, “mail” and in a second you have the answer in beautiful, easy to grasp images: “A can be produced in Aomori, Akita and Aichi.”
However, to create the 500 images needed to make the system work, I’d need days in front of a good computer. I didn’t have that time. So I sent some huge files to the Businessman with instructions just in case he’d be free one evening and wanted to help me making it possible for him to do me a huge favor. But the Businessman isn’t the type of guy that has evenings free. So this little project will have to wait till that day when I have no board games to produce, no blog to write, no highways to hitchhike and no game sessions to organize.
Later at night, Milos and the rest of the gang showed up for some Saturday night beer and I told them my stories.