I received a nice Email this weekend:
A few years ago you were kind enough to send a free copy of BAPUC for my son. I don’t want another free one, but I would like to buy one from you, this time for my brother. I hadn’t realized how much he liked the game until he recently mentioned it and wished he had a copy. It’s going to be a birthday present.Copies are going on ebay for $50, and that’s used, so I would expect a new one to be a fair amount higher. Can you let me know what you’re selling them for and how to send payment?
This weekend at the HARCON gaming day at Harford Community College, I participated in a panel discussion on game design. During the panel, I happened to mention this game, which was my first foray into game design. At the very bottom of this page, you can seem some images of the game: http://www.bucksurdu.com/Buck_Surdu/Personal.html. I was surprised that this game would fetch $50 on Ebay, but here it is:
I was really proud of this game in its day. The production values were quite good for something done by a high school student. I had a lot of help. A friend of my dad did the manual color separations, because this was part of what he did for a living. Another of his friends, who was an artist, drew the cover and the images for the counters. I did the typing myself on a Smith-Coronna electric typewriter. The high school vo-tech course needed things to print, so I got it printed for cost. Even with all that, the production cost me about $3.50 per game, and they retailed for $10. For the past 15 years, I have been giving them to folks free from time to time.
This experience really hooked me on game design. One day I was coming down the hallway of Thayer Hall at West Point to play some war-games with the gaming club. As I was walking down the hall, I could hear a lot of whooping, hollering, and cheering. I was wondering what game they were playing that was so much fun. When I got there, I discovered that it was BAPUC! There were four people playing and six or seven more watching. I thought that if I can make a game that gave people that much enjoyment, that was something I wanted to keep doing. I didn’t design another game for five or six more years, but the hook had been set.