Congratulations on the Success of Your Board Game!

You’ve been designing games for decades, not that the general public would ever know it. You’re kind of big in Germany, where people still play board games, discuss literature and take care of their homeless, but here in the good old United States of “get off my fucking lawn” America people don’t like to play games about healthcare reform, touring foreign countries and acquiring experiences and discussing Proust. They like to play games about money, violence and, of course, sex.

So tomorrow night after your high concept re-imagining of the core mechanics of Settlers of Catan as applied to the French Revolution launches to a total lack of critical or commercial response you’re going to sit down in your game designing studio and create a game which will force America as a nation to recognize your brilliance.

After a week and a half eating food cold out of cans, chain smoking and drinking black coffee at three in the morning you’ll emerge from your studio with a design doc. You’ll then bring that to your artistic designer, Sven. Sven will take your design and make it into a prototype. That prototype will then go to marketing and marketing will give Sven and yourself some notes and those notes will be taken into account when you produce a second prototype.

That prototype will then enter testing and experience some early press work. This boring story will continue for several months until it leads up to your a huge critical buildup and the most elaborate release party you’ve ever experienced. It’ll be filled with B celebrities and even Megan Fox will make an appearance to get wasted and make out with you briefly, then dismiss you as a “perv.”

When you come to the next day you’ll be in Ms. Fox’s hotel room covered in vomit and some sort of sticky substance which, you assume, is some sort of sexual product celebrities produce which you have been mercifully unaware of thanks to your life in the board game industry. The television will be flickering across the room, muted. It will be tuned to the news, where the reporter appears to be discussing something with great gravity. A graphic displaying the box of your game will be in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

You’ll stumble across the room to the remote and unmute the TV so that you can hear him as he excoriates the amorality of your game. He’ll claim that it targets children and that it promotes inappropriate behavior among minors. He’ll say that you’ve singlehandedly contributed more to the destruction of the American family than any other board game maker since Sorry taught children that apologizing was appropriate behavior.

It’ll feel like the bottom has dropped out of your stomach, voiding your bowels. Only your sphincter, still taut from whatever Megan Fox did to it last night, will keep you from shitting your pants right there as you watch your most ambitious effort to date turn against you. You’ll re-mute the TV set and sit on the couch, head in your hands as you bemoan your existence.

After a few minutes of pondering various forms of suicide your press agent will call you and ask if you want to appear on the Daily Show. He’ll tell you that the initial run of your game has sold out and that nerds and hipsters alike have come together in their love of your unorthodox entertainment product.

You’ll be speechless for a few seconds before telling him that of course, it would be fantastic to appear on the Daily Show to promote Oops! We’re Pregnant: The Life Ruining Game! He’ll tell you to show up at their studios in a few hours and that they’ll pencil you in. You’ll numbly thank him and hang up, mind reeling with the pressure and impact that comes with real success.

Congratulations on the Success of Your Board Game!