Tsumego Calendar

Are there any tsumego calendars in productions with a tsumego a day? I have read that there at least used to such calendars in Japan.

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I only know of this thread!

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There was, in 2022:

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I guess if it is possible to find a Japanese version, it would still work if one could not read Japanese, since the tsumego is just a Go diagram.

I tried finding one online, but was not able to. I did find some services that could do custom, print-on-demand desk calendars. However, the price would probably over $50 and you’d have to make it yourself.

Similar L19x19 thread from 2012: Go daily desk calendar? • Life In 19x19
They also could not find anything, but GoGameGuru considered making one.

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It is a lost opportunity that Go clubs or national Go federations or even international Go federations do not produce tsumego calendars.

Perhaps it is a missed business opportunity, but it could also be the case that the market demand might just be a bit too small to support it.

On the L19x19 thread, a few people expressed interest but said that they would only be willing to pay well under $20 for it. How much would you be willing to pay for one?

To get to that price, I think that one might need a somewhat larger production run, and that is inherently risky since the seller would probably need to sell most of their stock to make their money back.

Another difficulty with calendars is that there is a limited time window in which one can successfully sell them. People probably will be much less willing to buy left over stock of 2024 calendars, after a significant portion of the year has passed.

There is also the complications of addressing different skill levels and maybe even different languages / regional localization (e.g., different holidays around the world). So that might further split up production into different editions, complicating the need to balance production with demand, and increasing risk.

I wonder if this might be feasible via something like kickstarter (as suggested in the L19x19) or maybe some sort of group buy.

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To reduce print costs it would probably be more realistic to have a calendar with a tsumego a week or month. For difficulty it is probably good to have half of the tsumegos 15-9 kyu and the rest 9-1 kyu.

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One option that is a bit more practical and cheaper would be to make a customized monthly calendar (there are many more online shops that offer this). One could set the custom monthly photo as a few tsumego.

Some websites for ordering custom calendars might even let you put a custom image on the individual day boxes, but the sizing might be a bit small.

How much would you be willing to pay for something like this?

Maybe I am just a dumb guy, but does this really have to be a commercial enterprise?

I don’t think we could find a print shop willing to produce these for free.

Understanding budget is an important part of figuring out what is even feasible, and if one is considering a batch production (to take advantage of scale for reducing production costs), one would need to get an idea of what people would be willing to pay.

How about an e-book?

I just like calendars as advertisement for various stuff, e.g., Go clubs and Go federations, but then they also have to be affordable.

You can find daily/weekly/monthly problems in some websites or apps (IGS does it for example, or tsumego pro).
Just missing the calendar format.
That would be interesting, but potential buyers are in very limited numbers.

I was assuming that the original post was specifically asking about some sort of physical calendar. Obviously, there are many free avenues for getting daily Go problems via various apps and websites.

If you are looking for bulk quantities that you might want to hand out as promotional materials, then you can get custom calendars printed by VistaPrint for $6 each (with the unit price further dropping if you buy many, as low as $3.60 each for 100).

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Me too, but I thought how about opening a new avenue.
E-books can be distributed for free or commercially.
It saves you a lot of work distributing, etc.
Also better for nature.

It is more as advertisement for Go clubs and Go federations, that I like the idea. Otherwise I use the daily homework at 101weiqi.com where you get 10 tsumegos a day adapted to your rank.

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From post of @yebellz
1 See if you can get 100 calendars sold at $5
2 see if you can invest $360

If you can get some honest evaluation working, well go for it!

Personally, I wouldn’t want to launch a business venture like that. I think it would be quite risky and difficult to try to sell 100 of such calendars, even at $5 each (which would not even cover the shipping costs, on top of the production costs).

It’s also a non-trivial amount of effort to do something like this (both in the production and managing all of the logistics of selling/shipping) and the expected profit (more likely loss) does not make it seem like an attractive business opportunity to me.

However, I am considering making a custom one for my personal use. It makes it easier to justify spending the time on producing such a project, when it is just a matter for personal entertainment as a hobby, rather than business activity where one is hoping to get paid.

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As I said, I was thinking this is more suitable as promotional material for a Go Club or similar

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I’d be most interested in a daily tsumego calendar. Here, it looks like about $15 each for an order of 100. I wouldn’t personally invest $1500, but I could see myself buying a few for $20-25. Maybe a kickstarter is the way to go?

But I agree this might not be a business venture someone would want to pursue for the money. One would need to be very passionate about making tsumego calendars a reality :grin:

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