Fengol says:

From Comp 23 I learnt that you shouldn't wait for permission from the original owner to raise awareness for your game if you've used someone else's material or intellectual property. There's a good chance you'll be flat out ignored and wait forever. I also learnt that with board games and card games you have to print the physical components as early as possible because these types of games are difficult to market without being able to demonstrate properly.

On the first point, I started the competition by sending a single email to Valve and waiting patiently for some kind of response before continuing with the competition. I never got a reply and when I eventually decided to market the game anyway I was so far behind the competition that I nearly missed demoing my game at rAge 2009 and the other issues of marketing a card game. I should rather have spammed every Valve account I could find saying I was going to market my game anyway and if they had a problem with it, they can get hold of me. At the end of the competition while looking for Valve addresses I also found various fan sites to the original game that I could have used to generate hype which I missed out on.

For my second point, if I had printed my card game out earlier I could have taken photos of the game in play to show people what it's about or even made a short video to upload to YouTube for people to check out; without that, people could only stare at the artwork. Unlike a PC game which people can download and play for themselves, you have to physically print out and post your game to people which can be expensive, or have other people playing the game so that others can see what's going on; a video would have quickly solved this problem. You should also print a couple of copies in one go so that if you lose pieces you have spares and your game can be played by different people at the same time.