A SHOT FROM THE GUNTOWER: 5-May-25

Well, that was a month!

I know we don’t have it nearly as bad as some companies out there, but what with factory fires, Dragon Boat Festivals, EU regs and Trump’s insane tariffs, this month has felt like one of those games where you take one step forward and then someone plays a ‘£!*& with Mike & Lynn’ card that sends you two steps back on every-single-turn!

Despite that, we’re still on-track to deliver Pandora to everyone except our US backers just about on time, but with caveats.  At which point, here’s what I’m gonna talk about in this Newsletter:

• Unless something else gets in the way, we are now due to start shipping Pandora Celeste to the UK, EU, Australasia and Canada this month. We will post an update on Gamefound when the boats are finally on the water.

• Shipping to the US is still on hold - no prizes for guessing why [tearing hair out emoji]

• For financial reasons, we will be selling Pandora at UK Games Expo, and I’ll explain why below.

• Testing of Carta Imperia goes on apace.  Scroll down to get a taste of what the game is really about!

• Pandora’s Pirates are a blast! 😁 And now there are three new Nasties emerging from the dark corners of the Pandora Celeste…

SHIPPING NEWS

So there we were, pushing hard to get Pandora Celeste printed and on the boats by early April, when a fire in a neighbouring factory closed everyone in the area down for several days and pushed things back by a week. That bumped us into the annual Dragon Boat Festival, which delayed production by another week, and because of that we missed our projected shipping deadline.

In a way it’s just as well, because if everything had gone according to plan, the ship to the US would have sailed just as Donald Trump increased his tariffs to insane levels.  So we dodged a bullet there.

The Obligatory Tariffs Bit (if you’re fed up of tariff talk, skip down to ‘So What Does This Mean for Pandora?’ below):

I’m not going to rehash all the arguments about tariffs here.  If you’re interested, these 2 articles give a much better summary of the situation than I could possibly manage:

https://bitewinggames.com/the-state-of-tariffs-crowdfunding-for-board-games/

https://www.catalystgamelabs.com/news/tariffs-rolling-against-american-game-publishers

This extremely long video also adds a ton of detail, which while it’s about making computers rather than boardgames is incredibly illuminating. The first 40 minutes is well worth a watch, and at 1.37.51 is the most frankly honest response I’ve seen to the ‘All this would be solved if you just made it in the US’ argument – though I warn you it uses very strong language to essentially say: “Sure we can, if you want to pay $1600 for this item instead of $200, which you don’t!”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W_mSOS1Qts

Anyone still clinging to the delusion that it would be easy to reshore board games manufacturing to the USA should skip to the end of the article I’ve posted here, where Michael explains Why Boardgames Won’t Be Manufactured In The US Anytime Soon:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gametrayz/forsaken-5/posts/4354870

To reinforce that article, here is a first-hand account of the last (failed) attempt to reshore boardgame manufacturing to the US last year:

https://www.superheumann.com/post/my-year-in-manufacturing-games

To that, let me add our experience.  When we set out to make Pandora Celeste, we got in quotes from everywhere.  The US was a non-starter – no US companies could manufacture the sophisticated box configuration and pieces we required, and even if they could we’d have had to order at least 5,000 copies (I wish!).  We worked long and hard with a manufacturer in Spain to try to get the price down, but in the end the best he could manage was three times the cost of making the game in China. 

That would have meant that instead of asking £70 for the full game (MSRP £120), we’d have had to ask each of you to pay at least £180 just to get the game barely funded with no safety margin (MSRP £300+).  How many of you can honestly sit there and tell me that you would have paid £180 for this game with no add-ons?  Especially in a climate where during our campaign we lost £280 in cancelled orders off the back of a single update that didn’t lower our shipping rates fast enough (as it is, our ‘worst case scenario’ for shipping rates wildly underestimated what has actually happened, so we’re going to lose money on shipping no matter what we do).

Bottom line: even with tariffs at 145%, it would still cost our US customers less for us to make the game in China and pass on the full tariff cost than it would to make the game in the USA.  With that in mind, given that even the big beasts of the hobby game industry are posting losses of millions of dollars, where is anyone going to find the money to build a games factory in the USA even if they wanted to?

It’s fantasyland!  And all it’s going to do is put small indies out of business. 

And on that note, can I ask you all for a little compassion?  We’re not going out of business any time soon, but others are, and I’ve seen comments in their closing down announcements to the effect of ‘serves you right for not thinking ahead/manufacturing in China’.  Regardless of whether you support the tariff policy or not, those comments are just heartless!  I can tell you from personal experience that people in this industry pour their heart and soul into their business to fulfil the dream of a lifetime – and to be told that you deserved it when you finally have to admit defeat is simply pouring salt into an already festering wound.  So be kind to people when they tell you that they’ve been forced to give up on their dreams – they’re hurting enough already.

That said: all of you in the Pandora community have been nothing but helpful and supportive in your comments responding to this crisis, and both Lynn and I thank you for that from the bottom of our hearts 🙏🏽

‘So What Does This Mean for Pandora?’

As you’ll no doubt understand, we had to put shipping on hold while we worked out whether it was better for us to warehouse the US boxes in China or put them on the boat to Britain and fulfil from the UK.  This has delayed the entire shipping process, so we are at least 3 weeks behind our previously revised schedule.

We are hoping that we can get boxes on boats by Monday 12th May.  If that happens – and nobody throws yet another spanner in the works – our delivery timeline looks like this:

• Australasia & Oceania should be fulfilled by Aetherworks in late May.

• We are still trying to pivot to a Canadian fulfilment company to deliver to our Canadian backers in early June.  The problem is finding someone who will handle the small numbers we’re dealing with, but we have some leads - it's looking hopeful.

• The UK & EU will be fulfilled by Zatu in late June/early July.

• The US remains on hold until tariffs come down to a sustainable level.  At that point, we will probably pass the tariff cost onto our US customers, but if we were to do this right now the minimum additional cost we’d have to charge would be £32.55 ($43.34), so you can understand why we’re waiting.

When we finally have concrete information to share with you on shipping and tariffs, we'll post an update to our backers on Gamefound.

That brings me on to the UK Games Expo, which is taking place at the NEC in Birmingham on 30th May – 1st June.

Come and find us at Stand 2-372

As is the nature of these things, we had to commit money for the stand long before factory fires, Dragon Boat festivals and Trump tariffs pushed back our delivery timeline – and a combination of these factors and others means that we really need to sell some games at this, our biggest selling opportunity of the year in the UK. So we have invested a substantial amount of money into airfreighting 50 games to the UK in time for UKGE.

This means that we WILL be able to Fulfil to those of you who selected ‘Collection at UKGE’ in the Pledge Manager. 

However, we have no option but to sell the remaining games at our stall during the Expo. We understand that this means we will be selling games to punters before we have delivered the game to our backers, and we are really sorry about this – but please believe me, we have no option.

We have not taken this decision lightly.  But I have seen too many companies go under in recent years because, as The King of Average put it: “their guiding star was that backers came first even in situations [that hurt] the company.  But there is no company without backers and sadly there are no backers without a company.”  If the company goes bust because it failed to put its financial future before the goodwill of its backers, all that goodwill is for naught because that company’s no longer making games.

We’re not in that dire a situation, but one of the reasons that things are not as bad as they could be is because we’ve always taken a very prudent approach to everything we do.   And that’s why we feel we have to sell some games at UK Games Expo, to provide the financial cushion Guntower Games needs to ensure that we deliver as promised without having to dip into our savings now that the current fire / tariff / warehousing / shipping situation has blown all of our financial forecasts out of the water.

These are ‘Interesting Times’ in the true sense of the Chinese proverb, and in order to navigate them we sometimes have to make decisions we would rather not make.

We hope you understand, and please be assured that we are selling the game at a substantially higher price than you guys paid for backing us, even taking fulfilment costs & taxes into account (tariffs are another matter and ultimately down to President Trump).  We are also only selling at UKGE – very few Pandora units are being sold into Retail, and we have requested that our retail backers do not put their units on sale until we have fulfilled to all our backers.

Now, with that out of the way, onto brighter news…

CARTA IMPERIA and the Art of the Deal

One of the things we need to budget for is development of our new mini-4X set in the Roman Republic – Carta Imperia: Rise of Rome.

Playtesting is going well and here’s a little vignette that shows you what the game is all about – dealmaking.  It’s early in the game and someone has played a card which triggers a Governorship election.  They nominate Samnium, currently governed by the Archius Family: but anyone can put forward a candidate.  This sets the scene for an intense round of negotiations as each player horsetrades for the others’ votes in support of their candidate:

This is what makes the game: almost every Action that you play is designed to create a space for wheeling and dealing as you negotiate your way to victory.

If that sounds like a game for you, you can find out more at: https://www.guntowergames.com/carta-imperia and you can come and try it out at Stand 2-372 at UK Games Expo.  We’d love to show it to you.

PANDORA’S PIRATES: Here Come the Nasties!

The other thing we’re working on is, of course, the inevitable expansion to Pandora Celeste: Pirates & Salvage.

In the last newsletter, we introduced you to the Pirates.  Now it’s the time of the Nasties!  Three new Big Nasties are emerging from the shadows of the Pandora Celeste:

The Ulaar – the last survivor of a warrior race, driven mad by the suit of impenetrable armour that encases it.  The Ulaar is totally invulnerable to physical damage.  The only thing that can harm it is a dose of ‘Flu vaccine squirted into its breather intake.  So you’d better find that MediKit or convert the Combat Surgery in the Cargo Bays into a bio-weapon dispenser before the Ulaar carves you up with its deadly BuzzSaw!

The Cyber-Slaver – on a mission to Augment all humanoid life, the Cyber-Slaver doesn’t try to kill you if it catches you: instead it grafts a piece of biotech onto your body.  This grants you a temporary point of armour, but cannot be Healed – and if your combined Wounds and Augmentations every exceeds your Health, you become a Cyber-Slaver!  That which doesn’t kill you can only make you Servile…

The Garr’Goyle – has a very distinctive survival mechanism.  When under attack, it injects calcite nano-particles into its pores, which transmogrify into an impervious calcite substrate. Basically, it turns to stone. This renders it essentially invulnerable, but at the cost of freezing it in place.  Which means that if you threaten it by playing a Fist Icon into your Active Defence Area, you can hold it at bay – at the cost of a valuable Fight card. But better that than having it Steal one of your Wounds and convert it into an extra Hit for the Garr-Goyle – especially since no matter how hard you hit it, the Garr’Goyle only ever takes 1 Damage before freezing to stone.

So there you have it, three more Big Nasties from the Pandora’s Box of evils that haunt the Sci-Fi universe.  They have proven very challenging so far in playtesting, and we’re having a lot of fun refining them into something you will ‘enjoy’ encountering in the dark corners of the CSS Pandora.

Do come and try them at our demo on Stand 2-372 at UK Games Expo.

Until then, watch out for those dark corners…

Mike & Lynn