A Shot from the Guntower - July '25

Hey Crewmies,

We’re beginning the fulfilment process for Pandora Celeste – a month later than we’d hoped, but given all we’ve gone through to get this far (an IT meltdown, 2 fires and Donald Trump), by crowdfunding standards I think that’s pretty good.  I dunno about you, but I’m still waiting on games I backed more than 2 years ago to arrive. 

This is the culmination of a lifelong dream that has taken us the best part of 5 years to get to this point.  And now we’re finally delivering this game to you lovely people who helped us make it happen.  So please forgive me if I shed a little tear…🥲

Needless to say there are still teething troubles – of course there are teething troubles 🙄 – but we’re getting there and that means the world to me.

So, in this Newsletter, I’m going to talk about these things:

·       A Shipping and Fulfilment update for Pandora Celeste.

·       Component issues for Pandora Celeste.

·       How to Play and tell the World about Pandora Celeste.

·       The box & standees for Pandora’s Pirates & Salvage Expansion.

·       Tech Trees and the four X’s in Carta Imperia.

So if you’re here for Carta Imperia, scroll down to the bottom where I give you a juicy little development update, and feel free to ignore all this Nasty stuff about the hazards of Space Shipping.

PANDORA SHIPPING UPDATE:

Australia & NZ: Fulfilment is complete!  🥳  So if you haven’t received your game yet, email us at info@guntowergames.com and we’ll chase it up for you.  A couple of you have had component issues, which I’ll discuss in more detail below; but if you do have any component issues or other queries, email us at info@guntowergames.com and we’ll endeavour to sort things out as quickly as we can.

Canada & USA: The boxes have landed and are being delivered to ShipTop in Vancouver today (3^rd July).  So assuming Donald Trump doesn’t throw yet another chaos bomb into the mix, we should be Fulfilling to you over the next 3 weeks.  Please wait until the end of July before enquiring about your delivery – it will take a while to get things up and running and we won’t have any concrete information until then.  Once again, direct all enquiries to info@guntowergames.com.

UK & EU: The OOCL Felixstowe was last logged off Cape Town 4 days ago and is still on schedule to dock at Felixstowe on July 12^th.  Fulfilment will take place through Zatu from the second half of July, but please wait until August before enquiring about your delivery status, because we won’t have any info before then - and direct all queries to us at Guntower Games.

COMPONENT ISSUES:

We’ve had a couple of queries about cards and standees over the last few days.

First let’s talk about the cards:

• You will find the card for FN(K9) on the back of FN(R1R) in the Big Nasty Deck.  He is listed as part of the ShipDeck in the Component List because his token is a ShipDeck Token. But don’t make him angry: he gets Big & Nasty when he’s angry…

• There is no ‘Self Destruct Protocol’ card.  This was replaced at the last minute by the Clean-Up Protocol and I failed to change it in the Component List (cos we were having IT issues and doing everything in a rush).  So you still have 11 Emergency Protocols, you just don’t have one labelled ‘Self Destruct’.  If you have the Deluxe Game, the Ship can still blow itself up using the Overload Protocol, which is why I replaced the Self-Destruct card, because they were essentially the same story and it works better with the engines in the back of the Ship.

Now let’s talk about standees. 

The perennial issue with standees is that very slight variations in the laser cuts can result in the tabs that go into their bases being either too loose or too tight.  Too loose and they slip out too easily: too tight and they end up breaking the base, which is a much bigger problem.  So I erred on the side of caution when designing them.

If you find the base is too loose, the

simplest and easiest solution is to add a drop of glue to the corner of the tab, which will hold the standee firmly in its base.  A tiny blob of Blutac in the hole of the base will do an equally good job if you want to disassemble them later.  We crave your indulgence to try one of these solutions before asking for a replacement because there is no guarantee that any replacement we send will solve the issue. 

If the base is too tight, it can result in a stress fracture.  A small fracture is nothing to worry about.  But if the fracture cracks the base in two, send us a picture and we’ll send you a replacement.

As ever, please direct all enquires to info@guntowergames.com.

HOW TO’s:

As I’m sure you already know, the Learn to Play Booklet is designed to teach you the game as you play along.  You can literally open the box and start playing, following the instructions of the Learn to Play Campaign step by step.

But if you don’t like reading even these instructions, I’m putting together a series of Learn to Play videos which I’m posting on our YouTube channel.  Here are the first 2:

How to Play the Prologue: Waking Up’s So Hard to Do

How to Play Learning Scenario 1: A Bit of a Bug Problem

If you enjoy the game, please do us a favour and Rate us on BoardgameGeek.  Or better still, leave a comment.  And we’d love it if you’d write a review or session playthrough for the Forums or on your favourite social media boardgaming site.  It really does help a small indie like us to raise the game’s profile and get it known by more people.

And while you're on the Geek, check out these 3D-printed storage boxes that our fan Steve has created to hold the Tokens etc. They're absolutely fan-tastic and I want one!

PIRATES & SALVAGE

By now you should know that I’m all about the storage.  I hate it when a Kickstarter comes with tons of different sized boxes containing add-ons and expansions that you can’t fit into the main game box.  So it was very important to me that the Pirates & Salvage Expansion for Pandora Celeste should not only have the same quirky ‘the box is the board’ vibe as the main game, but should be storable in the main game box as well!

So here’s what I came up with.  The inside of the Expansion's box doubles as the Pirate Shuttle, which can slot into the Starboard Docking Bay. 

It can also be stored in one of the big compartments of the component insert, meaning that it doesn’t take up any more of your precious shelf space when you add it to the game.

We’ve also just received the first prototype standees for the Pirates and new Nasties.  They’re still a work in progress and the scale’s not quite right, but you can see that they’re gonna look great! 😁

CARTA IMPERIA BECOMES EVEN MORE 4X

If you’ve come here to read about Carta Imperia, you’ve probably played it at a convention or one of our test sessions.  So you’ll know that I’m trying to create a game that ‘feels’ like a 4X but which only takes half the time and space and cost that a 4X usually takes.

And for me, the key thing that was missing from the game was a Tech Tree.  Every 4X has a Tech Tree in some shape or form – a way of evolving your Faction to gain some advantage and elevate it above the rest.  But how do you do that in a semi-cooperative game where everyone is part of the same superpower – namely Rome?  And how to do it in a way that doesn’t add yet more cards or personal player mats that overbloat the game?

So I came up with Reforms.  These come in 3 types: Military, Political (Laws) and Administrative.  They cost Prestige to Enact, and once enacted anyone can use them (because everyone in this game is part of the Roman Republic), but to use them you have to pay Auctoritas (basically VPs) to the player who Enacted the Reform. 

This adds several interesting dynamics to the game.  First, it provides an advantage to the users of the Reform.  But secondly it creates a decision space where you have to ask yourself the question: does the benefit from this Reform outweigh the reward I am paying my rival for using it?  And thirdly, you have to decide when to Enact a Reform and whether it’s worth the cost of doing that rather than taking a different Action available to you – and that involves reading the room to gauge whether your fellow players are likely to use the Reform you are Enacting in this particular game.  Are they warlike enough to make use of Military Reforms; are they triggering multiple elections or law suits that give the Political and early Administrative Reforms some traction; or are they likely to go for the massive advantages that the later Admin Reforms provide?

We’re busy testing these at the moment, and I like where they’re going so far.

One of the other things that cropped up in our convention demos is that some players were struggling with the Latin names for the Action Cards.  While wonderfully thematic, they didn’t instantly tell you what the card was for.  So I’ve decided to forego the historical immersion of ‘Procurator, Politico, Protector and Proconsul’ for the more descriptive and thematically 4X titles of Xploit, Xec, Xtort and Xpand.  Of these, three I think are very obvious: you play Xploit to exploit the areas you control for resources; Xtort allows you to wring concessions from your opponents with threats of legal action; and Xpand allows you to conquer new territory.  Only Xec isn’t completely obvious.  This allows you to fulfil the Executive functions of converting your temporary Prestige into more permanent Victory Points, buying extra Meeples, Enacting Reforms and triggering Governorship Elections in the Provinces.  But if you can think of a more catchy, catch-all title that starts with eX… which describes this, please let me know.

In the meantime, we keep on playing, we keep on testing, we keep on refining and making all these games as fun to play as they possibly can be. 

So until the next time, when I hope that Pandora’s Fulfilment will be in full flow, watch out for those dark post vans. 😉

Mike