So… Remember last time I said: “Don’t hold your breath, something’s bound to go wrong somewhere…?” No sooner did I press ‘Send’ than we started drawing the ‘Spanner in the Works’ cards from the Fulfilment Deck.
The first was Compatibility Issues. The only way we could affordably develop this game was by doing a lot of the graphic gruntwork ourselves. So we would take the assets provided as a kit of parts by our lovely artists and spend most of our spare time combining them together to create the cards and rulebooks and other things that make up a game like this. It meant that our limited funds could go towards bespoke art and marketing rather than paying an artist to endlessly refine a card from playtest to playtest as we honed the game.
But as we started submitting these gamefiles to our manufacturer for validation, we discovered that the ancient steam-powered graphics package we were using had some compatibility issues with their design software. Turns out these issues weren’t as serious as we first thought, but by the time we’d figured that out we’d lost half a month. Suffice to say, we had lots of lovely cards and rulebooks that were being bounced back because they weren’t up to spec and we didn’t seem to have the in-house capacity to fix them.
Step up our lovely lead artist Kris. He kindly offered to do the fixes at no extra charge (bless you Kris, you lovely, lovely man!) That was great, but Kris can only work on Pandora part-time, so progress was inevitably slow…
It got even slower when his kitchen blew up in his face! I kid you not. His cooker went up in flames, setting fire to his kitchen. Kris is alright, thank goodness, though he has minor burns all over his face – he was lucky his glasses protected his eyes. But a combo of having to move out of his apartment while it gets repaired, dealing with insurance adjusters and recovering from his injuries has put a bit of a damper on getting cards for a poxy boardgame print-ready in time. Yea, I know: the man has his priorities all wrong, but what can you do? 🤕
So we bit the bullet and upgraded to a modern DTP package which didn’t require me to sell a kidney to afford it (I’m looking at you Adobe 🤨). Now bear in mind: we’re not graphic artists. With our old package, we could do basic things that didn’t require too much knowledge. Put simply, we could drive the car but if you asked us to engage Cruise Control, we wouldn’t know what button to push. And suddenly instead of a car, we were in the cockpit of an airplane with so many whistles and bells that the noise of new information was deafening. So we’ve spent the last month desperately learning an entirely new language and trying to translate our game into it so that we can get the assets out the door.
Which is a very long-winded way of saying we’re a bit behind schedule…
We’re not as badly behind schedule as I feared we would be. We still have a fighting chance of getting all our assets validated before Christmas and maybe even getting the print sample before the Chinese New Year. If we can manage that, we are still on track to start printing in late January and delivering in May, but it’s gonna be tight!
All I can say is that we’re trying. We really are. We want this delivered by UK Games Expo as much as you do, believe me. And we’re working flat out to try and make that happen.
So that’s the bad news. Now for some better news.
WE ARE ABOUT TO LAUNCH THE PLEDGE MANAGER!
This would have happened earlier if the curve balls described above hadn’t eaten up most of our time; but we’ve just had our Pledge Manager approved, so backers should expect the invitation from Gamefound to drop into their Inboxes sometime this week.
For those of you unfamiliar with this process, Gamefound will send you a link to the Pledge Manager, which will tell you how much you have pledged and give you the opportunity to adjust your pledge before paying for shipping (and taxes if you haven’t been charged those already).
Lynn has been diligently whittling away at shipping costs and the good news is that in most cases, we’ve been able to reduce the cost of shipping by a small amount. So backers in the UK, EU, Australia and New Zealand will pay less than we estimated. Backers in Hong Kong and Japan will pay a little more, but we are heavily subsidising these to keep within the Stable Pledge promise we made, despite being stung by higher costs than we were led to believe during the campaign.
US shipping is a little more complicated because of the constantly fluctuating exchange rate. We have done all we can to keep the costs to our US backers at or just below the $22 we estimated. However, since Gamefound will only let us set our prices in Pounds Sterling, the exchange rate may take this over $22 if the value of the Dollar falls. Hopefully, that won’t happen.
A MINI UPDATE
We just received a sample batch of all our minis from our supplier, and they look fab! 😁
Above you can see Marina trying to protect The Kid from FN(R1R) the CyberWolf, and below are some montages of all our minis on the board.
Some of the minis like the Trophy Hunter have been reworked to make them more easily printable and less prone to breakage. The MonsterBug is now set on a moulded base which makes it a lot less fragile than the original, but its mandibles need to be much more menacing than they are at the moment. And the Time Jumper needs a bit of a rework. But I think you can see that the minis have a great table presence and are really fun addition to the game. If you want them, both the Core Mini Pack and the Extra Mini Pack are now available in the Pledge Manager.
The 6 standard Crew. The Kid and Greasball in the centre are only in the Deluxe Game.
The Big Three Nasties (MonsterBug needs to be bigger).
Time Jumper, FN(R1R) and the ShapeShifter
Marina & Keni
PnP & COLLECTORS EDITIONS
Once the Pledge Manager is up and running, we’ll be working to get the PnP files and the Collectors Editions to their backers. This may take a little while longer, as validating the game assets is significantly eating into our time, but we are working diligently towards getting these to you before Christmas.
The Collectors Editions will still contain the old rulebooks from the demo copies, since it feels pointless to printout a new set of rulebooks until they are locked for printing. You will of course receive the final edition of the rulebooks with your Deluxe game. Until then, you can access the most up-to-date copies of our rulebooks-in-progress here.
That’s it for now. I was hoping to tell you more about our new game Mapcard Empires, but I hope you'll understand that it will have to wait a while, until we’ve got Pandora sorted out. Our top priority is getting the game you trusted us with to you as soon as we possibly can.
Until then, keep watching those dark corners…
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