Good day! We've got lots of good news for you today, but the main thing is that we have been assured we will be able to ship the consumer backer and pre-order copies of Gloomhaven out of China before the Lunar New Year.

In the coming weeks, we'll be putting together delivery schedules for all the different regions and start shipping updates again as the games start to move, but the first thing we wanted to do is communicate a cut-off date for address changes. With the games shipping out of China at the end of the month, we expect that, in general, they will be arriving at fulfillment centers in March for fulfillment around April. So with that in mind, we'd like all address changes for wave three to be communicated by February 28th. So if you need to change your shipping address from what is currently on file in Backerkit, simply email [email protected] with your backer ID or Backerkit email address along with your new mailing address, and the sooner you can do that, the better! In addition, any remaining preorders or partial payments due in the pledge manager will be processed on January 31st.

Not much more to communicate here than what is above. The factory is assembling all the components now to make sure backer copies get shipped out by the end of the month.

Also, here is an assembly video we received from the factory that may be of some interest:

This week saw a standard delivery of new digital modifications and red wax samples for our review. We also approved on 14 new polyurethane (PU) samples that are all looking quite lovely. We're really proud of how the group of Lurker enemies are coming along and hope you are too. Because Lurkers and Demons play such pivotal roles in Gloomhaven and Frosthaven we wanted to make sure these models in particular felt extra dynamic, and as such, budget a little bit more on the production side for these to be multiple piece sculpts. What this means is rather than the miniature being plastic injected molded as a single miniature, various parts of the sculpt are molded individually and later glued together during assembly. And while this isn't necessary or reasonable across the entirety of a project like Miniatures of Gloomhaven, it was important to us to identify models like Lurkers that deserved that extra bit of production love. We hope it shows!

We’re still hammering away at layout, but it’s coming along nicely. We’ve been working hard to incorporate playtester feedback into the documents, then update the current layout flow with the new text and moving art/design elements around as necessary to match the new placement of the text. I could go into all the technical details, but the long and short of it is that I’ve cleared my plate for the next two weeks to do this work and we’re hoping to have everything in its final place/state by the end of the month. We still have a few smaller details to nail down once that’s done, such as proofing (a once-over by someone other than the people who have been staring at it for months) and then an index. I’ve already got our indexer primed and ready to go with the text materials and our style guide so they can identify important terms to seek out and give us page numbers for. But that’s the very last thing we’ll do, as any change in the text during proofing could change a page number in one place and mess the whole index up!

Speaking of playtest feedback, we’ve updated some of the book text language to marry the book’s text with the cards in a way that I think will be more intuitive and friendlier on both new players and people who are intimately familiar with the board game. There’s always a lot going on in each individual Gloomhaven action, and we want to ensure the best understanding possible. 

So the text will look something like this:

And some full-page art by Ed Bourelle:

                                         

In other news, we are excited to share with you that Cephalofair is officially bringing on two more full-time staff! These are two people who have been working with us for a long time and are now having their roles expanded.

First is Danielle Lauzon Harper, the project lead on the RPG, who is now a full-time project manager for Cephalofair. Danielle has done such a great job managing the RPG, she was the obvious first choice when we decided we needed a full-time project manager for all our current and future projects. This should keep things running along smoothly as we work on getting the rest of these waves finished!

And second is Layne Huber, who has been doing contract graphic design work for us now since we launched the Backerkit campaign, and who is now being brought on as our graphic design lead. Layne has been instrumental in getting Gloomhaven out the door and is now hard at work on the cards for the RPG. Having him full-time means we'll get everything else out the door faster, which is always good!

On behalf of the entire Cephalofair Team, happy Lunar New Year to all our international and celebrating backers and manufacturing partners!

We've been working with many of our manufacturing partners for upwards of almost 10 years now, which is incredible to think about. We know the hard work it has taken to get backer copies produced ahead of the nearly month-long holiday in China and are so appreciative for them and their expertise. We wish our partners a prosperous new year and ample quality time with friends and family in the month ahead. Gong Xi Fa Cai!

And that's all the news we have. Catch you next time!