Good day! I need to jump right in with the bad news here: last week, we made the hard decision to cancel ocean freight on Gloomhaven due to newly presenting production issues. We were all very excited to see our first round of printing start shipping, and we sent advanced copies to our team, some creators, and our partners, only to find significant component problems when we opened our boxes.

What are the production errors? We saw warped map boards and scenario trackers, along with poorly injected and assembled miniatures. None of this met our quality standards or had presented itself in samples or pre-production copies received ahead of mass production. 

Obviously, this came as a huge shock to us, especially as ocean freight had already begun on multiple containers. However, once we verified that it wasn’t just one or two boxes with these issues, we recognized that halting further shipping and returning the product to the production facility was the only reasonable solution.

As Lunar New Year is tomorrow, facilities are already shut down for the holiday. We’re in conversation with the facility manager, who is fully invested in correcting these issues. They have both acknowledged the errors and  committed to providing us with replacement product. That being said, we won’t be able to reprint the game until workers return in mid-February.

We won’t approve another mass production run until we are certain we’ve discovered the root cause of the issues and solved them. So what does this mean for you? It means a delay of a couple of months. We aren’t sure exactly how long it will end up being, but be assured that we and our production facility are determined to solve this problem quickly and efficiently.

Making this decision was genuinely heartbreaking, but we firmly believe it was ultimately the best call.

So that's the news on the Gloomhaven front. We're also going to skip over updates on miniatures. We did have some progress there, but haven't been able to fully process it yet with big issues taking priority. So that leaves us with an RPG update below.

We do have some good news on the RPG front, so this update isn’t all bad. Layout is moving along smoothly, all art is turned in and approved, and graphic design on new icons for a few RPG-specific use cases are moving along quickly. We’re still on track for getting the RPG to proofing by the end of this week or early next week. I don’t want to make any promises, but I'm crossing my fingers that we’ll be able to send out a preview PDF in February to all of you.

This part of RPG production always feels like directed chaos. The pages look like a mess, headers are scattered everywhere, we only have placeholder images, and yet, somehow, we are close to done with the book. That last bit takes a ton of effort, but it isn’t so bad. We’ve gone through and edited the text for readability, and it might look a mess, but a quick find and replace will shape it up in no time. Here’s a spread to show you what I’m talking about:

While these updates have been focused on the book, we’re also hard at work designing the RPG cards and other physical components, so that those of you who backed for the deluxe box aren’t going to have to wait. (Which is, honestly, most of you.)

And here’s some more art from the core rulebook:

                                         

And that is all we have for the moment. We're sorry the news isn’t good, and it certainly isn’t news we’re happy with, but we'll hopefully have better news to come as we work with the factory on where to go from here. Catch you next time!