ENDLESS WINTER - Paleoamericans

Small production update #3, EW Expansion Tournament, and some big news!
almost 4 years ago – Thu, May 05, 2022 at 02:25:28 AM

Greetings dear tribe members!

Today we are going to share with you our typical production update and talk about an upcoming series of TTS playthrough videos and EW tournament. Also, since we promised to keep consistent communication about things we do here in Fantasia; at the end of the update, we are going to add a news section. If you only desire Endless Winter updates, you can choose to skip that section.

Production

Once again we are happy to announce that production moves smoothly without surprises. We have received some photographs of the camp and village productions and they look awesome. Have a look for yourself:

Our logistics department is working hard at the moment with split shipments, freight booking, setting up customs clearance agents and fulfillment centers. This project is very demanding with a large amount of independent products, so we need to be very careful to make sure everything is taken care of appropriately.

EW expansion playthroughs

Based on your question from our last Q+A, our lead playtester Dale Keefer proposed to us the idea of creating a series of TTS playthroughs based on the expansions and then a follow-up tournament. Of course we loved the idea, and Dale is already working to organize it.

Each of the following weekends this month we will present a live-streamed TTS session with some special guests that Dale will invite. There will be a total of 3 playthroughs - each of them based on one Endless Winter expansion - and they may be accompanied by modules and/or promo cards.

EW tournament

With the completion of those playthroughs during June, we are going to announce a new Endless Winter tournament that will also be based on the expansions. We will share more about this in our next update, so stay tuned. :)

News!

In our last update we gave you some hints about our upcoming games. Let’s go into some more detail on this subject :)

Here at Fantasia we love crunchy euro games with a strong theme and production. This is something we are going to dedicate ourselves to for the years to come, and this is the style of games we want Fantasia to be known for.

Nevertheless; as creative people, we would love to be involved with another game category - one that focuses on family oriented games and themes - but still has a strategic approach. We believe that family games have evolved a lot in the last decade and they can offer an enjoyable level of strategy that we would like to explore.

For that reason, we are excited to announce that Fantasia games is going to establish a publishing imprint with the name of PIKA Games!

Pika games was inspired by a cute, mountain-dwelling mammal found in Asia and North America. We literally fell in love with this animal while accidentally checking an article about the 10 cutest animals in the world. To prove that, have a look at a Pika in action! :) Isn't he cute?

Although PIKA Games will keep the same standards of production as Fantasia games, we plan to establish a totally independent team of collaborators that will run PIKA’s upcoming games.

And talking about upcoming games, let's reveal the designers that are already working on Pika’s first two games.

We are excited to announce that our first title will be designed by the talented Henry Audubon, designer of PARKS, and it will most likely be launched in February 2023. Expect the cover of this game, the artist, and some info to be revealed soon!

The follow-up game will be taken care of by the lovely design couple of James and Clarissa, designers of EVERDELL! We don’t have a clear launch date for this one yet, but we also plan to reveal the artist, the cover, and some info about it soon!

Our plan is to show our process in public to whoever is interested in those titles and be able to follow their progress. Something like an organic game’s diary. This way we will always be open for comments and suggestions along the way and ready to adjust when needed. Both of the games are commissioned designs about realms that we will explore together with the designers, the artists, our team . . . and of course you!

If all of these sound interesting enough, we would love to see you on the social channels of Pika games :)

Facebook page

 https://www.facebook.com/pikaboardgames 

Facebook group

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/pikagames 

Instagram

 https://www.instagram.com/pika_boardgames/ 

What’s next

And that’s all for now. As always, our main focus is the completion of the mass production of Endless Winter and we will keep you updated with everything that comes along the way.

Until next time…

Stay calm and play board games :)

—Fantasia

Small production update #2 and Q+A
almost 4 years ago – Sat, Apr 16, 2022 at 12:55:54 AM

Greetings dear tribe members!

Thank you for your patience. Since there is nothing urgent to inform you about, we took some extra time to have our weekly production update that takes place every Wednesday.

In addition, in our last update we asked you to share with us any questions you might have to participate in an unofficial Q+A with us.

Production

We are happy to announce that production moves smoothly; and until now, there are no surprises. Moreover, we have just received the official timetable of the production that the factory verified.

We basically only have a delay of 1.5 weeks (compared with the rough schedule), and that is mostly because of the Covid lockdown we informed you about in our previous update. The factory made it clear to us that they are going to do what is humanly possible to avoid any other delays.

Here are some nice images showing the preparation of the camp pieces :)

Unofficial Q+A

In our last update we realized that in our updates to come there might be minimal information to share, mostly because we are in the ‘waiting mode’ of the production schedule. Nevertheless, we are used to this organic communication we had with you until now, so we found the opportunity to collect and answer some of your questions.

We now reply to your questions in the order that we received them:

Question 1: I'd love to have sneak peaks of your future projects. I bet many of the ppl here don't know about Unconscious Mind yet.

Soooo . . . We have a surprise for you about that. Ok . . . Let us give you an unofficial sneak peak of the game’s components (at least the ones that are mostly done). You will notice the main board and other components are not yet done. In general, please keep in mind that the game is still under major development and anything might change along the way. So we would like to kindly ask you not to share these images in social media; but if you do, at least please let everyone know that nothing is set in stone yet :)

These are the player boards, representing your professor in his office. This is where the engine building / programming element of the game takes place. During the game, the player may add therapeutic technique tiles in these slots. During your turn, you place your worker to perform an action on the main board. Each action is linked with 1-3 Inkpot movements (round slots showing on the left of your player board). After performing your worker’s action, your Inkpot then moves and activates the line of therapeutic techniques that now align with it. The Inkpot slots are basically a small rondel.

The goal of the game is to complete psychoanalysis sessions with famous people of Vienna (the game is historical fiction) and heal their traumas by applying positive feelings on their unconscious (dreams). Here are some patient cards (top line).

Applying positive feelings on dreams will give you hearts, and hearts will heal your patients. There are 3 feeling types in the game (Desire - Red fire, Freedom - Purple bird, and Growth - Green plant) and each of them has 3 levels (ego, superego, and ID).

In order to convert those feelings you use your feeling converter tile. This dual-layer tile has a slot in the center (ID - unconscious) where you place your feeling tokens. Your goal as a therapist is to push those feeling tokens usually to the outer sections of the feeling converter and bring them from the unconscious to the conscious.

Then you can apply those feelings to the dream cards that are linked with your patients, and heal some of the childhood traumas.

Here you can see how each patient's info is customized through a transparent trauma card. Once that trauma is healed it is removed from the patient and you take its instant rewards.  Once a Patient completely finishes their sessions, they usually provide instant VPs, an ongoing effect, an end-game bonus, and an influence point in a building on the map of the center of Vienna on the main board. Also patients and paper cards give you access to write a thesis.

The winner of the game is the professor with the most victory points, who contributed the most to the collective knowledge of psychoanalysis and made a name for himself in Vienna.

Here's an overview of the game's presence on the table, but there are many things not done yet. Obviously, there is more to the game that we haven't gone into details like the actions of the main board, the thesis tiles, or the map of Vienna. We will share more info with you in the next couple of months. Until then, we believe that we’ll have a nicer TTS presentation with most of the artwork done.

And that was our mini unofficial presentation. We hope you enjoyed it. Before I go, here’s a sneak peak of the professor meeples placed on the map. :)

Question 2: Any plans to make Endless Winter available on Tabletopia?

Yes. Tabletopia already reached out to us and showed interest in bringing Endless Winter to their platform. Once we find the time, we will definitely work on that. Most likely during the summer.

Question 3: Would be cool to see a full test play video with all expansions?

We are already in agreement with Gaming Rules! of Paul, to make some videos about all content of Endless Winter once he receives his MPC copies of the game, somewhere around June. The videos most likely will be posted 1-2 months before the games reach your door. In the meantime though, after your proposal, our Playtest group plans to arrange some unofficial play in TTS soon, for all the expansions and modules of the game. We will let you know once they are ready.

Question 4: I actually would really like a little bit of a "behind the scenes" style of update. Where did the idea for the setting come from? What was the first prototype like? Stuff like that. Maybe like a small blog entry. Maybe even a little bit about the team, your favorite games, food, movies.

Interesting question. We found a text and image from Stan back in the days where he referred to some back stories of Endless Winter. Here’s what he said:

Theme or Mechanic, which came first?

Every designer has heard this question and not once. Sometimes it can be hard to answer but not in the case of Endless Winter.

You see, when I started working in this game I had a very clear mechanical goal in mind. I wanted to make a deck building game that was somehow different from a hundred other deck builders in existence. I admit I didn’t look at every single one ever made, just the heavies of this genre: Dominion, Ascension, Star Realms, Clank! Shards of Infinity and Mystic Vale. I also checked out less common ones like Path of Light and Shadow and Arctic Scavengers.

Then I came up with the idea of a deck builder where you play your cards a few at a time instead of all at once and then combine that with worker placement. That seemed pretty unique so I got cracking.

I initially used a generic sci-fi theme to skin my cards because I do not like completely abstract prototypes. Any theme helps with engagement and to ground your rules in some kind of universal system. I called that early game Space Colonists. Please hold your applause for that very evocative and unique title.

For a while I had a lot of fun with the sci-fi planet settlement theme and perhaps it will see the light of day once more. But in the end I opted for an Ice Age theme instead. I’m a big fan of history and I love doing research for games. Ice Age and early human history themes are definitely represented in board games but they aren’t as common as fantasy or sci-fi.

Of course the theme and mechanic inform one another. Some changes were cosmetic, like renaming cards. But The change in theme also led to real mechanics changes. I abandoned “warp gates” and “commodities markets” parts of the early game and instead I designed “hunting” and “culture” and “megalith construction”.

At a certain point the mechanics and the theme became so interdependent that I can not imagine this game functioning as any other theme. I think I would have to change about 60% of everything to re theme this properly.

Although this game began with an idea for a mechanically unique deck builder I’m extremely happy with the thematic feel of the game and at this point I’m more into the theme of it than the mechanics. Such is the story of Endless Winter.

And here's Fantasia's perspective on the game. Back in the day, we were thinking about which game should be our first to publish as a newcomer company. We already had a couple of ideas in mind (Unconscious Mind was one of them), but when we saw an image of Stan’s prototype on facebook asking for playtesters we were instantly hooked from it.

We asked Stan if the game was available, we tested it, saw the great potential of its mechanics and we instantly signed it. You could say that it was love at first sight. Although we loved the theme already, we tend to prefer more unique environments to explore, and there were a good amount of prehistoric games out there. This is where the idea of a paleoamerican realm came to mind. Many games were done about native americans but none of them (as far as we know) was done about the prehistoric era. Reading more about the Beringia passage in North America, we knew that this is the theme we should aim for.

And once we decided on that, we realized that Mico was a perfect fit for it, since he also hadn't worked on a prehistoric theme before (again as far as we know), and seemed to be a perfect fit for it. The last missing piece was a great developer such as Jonny Pac, to collaborate with the team in order to expand this game with 3 expansions and 4 modules, so we can provide an epic experience to backers from day 1. Being a newcomer company we wanted to instantly show to the community what our team can do, and by doing this, build a feeling of trust for the games to come. Many awesome people with great skills joined our cause, and you can check all of them in the credits section of the campaign. The rest is history :)

About our favorite movies, food, board games, let’s keep that a mystery for now since our reply was already too long :P We can come back later to it.

Question 5: Any info about the future expansion to endless winter!

We definitely want to make a future expansion for Endless Winter, but firstly we would like the game to reach the community and gather feedback first. Then we are willing to hear what are the desires of the fans about a future expansion. Nevertheless it’s not a secret that at the moment we have a favor towards a campaign expansion. Let’s see what the future awaits for Endless Winter :)

Question 6: ….Any news on upcoming projects is always appreciated. Or maybe some small accompanying games in the same 'world' of your big releases. Similar to what we see with final frontier games. Would like to have a 20-30 min short game with a similar artistic/feel as the big box.

We can assure you that we are interested in a future title that will be based in the universe of Endless Winter, but this time in Paleoeuropean territory. Most likely though this is going to be a totally new game. But this is going to take some time, we firstly want to give some time for the community to enjoy Endless Winter.

About future games except for Unconscious Mind, we have 5 more games in the works that we cannot wait to talk with you about. Expect some big news regarding the first one soon, even by the end of this month. The second one will probably be announced during the summer. Would you be interested to be the first ones to know?

Question 7: We could take a look at the rules in any other language before receiving the game?

Since the translated rulebooks are owned by our licensees, it would be best to kindly address this question to them. Most likely they will be happy to share their translated version of the rulebooks with you.

Question 8: Any news on shipping yet, or is it still too early?

Please have a look at our final schedule. Everything we know so far is listed there. More specific information about shipping per continent will come along the way.

What’s next

And that’s all for now. There was a question about what cause in our opinion the delays in our campaign but we feel we covered this topic twice in our previous updates. We hope our replies covered all of your other questions, and that you enjoyed this as we did. If you did, we might repeat this in the future. In the meantime as you correctly guessed, we will patiently keep our focus on the production of Endless Winter, and let you know all about it! 

Until next time…

Stay calm and play board games :)

—Fantasia

Small production update
almost 4 years ago – Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 11:58:47 PM

Greetings dear tribe members!

We would like to start by expressing our appreciation of the trust and support that you expressed through your messages in our previous update. This is going to be a small update since we don’t have much news to share with you yet.

Production

As you all know, we are glad that mass production has started. During the first few weeks after our last update, we received some packing test videos from the factory to find a proper way of packaging the core game and big box. For the big box, we came up with a ‘double-use’ foam solution. Firstly, to protect the game during shipping; and secondly, once the game is punched and unpacked, a pre-cut section of foam will be used as a placeholder inside the box (for a future-expansion’s gap). Expect an official video about packaging soon!

And while we were super enthusiastic and eager to dive into more info about production, we had a small unfortunate surprise last week. The city where our factory is based needed to close due to Covid for a week. Things are back to normal now, but we hope everyone there is doing alright, and we are glad to be back to production.

What’s next

So that’s basically it. Hopefully we will have more news to share in our next update. With this lack of news, we ask you: is there anything you’d like to know about Endless Winter, our future games, or our company? Please share your questions and ideas in the comment section and we could gladly answer them in our next updates! If you want to keep these updates strictly about production, that’s totally fine for us too. Let us know your preference. 

Social media

We were happy to see Endless Winter mentioned once again in Dice Tower’s most anticipated games of the year… and Unconscious Mind also made it on the list! Check out their fun reactions about the game - you won’t be disappointed!

(note: Mike mentions Endless Winter at 4:18)

And that’s all for now.

Stay safe and let’s be in touch :)

—Fantasia

Mass Production has finally started / Production Schedule estimation
about 4 years ago – Fri, Mar 04, 2022 at 11:30:11 PM

Greetings dear tribe members!

We are thrilled to let you know that the mass production of Endless Winter has finally started this Monday (it wasn’t endless after all :P) !! As promised, we have asked Panda’s project manager to provide us with a detailed schedule from production to fulfilment. Keep in mind that this schedule will need 2 weeks for the factory to verify that it's valid or let us know if there are going to be any minor adjustments in dates. Click on the image to enlarge it.

We will be honest with you. This left a bittersweet taste in our mouths. On one hand, we finally see - in action - our 1.5 years of efforts to make this game happen, and it looks so good. On the other hand, it was unfortunate for us to see that the last backers will receive the game by the end of September. The worst prediction we had before was that the game would likely be delivered during June; but as you know, at a certain point we announced to you that we are going to stop making predictions and instead focus on starting the mass production as soon as possible. It seems that although we honestly did our best, delays on file fixes, the scale of the production (50K copies), the global freight situation, plus us being newcomers, were the factors that led to this result. We know it’s not great but we would kindly ask you to show some understanding and go easy on us. This was a great lesson that we will obviously remember with our future games. In any case though, please accept an honest apology from our team for miscalculating our initial date of delivery by so many months. We really hope that once you receive the game, all will be made up for you :)

So based on the schedule above, here are some important milestones for the production:

February 28: Mass production

May 23: Assembly

June 27: Ocean freight shipping

July 25: Fulfilment Asia/Australia

August 29: Fulfilment America/Europe/RoW

September 26: Fulfilment ends

What’s next

In the following weeks the factory will check the packaging of the games, making sure of safe delivery. We are constantly in communication with them for any questions they might have. In our next update in 3 weeks, we will be able to give you more information about it - exciting moments are ahead of us!

Let’s be in touch :)

—Fantasia

Tiny Update
about 4 years ago – Wed, Feb 16, 2022 at 01:47:58 AM

Greetings dear tribe members!

The factory finally opened this week after Chinese New Year. As mentioned in our last update, we would prefer to postpone our official update for 7-10 days in order to have some valid information to share with you regarding the mass production.

As a summary of the last 3 weeks:

- We finalized the Big Box packaging with our tray designer, and we have updated the shape and usage of the foam. More about that in our official update.

- We have finalized all of the game quantities for mass production.

- We have gathered and updated the last files that had minor issues.

- On Friday, we got the approval that everything is good, and we are now waiting for the updated and final digital proofs for all partners. This won’t take that long now since most of the files were correct.

So we are now waiting with great enthusiasm for this week to hear more about the mass production schedule and then share it with you and our partners. Exciting times are just around the corner!

Talk to you soon :)

—Fantasia