ENDLESS WINTER - Paleoamericans

Sleeves, Trays, & Final Digital Proofs
about 4 years ago – Wed, Jan 26, 2022 at 10:13:08 PM

Greetings dear tribe members!

We would like to start by thanking you for being so supportive in our last update. We honestly didn’t know what to expect, but as we explained from the very beginning, we decided to be transparent during the entire process - and that’s exactly what we are going to do today also.

Sleeved cards

Lately in the comments we have gotten more questions about the number of sleeves needed for the game and whether sleeved cards will fit in the trays. Unfortunately, the FAQ section of the Kickstarter cannot be updated at this point, so we thought it would be a good idea to provide answers to these questions here.

So first of all, yes, the trays will fit sleeves of 60-100 microns.

Secondly, here is a detailed list of the cards used for each Endless Winter product:

Core game:

178 Euro cards

76 Mini Euro cards

Ancestors expansion:

90 Euro cards

60 Mini Euro cards

Rivers & Rafts expansion:

20 Euro cards

5 Mini Euro cards

Cave Paintings expansion:

20 Euro cards

5 Mini Euro cards

Canine expansion:

14 Euro cards

Ceremonial Grounds expansion:

7 Euro cards

Aurora Borealis expansion:

6 Euro cards

Promos:

5 Mini Euro cards

In total among all products:

335 Euro cards (size: 59 x 91 mm)

151 Mini Euro cards (size: 44 x 67 mm)

We hope this helped you. If there is anything more you would like to know, please let us know in the comment section.

Receiving updated samples

We have updated the tray dividers to address a technical issue that is now completely solved. In summary, the tray dividers were too short. As a result, the cards (especially the non-sleeved cards) would lay down too far in the trays. For that reason, our tray designer was in direct contact with the factory to make the dividers higher. Our factory managed to achieve a great result, and our designer will receive and test the samples in the following days. In the meantime, here are a couple images:

In addition to the samples of the updated trays, we will receive the updated quad-folded mainboard, the shorter Idol board, custom-shaped player boards, and the foam of the big box.

Tray guides

Our tray designer had an awesome idea about creating a storage guide. Some licensees decided to include it in their copies in physical form, while others will have it available on their websites to download. Either way we believe that this guide will be very handy, especially for your first plays. Have a look at them here:

Digital proofs arrived

For the last 3 weeks, we were waiting for the factory to send us the digital proofs from our licensees and we were happy to receive them all on Saturday. We were informed that it took more time than expected due to the size of the project, which makes sense (usually, it takes about 1-2 weeks). The good thing is that we got them before Chinese New Year, because either way, we would have to wait for the Chinese vacations to finish in order to start mass production. Since it’s our first time going through this process, we have realized that in each step of proofing, minor issues are found, and this step was not an exception. This is literally the 4th proofing we have done so far, but luckily this time only 7 files need to be fixed.

What’s next

So, for the next 2-3 weeks, our collaborators will have the time to check the digital proofs that we sent them today and fix any issues. The factory will open again on the 7th of February. At that point, all files should be fixed and sent for final approval, and then we will officially start to talk about the day that the mass production begins. On the side though, the factory will be organizing the mass production of all the non-translated components of the game. Since the 7th of February is literally the date of our next update, we might not have so much news to share about the production; so if needed, we might postpone that update for a week or so to be able to provide more interesting information. In any case, we will keep you updated.

At the end of this update, we will share with you some cool publicity for Endless Winter and Unconscious Mind.

Be safe, and happy gaming!

—Fantasia

Merry Christmas and a happy new year!
about 4 years ago – Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 12:17:07 AM

Greetings dear tribe members!

The team of Fantasia would like to wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year! We hope you have an awesome time with your loved ones.

Standard vs Big Box

We realized that we haven’t shown you a size comparison between the 2 boxes, so this is a good opportunity to place them side by side. Have a look and don’t mind the Christmas decoration in the back :)

The "legendary" dry-erase markers with eraser caps!

We also realized that we never showed the proper tribute to our dry-erase markers that caused so much buzz during our campaign. Shame on us! So here you have them in all their glory.

The gap between the legs of the Painting boards was quite big for them. We already made the adjustment for the final product but there was no need to prepare a new sample just for that.

Great news - the trays arrived!

One day before Christmas we received the trays of the game. This was the last piece of the puzzle needed to be able to test how everything fits together. And we have to say that except for a couple of minor things, they work great. Of course, we couldn’t resist making a proper presentation for you with a photoshoot and video. That’s the reason we postponed the update by one day. The lucky ones that searched the comment section yesterday could have already seen a sneak peek of the video. We hope you enjoyed that tiny surprise :)

Before we start, what were the minor issues with the trays? The animal board was longer by some mm so it couldn’t fit properly. We have already fixed that now. The mainboard was dual-folded, but the actual design needed a quad-folded board. We don’t need to do anything for that in the file, just prepare a new sample in the factory. Finally, a slot of the Sacred Stones was a bit tight. Nothing really serious but hopefully we can make it a bit looser.

Having said the above, we are ready to dive into the tray presentation!

Let us start by showing you the way you will store your trays to each of the boxes.

Here you can see the main big tray of the game that holds all the common components of the game. It comes with a nice lid to keep everything in place.

Here you see the Player trays of the game. These will help you significantly reduce the downtime of setup. Each player grabs one of these, plus a player board, and more or less you have everything you need for the game. Ok, there are still some things to select/take like the Chief card, Chief mini, Setup card, and Player aid card, but you get the point, right? :)

Here’s the expansion tray. You will find this tray only inside the big box. It holds most of the expansion material. Nevertheless, some expansion components like the Cave Painting Terrain tile, the Rafts, or the Rest token are stored in the main tray. Don’t worry, all of them have distinctive icons to easily distinguish them among core components.

And finally, as we already mentioned, we prepared a video presentation for you to fully understand how everything works. Hopefully this video will also work as a tray guide in the future. Enjoy!

Playmats

We also received the updated playmats and made some final adjustments to the small one (needed to reduce some mm from its length to fit properly in the standard box too). The rest are mostly the same; we just printed them with the final iconography since the last samples we had were dated.

What’s next

The last thing left to do is to receive the foam of the big box, alongside the updated quad-folded mainboard, and the shorter animal board. Then we will be able to fully test the proper packaging of the game and make sure everything fits properly. We have already sent all files from the licensees to the factory. They asked for some adjustments and we are in the process of providing them back. This is the third and final proofing.

Year’s summary

So December is almost gone. We remember back in October of 2019 we were setting 4 goals for this campaign:

1. Not make compromises in the quality of any section of the game’s production.
    
2. Keep the best possible balance of value for money.
    
3. Have constant and transparent communication with you along the way.
    
4. Try to deliver if possible before December.
    

Looking at the outcome of this campaign so far, we believe that we succeeded with 3 out of 4 goals. Although we gave the best of our efforts, working even during the weekends (our collaborators can verify that :) ), we obviously failed to achieve our 4th goal.

Since we were already informed that producing and delivering a game is the most challenging part, and we did our best to prepare ourselves for it, why did this still happen?

Well, there are a number of reasons for it and now that we learned the whole process of a game’s production, we have collected enough experience to be able to answer this question.

Not a fully developed game

When we launched our campaign we thought that the game was almost finished, and that we only needed to fully develop our expansions and modules. This proved more challenging than we expected. It turns out that we fully developed the game and all of its expansions and modules around June. That’s way too much. To have an idea, our first estimates were to start the production around May in order to be able to deliver the game 2 months earlier to you as a nice surprise. We know it sounds funny now, but this was our intention.

Lesson 1 learned: Don’t launch a campaign if your game is not fully developed. Take your time, complete the game properly, and then run a campaign. We are lucky now to have an amazing Discord community that will help us playtest and develop all of our future games. Having said that, we are already going to postpone the campaign of Unconscious Mind as much as needed, in order to have the game fully developed once we launch it.

Too many languages inside the KS campaign

This is a tricky one. It doesn’t necessarily mean that this was a bad decision, but it was definitely something that escalated the difficulty of the game’s production for a newcomer company like us. You see, since those languages were offered inside the KS campaign, it was impossible for us to split the production into 2 waves and deliver first to let’s say 3-4 languages and then the rest. At the same time though it’s actually a cool thing that so many backers with another language than English were able to join the campaign and get the KS exclusives.

Lesson 2 learned: As we mentioned this was not necessarily a bad decision to take, but you definitely need to be aware of what this means for your workload and be 100% prepared about it. With the proper game (the fewer things to translate the better), and being fully developed, this can be quite doable.

Too many products, KS exclusives, and Big Box

Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing to do, but the combination with the things above can be challenging. Keep in mind that everything needs to be translated X number of times for each language. Now if you have an exclusive product, let’s say the big box, you need to create a new production line for all of those languages. Now add to that the KS version of the game that contains the KS exclusive upgraded components and you need to add another production line for all of them, and so on.

Lesson 3 learned: Keep your production lines as efficient as possible. This is something that comes with the experience of the company. As we mentioned above in our goals, we have decided not to make any compromise for this game so in order to get the best out of it, we have created a gigantic network of production lines. At least we were lucky enough to have Panda on our side, and they encourage us that everything will be smooth with it.

After all, we were newcomers in production

As a team, we had a great experience in designing a game and setting up a KS campaign. The reason is that we all worked in previous campaigns as freelancers. But this would be the first time that we would take part in the production and delivery of a KS campaign. Now as we already mentioned we knew that this is a very challenging part, but being extremely motivated and counting on our enthusiasm to work as hard as needed, we overestimated our powers.

Lesson 4 learned: No matter how motivated and hardworking you are, stepping into a territory that you are facing for the first time, unavoidably will take you more time than others to adapt. Don’t overestimate your powers, and give yourself enough time to make things properly.

And there you have it. This is our year’s experience compressed into some paragraphs. Now to reply to the delivery question. Since we don’t want to tell you an estimation that is going to be proved wrong, we would like to first start the mass production. In order to do this, we need the last updated components that we mentioned to arrive and in the meantime, the licensees need to approve all of their files once the factory sends digital proofs to them. We honestly do our best for this to happen as soon as possible, but at this point, we can only make predictions since it’s affected by many factors (Christmas vacations included). We promise you though that once the mass production begins, we are going to ask the factory for a detailed schedule of the game, from production to delivery. We hope to have this in our next update. End of Q1 - beginning of Q2 2022 is still a very realistic goal. 

And that’s all for now. Thank you for your understanding. We promise to do much much better on the production-delivery topic next time.

Be safe, and happy gaming!

—Fantasia

FINAL FILES (Part-2)
over 4 years ago – Wed, Dec 01, 2021 at 05:49:32 PM

Greetings dear tribe members!

Sorry for not posting our update following our typical 3-week routine. That’s because we are heading towards a very important part of the project, but let’s take things step by step.

Big Box

Firstly, we would like to share with you some photos of the big box. We have to say that the combination of spot UV, the frosted effect, and embossed areas look awesome. It wasn’t easy to capture these in photos, especially the embossed parts, but once you receive them, you’ll get to see them in their final glory. Have a look.

Tray samples

Also, we literally just received, some hours ago, the game tray photos. On the left side is the original sample photo; while on the right, we did a representation of the final product with the bleed removed. We cannot wait to receive the physical samples of them!

Final files from licensees

Finally, we are happy to announce that all files were received as planned from the licensees, except for one that will be delivered tomorrow. Then we will make sure with Panda that everything is correct and we will send digital proofs to all of our partners in order to approve them. When everyone approves their files we are officially ready to start mass production! :)

What’s next?

We estimate that this process will take 1-2 weeks, so hopefully in our next update we will have exciting news to share with you about the mass production. As mentioned before, our partners will deliver their final rulebooks by the 20th of December.

Social media

Before we go, we would like to share with you two awesome videos coming from BoardGameDave about Endless Winter and its expansions. We met David through our Discord channel, and he was heavily involved with the play testing of the game. Have a look at them, let him know what you think, and show some love for his new channel.

And that’s all for now :)

Be safe, and happy gaming!

—Fantasia

FINAL FILES (Part-1)
over 4 years ago – Fri, Nov 05, 2021 at 01:36:47 AM

Greetings dear tribe members!

We would like to start by thanking you for all the great comments you shared with us about the presentation of our pre-production copies. For those of you that had the opportunity to check them at Essen, we would love to see your comments about them.

Finalising files

The last 3 weeks, the whole team was once again on fire. Once we received the copies - after we presented them to you - we started proofing them, and writing down all the minor errors we could find. Obviously, this is the most important and stressful process of the game’s production, so we can pass everything correctly to the mass production. We believe that we found all the issues, fixed them, and they were just approved from the factory.

As we previously told you, we were planning to finish this process by the 25th of October, but it seems that this process will be officially done by this Wednesday. The reason for this was: comprehensive and demanding rulebook editing to make things as refined as possible. But don’t worry, we won't have any additional delays from this. We are still on track to start working on the mass production by the 15th of November. Panda told us that we will have a couple extra weeks to provide the rulebooks for the licensees. As long as the licensees provide the cards and boxes of the game by the 15th of November, no delay will occur.

Late Pledges

After mass demand, we have decided to postpone the closure of the English version late pledges until the end of November.

What’s next

We will be thrilled to reach the 15th of November, and start talking about the mass production process of the game. As always, we will keep you updated for everything that comes along our way.

Be safe, and happy gaming!

—Fantasia

Essen Spiel & Late Pledges
over 4 years ago – Sat, Oct 16, 2021 at 09:38:32 PM

Greetings dear tribe members!

This is going to be a short update talking about Essen Spiel and our Late Pledges.

Essen Spiel

If you are visiting Essen Spiel at the moment, feel free to go visit the booth of our friends at Frosted Games (1-E118). You will have the chance to check for yourself the pre-production copies of Endless Winter! Feel free to take some photos and share them on our social media - we would love to see them! :)

Also make sure to check out the boxes of our upcoming games Unconscious Mind and Sweet Mess.

Late Plages

FInally, we would like to inform you that all languages (other than English and German) are now closed for late pledging. German will also close after the completion of Essen Spiel.

The English version of the game will close on the 22nd of October! So if you have friends that are interested in the game, make sure to spread the news :)

Before we go, we would like to once again thank you for all the kind and supportive messages you’ve shared with us after our last update. You are the fuel of our motivation, and honestly - you make this happen!

Be safe. Happy Gaming!

—Fantasia