Project Update: Timeline: Fulfillment, Gen Con, Adventure!
The print run has concluded and games are already on their way to our warehouses. Right now, we expect fulfillment to start the first week of August for the US/Canada, and later in August for other regions (games will be shipping from hubs for Europe and AU/NZ). This timeline is our current estimate if no delays at all happen. Customs, freight, trains, and labor actions like the potential UPS strike can all affect that, so it's possible things can be delayed by a couple days or a couple weeks. We'll update you when the boxes actually hit our building.
There's a small convention at the start of August that we attend each year called "gen con", and it turns out that those "perfect" dates are pretty much right in the middle of it! There's a world in which we might have some copies there to hand out to backers who want to pick up on-site, show to people at the convention, and sell a few if it works out. Will that happen? Ehhh, I don't have a ton of faith in quick freight these days, so it's unlikely we'll have more than 1 or 2 games to show off. But it's possible!
If you are *theoretically interested* in picking up at Gen Con, please send an email to [email protected] with your name and email (the BackerKit one, if it's different from the one you're emailing from). Near the end of July, if it looks like this is a real possibility, I'll contact you all with more details. I'm excited to get the game to everyone regardless, and that date is closing in!
Hope everyone is having a good Summer (or Winter for you Southern Hemispherians)
Project Update: Updates on Shipping / Replacements
EU shipping is underway (and many have received games already!) - If you received an email asking for address confirmation from our fulfillment partner it is indeed legit - they sent out a form email naming the wrong campaign in one spot. If you haven't received that email (or your game), let me know and I'll see if another can be sent.
AU/NZ shipping is beginning hopefully next week. Container took longer to arrive, but is unloaded and fulfillment ops are underway!
Replacement parts that I'd hoped would be going on in September I'm just getting to now - I apologize for anyone who's missing game/parts in North America, I'll be shipping out many things next week once I get games on hand.
Project Update: AU/NZ Shipping Update
If you are a backer from AU/NZ, and have any address change, the deadline will be October 4.
Project Update: Europe Fulfillment Update
If you need to submit an address change, please do it via email to aegeansea (at) asmadigames (dot) com. We've received a few already, but honestly it wouldn't hurt to send it again. It's been a very difficult couple months for me and I know a few emails have been lost along the way.
Project Update: Teaching Video: Today at 4PM (YouTube Later)
The video's going to be in the style of how I'd teach the game to someone, showing rules and adding mechanics in escalating fashion. Aegean's a lot of game, and teaching it can be tough if you don't have a strategy going in! Hopefully this is helpful to folks :)
Feel free to ask questions in chat, and we'll get to them between takes, or just hang out and watch Ivy surely jump on the table mid-demo.
EDIT: Due to a cat intervention, I'm rescheduling this for 1PM tomorrow, tech troubleshooting the power cable fallout.
Project Update: Games are shipping! (North/South America)
We had a great time at Gen Con, and were happy to meet (and hand off games to) a number of you who stopped by the booth. Got to play some demo games of Aegean as well, which was great to do finally. If you're in North or South America, your games are already on the way (some have even arrived, it appears). You should've received a tracking email. If you didn't, check spam - if it's not there, let me know and I'll see what happened.
As is inevitable, there's one (small) error in the rulebook. The setup diagram shows two copies of the same player's starting inner island, instead of one from each player. All the text is correct, and it's pretty clear what's intended. We did a late edit of the rulebook to clarify a sentence later on (which is fine), and somehow InDesign took that opportunity to muck up a file-include. Sorry about that!
I'll be recording a rules explanation video in the coming days, to help folks get off the ground. Aegean's a fascinating puzzle of mechanics, and once you get it it's a whole lot of fun.
If your copy has any issues (damaged in shipping, missing cards/components), our replacements form is at https://asmadigames.com/replacements . I do not yet have my copies of the game, so it'll be a week or two before I can start mailing out bits.
For those outside NA/SA, we're still waiting for freight to arrive at hubs, I'll share more when I know more! Our goal would be for you all to have your games arriving in September or early October.
Project Update: Good News! Aegean Sea Arriving at Warehouses! Also some other Carl game
Fulfillment for other regions will be starting in August/September as well, games are on their way to various hubs after some lengthy problems finding a proper fulfillment partner. In short: Aegean is on its way to everyone! Hurray!
In other related news, we launched our BackerKit campaign for Innovation: Ultimate today - https://www.backerkit.com/c/asmadi-games/innovation-ultimate, and it's already funded! Hurray!
We're excited to get games to everyone, so you can play them. It's why we do what we do!
Project Update: Quick Update Correction, re: late shipping
Project Update: Pledge Manager Closing TONIGHT: Final Notice
If you haven't filled out your survey yet, tonight's the time to do it! If you need help, let me know and I'll get you replacement links/etc so you can get it filled out.
If you miss the deadline, you can still get your game later, but it'll be in September after games are flowing to distribution/etc, and if you are a non-US backer that misses the deadline, your game will be shipped from our office directly in the USA, and the shipping price will likely be significantly higher, and paying VAT/local duties on arrival will be your responsibility. If that doesn't work, we can always give you a refund.
Looking forward to seeing the game on everyone's tables this summer! Thanks again to everyone who supported the project :)
Project Update: Pledge Manager Opening!
If you're a beta-test backer, we'll be sending out a message shortly with instructions!
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us and we'll help you out with the process.
Project Update: Factory Update: Production, Insert Adventures, Pictures!
As you can no doubt see, the well is not deep enough. It was exactly the height of the cards, which means they spill out reeeal easily:
So, we asked for a revision, taller wells, taller insert (needed to modify the box for this),and it fixed that issue:
But - they made the open top section much much too deep, where the home and island mats go. If the box was moved at all, the cards came out of the wells...same problem. You can see there's a pretty wide gap here, even with the protective plastic cover:
On the third try, we got it right!
So, everything is now in Actual Production, and we'll have info on opening up the BackerKit for shipping + VAT soon (ideally next week) so you can give us your addresses for fulfillment.
Here's some more photos of the box, and some cards in play (including the upgraded colorblind indicators in the corner indicating Preference.
We'll share as soon as we have info from the factory on a firm date, and we'll be making a gameplay video (again, the first one's recording has an issue with the camera's lens which made the whole thing uselessly blurry).
Hope everyone is having a good Spring!
Project Update: Proofs and Schedule
Specifically, we're on schedule to have production stuff start up with the factory after Lunar New Year, but before we submit the final files, we'd love to have you all take a peek!
You can find the cards (both individual island and home) and rulebook up at https://asmadigames.com/sea/proofs (three PDFs, 25MB total). We've gone over them ourselves, but we welcome any feedback. A number of wording clarifications and small clean-ups have happened since the campaign, and we hope the game's in good shape.
You'll notice that the rulebook ends abruptly - we're still compiling a FAQ, but we feel that the rulebook should be theoretically complete without it - if there's anything that isn't fully explained already, we want to know! The FAQ is there mostly for odd edge cases, and things that are in the rules that might not be obvious at first. You can submit feedback here as comments, or via email to [email protected].
We don't have a precise schedule for delivery yet, but we'll update you with boat dates as soon as we have them. Our goal is to have this available in the spring or summer, and we'll see if the Ocean Freight gods (Posiedon?) agree.
Project Update: Visual updates!
One of the most crucial things we've been aiming for with the edits to Aegean Sea over the past couple years is making it easier for first-time players to play (also something I've worked hard on for One Deck Galaxy!). The concept of an island's preference, and the fact that it differs from the color of the card itself, is tricky. Once you get it, it's simple, but between the streams and other first-time plays I've witnessed on TTS over the past few weeks, we realized we needed to beef up the up-front info a bit.
We've also been making various updates and corrections to the rulebook and cards, and we'll be posting proofreadable copies of everything that's been changed after the campaign concludes and before it's time to go to print. We're still aiming to press the print button on this in December. Thanks to everyone who's tried out the game and sent along feedback! It's super helpful.
PS, for backers:
Project Update: It has been a Day!
Unfortunately, our actual secret "real" funding goal was thirty seven point nine million dollars ($$$), and it just doesn't seem like we have the momentum to get there, so we're going to have to cancel the cam-
Yeah no :) We're thrilled with the support so far! Aegean Sea is maybe not a game that will hit the top of the sales charts, but it's a fun, clever, unique game that we want to share with as many people as we can. We're not doing any stretch goals or things like that- the game is complete!
Some folks have pointed out some typos on the current cards and omissions in our beta rulebook, we'll be taking care of those and shoring up the pretty-factor of the rulebook in the coming weeks.
This is our first campaign on BackerKit's new crowdfunding platform, and we like it so far! In fact, in this update, there's even a section called "Backer Only", so I think I get to write a secret message just to backers. Let's find out:
Project Update: Happy Friday! Crowdfunding: Goals, Real Goals, Advertising, and Momentum!
In the last update I made a little joke about "real" funding goals, and perhaps some folks are curious about what our own projections and thoughts were heading into this campaign. We've run many in the past for a variety of games with a wide variety of funding levels. Aegean Sea is a little bit of a niche game, albeit one that I think a lot of people will enjoy once they get to try it out. We set our goal low at $10,000, because that's a big chunk of what it'd cost to do a minimal print run of the game (2-3000 copies). 350 backers didn't seem like too much of a stretch, so we were pretty confident we'd get there. Our thoughts were that if we could get to $25000 (~800 backers) it'd be a good success, and the 1000-1500 backer range would be a great success. If we hit 2000 or more? That'd be amazing!
Having more backers on board gives us confirmation that the thing we think is cool *is* cool, and it also means that we can print more copies up front. Traditionally, the difference between a couple small print runs separated by half a year and one large print run hasn't been too large. You would get a modest break in the unit cost of the game, but nothing that's going to really move the needle. With shipping rates the way they are now, though, consolidating those two small runs into one large run (and thus, one boat trip) is actually quite significant! Having the confidence to create more copies in the first print run is a huge help (and for that we thank all our backers!)
As you may have noticed, we've kept this campaign very simple. We have a game we enjoy, we want you to be able to pledge + lock in a copy that you'll receive before the mainstream release, and that's it! Aegean isn't really a game that lends itself to a bunch of different extra bits, gameplay or otherwise. We're also keeping things very simple with how we're advertising the game. We've used almost exclusively our direct reach of emails through our own list and BackerKit's help with all our past backers. Quite honestly, we don't feel excited about handing any dollars to Twitter right now, nor Facebook (okay Meta, whatever), and so during this campaign? We're not doing it! (Before the campaign, we did run a small test set of ads to generate some email signups/follows.)
But what about momentum? Oh no! The campaign will slow down and...dire consequences! In olden times, crowdfunding campaigns were a grind of slowly getting the word out, shouting to your socials hourly (people loved this, of course). Things have evolved - by sending out word to all our fans directly by email, we scooped up a much bigger group of people to back on the first day. So over the first week, we get about the same number of backers as we would have before, but most of them pop in on day 1-2. Is that worse? Nope! Just a different data curve. So don't worry if things look "slow". We're fine! We're happy with how many of you are already here on our adventures with Aegean Sea :)
What's next? In the absence of ads, we're going to be doing more streams next week instead! On Tuesday night, we'll be hosting another stream on our Twitch channel with Anya Combs, certified cool individual and crowdfunding expert. On Wednesday night, we'll be sneaking over to another channel to play another demo with friends, who even made a cool image:
They're also cool, but their certifications are still pending. Lots of red tape with coolness, you know.
Because time zones are a thing, a summary:
Tuesday Nov 1, 7PM Eastern / 4 Pacific - stream on twitch.tv/asmadigames
Wednesday Nov 2, 11PM Eastern / 8 Pacific - stream on twitch.tv/brain__in_a_jar
Hope to see some of you there!
And of course, what update wouldn't be complete without a secret message just for our backers: