We will be locking all orders and charging cards for shipping for Chess Joker using the BackerKit platform on Tuesday, May 26. Addresses will lock that week as well.
Fulfillment in most regions will happen in mid to late July, based on our current boat projections!
(If you also backed Mystic Curling Club, you got two emails like this! Hurrah!)
Greetings! Assembly is underway, and we have some pictures! These are stills from a video from the factory, so pardon if there's a bit of blurriness because I'm screenshotting from that. Rest assured, it looks very good. If you're on the fence and haven't pre-ordered yet, now is the time. They won't be open too much longer.
Box Cover!
Back of the box
The insert holds the components in five sections - the top for the rolled up chessboard, and four divided sections for the card decks and pieces: The pieces look just like the ones we've had at Gen Con and PAX:
And the cards came out great - good big clear text, and pretty colors. Note again that there's a hair of extra blur here because it's a video capture. Once we have the samples in hand here, we'll do more pictures :)
Happy Spring all! We'll update with more info once we have a shipping schedule.
We've got a few days before things lock in pre-press, so if you happen to find something unclear or a typo, please let us know! We've checked over everything more than a few times by this point though. Fingers crossed, haha.
Shipping Surveys
These will start going out next week. If you have any trouble or questions, feel free to post a message or contact us and we'll help you out :)
Mystic Curling Club
Because we're producing two games at the same time (Chess Joker & Mystic Curling Club), each are available as add-ons for the other's campaign and pledge manager. Mystic Curling Club is our magical dice-curling game! It's neat. If you'd like to learn more about it, check out its Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/asmadigames/mystic-curling-club
If you backed both campaigns, we'll cut your shipping costs on the pledge manager for Chess Joker, and ship your rewards together. This will be done manually after you submit your survey. Shipping combination will be based on shipping address.
We're excited to get games out to all of you! Happy Olympic Season, all :)
Hey friends, happy holidays and almost new year! We have reached the 200% funding level, hurray!
Cool stuff to share today, first up - the box! We've been experimenting a lot over the past few weeks with various box arts (you may have seen a sneak peek of them in some places), and we're pretty happy with the result - a vibrant box that should look great on store shelves or your shelves. The render below includes the components for scale - the box will be 12"x6", which allows the rolled up chess mat to sit inside, above four insert slots for the decks and pieces. We've also updated the cover image for the campaign, which previously was a variation on the card back.
Stream Today! Games with friends and viewers
Do you want to come try out Chess Joker against the pros? (the pros are me) Today on Twitch starting at 1:30PM Eastern, I'll be playing games with whoever's around - or just against the combined might of Chat if you all want to team up together. Carl might drop in too if he's got time. Look forward to seeing a few of you there!
Chess Club Discount Tier
By popular demand of a few friends who run chess clubs at schools and colleges, we've added a $99 / 4-pack tier for clubs. If you want to spread our game to clubs, we'd love that! 4 copies is enough to run tournaments and provide lots of enjoyment for players of all levels.
Thanks everyone for joining us during launch week of our campaign! We appreciate each of you who're helping us get this game printed :) We're at 150% and hope to keep climbing over the course of the campaign.
Over the rest of the campaign, we're going to be doing some more fun interaction with our players and fans - we've seen a bunch of games happening on Screentop already, and remember, feel free to join the Discord and ask any questions you may have. We're happy to help!
This weekend I'll be running a couple streams. Saturday during the afternoon, I'll be beta testing the upcoming Chess Arena digital game (it's a strange but fun mashup of a Battle Royale + Chess), along with some games of Chess Joker against chat or people in the discord server. That stream will start around 1PM Eastern.
Sunday Carl and I will be doing a stream from 2-4PM Eastern. We'll play a game against each other, and maybe some games with chatters!
Both streams will be up at https://twitch.tv/asmadigames/ - and tonight the channel will also be streaming my Curling match tonight at 8:30, live from Broomstones Curling Club. This is not chess related, but it is still fun!
We're also going to retool the poll-based game with Backers - it wasn't quite working as cleanly as we hoped, so I'm working on some other ideas on how to have some fun with it.
