Hey all, wanted to pop in with a quick update. Thanks to everyone who's been sending us notes and taken a look through the hundreds of cards in Innovation Ultimate! A few sneaky typos have been quashed, and some misinterpretable cards have been clarified. So far no real functional changes, hurrah. 

A couple notes on the process:

1) I've tried to respond to as many emails as I can, but things are wild right now because of our move (Both I and our office are moving to a new place, landlord unexpectedly decided to sell our house/office! Yuck.). I'll be offline mostly the next 3 days as all the furniture moves/internet gets transferred/cat explores new apartment. We have looked through almost all the feedback sent.

2) A few folks have been offering large quantities of writing style advice. We appreciate the enthusiasm, but we are unlikely to change the way that the game is written to fit [insert grammar/style preference here]. Sometimes cards with similar effects are written slightly different from one another for space concerns, sometimes to add extra clarity, and sometimes because it we think it sounds better. 

3) Some of the cards are indeed missing, they're being worked on now. Special Achievments, Decrees, Museums, and of course the reference cards will be put together for the next wave of proofing, which will include the rulebook. 

4) A couple folks shared access outside the group I'd let in, which I am disappointed in, but it is what it is. Please don't! 

I'll be back up and running hopefully Monday in our shiny new place, and will have a lot more time to do Games Stuff instead of Panicked Packing Everything Up Stuff. Happy Spring, everyone! 

We are starting to share files for external proofreading, if folks are interested!

You can sign up at the form here: https://forms.gle/BcD24L1jR2s8V6hF9 - sharing will happen via Google Drive. 

Please send feedback directly to me, at [email protected].  If you know me personally, you can send a discord DM. 

I am personally in the midst of a move, which will be done in the next couple weeks. We're wrapping up work on files in the meantime! As they're completed, they'll be shared with proofreaders, and we'll be posting normal updates in May as things go to press. 

Happy April 1 everyone, the day for the most reliable news and information from around the Internet. On this day (yes really), we have opened up the Pledge Manager for Innovation Ultimate!

Pre-orders are also available for anyone who missed the campaign, at https://innovation-ultimate.backerkit.com/.

Note: Our last update has more images of the updated art and graphic design on the cards, if you missed it! (Double note: Due to a small bug, you need to reload the page once you go to the update, to get it to load)

You should receive an email from BackerKit shortly with a link to complete the Pledge Manager. In there, you can add copies, change your tier, enter your address, and put in your payment info to pay for shipping / any add-ons you've purchased. The add-ons are very simple! You can add on additional copies of Innovation Ultimate for $69, or case-quantities of 12 for $540.

Retail Level Note: If you are a store and need to be exempt from sales taxes, that is a manual process and you'll need to contact me with details after you put in your order. Don't worry, we won't run any credit cards for a while yet, so you've got plenty of time to contact.

We were able to keep shipping costs close to our estimates, but they are generally a couple dollars higher than our guesses last year.  We will be shipping from hubs in China, France, the UK, USA, and Canada. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Schedule: We're almost done laying everything out, and will be sharing proofreading versions of the game soon. We spent the last couple weeks doing rulebook tidying up along with a large wording consistency pass across all five sets. Turns out when you make cards over a decade and a half, your use of language evolves over time! 

We anticipate the game shipping to backers and pre-orderees early this Fall. We'll have production samples at Gen Con and will be running many demos there, but its quite unlikely it'll be available that quickly. 

Happy April everyone and thanks for being part of bringing Innovation Ultimate to life! The large response from backers is what's allowed us to invest so much effort in the art and playtesting that we've done over the past months, and we can't express our gratitude enough. 

Hello friends, we are here with an update!

Gameplay

We've been hard at work getting everything ready for print, and we're happy to say that we've reached gameplay/rules completion this past week. What this means is that all card text and rules concepts are "locked in" and we're going through now to ensure we've got wording consistency, no typos, and that everything fits on cards. Big thanks to everyone who's playtested the game on Yucata, BGA, or in person at conventions over the past half-year. Extra eyes are always a big help!

Proofs

With lock-in set, I'm going to be doing the big data-merge export from our card info spreadsheets through InDesign next week. With hundreds of cards, automating this part of the process ensures we don't wind up with transcription errors. From experience, copying and pasting thousands of icons? Not fun. Here's an extremely accurate illustration of the process:

Once we export all the cards, we'll be doing our own check through for errors, along with having the fresh export available on Yucata and a proofreading website for any backers who want to take a peek. We're pretty confident there aren't any major issues left, but a small lurking typo could be anywhere! We welcome anyone who wants to take a peek :) 

With the rules locked-in, we'll also have the rulebook PDF available in the next couple weeks. When all of that's approved, we'll be pushing the print button! Hurray! Definitely a little later than we'd anticipated, but the game is better for all the effort that's gone into it over the past several months. We want to deliver the best possible Innovation to everyone, and we're excited to do just that. 

Artwork Updates

Work on the card icons for The Unseen is complete, and we have a handful of other icons to create for cards that changed titles between 3rd edition and Ultimate. That should be done in the next week or so.  Meanwhile, we've been finishing up work on the new card backs, and we're really excited about how they've come out. Each age's schematic depicts what an innovator of the time might dream of building. We've used building and architecture styles from around the globe, with each illustration created as a monochrome sketch. The set (base or expansion) still determines the color of the card back, which you can see examples of below:

Each expansion also has its symbol beneath the age number to assist with identification, especially for folks with color vision issues. You can also see on the card fronts that elements of the schematic art are carried over on the left edge, to give a little bit of age-driven flavor to your board.

Having played with the updated cards in person, we're really thrilled by how all our changes have come out. The font size increases (especially for card titles) and our updates in color scheme have made the game both more usable and more beautiful.

Schedule

The time to the next update's going to be much smaller as we're rapidly moving into the proofing stage. Expect more news in the next two weeks! We'll be discussing packaging then, along with links to the proofread-ready things mentioned above.