Greetings, Innovators from around the world. We've been hard at work on many many things related to the game, and wanted to share what's been going on!

Artwork & Graphic Design

As we mentioned during the campaign, we've done a redesign of the card backs. We've also changed the previous checkerboard pattern on the card fronts to a design that is related to that age's back artwork:

What you can also see here is that we've done a full redesign of the latticework that connects icons when piles are splayed. In 3rd edition, we had the latticework change from age to age. Since we're doing the background art differences, this freed up the latticework to do an important new duty: Color identification!

Now, the lattices differ by card color, not age. They now have shapes related directly to the shape surrounding the card's age/value in the top right. Our goal here is for this to provide a significant distinction between card colors to anyone with color vision difficulties, and will also make each color's splayed grid look more consistent.

We're also working on making the 150+ new card images for The Unseen, Age 11 cards, and a handful of card identity changes across the other sets. Lots of cool new things to represent!

Gameplay Updates

With the playtesting resources we have available on Yucata and BoardGameArena, we've been able to play a LOT of Innovation over the past couple months, as have many of you! We've been taking in feedback and adjusting card balance based on our experiences and others. Some highlights:

There are many many more changes to cards (small and large) that we've been making as we go. We're getting pretty happy with where the game is, but there's still testing to be done.

Effects / Wording Clarity

One place we've been making a number of changes is card wording clarity. Removing extraneous phrases that were confusing, general streamlining, and making cards from different sets that did similar things more consistent in their wording.

An example of this is the new keyword self-execute which replaces wording like "execute all non-demand effects on [card]. Do not share them". We've also isolated visible to only refer to cards in a stack. A splayed stack has all cards in it visible, an unsplayed stack's top card is the only one visible. Other effects that refer to icons, hex/card images, bonuses always now only refer to those on a top card or those revealed by a splay.   

There is one potential wording cleanup that we'd like backer input on - cards like Masonry: "You may meld any number of cards from your hand, each with an [A]. If you melded four or more cards in this way, claim the Monument achievement." 

We're considering the following options:

There's a poll attached to this update (hopefully?) that allows you to vote for the option that you think works best. Thanks for your input on the topic!

Pledge Management/Schedule

We haven't yet opened the pledge manager, and we're probably not going to until December at this point. We need to do some back-end things with BackerKit to do with shipping before we can get that running, and frankly right now - getting the game finished is more important!

Our aim was to send the game to print around December 1, but we've undertaken a good amount of extra work with the cardbacks and more balance updates than we'd initially thought. We still very much want to submit the files to the factory by the end of the year, but it might slip a couple weeks beyond that. We still aim to deliver in the Spring - none of this was going to be on presses until after CNY regardless.

PAX Unplugged: Booth 3246

We will have a demo set of Base + Unseen (maybe one other expansion, we'll see - I have to cut them by hand) at PAX Unplugged the first weekend in December, and we'd love to have you stop by! We'll have a giant inflatable Plumplim, as is tradition. It's majestic. 

Hello friends, associates, and innovators! We're entering the last few days of the crowdfunding campaign, ending Friday at 7PM Eastern. We remain overwhelmed and incredibly grateful for the support of each and every person who's chosen to back Innovation Ultimate. We've pushed well past our projections, and it's wonderful to see a game that's close to 15 years old see such love. I'm proud of how much fun we've been able to deliver to the world with Innovation over the years, and excited to see even more come from this new edition of the game.

I'd like to address and apologize for the quietness of the back half of this campaign. My original plans were to be more active streaming plays on BoardGameArena and Yucata, among other things. Unfortunately, as some of you are no doubt aware from my posts on other projects and elsewhere on social media, it's been an extremely difficult year for me personally. Without going into too much detail, there's a family medical situation that's been taking much of my time, and in particular over the past couple weeks I've spent many, many hours going back and forth to the hospital and otherwise dealing with things. I sincerely appreciate the well-wishes, thoughts and support I've received. The good news is that things seem to be trending in a positive direction with regard to the situation. I'm hopeful that I'll have more time and energy for game-things during the Fall. 

While I've been largely sidelined, work has been continuing in a variety of areas on the project. As we shared in the last update, we're working on new images for the card backs. We've got three more of them in various stages of completion and sketching, and will be showing some of that art in the coming weeks as we progress toward print-readiness. We're also working on the individual card images (the hexagons) for the Unseen, the new Age 11 cards in other sets, and a small handful of other icons across existing cards that need updates. We're also still poking at the card-front template, making small adjustments as we prepare to create all the cards in the updated style. InDesign adventures are coming, hooray! 

On the game design side, lots of playtesting has been going on both on BGA and Yucata, and we've been amassing feedback from all of the game's fans who've helped us out by playing the game! Lots of things are working great, but a few things may still need some tweaks for balance, fun, or just wording clarity. It's been super valuable to have so many eyes on the game, and I think it'll result in even better quality than we would've had without that participation. 

Thanks again to each and every one of you! We couldn't make great games without people who want to play them, and your early support for Innovation Ultimate here on BackerKit helps us significantly in bringing Innovation Ultimate to you all in its best possible version.

It is the final day of the campaign! We're wrapping up at 7PM Eastern time, in just 12 short hours. We'll be hard at work in the coming weeks on finalizing gameplay balance adjustments, artwork and design updates, and all the other things that go into submitting a final product to the factory. 

I wanted to offer a quick update on localization - I'd hoped to share more details before the end of the campaign, but the situation I mentioned in the last update has prevented me from finalizing contracts and doing a formal announcement of partners. I can say that we're confident that there will be forthcoming editions of Innovation in Spanish, French, German, Chinese, with strong possibilities of some other languages as well. These versions will all carry the same look and design presentation as the English version, with some small adjustments for language as necessary. 

Work on those editions cannot start until our version is fully complete, so it will be early 2024 before we share files with our localization partners - their versions are not part of this campaign nor will they be available from us directly in the pledge manager. 

We're really excited to wrap this campaign up and thankful to everyone who's backed and supported us! Have a great Friday, everyone :D