Hello! With the move complete, we've been hard at work finalizing all the rulebook text for the rulebook, the reference cards and other in-game materials that need rules text (special achievements, etc). These will all be available for proofreading next week, took us a bit longer than anticipated this week to nail down some ambiguities and whatnot. We want this rulebook to be definitive, clear, and pretty!

Let's take a look at one spread:

A PDF version of this spread is available here.

The rulebook will be 32 pages, 8.5"x11", with lots of images and examples throughout. It will contain both the rules for the base game and all its expansions. This example spread is representative of the look and feel throughout, and we're excited to share the whole document with everyone next week to read!

Special Achievements

One of the things you may notice about the image above is that achievements are now tucked horizontally under the right edge of your reference card, to show the age name and stripe at the bottom of a card back. We've redesigned the look of the special achievements as well, so that they tuck in the same fashion. One side contains the game information, the other side is a neat image with a tuckable title at the bottom. They'll stand out from standard achievements once in your pile, because they're indeed pretty special.

Decrees and Museums follow the same pattern. We're pretty happy with how they all came out! 

Each of these cards also carries an expansion icon, which will make finding which achievements to put into play during setup easier. 

Hope everyone has a good long weekend, or for folks who are not in the US, a good normal sized weekend. I DEMAND you eat delicious foods! If you do, draw and score a [5]!

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. 

Hello friends and backers! It is 2024, and I for one am glad to put 2023 in the rear view mirror.  PAX Unplugged was a blast, we got to see lots of folks and try out the new cards in person, with a smattering of expansion play. Unfortunately, a week after I got pretty sick and that ran just about through the holidays. Not fun! COVID tests negative, but still an unenjoyable experience. This slowed me down personally for the month of December, but we've been making progress on icons, art, and getting things closer to print. 

Aside from the artwork, Carl and I have continued to refine the new gameplay bits and card wording based on feedback and testing. We got a bunch of valuable insights from the in-person play (especially from brand new Innovation players!). The new latticework styles looked great in person, and we'll be doing some physical print testing of the new card back structure in January. 

We're looking at this going to the presses shortly after Chinese New Year, so we're probably a couple months behind our initial estimates.  Gameplay testing has proven to be a bit longer than we'd anticipated, but we really believe it's worth it. We want the game to be clear, clean, easy to play, and easy to learn. This is especially true for expansion play. Our main goal is to have adding in 1 expansion to only require minor rules/complexity overhead for teaching folks. Adding multiple expansions is definitely still something for experienced players, but it's been very very fun in my experience. I've played a number of 4 expansion games now, and it's a wild but enjoyable ride! 

Apologies for being out of touch during December, but between sick, holidays, and trying to get as much work done as possible, my plate was full (which is supposed to be a November thing, but Turkey Day is a distant memory!) 

The Pledge Manager will be opening ideally in January sometime, but our priority right now is getting the game done. Collecting more money can wait! 

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

Hello! The campaign is cruising along, with close to 2700 backers and $180K in support, which we are very pleased with - a sincere Thank You to everyone who has chosen to back this project. With so many folks interested, we're going to be able to do some Cool Things.

First up, we've enabled our Retailer Pledge option, for 12 games, at $540.  We're thrilled if any stores want to be part of the campaign, but we also understand that it might be easier for you to use your normal distribution/wholesale channels. We do plan to have Innovation: Ultimate in stores through normal distribution, although we will be shipping to all our backers first.  Shipping for the retail level is free in the US, and $40 internationally. If you're a retailer and you have any questions, feel free to shoot us an email to stores (at) asmadigames (dot) com.

Gen Con was super fun! We had a demo table rotating between Innovation: Ultimate, Aegean Sea, and some Good Puppers here and there. One thing that surprised me a bit was the number of folks who came by and had never heard of Innovation. It was great to show some new folks the game. Innovation's one of my favorite games to demo because the rules aren't too tough, and the journey of discovery they go through in their first game is really enjoyable to watch.  To anyone who backed from seeing us at the show, welcome aboard! And to everyone else we got to chat with, it was great to see you.  We did get to play some games with The Unseen, and some exciting hijinks ensued with the Slot Machine.

Licensing: Many folks have expressed interest in whether the game will be available in other languages. We have a number of discussions going on right now with partners across Europe and Asia, and we're hoping to have confirmed announcements on many of those starting next week. Those versions won't be part of this campaign - but I don't mind at all if you'd prefer to wait for your preferred language version of the game. There's a lot of text here, after all :)  I do apologize for being coy about which languages are in progress - but we prefer not to announce anything until a contract is signed.

Art and Design Updates: Innovation Ultimate represents an evolution of the card design from 3rd Edition, and some of that's already been shown on the campaign page and elsewhere. Given the level of support for the campaign so far, we're able to invest in more updates. We're still in the early stages of work on this, but we'll have more to show soon (and during the campaign). The focus will still be on clear, clean presentation and ease of use, but we think you'll all enjoy what we're working on. In particular, we're looking to enhance the appearance of the backs of the cards. 

We're up over 2000 backers, which is pretty awesome! Thanks to everyone who's already supported the campaign, we're going to be hard at work over the coming months making sure everything about this box is as amazing as it can be. It's been fun seeing games launch on BGA and Yucata, the feedback we're getting from folks on the Unseen and all the other changes we've made is super valuable. 

This week at Gen Con, we'll have our prototype copy of Innovation: Ultimate on hand. We're in booth #1731, and if you'd like to stop by for a demo or just to see the marvel of my hand-cut cards, we'd love for you to stop by! We'll also be showing off Aegean Sea, with a limited number of copies available for sale. Come say hi! We'd love to see you. 

After we return home, we'll be back to focusing on our work on the game. There's a lot of artwork to be done, and some refinements we still hope to make to the card templates - we're still tinkering with how Demands are highlighted, for example. 

Thanks again to everyone who's supported already!