Hey fam, fun week this week.

I've a boat load of your surveys ready to go, so we're taking what Murphy and I put together the other weekend, slapping some labels on, and getting these packages out the door. Can't help myself, there's just a replay of that one scene from Mrs. Doubtfire over and over as we run through this last step.

When's it in the mail?!
Targeting a post-office drop off for Saturday (May 16th), which should also mean by or before then y'all that have completed surveys will get tracking numbers. (BackerKit has a lot of that built-in, so when I have the numbers, they'll get blasted into your inboxes. I'm 90% sure they'll come from BackerKit email address - or they'll come from me, directly.)

Couple of the international backers have some hiccups (like the post-office wants y'all to have american phone numbers to receive packages? weird, but not a game killer) - I'll reach out to y'all individually before the end of my Wednesday (May 13) to keep things sorted.

Local Pickup!
On Saturday (May 16th), will be the first day available for local pickup of your copies of Adventuring Letty. For those of you that selected "Local Pickup," I'll email y'all the time and place I'll be hanging out with Letty and a huge collection of y'all's games. Note: This will be a chance to meet Letty if that's your thing, maybe some of her friends if they come along, too. Subsequent pick-up opportunities will just be Mr Nick with boxes of games. Totally not shady. Probably.

Art, Add-ons, and Beyond
Following this week, those who picked up some art prints will have those sent to them, separately from the game. And sometime late(r) this summer Adventuring Letty will be available at her website. (Some updates are coming to the website once I get everything shipped to y'all.) Other than that, while this has been a much rockier journey than I expected, this is our finish line! Thank you all for your support. I hope you enjoy the game.

And thank you all for immortalizing my favourite thing in the whole world, Letty.

Much love,
-Mr. Nick

Hey fam,

Thanks to everyone that's completed their surveys, well over half of of you! We had an interesting weekend packing up all the games, last step is to slap a label on and get some tracking numbers.

It's May (the) 4th, so naturally Letty and I will be running through all of the remaining Star Wars films, today. By the time you read this, she's likely already wiped out from Episode 4.

There's a magic button I press on this end to shore up the addresses y'all provided: for those having completed your survey, you should be solid. Everyone else: I think you'll get a 48hr/2day window to complete the survey before I get addresses and start shipping.

We've got games going to Idaho, Michigan, Canada, and even Sweden and Australia! (And when I excitedly told Letty this just now, she demanded breakfast, sooooo does she think it's cool or just think I'm here to give her fried eggs and kibble? Who knows.)

Ok button mashing time!

Much love,
-Mr. Nick 

Hey fam,

It's been a helluva year - since the games left California (the last update over a year ago) life's been on fire, stop-and-go, hurry-up-and-wait, uncertainty, and the details don't matter, things've been rough. Finishing out this campaign has been a high priority, but never made it to the top of the list, 'til now.

So it's shipping time! Or uh, "survey" time, if you haven't done this before. Basically: we're sending you a survey invitation email with the subject: "Response Needed — Get your reward for Adventuring Letty" The email contains a personalized link to the fulfillment survey. The survey is powered by BackerKit (the same place where you provided your pledge initially), and it's where you will enter your shipping information so we can get these out the door.

We've answered a bunch of frequently-asked-questions about the survey and BackerKit below. If you run into trouble and can't find the answer to your question here, please email us at [email protected].

Thanks,
Mr. Nick

WHAT IS BACKERKIT?

BackerKit is a service that helps us collect and organize all of our backer information. The service was started four years ago by a Kickstarter project creator (another crowdfunding platform). These guys are great and have been trusted by some of the biggest Kickstarter and Gamefound projects of the last few years (Reading Rainbow, Peak Design, etc.).

Just click the link in the email invite and follow the on-screen instructions from there. You will not need to create a login or password to fill out your survey - just follow the personalized link, and you’re good to go! If you want to go back to review or edit your responses, just click on the link in your survey email again, or enter your email address into the BackerKit project page to recover your survey link.

The personalized survey link was emailed to the address that you provided for your original pledge. To determine what email address that is, simply login to Backerkit and check under "Account" which can be found inside the "Settings" menu. Also check your spam folder, and if you still can't find the email, just contact us at [email protected].

Nopers, sorry! Since this is a small campaign and we've been pretty slow in getting to this point (ugh, we know), we're keeping things brief and tight. When you finish your survey questions you'll see the Add-On screen, but we're not offering Add-Ons at this time. After all backer rewards have been shipped out, we'll let everyone know how to go about getting other Adventuring Letty games and related material.

You should enter the shipping address that you expect to have in May 2026. If you have no idea what that address will be, opt for "Local Pickup" and we'll reach out to you directly and coordinate getting your games. We've got some special help that made a long journey to come and help us pack and ship everything, and we're trying to handle all of that pre-work for fulfillment this weekend - once surveys are done: slap a label on it and send it out the door. 

Yes, you can update or modify your survey answers anytime before we begin shipping. Simply click on the same personalized email link and it will take you to BackerKit where you can modify your responses. We've made everyone wait long enough to get their hands on their rewards so we're looking to move fast, here. We will"lock down" the survey once we've received all our responses, shipping information, etc (estimated for the first weekend in May 2026). One thing to note is that you must fill out the entire survey before we can ship your reward.

Still have a question? Feel free to email us at [email protected].

Two minutes ago! BAM! Games are in California! Constantly refreshing that shippin' tracker actually worked!

None. Nothing really changes from the last update about how things will progress through to games-in-your-hands. We're still working on the Pledge Manager for handling shipping once the games arrive, so expect to see that pop in your inbox in the coming days.

How many times, what? How many times did I write this update? Only two. And I wrote it on Tuesday at Noon, Central Letty Time. If my fingers don't get twitchy on this update, today, it'll for sure hit your inbox--well you know what day it is you're reading this; oh boy am I excited.

My Dad gave our family two rules to live by:

and

Here's hoping y'all are able to enact these while the final preparations for this game are put into motion. The team and I are doing our best to provide relevant and reliable information in these final weeks of this whole adventure. Now I'm going to go off and try to sneak Letty some treats. (Don't tell Melissa, Letty's supposed to be on a diet.)

Much love,
Mr. Nick 

Hey everyone, welcome to the first annual update for the Adventuring Letty campaign!

Jokes aside, each time I've authored this message, including today (geeze), something has come up that either would yield additional questions I could not answer, or details that would yield even more hypotheticals that were just too far up in the air. Most of you are connected to me directly, and have pinged me after the campaign for updates, and it's same rhetoric I gave you then ("Here's what little I know, I don't have enough answers to keep you happy") -- y'all have heard a lot, but I think I've some solid information. And all good news, I think!

Earlier today, a good friend pinged me about the update; he gave me confidence that even if the update's not perfect, just share something. I owe you all that, apologies for the radio silence. Y'all helped bring my dream to life, the least I can do is share in some of the bits and bobs of information I have - and of course what I'm excited about.

Let's start off talking about the super simple piece that's burning most: game's made, on the boat, headed towards the fulfillment center. Does the fulfillment center look strangely like my living room? Maybe. But let's talk about fulfillment in a moment.

Next burning question: "omg Mr. Nick, WHEN!?" The short answer is soon. Based on initial estimates, Adventuring Letty should land in Los Angeles at the start of February (the 7th), and make its way across the country to Chicago a week or two after that. The far-end of the estimate, like everything is delayed and takes ages -estimate, puts the game in Chicago February 28th. Now we're talkin' boats, and traffic, and yada yada, variables that could impact the estimates, but largely I've no reason to believe there have been any hang ups.

My own dear mother, insistent I share my location with her 24/7 so she knows when I'm out on a walk or sitting at my desk -- well her habits have hit me hard. While not meant to be an official record of how the game's progressing, I have been constantly refreshing this ship-tracking page every day watching the progress. While largely I'm sticking to the estimates provided by the manufacturer, it is a tad optimistic that the ship may get to port in the states sooner than the dates I am sharing. It's just what happens at the port is a big unknown. I mean, most of this was meant to be a learning experience, so chalkin' up the World Cup -like anxiety of watching the ship to part of the learning experience.

A large part of the (lack) of communication these last few months has been due to answering these inevitable questions - and not having clear answers. From our small project being reprioritized in its production to - what I can only call - weird windows for when the product could leave the other side of the world: I really wanted to give solid information when I had it. This is more an explanation, not an excuse.

Well, aside from some humble pie, everything in this update should be considered good news! So you may remember from the campaign the imagery of the thing we wanted to make was this 5x7 box with some cute Letty illustrations that Bea Joy Javier made, yeah?

At the campaign close, we had all the assets and materials we needed to bring this product to life. Our manufacturing partner, Sarah, helped us explore some options that would require a tad more investment from us to nudge the game into a few upgrades. So we kinda went ahead and did that!

The Box
We did an upgrade to the packaging. Two-piece boxes are cool. There's something satisfying about a clean open and close of the packaging of a game. And more specifically, something delightful about a magnetic closure on a game. So: we did that. What'll show up in the mail is this fancy little magnetic box that opens up to show you the instructions booklet, the new tokens (we'll get to those in a minute), and the deck of cards for playing the game.

We hinted a tiny bit at future expansions for the base game, "Adventures" we're calling them. May have gotten a little too excited at the prospect of brining those to life, so a little preview of their artwork is all over this box. "Camping," "Beach Day," and "In The City" are what you can see, here. Also Letty's tail, ha. (She knew I was distracted when we were crackin' open this production proof at the brewery.)

The Token
Throughout playtesting and development, the "token" of Letty - the two sided card that passes between players indicating who has Letty's attention - well it was just another card. It served its purpose, it was clear during playthroughs what that card represented. However, during clean up of games, and setup of future games, the Letty "token" would get a bit lost in the rest of the deck. In a few instances during playtesting, the Letty "token" would even get accidentally discarded. Anyway, we solved it: we upgraded the Letty token to a nice little punch-out piece of cardboard. Now when you play, the token won't get randomly discarded, it's bigger (wider, for sure) than a standard poker-sized card, oh and there are two! You don't need two to play the game, just one, but each token is still double sided. Since we playtested this game with some younger generations, and because it's all "this dog I love" -themed, I'm anticipating a chance that a token may suffer through some tough love. So there's an extra just in case.

Hmm, "easier to use?" How does one claim something is easier to use than a poker card? Too late, I'm rollin' with it.

The Cards
Ok so I'll swoon about card quality upgrades, but largely since I didn't send out the prototypes to everyone here, I'm not really giving you anything to compare this upgrade to, really. So even without the frame of reference, feel my excitement about upgraded card quality! *pauses for you to feel it!* (There's probably a pun in there with respect to card texture. I think I've been doing this for too long.) Anyway! Cards are a bit easier to fan out in your hands (and the hands of smaller-sized players), they're a bit tougher when performing riffle shuffles, and overall they seem to be a bit more durable. (Somewhere around 230 games is where the prototype's cards started to fringe or fade on the edges, just due to normal wear and tear. While we haven't played nearly that may games with the production-proof the manufacturer sent over, there's a noticeable difference in these cards.)

The game itself doesn't have 54 cards (think: 52 card standard deck of cards + 2 jokers), so there are two cards with some pictures of Letty (for real life!) to help round out the decks. These aren't playable cards, but adding playable cards to the game likely would've had to go through all of the testing and balancing that Perfectionist-Mr-Nick would've demanded.

There are two things (plus one optional step) that need to fall into place (besides the game getting here, of course). First: while the current "fulfillment center" does look suspiciously like my living room, we are partnering with a local organization to assist with the fulfillment of orders. They'll handle the packing, labeling, and shipping of the orders. This piece is still in motion and largely shouldn't slow the process from games-at-Mr-Nick's-house to in-your-hands. Second: The Pledge Manager here on BackerKit. Do I know where Steve lives? Yes. Does that help ship to Ann-Marie? Not at all. So we're still going to need to use the Pledge Manager to collect all'y'all's addresses where you'd like me to ship your pledge. BackerKit's Pledge Manager does allow for picking up an extra copy of the game or two, that's built in; however that's not really the motivation for the Pledge Manager. There are extra copies of Adventuring Letty available, but our main focus is getting your pledges out to you. If you had art work as part of your pledge, there'll be a way in the Pledge Manager to pick which piece of art you want, too.

The third optional step is tied to everything that happens after the pledges are fulfilled. I wanted to do something to give back to the community around Letty, and Melissa had this great idea that we take a portion of post-campaign sales and donate them to the Friends of Chicago Animal Care and Control. That is 100% the plan, but there are some logistical or operational things that need to happen to ensure we get the donations to the right place and all this legal-related-mumbo-jumbo is in place to make sure the dogs are benefitting from the donations and everything has been accounted for appropriately. This step isn't a blocker or even really affects getting pledges to y'all. It'd be nice if it was sorted at the same time as we get pledges out the door - but not necessary for you to get your game.

I think I also have a stack of stickers unrelated to the campaign around here, somewhere. If I can find them I'll throw them into every order, too.

Awesome! Since I'm spending the next few days (and weeks?) here on BackerKit with the Pledge Manager, y'all's pledge information, etc, I'll be super active. We don't have any "release party" planned for March, yet, though that is something we'll likely want to do for our folks in the Chicagoland area.

Well it's always an adventure with Letty. Lately she's been over the moon about the snow in Chicago. (Last few days have been more cold than snowy, but does that girl love the snow!) Mmm, do we -- yeah ok let's share the other something special.

So unrelated to the game, I had some friends do up a comic of "Adventuring Letty" what feels like a thousand years ago. Check out this piece that hangs proudly at Letty's place.

The immensely talented Max Bare & Melissa Sue Stanley brought this to life. I know, another Melissa, but different Melissa.

Then sometime I think as recent as just before our campaign, another comic artist and children's book creator Justin Castaneda ran a crowdfunding campaign to promote a self-published comic loosely based on his niece (super adorable). Well we managed to sneak Letty into one of the stories in that campaign - Letty, a race car driver. Still distractible by butterflies, though.

And a bunch of other cool stuff we'll share another time, because this was supposed to be about the game, not Mr. Nick swooning through photos and projects of Letty.

Ok one more.

Alright thanks for your patience both with the project and getting through all of this content. If you fancy more Letty photos, she's over on the 'gram. Expect to see more alerts from BackerKit in the coming week (singular) about Pledge Manager, refined shipping estimates (as they come in), and maybe I'll find a surprise or two to share out.

Thank you all! For all the reasons!

Cheers,
-Mr. Nick