Things remain on track for (a) having games available for sale at the San Diego HistCon Night Market on Saturday, November 7 and (b) shipping to everyone else during November.
If you backed the game and you'll be at SDHC, I can hand-deliver your copy without any shipping costs. (The same goes for people in the Oakland, CA area who are able to come to the Tabletop Library for fulfillment.) I have not yet set up the pledge manager, but as soon as I can, I will, and there will be a "pick up in person" option with $0 shipping.
As for the hiccups, these are both on me, but when the final artwork for the player boards got submitted, we accidentally sent in a version that omitted the +1VP consolation prizes for players who fail to qualify for a progress token, either because they came in last place in a 3p or 4p, or because they came in 2nd place but only have 1st place progress tokens left to take. These were originally intended to punch out of the aerodrome just like the progress tokens, but now they will come as a separate sheet of tokens, usable across players (so they'll be black rather than the players' colors).
This then required a substantial rewrite of the rules (it made it a little easier since now "token on the Aerodrome" and "progress token" are perfect synonyms, no need to say "not including the +1VP tokens" all the time). As it happens, sadly, the rulebooks had already been printed, so $360 dollars later, everything's fixed!
(In truth, I had found a lot of little annoying typos as well, so I was planing to print an errata sheet so the cost of the full reprint at least is offset by not needing to sent out errata, and in truth, it'll make me happier that the rules don't have "Armitice" or "nd" hidden as evil Easter eggs.)
I don't want to jinx anything, but the schedule remains good for the deliverables promised, and right now 75 of the 120 games are spoken for. I will have 30 for sale in San Diego, though of course if they sell out, I will be able to offer those customers a chance to buy for fulfillment with Backers. It feels like I will end up with a couple of dozen copies when the spoken-for sales are done, and can sell them myself in ones and two over 2027. But if you know someone who would like this, do be aware it's a limited print run, so [insert effort to generate FOMO here].
I greatly appreciate everyone's interest in the game and cannot wait for folks to be playing this on their kitchen tables and at game nights everywhere.
As a side note and unsolicited endorsement, when I was a teen, I played a ton of a game called Ace of Aces - I got my copy circa 1983 and still have all of the game-books. Aces of Aces is this amazing set of booklets that allow two players to simulate a dogfight. My favorite of the books was the "Handy Rotary" series, which featured planes with Wankel engines (like the Sopwith Camel and Fokker Dreidecke - see them in action here! NOTE those are WW ONE German uniforms, not WW TWO!!!)
). The Wankel engine spins to improve cooling of the engine, and a side effect is that it creates a lot of torque, making the plane tug to the right if not held in check. Pilots would turn this bug into a feature that allowed them to make a very sharp U-turn to the right (in the direction of the torque) and so these planes had a 180 option that none of the other planes could do.
The second from the right maneuver is a 180 courtesy of the Wankel (rotary) engine's rightward torque.
I mention this only because a nifty new version is being released with color illustrations (the old ones were just pencil sketches) and I think the campaign is about to close. Many of you who backed Skybirds may have Ace of Aces in your collection already, so simply upgrading to color might not excite you, but if you are into WWI aviation and don't have Aces of Aces, I highly recommend it. You can play it almost anywhere -- we used to play in line waiting to get into events, etc., and it's truly fun.
An old-school Handy Rotary book
Here's a link to that campaign. I get nothing from this rec other than the joy of helping other aviation buffs find more joy. Tell 'em AndyHRE sent you (and they'll say who? but tell 'em anyway)
(and yes, I did decided to get a pretty color version but just of the Handy Rotary, since that's my favorite. the other ones in monochrome/pencil sketch are fine)
