Yesterday I received 20 copies of Skybirds, representing the set of games I plan to fulfill locally and/or send internationally.  Another 30 got shipped down to San Diego for sale at the SDHC Night Market.  I was pretty stoked and took pictures as I opened it up to share with you.  (BTW the current plan is for any domestic orders that are not local pickup to ship to you directly from the factory in Tennessee once the Night Market is over; this is why the other 70 copies were not shipped out.)

 

However, as Roseanne Roseannadanna always told us, if it’s not one thing, it’s another.  When I opened up the games, most of it looked fantastic.  The cards are top-notch.  The boards look crisp and sturdy.  The rules are slick, etc.  But…

There was some confusion with respect to the dual-layer board system and the good folks at BluePanther accidentally:

Oops.

Steve Jones at BluePanther was super apologetic about this and we’ve already worked out a plan to get everyone what they are supposed to get.  It may delay things just a bit, but maybe not.

To wit:  I will be receiving replacement boards for the 50 copies in my possession, in time for the Night Market on November 7 (like shipped to SD, but perhaps to me to bring down).  I will bring back the replacements for the local-fulfillment in the Bay Area and thus can provide local fulfillment in the second week of November and there after.  I had been hoping to do this before SDHC, but alas.

I will be sending the half-printed and or incorrectly printed boards back to Tennessee, where they will get repaired and used for the 70 copies being fulfilled from there.  This will happen probably a week or two later than otherwise, but the trade off is that you will get the game as designed, not the kludge I was working out in my head to email you a PDF to fix things, etc.  

Many thanks to BluePanther for quickly remedying the mistake.  In the world of crowdfunding, the couple of weeks of delay this may impose is tiny, relatively speaking, and I am very glad you’ll get top-notch stuff.  I really do want to emphasize how nice everything looks (even the punchboards on the side printed correctly!).

About the only way you will know that anything happened to repair your games is that the ones I provide will not be shrink-wrapped, because I am going to be removing the wrong versions and replacing them.

For those who are curious, the box is almost the exact same size as the latest Restoration Hardware “RH Modern” catalog we received – basically 8.5 x 11 x 1 inch, but ti weighs much less than that beast of a catalog.  If you have any games from HollandSpiele (e.g., Westphalia or Field of the Cloth of Gold), you will recognize the form factor and the type of box.

 

 

 

So, this is not quite the gushing update of “the games are ready!!” that I had hoped to send out, but I can tell you I have touched everything and the games are looking good and just need a quick visit back to Tennessee before they are all ready to be adopted into your homes.