📓 Early January Progress Report
7 months ago – Mon, Jan 08, 2024 at 03:22:16 PM

TL;DR

• We've received digitally printed physical proofs, and all three games are being printed now
• The pledge manger is built and in review
• Our next Kickstarter: Penguins!

📥 Physical Proofs

Before they begin to print, the factory we work with sends digitally printed copies for review. These are cut to shape, include most components, are fully assembled and shrinkwrapped, but do not yet have final coatings (e.g., varnishes) or color fidelity. They do, however, provide a last chance to avoid many possible issues before thousands are produced. Let's have a look!

Standard Edition

There were a number or minor tweaks to communicate back to the factory on the Standard Edition proof. The leatherette patch on the zipper pouch is not quite centered, and after seeing the body color for the logging dice, we decided to go with pure white instead of cream, which came out a little more yellowish than we wanted.

The tricolor pearlescent color stretch goal for the Sasquatch Die looks great! This die will be a little larger than shown here when the mold is finally made. The die you see here was made with a stock mold for more typically sized eight-sided dice.

Finally, the wooden nickels will be about 50% thicker, with a natural wood appearance under the sasquatch emblem rather than a white paint coat.

Deluxe Edition

The dice tray turned out great! We ordered some extras, which we'll offer in the pledge manager. As with the Standard Edition, the wooden nickels here will have a natural wood appearance.

You don't see any logging dice here because the Deluxe Edition dice are being specially made by a different factory. We haven't held these in our hands yet, but here are factory photos of how they turned out. Pancakes! 

These have been shipped from our friends at Foam Brain to our main factory and are all ready to be assembled.

The sales material you see in the bottom of the Deluxe Edition box in the video is a retail backer sheet. When assembled, it will be shrink-wrapped to the back of the box (printed side out, obviously) so the Deluxe Edition can be displayed in stores. The sheet can be independently discarded so you can use the wood texture of the flipped-over box base as the sawmill — the area where you keep unused dice and wooden nickels — during play. It's also just a lot nicer to have a visually cleaner box on your shelf if you're going to pony up for a Deluxe Edition.

Lumberjacks with Rocket Launchers

Everything here's just as hoped and expected! Hooray!

Squatch & Seek

Another proof with nary a change or explanation required.

Pancake Polyhedrals

Here's a photo of the final RPG dice with pancakes inside, which many of you purchased as add-ons. They're on their way to the US now, where they'll be assembled into some final packaging at Foam Brain HQ before being shipped to us.

With our feedback on these proofs back with the factory, everything's now being produced! (With the small exception of the Collector Edition cases and wooden nickels, which don't need to start quite yet because they don't need to be shipped across the ocean to get to our main fulfillment hub in the US.)

We remain on track to ship to backers in April. If we were going to get derailed from our timeline at this point, it would be if our games don't manage to get out of China before the month-long Chinese New Year holiday begins in February. We've been in touch with the factory with this specific concern in mind, and all indicators are that they'll be done in plenty of time, but you never know for sure until your cargo's on the water.

🏢 Pledge Manager Update

We just finished entering all of our data, images, and details into BackerKit, our pledge manager, and submitted it for review today. One of the things that keeps us coming back to BackerKit is this service, which has helped us spot issues before launch on past campaigns.

BackerKit promises review within two business days. After that'll we'll send a "smoke test," which invites about 5% of backers across all tiers to fill out their surveys and give us the info needed to collect shipping costs. The smoke test process is used to further test the setup. Assuming it's all smooth sailing through these two steps, expect that you'll receive your pledge manager invitation by the end of the week.

As a reminder, since we know there are a fair number of backers on this campaign who are new to Kickstarter, there are basically three purposes for having a pledge manager. The first is so you can wait to pay your shipping costs until closer to the time of shipping. The second is so that we can collect your shipping details — your address, and so on — closer to the time of shipping to avoid more missing parcels due to house moves. The last is to give you one last chance at add-ons, and for folks who plain missed the Kickstarter one last chance to get on board.

If you plan to fill out your pledge manager by February 12, that would be great. We expect to charge cards for shipping costs on February 15.

🐧 Up Next: Jewels for the Emperor Penguin

Our next Kickstarter launches in just over a week!

It's called Jewels for the Emperor Penguin. It's a medium family-weight board game about joining a penguin guild, climbing icy cliffs and finding gems you can trade in for the jewelry that your liege, the Emperor Penguin, covets.

Like the Lumberjack Games campaign, this one also includes some extra goodies. In this case, a card game called Frozen Shinies: The Emperor Penguin's Nephew, and a penguin mountain climber plush with a flannel earflap hat and adorable little backpack. There's only one stretch goal, to create a reskin of Lumberjacks with Rocket Launchers called Penguins with Rocket Launchers.

If you'd like to get a notification when the campaign launches, follow this link to the preview page and click the green "Notify me…" button. If you're on the fence, you don't have to commit now. And having more followers helps us out, so we'd really appreciate it!

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Thanks for backing!

📓 Early December Progress Report
8 months ago – Wed, Dec 06, 2023 at 09:55:51 AM

TL;DR

• All print files are at press
• BackerKit is (still) coming soon

🚀 All Games are at Press

All of the print files for all three games — the Flapjacks & Sasquatches Dice Game, Lumberjacks with Rocket Launchers, and Squatch & Seek — are with our factory.

(There is one modest exception that you almost certainly don't care about. We're creating a 12-unit countertop display for Squatch & Seek for retail stores. This was a late-breaking idea, and we've only just received the dielines for it, so we're still working on its graphics. The odds that this will affect our timeline are extremely small, and we'll abandon it before we allow it to make backer deliveries late.)

🏢 BackerKit: Still Coming Soon

The pledge manager is still not ready to go, due mostly to a crunch of other work. We were hoping it would be in the wild by now.

That said, we have never planned to charge shipping until the new year, to avoid being taxed on the funds by collecting them in a year different from the one where we pay the shipping expenses. And since we have months and months to go before we need your shipping details, this delay causes no delivery timeline peril at all.

As mentioned last month, please make sure you are set to receive emails from the backerkit.com domain, such as by whitelisting it in your spam filter.

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Thanks for backing! If you ever have questions about this campaign, don't hesitate to send a DM on Kickstarter, or an email to [email protected].

📓 Early November Progress Report
9 months ago – Thu, Nov 02, 2023 at 09:29:38 AM

TL;DR

• We’ve received funding
• Pancake dice are on round two
• BackerKit is coming soon
• 35% off webstore offer

💰 Funding is Complete

Kickstarter has collected your funds, earned a few weeks interest on them, and deposited them in our checking account. There the money sits, ready to pay the printer as our invoices come due.

If your charge failed for whatever reason — and there are always legitimate reasons — don’t worry. You’ll have a chance to rectify it in the pledge manager.

🥞 Pancake Dice Round 2

The production of the clear resin pancake dice is the longest leg of our production process. In recent correspondence with our partners at Foam Brain, we learned that they were not happy with the quality of the first mold for those dice, so they’ve requested another.

As things stand today, this is unlikely to affect our delivery timeline, because ample time has been allotted for the unexpected. But we will obviously keep you posted in future updates.

🏢 BackerKit: Coming Soon

We’ll use BackerKit — as we have on previous Left Justified Studio campaigns — as our pledge manager. This means we’ll collect your shipping details and shipping payments there. You’ll also have the chance to add more items to your order that way, such as if you need more copies of Squatch & Seek than your pledge level provides.

When the time comes, you’ll get an invitation at the email address you use for Kickstarter. We’ll also link to it in updates here. Please make sure you will receive emails from the backerkit.com domain (such as by whitelisting it in your spam filter), and/or making sure to read our updates.

As a cautionary tale, we received an email earlier this week from a Broken and Beautiful backer who had no idea we had been fulfilling that game for nearly a year, in spire of more than a dozen attempts to contact everyone by both of the aforementioned channels. Don’t let that be you come late 2024!

🎁 35% Off Webstore Orders!

As a special thank you for backing, use the discount code BACKERSPECIAL to get 35% off anything and everything on the Prolific Games webstore for the next week. That's not combinable with other offers, but you can still get free shipping at $40.

We appreciate you!

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Thanks for backing, loggers!

🎉 Success! Thank You, Backers!
10 months ago – Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 07:09:07 PM

TL;DR

• You did it!

🔓 Squatch & Seek: Unlocked

It came down to the wire. With both of the possible routes to unlock Squatch & Seek inches from the finish line as the clock counted down, it occurred to us that it didn't make much sense to get nearly all the way to a stretch goal by two different routes… and then not unlock it. It would be like scarfing down eleven donuts out of two different dozens and claiming you hadn't eaten 12. So we decided to prorate the Bacon Log progress toward its 100-helper end and add that quantity to the adjusted backer count.

So, success! We wound up at 107% of the adjusted count we needed, Squatch & Seek is unlocked, and we're grateful to everyone for pushing up until the last minute.

 🕑 It's Just the Beginning, Of Course

We will probably not do much tomorrow, but the day after that we'll get started on printer files and the pledge manager.

If you have any questions or concerns, now or any time, you can always reach us here by Kickstarter DM, or by email at [email protected].  

 🙏 Thank You!

We're grateful for your support and your trust, backers. Thanks for signing up and coming along for the ride.

~

Thanks for backing!

⏲️ The Clock is Ticking, Only a Few Hours Remain
10 months ago – Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 02:54:12 PM

TL;DR

• Three ways to help push Squatch & Seek over the edge in the next three and a half hours

1. Rally Support

As of this writing we only need (checks spreasheet) 31 more backers to unlock Squatch & Seek. [Good news: I have had to update this number multiple times while writing this update.] Even $1 backers move the needle. Go outside and flag down a lumberjack!

Progress today has been fantastic — thank you to everyone who's been rallying support. It's continuing to look like it's going to be down to the wire, so don't let up!

2. Pre-pay Add-ons

Backers have asked whether they can pay for add-ons now in order to help generate Bacon toward our Squatch & Seek Helpers stretch goal. The answer is yes! You can pre-pay…

• Collector Edition Wood Upgrade: If you're backing at the Collector tier and want to upgrade your maple Collector Edition to a mahogany Collector Edition, you can add $25 to your pledge.
• Logging Camp Group Pledge Edition Upgrade(s): If you're doing a group pledge, upgrading a Standard Edition to a Deluxe Edition is a $21 upgrade, which you can do up to five times.
• Just Squatch & Seek: If one of your friends only wants Squatch & Seek, they can pledge for $1, then add the game in the pledge manager, or pledge for $12 now to pre-pay the add-on cost of the game.

To prepay add-ons, just go to the campaign page, click "Change your pledge," add dollars to "Bonus support," and click "Pledge."

All of these add-ons can also be paid later, so don't feel like you have to do this. But if you can afford it and want to help us push forward, it's an option!

3. Let's Expand the Pool

To help entice folks, for backers at the Lumberjacks + Rocket Launchers and Basic Flapjacks tier, we're going to drop the Squatch & Seek pledge manager add-on price from $12 to $6, if unlocked.

We know you backers at all levels have been helping to spread the word and we want make sure you partake of the rewards, too.

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We're almost there! Thank for your support, loggers!