1001 Odysseys

Short Update: Rulebook / Tutorial Tweaking
22 days ago – Wed, May 13, 2026 at 09:14:06 AM

Hello Galactic Citizens! Here with our promised May 13 update.

As mentioned in our last update, a big focus of late is on the rulebook and the Chapter 0 Tutorial. We had the opportunity last month to run a number of purely unspoiled testing sessions (players who had never seen the game) with the players learning in theory with no input from me. This is an important step for a game like Odysseys, because while the rules are fairly simple, getting them wrong isn't going to result in someone scoring a few extra points - it's going to result in the game not functioning! We would like our game to function :) 

Things went mostly okay, and the players absolutely loved the story portions of the tutorial. Many laughs were had, voices were performed, and at least one food disaster was described. The rules parts were a bit bumpier. Watching this latest playtest group made me realize we've got a little bit of work to do to refine the way the tutorial bounces back and forth between the Reader and the Information Officer. There was some confusion about who was supposed to talk when, and some duplication of talking points. Also, the tutorial chapter ran long in most sessions - 60-75 minutes instead of the intended 30-45. 

So, for the last couple tests, I sat in as Information officer, and did the explanations manually with a slightly different style. It worked very well, and the chapter ran much smoother. 45 minutes, each time.

With those tests complete, I am going to run through all of the command sections and tooltips for the tutorial and streamline them for clarity and maximum learning potential, in the style that I used in those last tests. We should have this done and re-laid out later in May, hoping to update around Memorial Day with some new screenshots. 

This will overall push everything back 2-3 weeks from the earlier timeline, but it is work that needs doing - the tutorial chapter is a critical part of the game, and we need to get it right!

Starship Onboarding Process
about 2 months ago – Wed, Apr 15, 2026 at 02:38:24 PM

All Hello friends! Today, we're going to talk about getting on board a starship, or in this case, the onboarding process to our virtual starship tabletop, The Odyssey. 

1001 Odysseys is not a super complicated game rules-wise, but there are a lot of bits that make the ship run, and we want to make sure new players have a good experience learning the ropes - and get right to the story content! 

Learn to Fly

In order to facilitate this learning, we've included Chapter 0 in the first Storybook, and it aligns with the first part of the Almanac, the Odyssey Operations Manual. For playtesting, we separated these out from the books to print as small booklets:

The result is an optional half-hour experience where your crew experiences the backstory of the Odyssey winding up in Insula while learning both how the game flows, and how to operate their station of the ship. If you prefer to teach directly, you can of course read yourself and hop straight into Chapter 1 and guide your crew, but we think this will be a fun intro chapter to the game for many! 

Chapter 0 is laid out much like any other chapter in 1001 Odysseys, with sections of text followed by commands for the crew. After each paragraph, it refers to Tooltips, thematically part of the Almanac held by the Information Officer. This is the first page of Chapter 0:

It helps along the players on setting up the game, and refers to the tooltips so that the Information Officer can explain the parts of the game that are used as you go. For example, here'rs Tooltips E2 and E3 in the Operations Manual portion of the Almanac:

So, the crew will have a mini-adventure to kick off the story, learn how the game works, and laugh (but probably not cry) along the way. The Operations Manual can of course be refered to later if there are any questions, or as mentioned, read straight through to learn the game. It has lots of pictures! Pictures are good. 

We have been testing the experience while waiting on factory things, and will be running another couple in person with fresh faces this weekend at the Gathering of Friends convention. 

Rules Files

We've uploaded our playtest PDFs - you can check out Chapter 0 and the Operations Manual on your own if you'd like! 

If you have feedback, please direct it via email to [email protected], I do my best to keep up with KS comments but their notification email system is not the best, and I miss things sometimes! Email I should see much quicker. 

Progress

I was hoping to have some professional box renders to share, and what I have instead is a description of what we're planning to do...and a very simple image. We'll get a prettier version of it properly rendered out for the next update with dimensions locked in. The almost-approved plan is to go with the square box we originally wanted, 12"x12". All of the large printed materials - the books and the maps are laid out to be 8.5"x11" pages. They occupy the pink area in the very exciting image below. The cards will all be in a removable box in the blue area, and the tokens in a tray in the green area. On top of it all, the MCB (11"x11"). Everything fits! Hurrah! 

All kidding aside, we are making progress toward printing. We'll be away this coming week at the convention, and back at it to close out April and into May. 

Our next update will be in the middle of May, currently scheduled for May 13. Happy Spring everyone! 

Schedule: 2026 Updates, Production, and Launch
2 months ago – Thu, Apr 02, 2026 at 03:50:37 PM

Hello spacefaring friends (is anyone on the Artemis reading this? No? Okay fine.)!

I come to you from the great land of Sick-ville. Apologies for not getting this update out in March as intended, I've been sick for...pretty much the entirety of March. Getting better now, but it has unfortunately consumed lots of time, and a small nation's GDP in tissue boxes. Suffice it to say - I have gotten very little accomplished in the past 4-5 weeks. 

Nonetheless - we have a production plan in place now! We have four new games going to print this year through our partner factory: Chess Joker, Mystic Curling Club (Both in production now), One Deck Dungeon: Relics of the Forge (and the Vault box set), and 1001 Odysseys. They will be printing in that order, with Chess + Curling set to premiere at Gen Con, and Dungeon + Odysseys to premiere in the fall, first convention appearance at PAX Unplugged. For all of these games, crowdfunding fulfillment should be done (or 95% done with a few stragglers) before the conventions. 

This means that 1001 Odysseys will be on the production line at the factory in June or possibly July. Since it's almost all paper-based components, we don't need to deal with any complicated plastic molding (which adds lead time). Our game will need to be print ready for June 1, which is fine, it's 95% print ready already, I just need to finish up the bits of work we lost due to the computer issues in January. I'd planned to take that on in March, but that plan had a few (t)issues arise. 

We're going to be updating in just 2 weeks with more information, and I want to keep to a more firm update schedule this year as the game goes into production and makes its way to your homes! The plan is below.

Upcoming Update Schedule:

April 15 - The stuff I wanted to have in this update! Some models of the box layout, for one, plus some rules PDF sharing.

May 13 - Update on the work being re-done, hopefully complete!

June 3 - Files to Factory Update - this is when everything should be at the digital proofing stage, with production set to start shortly after.

July 15 - Fulfillment / BackerKit Update - Assuming everything else has gone to plan, this is when we will discuss shipping costs and other fulfillment things that've changed since the campaign. 

And more to come in the late summer/fall after that, every 3-6 weeks depending on what's going on. 

Progress, un-progress, and Next Steps
4 months ago – Fri, Jan 30, 2026 at 09:40:24 AM

Hello friends, I know we're long overdue for an update, and I'm here to share where we are. There's good news, bad news, and medium news. 

The good news is, we've got a path forward with the box, and it's not going to require us to redesign the Mission Control Board (MCB), or any other components aside from repositioning some art assets on the sides. We're moving this project to use our new factory partners (the ones who produced Innovation Ultimate, and the new printings of several of our other games. The other production partners we explored options with during the second half of last year did not pan out, unfortunately, and this wasted a decent chunk of time. Apologies for that. 

The bad news is annoying but not catastrophic. If you've seen my other updates on socials or projects, you'll know I was the victim of a bit of malware. It was not nearly as bad as it could've been, but to be safe, I reformatted + rebuilt Windows on my local machine. One of the things that unfortunately did not survive that process was my personal work on Odysseys from September onward. To be clear - this does not affect any of the story or art or files, this is the work I was doing for final print preparations and hadn't checked back in to the Google Drive. All of the core work for the game is safely backed up in multiple places, but I will need to re-do 30~40ish hours of work that happened during the Fall and early Winter. With the Olympics coming up, it'll probably be what I do while watching too many Curling matches :) 

The medium news is the schedule. I had hoped to be at print in December. Once we lock in the packaging with the factory, I'll get the final layout steps done. We should have the specs on that soon, which should be just in time for me to do after re-doing the work mentioned above. 

Lunar New Year is approaching so the factory will be off for a couple weeks, and after that we expect to have samples and some 3D renders of the box and how things fit inside it to share in March. 

Assuming no other issues arise, we should have the game files submitted for print shortly after that. Once the game is in production, we will start doing the address updates and such.

Thanks everyone for sticking with us over the long adventure! Stay warm out there, its a chilly time.

Production and Fulfillment
8 months ago – Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 08:50:31 AM

Hello, friends across Space and Time, I am here with a logistics update. First off, we've completed writing and editing! The stories are done, all eight bazillion branches of possibilities, so now we are working on tackling the next phase: Production.

Obviously, its been a long time since we started work on this project, and a lot has changed around the world in that time. This has affected some things, and we're working to get through some new obstacles.

Production

When Odysseys was initially envisioned, it was to be four 100-ish page books in a box, with maps, cards, etc. We got quotes for that, and our plans for the box were made with those specs in mind. As we've discussed a bit this year, the amount of writing grew, and we'll be delivering you all over 750 pages of content across two books and the almanac. This has unexpectedly caused some significant problems with box design in recent testing, and we're in the midst of figuring out how best to address it. 

In addition (and partly as a result of the delays), we're now going to be using a different factory. We're working on getting everything in the game re-quoted with a couple factory options and also sorting out plans for a functional box given the book size increases. This will likely require some changes to the box art, but not in a way that needs a lot of design work. Just some repositioning of elements and perhaps a little more dark border than initially planned. When we have pictures of samples, we'll share them. 

Obviously, this has to be solved before we can go to print, and we're trying to get everything in order as quickly as possible. We definitely do not want to ship you all a product where the box splits open. 

Fulfillment

We sent out surveys in BackerKit a long time ago, and with the exception of add-ons (plushies, pins, canvas prints), nothing was charged since we were waiting for fulfillment to begin. Addresses and credit cards are likely out of date, and the most sane course of action is likely going to be to un-lock all of the surveys and have everyone re-enter information. We'll start on this process after the production issues are solved, because we only want to have addresses and CCs entered one more time! 

In the meantime, don't worry about sending us address updates - we'll take care of that all at once. 

I'll give an update at the start of November with information on how we'll be proceeding. It's annoying to spend time on production stuff that we thought was fine, but it's good that we discovered it before it caused issues for everyone.