An adventure board game with storybooks full of journeys to visit new worlds, meet quirky aliens, and make many, many branching choices. 1-4 Players, 30-60 minutes per chapter.
We have just pressed the button to send out BackerKit surveys to everyone, so you should be seeing that email soon. If you have any questions, or if the email does not arrive, please let us know and we'll help you out.
Greetings and hellos to all our backers - I have recovered from the PAX plague, and in the meantime, we've been working on the BackerKit. It's ready! We encountered a bunch of technical hurdles that had not come up with past campaigns, so it took a bit longer to work them out than intended. Thanks for your patience :)
Phase 1: Smoke Test
When deploying a BackerKit to a large campaign such as ours, the preferred method is to do a small release (5% of backers) as a "Smoke Test" - make sure there's no huge glitches with shipping costs or the like. We'll be pushing the button to send out those surveys this afternoon.
Phase 2: All Surveys
Assuming nothing explodes, we'll be sending out the rest probably on Monday afternoon.
If you have any trouble with the BackerKit, let us know! Email is best - [email protected], but you can send a Kickstarter message or leave a comment if that is easier for you.
Add-Ons:
In the BackerKit, you'll be able to add on copies of 1001 Odysseys, the Fates of the Iliad expansion, pins, canvases, plushies, and refresh kits. One Add-on is available that didn't exist during the Kickstarter, a second pin:
Molia Thagdin is a Plumplim mechanic on Brumigum, who you'll meet early on in one of the stories (You might recognize her from the Gen Con demos of previous years!). She has a carrot wrench, is adorable and awesome, and is available in limited quantities - she was our PAX Unplugged pin as part of Pinny Arcade.
Shipping Costs:
We're charging flat shipping rates regardless of add-ons, by region. The costs came out reasonably close to our estimates during the KS campaign.
US - $8
CA - $18
EU / GB / AU / NZ - $28
Everywhere else - $36
Some US backers were already charged shipping during the campaign - for everyone else, shipping will be charged when entering your info during the BackerKit, after purchasing any add-ons you'd like.
Print and Play News:
We're nearly done setting up the files, and are working on writing up a simple rules document for just the Print and Play (Target: next week). Here's a little preview:
COVID-19:
It's been a bit of a chaotic week, and I wanted to briefly address what that means for us and the project. We're a remote office, everyone works from home and collaborates using Slack, so we don't have any direct immediate impact from social-distancing. We're going to bunker up, stay safe and hopefully get lots of writing done! If unforeseen obstacles arise, we'll let you know. Be well, wash those hands, and hopefully we're all through this soon!
This update is about our team's adventures at PAX East this past weekend. We're going to have a status update on a variety of topics in a few days, after Chris is no longer sick with post-PAX-plague.
We have returned from PAX East! Here's an update from our intrepid writing-space-crew. Visual information is included, but fair warning: the lighting in the particular area of space was a vivacious magenta color, possibly to improve morale on long voyages or perhaps just for fun. Also, we've cropped out or blurred non-team members as appropriate!
Greetings to our backers and friends! It was good to get to see some of you this weekend at PAX East in Boston. We took off in the Kickstarter spaceship-room for a number of very comfortable demos.
Some of our impromptu crews worked well together right from the moment they boarded, while others found themselves wrapped in the drama of guessing and second-guessing their choices. Where to go? What to do? Will this thing be useful? How will we ever accomplish this mission?
In the end though, our recruited crews did great! Navigators searched the Map, Operations officers kept the Mission Control board running like a well-tuned machine, and Information explained the meaning of each strange new word we encountered. Everyone weighed in on the merits or potential pitfalls of each choice. Some intrepid young crew members pointed out possibilities that their more seasoned colleagues might have missed. There were moments of peril, and yet, after a humorous romp around the capital planet Avallonis, each crew accomplished their mission.
We were able to connect with a lot of gamers who might not have seen 1001 Odysseys otherwise! "The Admiral's Request" is a great demo and a fun way to spend a half-hour with your friends. We especially loved showing two young girls, bright Commanders of tomorrow, what it was like to pilot a Chapter.
Back on terra firma, we are still in the depths of brainstorming all the branching narrative paths for Story Book #1 (we are working on Stories out of order). "Welcome to Insula" is moving along nicely. Each time we have a brainstorming meeting, we have created half a dozen new ideas to weave into the narrative. New Missions, new Locations, and new branches. It is especially important to have compelling characters and enthralling environments. For example, our current working title for a Story-important planet is Miniphantasia, the planet full of miniphants. What are miniphants? What is Miniphantasia? You will soon find out!
Hey all, I wanted to provide a more clear roadmap of where we're at and what our schedule looks like for 2020. While the game didn't grow significantly in scope, we spent a lot of 2019 perfecting the engine of how we're going to tell these stories, and specifically how to make it as easy as possible to learn and play. 1001 Odysseys is at its best when you get to dive right in to adventure! We don't want someone to have their nose buried in a thick rulebook and missing out on the story.
The integrity of the story paths is also crucial - nobody wants to hit a broken dead end and have to go to online forums to seek out errata for their game. To ensure this, I've been developing a database system that tests every single possible story path for loops, dead ends, and paradoxes. This took longer than I'd hoped! However, it's going to be a crucial asset for testing once all the writing is complete - we're still going to do plenty of live playthroughs (see scheudle below!), but we can focus on organic experiences and not trying to hit every single paragraph in the book in each possible way. Each chapter has thousands of different potential paths, and we don't have quite that many playtesters :)
We have some beautiful art completed for the game, but there're still a couple maps to be painted and various other smaller pictures (Chapter headers, etc) that haven't been drawn yet.
What does this all mean? With our revised schedule below, we're going to be shipping the game early this Fall. We estimated 12 months to complete, it's looking more like 18. As we get closer to completion, we'll refine our target to precise dates for KS shipping + Retail release. We will be opening the BackerKit later this week, and it will remain open until we start shipping games.
Here's our schedule for the year of what's happening from now up until we ship out fancy boxes with games inside!
February: Completion of database testing suite. BackerKit opens. Print and Play Demo releases (The Admiral's Request). PAX East - visit us in the Kickstarter Lounge!
March: Completion of Book 1. Granite Game Summit - Some secret live testing and demos.
April: Completion of Book 2. Live testing of completed Book 1. Surprising amount of snowstorms in the Northeast, despite an otherwise mild winter.
May: Completion of Book 3. Live testing of completed Book 2. Plushies arrive and amass in warehouse, creating a worrying over-adorable concentration.
June: Completion of Book 4 & Iliad Expansion Book. Live testing of completed Book 3. All map artwork complete! Pins ordered.
July: Live testing of Books 1-4, and completion of all non-map artwork (Box cover, cards, etc). Gen Con 2020 - come visit our booth! Some demos, pins, art, adventures? Adventures!
August: Print-ready, send to factory. Proofing, approval! The presses roll. Pins arrive in warehouse.
September: Dance Party!
October: Shipping Party! (Some dancing) Then, once all backer games are shipped, we'll start shipping to stores and distributors. BackerKit closes, since you can just order the game normally at this point.
We'll be posting an update in each of these months (including one late in February) to keep you updated on where we're at in our roadmap and to confirm we're on target. And of course, to share art and things, because it's really pretty and we like sharing it!
Thanks to everyone for being understanding and positive - we received a lot of lovely direct notes from backers after the last update, and reading things like that is always a highlight of the day. We love our stories, and we're eager to get them to your table :)
Hello! I hope everyone had a lovely holiday / new year / winter snow bonanza, because we are now in the future year 2020, the YEAR OF THE PLUMPLIM. Ominous? Cute? Vegetablish? Maybe all three.
The Plumplim plushies have been ordered, and production will be underway soon! We'll post some pictures of the finished ones once we get them from the factory, they should be quite similar to the prototype we received from our friends at Symbiote long ago. They also made the Glooping Ooze plush for One Deck Dungeon, which came out fantastic! We'll be doing a limited one-time run of 1000 Plumplim plushes - we'll likely have some left over after the BackerKit (and if we had a huuuge run on them there, we'd produce enough to cover the orders)
We now have a process in place for map printing for the actual boxed game (up until now, all of our prototype maps have been printed at local print shops + folded by hand). We've been working on a way to produce the maps that avoids having them cut into 3 pieces, and we're happy that it's going to work correctly with a combination of laminate and kiss-cuts on the back. They won't bow up like our prototype paper maps, either! Hurray!
Prooobably what you're looking for here is a pretty picture. And we're not about to disappoint! Behold the Almanac art for the Elemens:
Pretty? Pretty. It's tough to not immediately post every single image that hits our Slack, but we're super excited about how things are coming out.
This remains a spoiler-free zone, so we're not going to talk about the particulars of stories or plot. Our illustrious writing team remains hard at work creating and refining stories, plot-diagram-trees, characters(some of which sparkle), places(largely they do not sparkle), objects(34% of these sparkle), and ideas (metaphorical sparkle). It has been so much fun to see the small ideas we started with evolve into the 4 neat Books we'll be delivering with the game. I'm biased, yes, but I think they are all good stories, good sci-fi, and good fun :)
We do still have work to do, and while our target was to deliver in March of this year, we're going to be behind on that. Which leads to the next bit:
When we launched, we thought it'd take about 1 year to complete work on the game. A bit ambitous? Probably. One of our core beliefs here is that we don't rush projects to meet deadlines. We want to deliver the best possible game we can, and if that means we need to invest more time into it, we're always going to do it. What we're going to avoid doing, though, is playing the estimated date game where we keep pushing back by a day, a week, or a month here and there. We're going to continue working hard on getting things done, so that you can have a beautiful box full of stories for your table. We're sorry it's not as quick as we (or you!) hoped, but we're confident you'll love the finished product :)
We are going to be launching the BackerKit late next week or early the following week, (Jan 29 ~ Feb 4), once we've got it all laid out in their system and ready for you. The BackerKit will remain open indefinitely, right up until we start shipping out games (and likely open beyond that too, for a while).
As always, if you want a refund for any reason we'll always give it, no questions asked. Things happen, money situations come up, we understand!
Sorry, forgot to mention that we're working on making a Print and Play happen of our convention demo from PAX U, BGGCon, and Gen Con last year. We expect to have it up as downloadable PDFs in February.