Oh boy was that a MONTH! August kicked off with the spectacular GenCon, continued with a couple smaller playtesting events, and will conclude with preparations for a SF Bay Area local convention, Pacificon! A lot got done this month, so read on to learn about your favorite games!
This Month's Topics:
Cyber Pet Quest
We demoed Cyber Pet Quest every hour at GenCon, and got a lot of interest even from people just walking by our booth. Of course, the enamel pins of the 4 pets sold VERY well. So well that we have at least 2 more pins in planning for future conventions!
The one key thing we learned from all the demos (which also served as playtesting) of CPQ is, that the game is in its late-beta stage where we don't need to make any more drastic mechanics changes. The game is extremely easy to teach, fast to play, and most people who played it really enjoyed the story and adventure of these four brave pets!
Monthly Protospiel at Gamescape SF!
Choose the Next Pets Contest!
Speaking of pets, if you missed this before, we are keeping the "Suggest the Next Pet Contest" open for another month. By the next newsletter, we'll have the community vote for the next pet (or two) that will join Cyber Pet Quest as future expansions. We've already seen some very cool ideas (we definitely have enough turtles and hedgehogs, as well as other breeds of dogs), but want to give everyone who just joined the community a chance to participate too!
Just a little background for those who just joined us:
In our previous Kickstarters for Lunar Rush and Omicron Protocol, we loved having our community help with naming things in the game as well as suggesting the ideas for new characters and storylines! So in October, we're going to have the community vote on their favorite pet ideas (after we select our favorites from all the submissions), and the top winners will likely go on to become new characters in expansions of the game! As always, we will include the person who suggested the idea in the credits for the game and they will also get a copy of Cyber Pet Quest for FREE (if we successfully fund and publish the game) so they can show their friends and family their design!
Suggest your pet idea here!
New Art
New art is being done in a fast and furious way. Here are some more awesome pieces of art by our three main artists.
Top 2 images by Zach Leo, middle 2 images by Maria Zvonkova, and bottom one by Alex Pei
Stay tuned in our social media (FB, Twitter/X, Instagram) if you want to potentially get your name in our credits for naming some of the cards that these art will go onto!
For those of you wondering, we're still aiming for a late October/early November Kickstarter, but will know more as we finish September and get into October.
Lunar Rush Updates
The GAMES ARE ON SHIPS for UK/EU and North America! Woot! Here is some more detailed information.
RoW: VFI has been very busy and non-responsive for the past few weeks, unfortunately. We're still trying to check with them to see why only a few games have been fulfilled. The people with the Level Up Dice orders will be delayed a little bit due to some errors with the Lunethyst Gems that they shipped to us, so hopefully it'll all get cleared up in the next week or two. We'll keep pushing to get the games out to everyone in this region!
UK/EU: The boat EVER ART left China on 7/31, and is estimated to make it to port in the Netherlands around 9/3. No estimated date for the UK yet, but it should be soon after Netherlands. You can track the ship directly here. We hope to begin fulfillment sometime in September.
US/CAN: We had a few weeks delay getting on a ship to the US, due to a high volume of bookings for ships headed this way. But we finally got on WAN HAI A07 and the ship left China on 8/10. Current ETA to our warehouse in Michigan is around 9/25. You can track the ship directly here. We hope to begin fulfillment sometime in October.
GenCon Local Pickup: We were super excited to meet many of the backers who attended GenCon and handed them their pledges there. THANK YOU SO MUCH for the support!
GenCon Lunar Rush Promo Card
Just a reminder to fill out this FORM if you want this GenCon Promo Gold Module. This is free for those who backed us on Kickstarter or pre-ordered the game. We'll have it shipped out with your fulfillment soon!
The rules clarification for this card is as follows:
You may "boost" your ship that is in the final Medium or Slow route, whether it's Up (to the Moon) or Down (to Earth), forward and immediately arrive to the destination. You can do this for the Fast route too, but it generally doesn't help as much. Some clarifications below:
You may only use this card once per Turn, and must spend an Ore and Shard to do it.
You may use this card any time during the Moon Phase, except in the Game End Final Scoring period, you may use the card ONCE just before moving the ships to the market.
When used on the Up route, you may immediately get the resources from the ship you "boosted." The resources for this ship may be used to build Gold Modules.
When used on the Down route, the ship that is "boosted" sells FIRST in the Market Sale Order, ahead of any other ships.
If there are any other questions, just send us an email (or reply to this one) and we'll add it to the future FAQ!
Omicron Protocol Updates
Fulfillment Update
OP Critical Condition has been FULFILLED to everyone outside of North America! Thank you so much for your patience as we navigate the tricky waters of EU Shipping/VAT, and we hope you're enjoying the game and its expansions! This should be the last update for Omicron Protocol expansion Kickstarter for now, unless we have new coverage of the game to share or when we are ready to announce the next expansions!
GenCon
GenCon was AMAZING! It was 5 full days (Wednesday was setup and 2 demo/media events) of non-stop vendor booth action! It was definitely tough to go from last year's 20'x10' end-cap booth down to an in-line 10'x10' booth, but we're glad to be there!
Setup was definitely tough, loading in the advanced copies of Lunar Rush, along with all our furniture and other games, into that small space, but we did it in the end!
We now have a "merch/cute" side (right) and a games side (left) to the booth. With Mr. L. P. Moonie prominently featured everywhere.
And this was just one of the snapshots of how busy it was doing interviews, demos, and pitches to the record-breaking crowd at GenCon (70K+ attendees, Saturday sold out!).
It was an exhausting week, but we can't wait to do it again next year, with Cyber Pet Quest in tow!
Other Conventions
2D Con
Brendan attended "2D Con" in Minneapolis, and was able to show off Lunar Rush and Cyber Pet Quest. Also got to hang out playtesting other local desigers' games!
Essen Spiel 2023
Bernie will represent Dead Alive Games officially this year at Essen Spiel, the largest boardgaming convention in the world! You can find us at Booth 2B131, and the main game featured there will be Lunar Rush (with some Cyber Pet Quest on demand)! More info to come in the next newsletter!
An that's a wrap!
Till next month!
Brendan & Bernie
Dead Alive Games