You are in a small cylindrical room with very smooth walls and a flat floor and ceiling. There are no exits visible anywhere.

The Kickstarter campaign may be over, but don't worry, Colossal Cave: The Board Game continues to march toward production. We're aiming to have everything packaged up and ready for the printer by the end of June, and then have the game rolling off the production line sometime in Q4 — in time for Christmas!

Art update

Katy continues to do good work on the board art, too. All of the rooms are now in pretty much their final forms, except that the mazes need to get mazier. Here are some highlights from Katy's latest sketch:

The room names will be handled differently in the final board art, of course; I'm not really sure yet whether they'll be slapped on top of the room art, or off to the side kind of like you see here, or perhaps a lot smaller and unobtrusive, if we can figure out a way to make the room names less critical to understanding the cards. For example, we could associate each room with an icon (Bedquilt's slabs, the Misty Cavern's bridge, etc.), and then insert those icons into the card texts that talk about those rooms.

On the other hand, even with such great artwork, I don't want to completely minimize the actual names of the rooms. Just seeing those names on the board is a big part of the theme, at least for me. So, we'll see what happens.

Game Salute is going to have a booth at Origins; if you're there, stop by and say hi! (Not to me — I won't be there — but to Dan and/or Chris.) We're going to try to have a playable prototype of CC:TBG at Origins. There's not enough time to order one of my prototypes from TheGameCrafter, but I'm pretty sure Game Salute has access to a color printer and some cardstock. :)

Administrivia

If you've gotten messages from Kickstarter saying that your credit card payment hasn't gone through yet, please send me a private message using the "Ask a Question" button on the front page. I think Kickstarter will stop trying to charge your card after seven days; but if you send us your pledge payment via PayPal, we'll keep you on the backer list.

Just five minutes ago I sent out messages to all the backers at the $40 reward level and higher, asking you all to PM me if (and only if, please!) you'd like your name to appear in the credits as something other than your Kickstarter public profile name. I'm hoping to get page 2 of the rulebook into its final form by June 1.

I won't be sending out the actual backer surveys (to collect your mailing addresses) until we're a lot closer to October.