Friends, I hold in my hands the first copy of Lyssan. Pulled off the front of the line and airmailed over for final approval. It passes. The presses are now going at full speed.

The prints are all high quality. The matte finish works with the muted tones of Lyssan. The die cuts are quality, too. All the parts came out of the punchboard without damage.

Those are the tokens for shame, coins, conscripts and turn order, respectively.

This is what the cards look like. Rather, this is what they look like after 1,000 shuffles. I torture-tested the main deck to confirm it would stand up to a lifetime of play, first thing. I'm impressed. After 1,000 shuffles there's no frayed edges, no whitening of the art. The cards are still springy and stiff.

Plastics

The printed parts are now on schedule to finish in the next two weeks. The plastics are going to take a few weeks more. The last part to finish will be the liner tray. But this little detail is one of the game parts I'm most proud of. 

One of the design goals for Lyssan was for it to be playable on a clock, like tournament chess. To make that work, the time it takes to grab a game token you need has to be vanishingly small; not even a consideration in how you spend your time. The organizer tray has to hold each part so that you can see it at a glance and grab the pile of tokens that goes with the card you just played. Between those design goals and the limits of how the plastic could be stretched, it took eight revisions to get it right. But here it is.

(Pictures from the factory. It took a week longer than the printed matter to get this first one out. The organizer tray is the one bit I haven't gotten to examine hands-on. Yet.)

Art & Prints

The complete card art is online for viewing! Check it out HERE

If you selected an art print as one of your backer rewards, this is the gallery you'll be selecting your print from. Take a look over it - I'll send out eMails to get your choices next week.

The View From Here

So that's where we're at: The complete print run, plastics included, should finish in another month, give or take a bit. Then 2,000 copies of Lyssan get loaded onto a 20' container for shipment across the Pacific. Tack on most-of-a-month for that. Customs gives it a look over when it lands. Fingers crossed, that's just a couple days. Then a bit more time for me to send these out! 

This appeared in the mail today:

The proof copy of Lyssan.

Well, I couldn't wait to dig in. This is the test run of the game on non-mass-production gear that we check for last errors before firing up the big presses.

And it looks pretty good.

There were something like two and a half copies of the game in the box, demonstrating different things. First off, there was the assembled copy. This one was printed out on typical desktop machines, and hand-glued together. It shows where everything goes and (very) roughly how it looks assembled. 

Then there were piles upon piles of folded sheets showing what different parts of the game would look like at the final print quality.

And it looks good. Giving it a last look over, I had half a dozen final questions and fixes for Michael, at Panda's factory. I'm hopeful we can get those knocked out tomorrow, so they can start the full print run come Monday.

The Weight of a Nation

Have I mentioned yet that this is a ~heavy~ game? Because that's the first thing I noticed hoisting it off the UPS counter. I'd meant to pack a lot of value into this box, and if weight is value, then the mission has been a success. It fits in a box nearly identical in size to Smallworld, yet tips the scales at over 3 pounds. That's also the same as Smallworld, after you've crammed the first two expansions in with it. And that's before Lyssan gets its plastics. Those take a little longer to sculpt.

Little Plastic Castle(s)

Speaking of the castles, they're coming along as well. Michael just sent me a picture of their latest sculpt.

That looks like it would hold a hill against an invading army to me. If you're invaded by tiny soldiers after getting your copy of Lyssan, you'll have the fortifications you need to fend them off.

After a seemingly interminable art approval process, Lyssan is getting proofed. Today. Michael over at Panda Game Manufacturing tells me his crew is putting together the first handmade print now. This is the one where, if everything's right, the thumbs-up is given and full scale production begins. 

Fingers crossed, the proof arrives this weekend. Once that happens, I round up a playtest crew and give it a play to make sure everything's there and everything works as printed. 

Last Sweep - Proofreading

If all goes well with that proof the final go-ahead for printing Lyssan could be given this weekend, which makes the next 48 hours the absolute last chance to catch blunders in the game.

Can I interest you in giving a last peek over the rulebook? The normal rewards are all spoken for by this stage, but I'd be thrilled to break into the reserve supply of promo cards and add a triple helping of influence card blanks to the backer rewards of anyone who points out a typo that the previous several proofreaders have missed. If you're up for giving the rules a peek, or just want an advance glimpse of Allan's ornamentation of the book, here's the link:

lyssan.com/LyssanProofreaderRules.pdf.zip

Blanks? Blanks!

Included in the promo card pack will be a blank for each of the three kinds of influence cards: Surprise, Courtier, and Vassal, so you can put your own spin on Lyssan. And even these blanks have their own artwork, not found on any other card, from the inimitable Marek Madej.

Art Note: The first image is the "soft proof" of the box labels, back from PandaGM. These are the printed-out sheets that get laid over the chipboard core of the game box. 

You can see some slight lightening of the graphics in these pictures, compared to the master version. That's a side effect of changing how the colors are coded. When the artists create the masters, they typically work in Adobe's "sRGB" color space, which describes colors in terms of how bright a monitor's red, green, and blue pixels are glowing. The printer's hardware, meanwhile, thinks about colors in an entirely different code, named "FOGRA039 Coated" that describes colors in terms of how much cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink are being deposited onto paper. The two ways of coding colors don't exactly line up. Sorting out those differences are one of the things we're taking care of at this last stage of proofing.

Friends, I have big news for Lyssan today: We're headed to the printer. At very long last. The opening half of our bill is paid. Soon, the presses will be firing up, the die-cutters to punch out the cardboard pieces will be carved, and the molds for the castles made. And then Lyssan will start rolling from idea into reality.

Well, not quite so fast. 

First, there's the Art Approval Process. Starting January 3rd, when the fine folks at Panda Games' Vancouver office return from their New Year's soirees and confirm that the payment cleared, they'll take a look over all the files for the game, and tell us everything we did wrong. This is too dark, we didn't leave enough margin here, are you really sure you want to push the art quite so close to the edges and on and on. We go back and forth until everything's settled. I'm told this usually takes between 10 and 30 days.

Once that's done, they hand-make one copy of the game, overnight it to me, and if everything looks right, I give them the thumbs-up and THEN things really start to roll. All told, from the first payment until the game lands in the Port of Oakland, I'm told to expect it to take 4 months, plus a bit more because Chinese New Years falls during the print run. After it lands and customs gives Lyssan the stamp of approval to come into the country, there's 5 miles between the docks and my loft. And from there, a little more than 400 copies go right back out. To you all!

And What Castle Glowers Down From the Horizon?

In the last couple months leading up to this, while Allan worked and reworked and reworked the graphic designs, I've had time to take a hands-on role in sculpting the castles. Frankly, with all the rush to get the art ready for printing, I had expected to need to delegate the castle sculpt, and in so doing, end up with a generic medieval edifice. An upshot of the endless map reworks that stalled us this long is that I got the time to do the castle model myself, and be certain it stayed true to the Dark Ages aesthetic that runs throughout Lyssan.

And there it is. The shape of this fortress is slightly precocious, as one would expect of the greatest citadel of an era. The curtain wall is thick and stiffened with towers. But there is only the single curtain, the back wall is curved to follow the line of the hill the fortress sits atop, and the merlons imply a fortress not yet grown to the giant scope of later ages. It's an edifice with one foot in the century to come, but still rooted in the designs of the wooden hill forts that dominate its age.

The layout takes elements from several 11th century ruins. Out of the many dozens of castles I looked into, the ones still up had typically been modernized, knocked down, rebuilt, burnt down, and built again. Whatever their 11th century core was had been lost. It seems the only castles that stayed true to their Dark Ages lines in central Europe were the ones that were knocked down once and left that way. There are bits and notions from Rotenhan, Old Sarum, and most of all Auerbach here: Castles that were mighty in their day, then left to gather moss after a fall. 

You: Game Designer

And that is the art for the first of the backer designed promo cards! This is "Salvation", designed by Sir Norbert Barrion and illustrated by the ever excellent Marek Madej. With salvation, a priest can persuade a knight or nobles to set aside their swords and take on the robes of the clergy. It's an elegant mechanic to add new possibilities in the game, and a sneaky way to open a hole in a rival's battle lines.

Conventions 2012

One last bit of news before I head to my own New Year's celebration: Lyssan will be sharing a convention table with fellow Kickstarter David Fooden, and his creation Oh My God There's an Axe In My Head. Expect to see us at KublaCon, Origins, GenCon, PAX Prime, and Essen in 2012!

Over the last month, the artwork you've seen for Lyssan has been finding its home within the graphic designs of Mr. Allan Amato. Almost every component of the game you saw in the Print and Play has been reworked.  

Like the counters.

Those have come a long way since the developer art we had to show you in the video. That's the new spy, priest, noble, and knight.

Likewise, the rulebook has been getting a complete working-over for beauty.

The pages should look familiar to anyone who's downloaded the Print & Play edition. These started with the layout Joyce created for the P&P rulebook. Then Allan went back and put the final art for the game pieces in.

Preparing for Printer's Approval

There's also a ridiculous amount of fine tuning happening at this stage. The next step after this is getting the art into a format that the printer will give the thumbs-up. There are pages of requirements for how each file has to be laid out to print properly. 

For example, there are strict rules on adding "bleed". Every card, every token, every printed thing in the box requires a bleed margin around it. This is the extra space around the card that gives a couple millimeters margin of error when the printer's press isn't perfectly lined up with their die-cut machine. 

The first image shows how we send the card off to the printer. The inset shows the bleed margins. The red is the bleed area. That's supposed to be trimmed off, but any part of it might show, depending on how far the die cutter slips from the printing. The blue area is the safety margin. Everything inside here should show, but could be chopped off. If the die cut slips 3mm down from the top, we lose the blue area there, and pick up the red area on the bottom of the card. And that's why every card (and token, and even the board itself) has extra framing outside the borders, just in case. If we'd have been sane, we'd have had 3mm of black borders inside the card, for the safety margin, and 3mm outside for bleed. But given the chance to squeeze 3mm more design in, Allan couldn't resist.

Promo Cards

Meanwhile, with the core deck's art 100% complete, Marek has been turning out the artwork for the promo cards. 

You were promised a few silly promo cards? For starters, we have Lyssan as a drinking game.  I thought this card was going to make a player drink whenever they mispronounced any of the myriad transeuropean names in the game. (How is Öch pronounced exactly? Kulesču?) But I mentioned "Lyssan as a drinking game" during one demo and the player shot back, "Oh, you can drink to ignore your shame?" And this is how game development happens, folks.

Other promo cards explore magic and myth in Lyssan.

While the core game is true to history, the promo cards will give the option to add a hint of magic into your game. "Lost In Faerie" is one card that brings myth to the table. The common folk of Lyssan believe in witches, werewolves, and the fair folk. Add these promo cards to the deck to play in a world where they're right.