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.