Hello, Racers!

This is it -- the final update from this Kickstarter project!

Packages Are Shipped!

We got confirmation Monday morning that all remaining shipments have gone out from the warehouse. Many of you have received emails by now containing your tracking info. We figure most of our backers in the USA should have their packages before the end of the week. Exciting times! Loud noises! Gorillas and zeppelins!

Non-Backers Can Now Buy Race to Adventure!

We've put Race to Adventure! up for sale on the Evil Hat website (official announcement coming Tuesday). Jump straight to the store, here, for both the game and the expansion.

You can reach the Race to Adventure! page (make sure to check out the downloads page for translations and extras) here.

The Bottom Line

All told, this Kickstarter raised almost 48,000 actual dollars for getting Race to Adventure! into production. That said, expenses have been more like $67,000. 

But don't fret! That $19,000 gap (almost entirely from shipping costs) is something we were ready for, and now that we have the game up for sale, we will need your support to get more folks interested in playing and purchasing Race to Adventure! We'll need to sell about 600 copies via our website, or about 1600 in distribution, to make up that gap.

And so, we need your help to spread the word one more time! Make noise when your game arrives. Play it with your friends, and bring it in to your local game store of choice to show it off and get some table action going.

And because your input and boosting is so valuable to us, stay tuned to the Evil Hat website for an upcoming announcement on how you can earn cool stuff just by helping to spread the word about your favorite Evil Hat games, books, and more! You can also sign up for our mailing list on the front page of the site.

"We Have Returned!"

And so, we've made it to the finish line, dear Racers. Our passports are fully stamped, and with the thrum of zeppelin engines all around us, we can just see the top of the Empire State Building cresting over the horizon. Clear skies and a smooth landing ahead...

So one last time: Thank you again, so much, for everything you've done for us. We look forward to further partnerships in the months and years to come!

Hello, Racers!

While our shipment continues to make its way to the warehouse for its labeling-and-shipping extravaganza (we're told it's off the boat and onto a train by now), Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Productions will be at PAX East -- and Race to Adventure! will be featured on Friday as part of the Kickstarter Arcade!

From 3pm-6pm on Friday Rob and Fred will be in the Kickstarter room to talk with fans and demo the game. If you'd like to get a chance to look at the actual physical thing before it ships out, we'll have an advance copy or two at the demo table with us -- and likely on us as we wander around the convention outside of those hours. 

So if you happen to see us anywhere at PAX East, please introduce yourself as a Race to Adventure backer and we'll be thrilled to open up the box and let you see the gorgeously produced componentry in the flesh.

See you there, Racers!

Hello again, Racers!

Here's a quick progress report as we approach the Empire State Building with our passport full of stamps...

We're finalizing our spreadsheet. Do we have your correct shipping address? If your address hasn't changed in the last six months, all should be well, but if it has and you haven't let us know yet, now is the time. We need to know about all address changes before March 15th.

(You should be able to see how you answered the backer information survey by clicking the links that show up underneath your selected reward tier over on the right-hand side of this Kickstarter page.)

The boxes are definitely on the boat! We have confirmed (and re-confirmed) with the shipper that the big pile of Race to Adventure boxes are on the transatlantic boat to our shores. Arrival is expected at mid-March, with customs clearance taking at least a few days, then a week for it to get to our shipping warehouse. 

So where's Race to Adventure! right now? Somewhere around here:

We've got our corrected information labels already printed up and ready to go at the warehouse, and all the bags (dice and shoulder) that folks are due are on their way to the warehouse as well. Essentially, the only missing pieces at this point are the games themselves! We'll be shipping everything out just as soon as we can get those labels on the boxes after they arrive.

Strange Travels are here! We've just recently been able to put the final touches on our final stretch goal for this Kickstarter -- the Strange Travels PDF, featuring three alternate board arrangements, plus the six-player and solitaire rules and printable componentry. You can download Strange Travels from our Race to Adventure downloads page!

http://www.evilhat.com/home/race-to-adventure-downloads/

Foreign language translations are now available! You may notice that the rulebook and location guide are now available in languages other than English from our downloads page. We're thrilled to offer the rules in French, Italian, Spanish, and German!

If you see a missing language and would like to provide us with a fan translation, we're happy to share it on our download as well. (It will be text-only, not laid out like these four, but we figure your fellow speakers will enjoy having them all the same!) Please let us know if you'd like to contribute your fan translation!

That's it for now. We hope you'll enjoy Strange Travels while we wait for our final lap to conclude! We've cured our curse, rescued our prisoner, and our jetpack is fueled for the final push. See you at the top, folks!

Helloooo, Racers!

We've had an interesting couple weeks since our last update to you. Here are the details.

Safety testing took longer than projected: Some of you may remember that we had a bit of a snowstorm hit us in the USA these past couple weeks. The chemical testing portion of our safety testing provider got held up by this, creating a big back-log -- the chemical testing didn't wrap up until just this past week, and the great news there is that the game passed with flying colors (as we expected). That said...

Safety testing revealed some problems with our packaging: Coming into this, we were big newbies on the whole board game production and labeling thing. While we thought we'd communicated this, clearly, with our manufacturer, they provided us no oversight on whether our package labeling was up to standard (tho over on our side, we thought they were, and we were fine). And it turns out, it wasn't! In perhaps one of the silliest ways: our packaging simply didn't provide the full address of Evil Hat Productions. This is enough to make the labeling requirement of safety testing fail in multiple markets: it's not CPSIA compliant in the USA, and it's a problem in Europe, and other places besides. When we learned that...

We put a halt to the big shipment to the USA until safety testing concluded: With the bad news about the labeling hitting us, it threw our previous confidence in "just go ahead and ship it" into question. We asked LudoFact to hold off shipping the big pile of games to the USA until we found out what the full results of the safety testing were, and to take time to figure out what the right way to address the problem was. Turns out we should be able to address it by un-shrink-wrapping each box, applying a sticker to the bottom, then re-wrapping it -- so then the question was, where's the best place to do that, for the most affordable rate? And the answer to that turned out to be -- at our fulfillment partner's (Alliance Games Distribution) warehouse here in the States, for about 55 cents/package. All in all our goof amounts to about a $3000 added cost, which we can definitely absorb. The other cost is...

A two-ish week delay on our timeline: Our shipping contact in Germany has been keeping a space open for us in case we gave the "go" sign, so we're able to get back onto the boat pretty quickly here. (Non-European international customers should see their packages shipping out from Germany as well during this timeframe.) Our new arrival estimate (in Norfolk) is 13th of March; the same provisos from before still apply about that then involving customs check-thru and clearance, travel time from the port to our warehouse, and now add in time to unwrap, stickerize, and re-wrap, before we can ship out to our US customers. But...! 

That should be the last of the speed bumps: The safety testing was the last big roadblock on this race of ours. Everything else should just be "standard process" to get the games from Germany on over to Fort Wayne, Indiana and then out to everyone else. 

Thanks as always for sticking with us, and we're super eager to get everyone their games by late March. Eyes on the skies, Centurions -- zeppelin's coming!

Lots of news -- big news! -- for our favorite Racers today!

We'll get right into it:

The games are printed. They're printed, assembled, shrink wrapped, all that jazz, and are sitting on the pallet ready to go. In fact, we would have shipped them a little earlier, but...

Safety testing. The safety testing results are expected at the end of this week. This is practically a pro forma process, as Ludofact, our manufacturer, has a sterling reputation and a strong drive to produce products that comply with Europe's exacting safety standards. And because of that...

We're starting shipping now. In fact, we're starting shipping as of last week, but because this is an international operation there's some variation to how all that will work out.

International shipments will head out straight from the warehouse. This just makes sense for us: we'd be making poor use of our resources (and your money) if we shipped our international packages to the United States and then back out; the shipping subsidy we took for international customers doesn't really cover more than a third of what it would run us to ship them that way. So straight from Germany it is! Some of the earliest packages have already arrived in the UK and other locations within the European Union. 

The rest of the games for US customers are getting on a big slow cargo boat across the Atlantic. Just this morning we got the lowdown on what that means, from Ludopackt -- the shipping arm of Ludofact. "Ets. 13.02.2013 Eta. 26.02.2013" was the coded transmission... fancy Euro-speak for estimated shipment date of Feb 13th, estimated arrival date of Feb 26th. Granted, that's just the time it'll take to reach the USA. For all we know it'll take a few weeks or more past the 26th to clear customs and make it to our shipping service in Fort Wayne, Indiana. But once the shipment arrives there, we'll spin up that part of the shipping operation and get the games out to all the United States customers within a couple weeks of their warehouse debut. 

We won't ship or sell any of these games until all the backer shipments are verified as having gone out. Backers first, people! Backers first!

There are extras that still need to go out. I'm talking about dice bags (some of which are still being hand-crafted) and the shoulder bag, primarily. If necessary we'll ship these separately, because we don't want anyone waiting longer for their games than they have to. Posters have already gone out, and as you know the patches and pins went out many months ago.

Digitally speaking, the Strange Travels PDF containing a few alternative board layouts and solo and six-player support is still coming together -- we need to get a few art assets created by the artist in order to provide it! Figure on March for Strange Travels, if not sooner.

So what are you getting exactly? Rather than try to describe the incredible experience of looking at the actual finished game in text... we thought we might show you. Enjoy this unboxing video from Fred Hicks!

We woke today to hear that people in Europe are already getting their games, and that's awesome! We really hope you enjoy them. 

No matter what you think, please drop by the Race to Adventure! Board Game Geek page and share your thoughts on the game. You are our voices to carry this game to more players and new racers, so we'd sure appreciate it. :)

More soon!