With the apparent failure of the equity crowdfunding campaign, we have taken a step back to regroup and consider a number of options. Some paths forward have been presented to us. We need a few weeks to find the best path forward. As soon as we find that best path forward, you all will be the first to know.  

Sincerely, Shon Bury

Hello Everyone,

THE BOARD

Last week we talked about some updates to the 2029 board. We received a lot of good backer feedback about that--including a few folks suggesting that we make those barriers modular chipboard tiles that would allow you to change the setup on your 2029 boards to keep the action fresh each time you play the game. Even potentially allowing you to play out some different scenarios on the future board.

After thinking about it, and looking at how it would affect production and cost, it really seems like that would be a great way to add some additional value and replayability to the game--with very minimal impact to any aspect of production.

So with that in mind, I’d like to announce that we’ll be making those modular chipboard obstacles/barriers along with the board updates! 

Thank you to Evanovich13 for making the initial suggestion!

We’ll have some more about the board next week, but this week I wanted to show you a little bit of the behind the scenes stuff on part of the work that goes into the miniatures.

FUN WITH SCALES

When I first started looking through the miniature files of the Terminator game when I came on board, I noticed that they hadn’t yet been fully scaled for manufacturing. This is one of those things that a project manager has to make sure is done, because when you have different artists working on different models, they have no way to properly scale each figure and base seamlessly with the other figures and bases from other artists….and when you look at each file individually they look great, and can easily be sized to what you want them to be...but when you set them side by side, you need to make sure the Terminator doesn’t look like a 7 year old next to Kyle Reese.

BTW, this can be boring (and if you’re bored feel free to look at the pics and skim the text) but I think it’s an important piece of process information for anyone thinking of making a game like this yourself, or just for those of you who want to see exactly how much work goes into the these things…

Here’s a good example. Our Terminator here looks awesome, but he needed to be beefed up just a bit. (The blue figure is the original). We had the amazing and talented Lee Stansbury make some tweaks to the figure to make him just a bit bigger and more ARNOLD, so he would be the imposing force that he should be in this game.

But remember what I was saying about Kyle?

 We needed to do the opposite with Kyle. His figure was just a bit of a beast and needed to be brought down to size a bit so that he wouldn’t look like a giant out on the board.

 The last one I’ll show you here is much more subtle. Traxler looks largely unchanged at first glance...but if you take a close look at the bases you can see the subtle change that was made to increase his size to put him into scale with the other figures.

Now that this has been done--everything looks good together in a seamless and consistent way.

All of this work has been done on every miniature, obstacle, and vehicle in the game--and everything is looking great together now.

That’s it for this week’s peek behind the curtain of Terminator: The Official Board Game.

Until next time -- remember --

I’ll be back.

Best,

Michael

Hello Everyone,

Let’s dive into this board!

Last week I told you about some functional adjustments that we need to make to increase the playability of the board.

In case you missed the last update, here’s another look at the original board….

 Now, I have always thought this board looked pretty damned impressive. It does. It’s a very cool board, but I’ll tell you something else I found when I started looking closely at the original PSD files for this board: the grey, washed out, primary look of the board is not actually what the original hand-drawn artwork on the board looks like --

This week, I got an update of that original piece of artwork that reflects the barricade adjustments I mentioned last week from our amazing artist, Dave Youkovich.

Take a look at the completely unfiltered art right here:

 Let me show you some of these things a little closer up:

 As you can see, there’s some amazing stuff and there’s nothing being duplicated. Every barrier is an original piece of art.

As we’re modifying the board over the rest of this week, I’m going to be making some adjustments to see some different ways we can highlight this artwork and emphasize it.

Once I have that finished, I’ll post images of the board exactly like it has been originally, but with the modified red zones and edits I mentioned last week, and also an image of a more modified board that will showcase this artwork a little better...THEN…

We’re going to let you vote on the two, and select the final 2029 board for this game.

I hope you’re into that. I think it’s a great way for all of us to have a voice in making sure that this game is the absolute best it can be.

Until next time, remember...I’ll be back!

Michael

Hello Everyone,

This week we’re going to talk about the 2029 Skynet Board! Throughout playtesting, I kept running into areas where this board felt like it could be improved. 

 Let’s get right into it!

This is the board as it appears right now and as you have seen it. This is a good board and the art is stellar--but this can, and needs to be, better.

There are two issues with the board right now as it relates to gameplay.

• The Board needs an extra column to make it a 20x20 grid. This gives everything more room to breathe for smoother play and all around improves gameplay, rules, everything. 
• These barriers in the corners are dead space.

You can see them here marked in red. They are barriers where the various factions cannot go, but they don’t serve a purpose beyond giving us less board to play on.

SO, we need to make some adjustments, which I have outlined here in yellow --

 Adding the column will make it necessary for the artist to adjust several different aspects of the board, but we need 20x20 rows and columns so we have an actual center on this thing. I expect to be able to show you the updated and modified board soon.

Because we’re going back in and doing this I also wanted to increase the playability of the entire board by making the barricaded areas more useful. To accomplish this, I’ll be adding rules about how players can climb on top of these barricades to claim the high ground in an attack, as well as how these barricades can be destroyed, opening up that play area for players to move into.

Overall, I think these improvements to the board are going to improve overall gameplay and expand how you can play the game.

This is what I’ve been working on this week. I’d love to know what you think of it!

Best,

Michael