A city-survival, cooperative game for 1-4 players where heat means life and every decision comes at a cost. From the designer of Nemesis and story creator for This War of Mine: TBG.
In Frostpunk: The Board Game you will take on the role of leaders of a small colony of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world that was hit by a severe ice age.
Build shelters and resource gathering facilities, explore the frostlands, research new technologies, and introduce new laws.
What decisions will you make to ensure your city's survival?
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Additional products survey
about 3 years ago
– Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 02:49:13 AM
Hello Frostlanders!
DISCLAIMER: If you are not interested in the alternative wooden game components nor the big-hold-it all-box please ignore this update. Our regular update is coming and will be posted in the first half of April. The April update will feature a detailed development & production schedules and a lot “what’s new” information. If you are curious about the potential new addons please keep on reading :-) !
So we all now know that 2021 is not going to be much better than 2020, let’s just hope it isn’t going to be worse ;-). Meanwhile let us all enjoy the first days of Spring!
We can’t wait to put some extra coal into our generators using those warm and sunny days ahead of us but before that can happen there is work to be done here! There are amazing board game components to be made and one heck of an epic game to be developed!
Additional products: the hold-it-all box and wooden buildings meeples
You’ve asked us to prepare the following products, like really a lot :D we received comments and messages so here they are for your viewing pleasure ;-)
Please note, that the shipping price of The Iceberg Box will be calculated individually, it is going to be very similar to the price of shipping for a Core Pledge (the box is bigger than two standard board game boxes). KS Exclusive means that this hold-it-all box is never going to collect dust on shop shelves. It will be available only here, via Pledge Manager and our internet shop. It is a one time limited print.
Hunter's Hut and Coal Mine sample buildings plans:
Please note that the Timber City Expansion shouldn’t affect the shipping costs if added to the Core Pledge. With other pledges it may affect shipping, but we are still waiting for the estimation of weight of this product.
The Survey
To manufacture any of these products we will need at least 500 orders for each one. We realize these items aren’t cheap but this is because of the low printrun we are dealing with here (500, compared to 20.000 of the Miniatures Expansion - this really affects the price) and that they are custom made for our products alone.
In order to evaluate your interest in these items and the sense of adding them to the Pledge Manager as add-ons we’ve prepared the survey you will find below.
We will collect your answers until the 30th of March. Depending on your responses we will either add these to the PM as add-ons (this would mean that we will prolong the PM being open until mid-April) or we will simply forget about the whole deal :-)
Thank you for being a part of this endeavour and stay safe!
Jakub & GCU Team
Snow is thawing, the Spring is coming!
about 3 years ago
– Sun, Mar 07, 2021 at 01:52:05 AM
Greetings and salutations dear Frostlanders!
We hope that wherever it is that you call home you too can feel the coming of the Spring. In Poland we had a rather oldschool Polish winter with snow and temperatures of – 10 Celsius at night so it caused some everyday life issues and a ton of fun for the kids 😊. Surrounded by frosty weather, covered in snow and unable to leave (pandemic restrictions) we kind of felt trapped, as if in some crater with walls frozen solid…
Enough daydreaming 😉 let’s get to the good stuff! Today’s Update is sponsored by the number 87!
87%...
Is not how strong the Polish drinks are during winter… it is the amount of backers who completed their pledge manager surveys. So, if you are not among these fine folks yet please don’t hesitate and complete the survey. This link will take you to the update where all the necessary instructions and useful links are:
In a week or two we will be sending out reminders by email to those who still won’t have their surveys completed. Please remember that without a completed survey we won’t be able to deliver your games since it not only provides us with your delivery address but also lets us know which language version you want, and should it be pre-shaded or not (if you went for the minis).
The pledge manager will be closed at the end of March. Your cards will be charged a few days later so it is safe to say that it will happen in the first week of April. Of course, your cards will be charged with the shipping costs and any potential add-on you might have added to your pledges. Then we will be able to estimate the production volume more accurately and share it with our publishing partners who will in turn determine the volume of their orders for the retail version of the game that will be manufactured for their corresponding markets. Only then can we hit the red button and send the exact numbers to the manufacturer for the first print run of the game. As you see for yourself this is a process that has many dependencies and is rather time consuming. Fortunately, we are working with experienced professionals and so far, the whole process is running smoothly.
Additional products you have been asking for
The Chinese New Year celebrations made it a bit tricky to receive the estimations for the two add-ons you have all been asking about: the hold-it-all box (storage solution) and the wooden buildings. We expect to get the first quotes in about two weeks. Then we will be able to calculate if these add-ons are doable from the production perspective and how will they impact shipping. We plan to ask you through a survey to check how many of you would be interested in getting each add-on to see if their existence is reflected in your needs and desires 😊. If the demand will be high enough from the production point of view, we will create them thus prolonging the pledge manager shut down for some time.
The hold-it-all box will probably be 660x340x120mm. To store all the game components in it (Frostlander, Miniatures, Dreadnought, Resources and Playing Mat Expansions – all in their component trays you will find inside their original boxes). We are waiting not only on the quote but also for a digital presentation of such a solution that will show where each piece will have its place inside.
Wooden City is going to be an add-on that will have all the buildings from the game but in the form of wooden components, it will be a great alternative for the Miniatures Expansion for those of you who do like the wooden feel of your board games 😉 (looking at you Meeple purists! 😊). The size and cost remain a mystery for now, it will include around 84 wooden buildings with both sides printed, depicting the corresponding building. Below is an exemplary presentation of how it could look.
What do you think? Is it to your liking? We wholeheartedly request your opinions on that matter in the comments section of this update, since without your feedback we are like a team of scouts without the light of the beacon to guide us through the deadly, endless white!
OK, that is it with the soft theory now let us crack into some hard as ice facts!
Anez joins the crew!
We’ve been bursting to tell you about this for some time now, but we finally can! We are honored to announce that the whole board and all the tokens will be illustrated by the one and only Anez - an extremely talented illustrator with board game specific experience. She worked with the best and most prestigious publishers like Stonemaier Games or Bezier Games. We think that her style, full of details and distinguishing features, will breathe new life into the visual experience of the whole game. Some of you might already recognize her style from Castles of Mad King Ludwig we see it as a perfect match for what we want to achieve in Frostpunk: The Board Game. Enough of us talking, see for yourselves:
We’ve put a tremendous task in front of Anez, she has to create nearly 40 unique buildings and a few dozen other illustrations for all the tiles and the outer rim (resources, terrain diversity and naturally the snow itself 😉 lots of it!). This task will take her nearly 3 months of intensive, everyday work. We will be sharing the progress with you on our media, especially on the Facebook group and on the… Discord group (more on this below!):
Here are some sketches prepared by Anez, they provide basis for further works:
It is thanks to your generous support that we can work with such a talented artist on this project so a big warm THANK YOU flies your way!
It is alive! The Generator... works!
Being able to work with Anez is exciting news but we have something even more exciting! The production prototype of the Generator came to us from the manufacturer in Ningbo and we have been running some extensive tests since February on it and… IT WORKS! The interior provides results exactly as it was intended and designed to. The cubes that stay inside fit in the norms we had in mind… the Generator slowly fills in as you progress through the game and starts spitting out its contents towards the late game when it hurts the most to have all that malfunction to deal with. Your engineers will have plenty to deal with 😉 maintaining and upgrading this life-sustaining behemoth.
Making a plastic cube tower might seem like a trivial thing but it is an illusion – a dependable, predictable and reliable functioning of this piece was one of (if not THE) biggest risks in this whole endeavor, hence our joy and excitement that it is functioning as intended. Big thanks and kudos to our manufacturer who was able to replicate the same results we had with our 3D printed prototypes. This news allowed us to drop a heavy stone from our shoulders 😊.
Please see the short video below, presenting what happens when 10 cubes are thrown inside.
As you have seen some of the cubes were caught as early as the very top grate (it can be installed as an in-game upgrade to your Generator), a few got swallowed by the machine’s innards and half fell to the tray/drawer. The ones that stayed inside may fall out when you next throw cubes in, potentially altering the result of the operation. Currently we use the manufactured Generator in our test plays and well it does generate a lot of emotions (pun intended 😉).
We realize that there are many more challenges ahead of us, with the Generator as well since the mass production version must keep the same quality and operating parameters. But it is something we will be pulling out our hair later in the grand scheme of things, the main and extremely positive news is that the manufactured prototype works just as intended so it is great news – we must admit it even with our inborn Slav pessimism 😊. We have found some minor issues with the Generator that need fixing: the tray/drawer doesn’t slide in fully (it is 1 mm too long), the Upgrade grate is not as easy to install as we’d like (shortening the arms by 0.5mm from each side should fix it), the outside detail level is too low (we want the Generator to look like a piece of engineering not a plastic toy 😊). Our 3D artists are already on it and there is a lot of work in front of them, the same can be said about…
The design – a progress report
We have made some major progress since the beginning of the works, especially when it comes to balancing the game. We were able to come up with many conclusions from the couple hundred tests on Tabletop Simulator (many of them with the active members of our community). The one that worried us the most was the “7th turn syndrome” (that is what we called it :-P). It bothered us because in some of the games it was possible to see whether the game is going to be a win or a loss. This was a major issue since there is little point in playing if you already know the outcome! Our project goal was to resolve a playthrough by the 11th or the 12th turn so that the tension would keep you in its grip to the very end. Lack of perspectives for winning or the sureness of it were working directly against our goal. To get rid of this major issue we had to revisit the very core of the whole game like for example the supply and demand for resources, costs of the buildings and the costs of the upgrades. These are the foundations of the game from which many later values and numbers derive. By a tedious process of calculating, re-assigning the core values and testing them we were able to solve this issue. We are still inspecting it rather meticulously observing how spending some of the key resources in the game (wood and steam cores) relates to the settlement’s development and growth.
This struggle unfortunately cost us time; we call this fight a win, but we are still cautious in celebrating our victories since in game development questioning your own work is what makes it good. The creation process for new content of the game (scenarios and setups) will suffer a delay from this effort. Fortunately, we were able to polish all other key aspects of the game, such as citizens getting sick, heating, technological research. All these layers were updated and many of the updates were a direct result of the invaluable feedback many of you provided be it on the campaign page, boardgamegeek.com or test sessions. In the next update we want to present those updates and changes to you in more detail and provide you with an updated version of our Tabletop Simulator mod along with the updated manual. We are happy (mind you we don’t say it often) with how the game’s mechanics have grown and “matured” in the development process. The dependencies that occur between them create a connected vessel system that recrates the complex intricacies we all loved so much in the digital Frostpunk.
The necessity of changing the supply and demand at its core impacted the app, we already have a working beta version that is waiting for us to install the updated dependencies between the resources. We anticipate that we will be able to launch open tests for the app and its marketplace soon.
Below you can see a print screen from one of our test sessions with 24 different technology cards that were the main focus of that test...
Currently we have 16 technology cards picked. Half will land in the core box (+1 scenario based) and the other one in the Frostlander expansion. These cards are being tweaked and polished before we tick them as final, we want to make sure their cost is equal to their impact on the gameplay.
The big rock and a Dreadnought!
Today’s update is a large one, so we’ve brought some big guns! The Edge of Kinship sculpt by Ścibor Teleszyński is finished and we were able to cut it to pieces...
...don’t worry this is how we can cast it into molds and later pour that magic resin into the forms! The manufacturer had to check if the final sculpt fits their specs before they begin creating silicon forms which will later be used for mass production. Once this process is over the miniature will go back to our master sculptor – Ścibor for some final touch ups and for adding the parts that will make the assembly of the final miniature a child’s play for you. Then the miniature flies back to the manufacturer where the final silicon forms will be produced, and a few masters will be created (masters – this is how we call the exemplary model from which copies are later made). Those masters will be closely guarded and stored in our manufacturer’s workshop since they will be in constant use and should any one of them bear any signs of usage it will be changed to a new one. The whole process will be almost entirely manual labor and we can guarantee the highest possible quality of the final product – the whole process will happen in Poland where we live and work.
The Dreadnought is also looking rosy 😉, you have seen the render in our previous updates, and you have seen how it evolved as a sculpt. Here is the prototype from our manufacturer in China where the model is being prepared for plastic mold injected production. The model you see has been 3D printed to check if it is in accordance with the vision we had for it. Please see the photos we received last Monday:
Soon the pre-production prototype will be in our hands and we will be able to place it on the board and check how it sits with all the other components… of course we will share the pics 😉.
The voice that matters most
You guessed it! It is your voice, and we want to hear it even more than before… it will be possible thanks to a certain duck… yes! Ok we did not smoke anything funny it is time for the big reveal!
Glass Cannon Unplugged is proud to announce that we have joined the Paddle communityon Discord.
Our co-operation with Jesse and Jan began with the first ever gameplay video for Frostpunk: The Board Game and the astounding reception it received. Ever since Quackalope and the amazing community of nearly 4000 people (!!!) called the Paddle on Discord have been a real treasure to have.
We consider it a bold move since the first publisher to join it. The hosts were kind enough to provide us with our own space in their territory but should you join please feel free to explore the whole community! Among a few of the major YT content creators it holds a space for RPG fans, indie creators, and occasionally internal conventions! That is right if we are not mistaken there were already 2 virtual cons on the Paddle! Both incredibly successful.
Oh and did we mention the regular giveaways that are happening there?
Please feel wholeheartedly invited to join and embrace the power of a community 😊!
As we near the end… it is time for a feast for your eyes! Behold the work of Laurent Laveau
Who doesn’t love miniatures! The only thing better than miniatures are painted miniatures! Even better are painted miniatures in a diorama! 😊
Laurent is an incredible person who lives in a remote area of France, when he first wrote to us, we weren’t even able to send the materials to him but the French post services are brave and dedicated and they were able to deliver the package… the results? See for yourselves!
Please remember that Laurent is an artisan by trade, he has been working with meticulous detail for many years and he used advanced modeling techniques to achieve these effects using high precision, resin 3D prints. Yes, we would also love to be able to do stuff like this but it is beyond even old hobby nerds like us :D
The final plastic buildings won’t look as amazing as Laurent’s work, but they will be as impressive as any mass-produced thing can be! The recesses and openings in some of the buildings are the result of 3D printing and cannot be replicated by plastic injection so please also keep this in mind. Soon you will be able to see for yourselves!
Laurent, you are an amazing person and the whole team is thankful for your time and dedication!
Thank you for being a part of this endeavor and for allowing us to work on this amazing project! May Spring bring you all health and smile!
Jakub & GCU Team
GCU Spotlight
TinkerTurf wargaming terrain
At GCU we are major geeks… and wargaming is among our many soft spots this is why when we saw this, we went mental and we wanted to share it with you in case any among you are wargamers as well 😊
The late pledge option is open and can be accessed here:
Our friends from 11 bit studios shared this amazing video on their Facebook page today and we must admit that it is downright awesome!
Frostpunk + LEGO = YES!
Hear me, hear me! Pledge Manager is Live! Pre-Order is Live!
about 3 years ago
– Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 09:36:14 PM
Hello Frostlanders!
We’ve said our goodbyes to 2020, although for us it had one major positive memory - it saw the birth of Frostpunk: The Board Game and this year will be all about seeing it land safely on your tables and stay there for many months, if not years to come! We are doing everything we can to deliver a game you’ve dreamt of. Happy New Year!
The Pledge Manager
The best part of making promises is fulfilling them, so here is one of many to come - The Backerkit Pledge Manager (PM)is now open, and you should receive an email invitation soon. If not, please check your SPAM folder.
Once you click the invitation link, please choose your country [Select your country for shipping]. This will set up your shipping charge.
If your pledge level is wrong, please switch your pledge level [switch your pledge level].
And chose the pledge you want. You may upgrade your pledge here as well.
Disclaimer: Please note that if you want to add a Miniatures Expansion box to the Core Pledge, it is better to upgrade your pledge to Deluxe Pledge, as doing so you will pay less for the shipping (due to standardized packages for such bundles).
When your pledge level and shipping destinations are OK, please proceed by clicking [Get Started].
The second way to change / upgrade your pledge is by clicking the amount of the reward you have chosen during the Kickstarter campaign on the top bar of the PM screen.
Choosing your language and pre-shading options
Now you will see a survey that will guide you to choose your language edition and the options of pre-shading (we recommend to take them pre-shaded, unless you are a miniature painter and are going to paint them by yourself). When everything is fine, you can move on to Add-ons.
Choosing your add-ons
Continuing with the add-ons - please add the additional items you wish to have in your order to your cart - as you’d do in a regular web shop. Your pledged amount is your available credit (reduced by the pledge you have chosen - it should already be in your basket, including the game itself and free items, like pre-shading for the miniatures and the Frostlander expansion). But you can purchase any extra items, and the total to be paid will be estimated including the shipping price.
All items that are currently in your cart are listed in the top-right part of the screen. Current shipping price is listed below.
Shipping address
Finally, enter your shipping address, pay the balance, and click "Place Order" and you'll be all set.
Important: You will be able to edit your shipping address till we prepare the parcels to be shipped (autumn 2021).
(In rare situations when you can't proceed with your shipping data please refresh your browser's screen.)
Once you respond to your survey, you can still go back later and change your choices until we close the surveys and get our final counts. If you need to review your information or pledge status, you can return to your survey by clicking the link in your survey email or by requesting your survey link under "Lost your survey?" on our BackerKit project page at: https://frostpunk-the-board-game.backerkit.com
If you used your Facebook credentials to log in to your Kickstarter account, the BackerKit survey is sent to the email address you use for your Facebook account.
The pledge manager will be open until the end of March 2021. After this day your cards will be charged.
Pre-Order
The Pledge Manager is open to anyone who would like to receive the game at the same time as the Kickstarter backers. Here is a link to the pre-order page (it works like a regular webshop): https://frostpunk-the-board-game.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Please note that free pre-shading is exclusive for Kickstarter backers. The Frostlander expansion was free for the Kickstarter backers - you may still order it, but at the regular price. Everything else is the same as in the campaign.
Shipping
It was a team effort and we did everything possible to squeeze into the price range that was promised during the campaign. Why was it an effort? In general the rates have gone from 5-20% up at the beginning of the year. So some countries may have a shipping rate slightly exceeding the estimated range during the campaign, but not by a lot. Why were the shipping costs globally increased? The past season in logistics dealt with the same thing we all deal with - the global pandemic. In logistics it caused immense hold-ups that impacted the global logistics ecosystem (large container shipping prices went up several times in their value: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55740063 ). Courier services have also gone up as an effect of us all sitting at homes and buying everything online (we are as guilty as the next men and women ;-) ). For those of you who would like to delve into the industry's inner workings even further we suggest this article as a solid reading: https://www.boardgamequest.com/why-new-board-game-releases-may-be-delayed-this-year/ .
Please mind that as a publisher we are not making any profit on the shipping of this project, to be completely honest - we are chipping in for a fair share from our profits to minimize the impact this situation will have on your shipping prices (we are also taking the risk included on ourselves since it is only reasonable to say that the situation will not change for better due to the upcoming wave the epidemic).
The games will be shipped from local hubs for any given destination so that any potential fees and customs are minimized or reduced to 0. For Europe we will most likely go with Green Logistics, for North America we will work with D6 Publisher Resources, for Asia with VFI Asia, and for Australia and New Zealand with Aetherworks. These are all battle-hardened logistics partners with whom we had dealings in our previous projects and who helped deliver some of the biggest and well received (pun intended) Kickstarter campaigns out there, All packages will be trackable and professionally secured (foam, foam everywhere!) to reach you in all their beauty and geeky glory!
Production Update
For those who missed last month’s update we’ve informed you about the development progress on both the game and the digital companion app... not to say that nothing has happened since! On the contrary, we have even bolstered our ranks with a new developer - Wojtek whose main job will be adding new content to the game and keeping it all perfectly balanced (he is a analyst with a Masters degree in mathematics) is lending us his axe-sharp mind. Of course the whole development is happening under Adam’s watchful eye ;-)!
Since we now have all the sizes for the cardboard elements, we can begin working on the graphic aspect of the game. The work on the new board and buildings, which was one of the upgrades that you dear backers made possible, has started. We’ve managed to secure an incredibly talented individual whose works you’ve seen in some of the best selling games across the globe. It will be pure pleasure to feature that mysterious person along with… her work as we progress with the work. The teasing will cease now however it is almost painful not to tease some more… must not tease… ;-)
We have chosen a manufacturer - it is going to be the Eastar company who is responsible for manufacturing such fine titles as Nemesis, Tainted Grail or Etherfields. Let’s just say there were cheaper options that also promised good quality but we decided to go with Eastar for their top of the industry standard for manufacturing games (especially miniatures, for it is rather safe to say they are unmatched in this field). The epicness of our last city on Earth is something we take very seriously. We went with the deluxe version ;-). We’ve paid a 50% advance for production to secure our place in the production schedule and for the manufacturer to purchase all the necessary materials should the prices go up for some reason.
Our 3D artists are working real hard to chisel the hell out of the models, so that the quality guaranteed by our manufacturer is not wasted. The buildings are still in development, but the works on the Generator and the Dreadnought are finished. The models were sent to the manufacturer’s prototype workshop and we are awaiting samples :-). Once we receive them, we will need to run tests if the manufactured interior works the same as the one in our 3D printed prototypes. For now we can present to you the rendered models of the two biggest pieces that will land on your tables along with Frostpunk: The Board Game.
Generator Tower - comparison render - production model on the right, campaign demo model on the left:
Rear view:
Thanks to the inspired work of our 3D artists we were able to add this extra layer of “realness” that we all so loved in the digital game, making it look more like the original piece and maintaining our unique interior design. As promised and requested - we’ve added multiple details stretching the barrier of what is possible with mould injection technology for plastic miniatures to its limits ;-). We simply cannot wait for that moment when the first Coal cubes will start bouncing off the walls of the Generator’s factory prototype, so you can be sure there will be a video posted in our Facebook group as soon as it arrives and in an update soon after! If any of you still wish to join the Facebook group for Frostpunk: The Board Game please use this link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/frostpunktheboardgame/ in the questions section just say: “I’m your backer, yo!” :-)
Below you can lay your eyes on the one and only Dreadnought - the second largest (after the Generator) iconic miniature (sic!) in Frostpunk: The Board Game. The way our artists were able to translate the model from the digital game into a miniature that is possible to manufacture and still amazing left us jaw dropping for half a day! But don’t rely on our words alone, see for yourselves!
In the Pledge Manager you can add this beast to your pledge in the Add-ons section for 20 EUR. Of course all of those who went All-in will already find the Dreadnought as a free bonus in your baskets. If any of you full backers (pledge level of Core Box and above) feel like it you can upgrade your pledge to an All-in and receive this steel (actually it is plastic) behemoth for free!
Most Anticipated Board Game of 2021 Contest
We’d like to invite you all to participate in BGG’s vote for the most anticipated games of 2021. We can’t think of any other online event that would be equally exciting for publishers and gamers around the Globe. We are very keen on Frostpunk: The Board Game being visible in the charts not only because it is our first project as Glass Cannon Unplugged but also because we feel that the road we’ve walked together with you deserves to be in the spotlight so that other lost souls can joins us and heat up a little by the fire. This is why we are kindly asking for a bit of your time, if you agree with us that Frostpunk: The Board Game deserves the visibility please go to the BGG website (https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/282115/20-most-anticipated-board-games-2021-1200-votes-fi) and support us once again with your vote. We’ve been nominated in three categories: Overall, Economic, Sci-Fi - we won’t mind if you vote on us in all three ;-)
Our sincere thanks and good thoughts go to you!
Jakub & GCU Team
P.S.
GCU’s Spotlight
Napful Games – A Hobby Tabletop Game Publisher
Those of you who’ve met us during the times when we could all meet in Essen or in Indianapolis might know that we are strong believers in the power of community and giving back the positive energy you receive.
This is why we’d like to… break a little promise given a bit earlier and tease some more…
We have a surprise in the making for you all, a top secret project that almost no one knows about… well now it isn’t so secret but at least it’s details are!
Helping us in this perilous venture will be one amazing individual whom some of you might remember from our very first gameplay video done by Jesse on the Quackalope channel… It was a 4 hours game and he took it like a boss! Ladies and gentlemen please give it up for Natanel Apfel!
Nat is one heck of a talented geek who is starting his own one man publishing venture and came up with his immensely dark, rich and strangely appealing world… the world of Into the Outside!
Into the Outside is a free storybook, roll and write PnP game that we strongly encourage you to check out! -> https://napfulgames.com/
We will keep you updated on our cooperation with Nat!
DEFCON 1
We wholeheartedly recommend you click that “Notify me on launch” button for the upcoming campaign of our French edition partner - Asyncron Games - they are working on a particularly ambitious project featuring an asymmetrical, strategic game for up to 5 players… and the setting is cold war! -> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/asyncron-games/defcon-1
Christmas Carol
over 3 years ago
– Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 01:14:48 PM
Hello Frostlanders!
We decided to publish this, second after the campaign update, a bit sooner mainly because we wanted to pass our wishes to all of you beautiful souls! To those of you who partake in the Christmas tradition we wish the merriest possible time with your loved ones and to those of you who have other beliefs or simply don’t have any we hope that the upcoming year brings only the most welcome changes and improves every aspect of your lives. We hope that no matter where you are in World these last days of 2020 will allow you to catch a breath and gain the strength needed to face what 2021 has in store for us ;-). With a new hope we all look to 2021 to bring us challenges that we can easily overcome together without any bad outcomes, so let’s hope that the Event card to be drawn on the 1st of January will be a good and easy one ;-). To wrap it up we wish you all the strength and determination to turn the upcoming year into a series of success and joyful memories!
Using this occasion we want to provide you a brief summary of what is going on at GCU’s workbench:
We’ve collected all the pricing from the manufacturers and are working towards making the final decision that will allow us to achieve the best possible quality in the dedicated budget. Using our experience in manufacturing we’ve asked a series of questions to the manufacturers and we will base our final decision on their answers and the samples they will send us (including other games they manufactured). Your amazing support allows us to choose from the top manufacturers (responsible for manufacturing such games as Scythe or Nemesis and Etherfields) because at the end of the day we want to be sure that you are receiving the best possible quality achievable in the board games industry!
Pledge manager is up and we are currently filling in the shipping prices. We have the dimensions and the weights of all the components and thanks to that we were able to analyze the shipping costs and what follows we chose our logistics partners for all the parts of the globe. Just as promised we will be breaking the shipping for various, separate logistics HUBs: EU (+ Europe), USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and Asia. This will mitigate or greatly reduce any customs fees or charges that you would otherwise incur. We are waiting for a pricing update for shipping by various operators (a new year always generates an increase in the prices for global services, depending on the region the increase is between 5% to 20% and we will learn about the exact numbers just after the new year). We’re also waiting for the GB – EU situation to clear out. We took those increases into account when estimating our shipping costs in October and we hope the actual ones will not be much bigger than what we’ve estimated. Once we’ll collect all the information we will update the prices in the PM and as promised launch it in the first half of January 2021.
Before we launch the Pledge Manager for all of you we will do a so-called Smoke Test where a group of randomly chosen backers (about 100) will receive early access to the Pledge Manager. This will allow us to catch any potential errors and mistakes and smooth things out for the majority of you. You will have well over 2 months to browse our Pledge Manager before we close it on 31.03.2021.
At the same time we will keep the preorder open for all those who missed our campaign but would like to receive a copy of Frostpunk: The Board Game.
As far as the development is concerned we are making slow but steady progress, solving the issues we knew existed and the new ones that keep popping out now and then, the checklists are being ticked away! 😊 A new developer (Grzesiek) joined us in December and another one will be pledging his sword (or in his case it will probably be an axe or a war hammer) to our cause in January. Come February and March we will launch a test offensive where a team of testers and test coordinators will join our ranks for mass testing to begin. Once the snows begin to melt away (if 2021 doesn’t bring any weather surprises 😉 ) we will update the Tabletop Simulator with a late beta version of the game and we will ask your help in catching any typos and chliks that might sneak past our eyes. Of course we will show only the basic scenario not to spoil anything for you, before your physical copies arrive at your tables 😉.
We are constantly improving and tweaking the 3D models of all the buildings in order to have the most detailed and eye-catching effect at the end. Buildings, generators and piping, those are all sculpts a lot more complicated than human or animal poses, all the lines must be perfectly straight and realistic… the fun fact is that there are a lot more sculptors who can sculpt an epic dragon then there are those who can depict a realistic building! Come next update we should be able to share the final images for the generator and the dreadnought.
Keeping true to what we wrote last month we’ve updated the board, the modifications of all aspects of the board allow us to add the second layer of cardboard and decrease the general size of the whole setup meanwhile improving the ergonomics and clarity of how everything is depicted. We’ve printed the new board and will soon begin testing it with tokens and miniatures. Things that work in Tabletop Simulator are not guaranteed to work the same in the real world with physical manipulation on a real table. So each new modification gets tested both on Tabletop Simulator and on the physical prototype before it will be accepted and admitted to the final game to be printed.
The work on the companion app for Frostpunk: The Board Game is just as intensive as the aforementioned aspects of development performed by our merry little bunch of nerds and geeks 😉. An experienced digital developer joined us. He was able to create a working prototype in less than a month, it is based on the concept by Adam Kwapiński. In the meantime our visual team was able to prepare the UI for the app for your viewing pleasure:
That would be all for today! Stay safe, stay sharp and look into the distance with hope and determination! Happy New Year Frostlanders!
Jakub & GCU Team
Last Days of Autumn
over 3 years ago
– Tue, Dec 01, 2020 at 11:56:53 PM
Hello Frostlanders!
We hope you missed us a bit, cause sure as heck we missed y’all!
Preparing and managing a Kickstarter campaign, let me tell you, It’s like being on a roller coaster. First the slow build-up, then it goes live, excitement and adrenaline courses through your veins, and before you know it, it’s over. All those pent up emotions have to find an outlet and be refocused elsewhere: towards fulfillment. And let me tell you, we haven’t wasted any of those short autumn days.
Work Report
We’re currently working on multiple codependent tasks. Here’s a list of those that we’ve managed to complete recently, and will be finishing in coming days:
We’ve recruited and trained a dedicated Customer Support team. Be it email, Kickstarter, Facebook or any other communication channel, those brave souls are always ready to answer any query or question you might have. ;) The best way to contact us (with fastest response time) is now a contact form available on our website: https://glasscannonunplugged.com/customer-support/
For the Pledge Manager we’ve chosen the best and most reliable option currently on the market: - https://www.backerkit.com/. As we write this update we are finalizing the creation of the base of products, their descriptions, prices, versions (pre-shaded non-shaded, language, etc.), pictures and surveys. The surveys will allow you to pick your language version. It is a huge chunk of work but we are nearly there.
We were able to complete the pricing process for all the games (it grew significantly throughout the campaign 😉). Fortunately all the calculations were accurate and we haven’t breached our production budget… that much 😉. We were able to receive the approximate size of the boxes and weight of the components (once the prototypes will be created we will know the exact numbers).
Having obtained the aforementioned info we are now in the process of calculating the shipping costs. This part includes not only the logistics – meaning the delivery but also confection and packaging. The costs of transporting the games from the factory to all the logistic hubs and centers. Your support found its way towards us and this project from all over the world, so there are many directions we will ship and many ‘pitfalls’ for us to avoid (like the custom fees in Brazil or Canada, UK leaving the European Union, etc.). We are working with experienced logistics operators to be certain that we can avoid these ‘traps’.
Only once the shipping costs are certain and set in the pledge manager will we be able to launch the pledge manager. We will need about 2 more weeks to finish the work on our end before we are ready with all the options and products but we see very little sense in opening the pledge manager just before Winter Holidays and the New Year’s break. This is why we will launch it at the beginning of January, when all of us will be back at work. The pledge manager will be open for 3 months, meaning until 31st of March 2021.
Meanwhile we’ve been working hard on the game itself. Thanks to your feedback and to our testers we’ve confirmed several issues that heavily influenced the flow and the dynamics of the game (the difficulty level falling after a certain point and an unsatisfactory model for the Citizen’s falling prey to sickness). The solutions we’ve implemented to solve both of those issues look very promising, making each playthrough even more exciting. It is too big to chew at once and when the time is right we will dedicate a separate update to it. For now it is too early to talk about it in detail.
We’ve reviewed most of the main board and the auxiliary boards so that they will fit most tables. It is an ongoing process and soon a new prototype will see the light of day and if it will meet our (and your) standards it will be presented in one of the upcoming updates, if it will not be OK then it will land in the trash and a we will begin the work anew 😊
We are in the process of signing all the contracts with the publishers that will handle the localization process for their home markets and for your localized versions of the game. There is a probability we will have some new language versions previously unavailable during the Kickstarter. If the talks go well we’ll announce them when we launch the pledge manager so that you will have the maximum of possibilities – for example if you want to stick with what you chose during the Kickstarter or will you wait for a retail version in your native language (should it be one of the new ones unavailable during the KS).
The preparation for the production of the plastic components is in full tilt mode, it is a time consuming process and we want to start it sooner than later to avoid any unpleasant surprises before we are ready to ship the games. The models are in the hands of the 3D sculptors who prepare them for the mold injection process, checking each model several times to see if it can be manufactured in its current form. What is more, wherever it is possible we are adding final touches to make the miniatures more like the ones in the digital game, Generator Tower for example. Here is how it looks:
Generator Tower, updated sculpt.
So this is how the last month looked from our perspective.
Let us know in the comments how the days after the campaign have been for you. Any exciting board games you played?
