5/1/24 Roads & Boats &cetera
8 months ago
– Wed, May 01, 2024 at 05:23:20 AM
Hello and welcome to the May update, we have mostly good news!
Production is complete!
Panda completed production on April 16th and packed up the games for their freight journeys.
Ocean and Land Freight
All games have left Panda’s factory and are en route to their hub destinations with the exception of the UK/EU stock, more on that below.
The land shipment to VFI has arrived at their warehouse and been split and shipped to their external hubs for fulfillment. Most of those shipments will take about 3-4 more weeks to reach their destinations and start fulfillment to those areas but some Asia backers may see their games arriving sooner than that.
AU/NZ games are en route to Sydney and are expected to arrive there on May 13th.
North America and rest of world games are en route to Jacksonville and are expected to arrive there on June 4th.
UK/EU Update
UK/EU games are also en route to Jacksonville to be stored by QML while we wait for our UK VAT registration to clear. We did this for a couple reasons:
We were offered the opportunity to consolidate our shipment with another client of QMLs to save on freight costs, which ended up being pretty major savings, and, not to mention, more efficient because neither company is shipping partially filled containers now.
Our UK VAT registration, which is needed in order to book a shipment to the UK, was not able to be submitted until about a week ago. This is because the required documents to register for VAT are things we just didn’t have access to until later in the production process. Once we got them we submitted our application as soon as we could. Then we were informed that the approval process could take up to 12 weeks (though HMRC says 30 days…) so to be safe we put the games on a boat to the US which gives us the ability to send them to the UK from QML which should be a shorter trip and will ultimately save some time and reduce the potential delay. If the registration goes through while the boat to the US is still on the water we will sort out the follow-up shipment to be done as soon as possible upon arrival. All that being said, we are expecting a delay for UK and EU backers. How long that delay will be is still up in the air but we are doing everything we can to minimize it.
Address updates
We have locked addresses for backers in the Asia region already as those orders are close to being fulfilled.
All other regions, if your address is changing or has changed from what you entered in the pledge manager survey please update it ASAP. We will be locking all addresses on Monday May 6th.
First games out in the wild!
We had 10 copies of the game air mailed to us from Panda, along with all the spare parts we may need in the unlikely event of printing or packing errors that we need to resolve. Most of these 10 games were sent to our playtest groups as a thank you for participating and giving us their feedback. If you are headed to TraXX this weekend it’s possible you will see a copy floating around there.
Thanks!
Asterisk
4/1/24 Mass Production Copy and EU/UK Fulfillment Update
9 months ago
– Mon, Apr 01, 2024 at 03:48:24 PM
Hello,
A few things to talk about so let’s get into it.
MPC Has Arrived!
First, the MPC (Mass Production Copy) arrived not too long ago so we got to see what the actual production version of the game will look like. Spoiler alert, it’s great. We’re very happy with how everything turned out and we have no changes to make based on this copy. Here are some pictures:
EU Fulfillment
We do have an adjustment to our fulfillment plan to talk about. We have made the decision to move EU fulfillment from happyshops over to Spiral Galaxy. We did this for two reasons:
1.We’ve been struggling to get everything we need to register for an EU VAT ID, it seems like as a new company it’s just very difficult to do because VAT registration requires us to prove we have product shipping to our EU hub, but in order to schedule a shipment to our EU hub we need a VAT ID. Using Spiral gets us around this for now because they will use their VAT ID to make shipments into the EU and we will reimburse them with the funds we’ve collected from our backers. We are hoping to get our own VAT registration for future projects to allow us more freedom with how we handle fulfillment but for now this feels like our best option.
2.Spiral is just a better fit for us as a new company. In our communications with them they’ve helped us understand a lot of the little details that we need to address from safety markings to how we fit into the tax system.
What this means for EU backers: Hopefully you don’t notice any difference. We are on track to ship the games to Spiral with no added delay due to this change. Spiral’s fulfillment quotes were a bit higher than happyshops but we will not be asking for any additional payments. Any difference in fulfillment charges will be our responsibility.
We also had to reprint the false back of the box to adjust the fulfillment company information but that is a small expense for us and shouldn’t cause a delay.
UK and EU fulfillment
Finally, we are closing in on everything we need for our UK VAT ID, which is a requirement for scheduling ocean freight. It’s coming down to the wire (more chicken and egg issues) so it’s possible this process will cause a small delay to our ocean freight timeline. It depends on how long the registration process takes from when we have submitted everything and on when Panda completes production of all the games. Neither of those things is known to us at the moment. Even with a delay I believe we are on track to fulfill in July of this year, but we will let everyone know if that expectation changes with more information.
Backers with Uncompleted Surveys
There are still about 25 people (down from 50 a few weeks ago) who paid for a game but did not complete their surveys. We have contacted those people directly on kickstarter as well as through e-mail reminders in the backerkit system. These games will not ship with regular fulfillment because we had to pull our final backer data report for our fulfillment partners today. If those surveys are completed between now and the time of fulfillment we will handle them after regular fulfillment is done.
As always, thanks so much for your support,
Asterisk
3/1/24 Update
10 months ago
– Fri, Mar 01, 2024 at 08:45:55 AM
Production Update
Chinese New Year has ended and things are back in full swing at Panda. We are expecting the mass production copy to be sent to us near the end of March. Assuming we find no major faults we should be on track to complete the production and get the games into containers for distribution towards the end of April or early May.
Back of Box Adjustment
We are adding a loose sheet of paper with a duplicate image of the back of the box with some additional regulatory information for the EU and UK to be placed over the actual back before shrink wrapping. This won’t delay production and should prevent any unexpected delays when the games are imported. We decided to do this because information about what the regulations are and how they are enforced changes pretty often so this is the better safe than sorry option. We snuck a little treat on the back of the sheet as well so it’s not just a piece of garbage after you open it.
Orders have been locked
For the small number of backers who have not completed the survey, please do! We will be reaching out directly to try and wrap this process up. Cards have been charged for shipping. A small number of these were declined for various reasons and if yours was one of them please check your email which should provide instructions to update and retry!
Thank you all!
Asterisk
2/1/2024 Update
11 months ago
– Thu, Feb 01, 2024 at 08:05:14 AM
Hey Everyone,
Backer Surveys
Surveys have been out for a few weeks now and most of you have completed them. Thank you! Those of you who have not have until we close the survey on Saturday, February 17th. Please complete the survey so we can make sure you get your game(s). We will be sending reminder emails to those who still need to respond, please check your spam/junk folders. If you have not been receiving the emails send us a message here on Kickstarter and we will send you the personalized link to your survey.
Timeline Update
We got word from Panda that our Mass Production approval copies will ship to us near the end of March with production slated to finish towards the end of April. We were hoping for a shorter production period but even with a little extra time spent at the factory we are still more or less on track for a July fulfillment period. While production is happening we are coordinating with our fulfillment partners to make sure everything we need is ready when the games are able to ship.
Freight and Fulfillment
We had a great talk with our contacts at QML and have decided to expand their responsibilities in this project to include freight coordination in addition to the fulfillment duties we had already settled on. This basically means they will be handling the paperwork and planning of our ocean freight to the US, UK, EU, and AU. This part of the process is very new to us so it will be a good learning experience to see how everything is handled.
Thanks,
Asterisk
Pledge Manager for All
about 1 year ago
– Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 04:25:22 AM
Hey Everyone,
The smoke test looks good so surveys have been sent to all backers, keep an eye out for it, check junk folders, etc.
A few notes:
UK and EU backers have VAT folded into the shipping price so what you see as shipping will be all you will pay.
Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico backers will only have the option of flat rate ($20 per game) shipping sent by us as soon as we receive the games from QML. If you want to pay the extra $24ish dollars to get it shipped during regular fulfillment send us a message and we’ll figure it out.
It looks like Backerkit doesn’t charge cards immediately, but cards will be charged when we lock down the Pledge Manager. That will happen in late February or early March.
If you have questions or run into issues, let us know with a comment here, message through Backerkit or Kickstarter, or an e-mail.
Thanks so much!
-Asterisk
