Color Issue

Ah, crap. Yesterday, Sean had a long Skype call with our manufacturer’s liaison. We were informed about a couple more problems with the plastic cards. Some of the red cards have what the printer calls a “non-homogeneous color.” As you can see in the picture below, the printing of the color is inconsistent. If you look closely at the team bar at the bottom of the cards, you’ll notice that there is a slightly lighter shade of red than the rest of the character bar.

Scratches on Plastic

Our manufacturer’s quality assurance team also caught some scratches created during the printing process on a few of the cards. If you look at the picture below, you may notice these scratches. The most noticeable scratch is the one on the President card, immediately after the words, “You are the.” You can also see some on the President's Daughter's ponytail.

The Good News

Besides the plastic cards, all of the other components to the game are done being printed. The box, rulebook, character guide, and leader cards are waiting on pallets as I write this update. We are expecting our MPC to arrive this week.

What does this mean for our timelines?

Our manufacturer is working hard towards fixing these issues with printing. Resolving these card issues is going to add, at the very best, an extra week to the process. The painful thing is that this is the worst time for another delay to hit because now we are entering the dreaded Chinese New Year!!! This is where all of China basically stops working from the rest of the month. The factor closes from February 14th until March 2nd. So now we are looking at additional time to fix the issue, and at least 17 additional days because of Chinese New Year.

On March 2, the factory opens again. If, at that time, they have appropriately fixed these card issues, they'll begin to assemble all copies of the game. Assembly will take roughly 25 days. If the cards are not ready and fixed at this point, they will begin assembling the other components in order to save time.

Assembly includes: building the box, inserting cards (if they are quality approved), foam blocks, leader cards, character guide, and rulebook. Assembly also includes putting the games in cartons (bigger boxes used for freighting), putting those cartons on pallets, slapping on the shipping details, fumigating the pallets (so fungus and pests don’t eat your games), and then sending them off to get freighted to their appropriate country.

Freighting means: loading the pallets full of our games onto a ship, sailing to the target destination, unloading the pallets, getting through customs, and finally getting the carton of games picked up for shipping. This entire process is estimated to take about 30 days.

The Best Case Scenario

Doing the math gives us two different estimated times of arrival for your copy of Two Rooms and a Boom. The Best Case Scenario is that these printing errors are resolved easily. We are hoping that the non-homogenous color issue is an isolated issue, affecting only a few hundred cards or so. There is a good chance that this is the case as printers often have perform a few runs before the ink settles into its standard uniform colors. This would require only a minimal reprint, likely setting back our timeline only the aforementioned 1-2 weeks. This adds up to backers getting your boxes in mid to late May.

The Worst Case Scenario

In the Worst Case Scenario is these printing issues are not an isolated case fixed by merely printing cards to replace the few flawed cards. Rather, the entire print run has to be scrapped, machines recalibrated, and all cards need to be printed from scratch. Sean and I were told that if the entire set reprint commences and finishes by the end of March, then assembly would occur in April, and freighting would reach appropriate destinations by late May. Let’s assume there are problems with getting our containers through customs. Add in a couple more weeks then. Throw in a pinch of shipping time, and the worst case scenario is that backers start receiving their copies in mid to late June.

Lessons Learned?

Anytime anything goes wrong, Sean and I reflect. We want to make sure that we are continually learning and doing our best to be proactive. We want to gain and maintain the trust of our loyal backers and game players. So Sean and I audibly ask ourselves, “What did we learn this time and how to we apply the lessons we learn?”

We previously learned that emails to and from our manufacturer are not good enough. There is too much room for loss in translation and too often there are delays in responses. To fix this, Sean has successfully negotiated to have a weekly Skype call with our manufacturer’s liaison. Now, every Monday Sean gets to look a human being to whom he asks questions and from which he gets answers. This added human connection is already doing wonders, increasing efficiency, and decreasing some stress. I now personally believe that weekly Skype calls with your manufacturer should be an industry standard.

So what did we learn this week? Oh man, we really didn’t know how to estimate release dates. The artwork? Took way longer than we expected. Proofreading the massive character guide and rules? That also took extra time. Next gaming endeavor, we’ll happily invest the money and time to get that stuff done prior to Kickstarter. But after we finished dragging our asses to get our files to the printer, we thought, “Ok, now we’ll just assume the usual manufacturing time on standard games.” Well, crap happens. This is why manufacturers never give exact dates. So the best thing I can do is get as much information as quickly as I can and openly share that information with our backers as soon as I can. I hope we are properly implementing that lesson with the update you just read.

Thanks for your time and patience. I sincerely apologize about the long update and the news of another delay.