Hey friends,
I’ve got a few updates to share. Well… more than a few. 🙂
Things have been moving steadily along, and without hiccups since we approved the Pre-Production Copy a few weeks ago. We’ve been in the mass production stage for the last couple weeks and are now prepping freight shipping with Panda, OTX, and QML. So all our planning up front paid off and it’s smooth sailing (literally) from here. 🙂
We will have an MPC at Origins Game Fair, and will be demoing the game out of the Tabletop Game Cafe local retailer booth. Please come see us and check out the game. You won’t be disappointed!
Rulebook Translations
You guys really stepped up on this one. Thanks to all the help and hard work from the folks who offered to help us, we’ve finished the first round drafts of the rulebook for Italian, Polish, Thai, Swedish, Chinese, Greek, Dutch, Portuguese, and French.
I’d like to introduce you to a few of the folks who are coordinating the rulebook translations.
Unfortunately, the Spanish, German, Korean and Russian rulebooks were not able to be finished in the first round drafts although some progress has been made on all but the Russian rulebook. If you want to help, please shoot me a private message through Kickstarter. We are offering a free game to our principal translators who help draft the first version, and help with editing based on feedback from our backers. 🙂
For the rulebooks that are done with the first round of drafting and editing, there is another way you can help. Please click any of the links below and review them. If you spot any errors or think there is a clearer way to state a rule, please leave a comment in the Google doc and our translators will work your feedback into the rulebook. Once everything looks good, Emily will take these translations and drop them into the graphical rulebook, which we will publish on our website and on BGG. 🙂
- Italian by Gianluca Casu
- Polish by Tomasz Barczak
- Thai by Suppadej Mahapokai
- Swedish by Johan Ek
- Chinese by Cary Huang
- Greek by Nikos Christakis
- Dutch by Jelle Van Camp
- Portugese by Daniel Polli
- French by Alexandre Piquet & Tilman Chazal
The Tarrifs
This is sort of the elephant in the room at the moment. It’s on everyone’s minds. I’ve heard from a few backers that some other creators are raising shipping prices last minute or asking for more money to help out. We won’t be doing that!
When we budgeted shipping and freight costs before launching the campaign we put in a huge contingency on our costs to cover this in case it happened, and to cover other things that might cause a problem too.
Unfortunately, these tarrifs will end up costing us nearly $8,000 in added costs that we hoped we would not have had to pay. It is harming our business, because that is money we could have spent attending another gaming convention, putting towards the second print run or investing into art on our next game and if any other things pop up in the process, well… now our contingency is gone and we’ll be forced to take out loans as a result. It’s a really painful pill to swallow, but we will get through this!
This will probably lead us to increasing the prices on games we publish in the future. We’re not happy about that, but we want to grow Parallel into a truly special tabletop game publisher, and that means we need to make a profit on the games we make. I think as a result of these tariffs we’re likely to see retail pricing of all tabletop games to climb 5-10% over the next 3 years in the US. 🙁
For now, just be confident that your games will arrive sometime in August, and things will continue moving along gracefully in the meantime. 🙂
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That’s all for now. To summarize: Production is good. Shipping is good. Translation is moving along, and we need your help. Tarrifs are bad, but we’ll manage and get through it. 🙂
Thank you again for supporting us and our dream to make excellent, beautiful, and challenging games. It means the world to us, that we get to do this and it’s all because of you! <3
Don’t forget to come see us at Origins and say “Hi!”.
Cheers,
Raymond
