Fulfilment Update #3: France, Canada, USA
almost 5 years ago – Sat, Jun 15, 2019 at 02:32:05 AM

Dearest villagers,

I always say updates are going to be short, and they rarely are. But this one will be, because Carly and I are heading back to the warehouse in a minute. We have until this batch of customs labels has finished printing, and then we're off!

This is the news!

• We have completed shipping to France. Backers can expect their pledges to arrive in 3-5 days.
• We have completed shipping to Canada. Backers can expect their pledges to arrive in 5-7 days.
• We have started shipping to US postal codes beginning 0, 1, 2, and 3. Backers can expect pledges to start arriving in 5-7 days.
• UK retail pledges are packed and will be shipped on Monday. Sorry for the delay on this.
• A few outstanding pledges for Norway, mostly Wealthy Wood Carvers, have now shipped.

We email everyone whose pledge has shipped. Please wait for the email rather than contacting us to ask if your pledge is on the way.

And the labels are done, and so it's back down the mines for us...

Much love,

Dave & Carly

Fulfilment Update #2: UK, Norway, France, USA
almost 5 years ago – Thu, Jun 06, 2019 at 03:04:26 AM

Hey Villagers!

Straight to it today - it's crunch time!

Very Important Stuff

Now that we're back home from UKGE, we are 100% focused on completing fulfilment of Villagers, and we need your help. Carly is being inundated with support requests, which is taking her away from helping me with fulfilment. In order to reduce her workload, here are some common questions (all real), and their answers:

•  Have you sent my pledge? We will communicate this via these updates, and by personal email when we complete fulfilment to each country.
•  When will you send my pledge? We will communicate this via these updates. 
•  Can I have my tracking number? We're not doing tracking, other than to select regions to ensure correct delivery, eg, Brazil. These backers will be contacted individually by email.
•  Has shipping to X started yet? We will communicate this via these updates.
•  Are you going to make a playmat for Villagers? Yes, but let us get the game out to everyone first.
•  I've had a parcel card delivered. Is it Villagers? We don't know. Go pick up the parcel!
•  Can anyone assist me? Yes! Please include your question and all relevant supporting information in your first message :)
•  Are you going to Origins? No, I'm afraid not. We don't have any more events booked this year.

If there's something you really need us to help you with, such as a delivery address change, or a problem with your pledge after it arrives, please use the contact form on our website. This is the most efficient way to contact us, and will ensure the swiftest reply. Please include all the relevant information in your first message, and above all - please keep reading the updates!

UK Games Expo

We had an absolute blast at UKGE. It was awesome to meet so many backers who came to say hello, and to hear about all the tables in the open gaming areas where Villagers was being played. There was a lot of love in the air, let me tell you! We also sold out all the games we took with us to sell, Haakon signed a few copies, and many gallons of water were consumed! 

UK & Norway

We still need to send out the UK retailer pledges, and a few of the heavier pledges for Norway which didn't go out with the rest. We should complete shipping of the final UK and Norwegian pledges this week.

France

The French version of Villagers, Compagnons, is coming out at the end of this week from publisher Gigamic. The French rulebook is currently available on Gigamic's website, and also on the Sinister Fish downloads page.

We would have preferred it come out a little later, but the licensing deal with Gigamic was done last year, when we thought Kickstarter fulfilment would begin months earlier than it actually has. This has been a lesson learned for us, and in future we will work harder to ensure that licensed versions of our products are not released until after Kickstarter backers receive their pledges.

Compagnons is a more basic product than Villagers, but contains the same base game experience. It does not contain any expansions, wooden components, or card dividers, and comes in a standard box. I completely understand if any of our French backers are frustrated by this, and I can only apologise if that is the case.  I am very confident that the English version of Villagers is an excellent product and represents very good value for money.

In light of this, we will begin fulfilment of Villagers to our French backers immediately, alongside US pledges. All ~400 address labels for France have been printed. French backers who would like to return their unopened pledge will be issued a full refund.

USA

We are currently in the process of generating ~8,000 US mailing labels, and we will begin fulfilling these pledges alongside those for France. We are going to spend a few days packing up lots of mail bags so we get ahead of ourselves before the first collection, which we will schedule for early next week. After that we hope to have multiple collections each week.

Everywhere Else

When we're finished with the USA, we're going to ship all remaining pledges by country in alphabetical order, starting with Argentina, Australia, and Austria. I don't know exactly when this will be, but you guys will know about it via an update here when it happens.

Errata

Embarrassingly, our attention has been drawn to three cards with mistakes on them, namely; the Bed Builder, Priest, and the 3-5 player side of the End of Draft Phase reminder card. More fortunately, none of the errors are game-breaking. We are maintaining an official errata list on BGG and our website, and we are concocting a plan to offer corrected cards, which we will finalise and share with you once fulfilment is complete.

End transmission.

Thanks so much for your continued patience - I promise that Villagers is worth the wait!

Much love,

Dave

Fulfilment Update #1: UK & Norway
almost 5 years ago – Sun, May 26, 2019 at 02:53:00 AM

Dear villagers,

The time has finally arrived; Villagers is coming!

As of Friday we've sent out a little over 3000 copies of the game. The outer packaging supplied by Whatz Games in China has held up really well, and we've only heard of one game box damaged in transit. 

• As promised, all UK pledges have been shipped out ahead of UK Games Expo. UK Shopkeeper pledges will go out next week.
• All pledges for Norway have been shipped, apart from a small number of larger pledges which will also go out next week.
• From what we hear, backers are really enjoying the game and the quality of the components.

We learned a lot in this first week of fulfilment, and when we get back to it we know we can go faster. The Lumberjack and Wood Carver pledges are especially quick to process because all we're doing is putting a label on the carton. The "odd" sized pledges that require repacking into another carton (Wealthy Wood Carver, Two Wood Carvers, etc.) take a lot longer, but we hit a good groove by the end of the UK pledges so we're confident we can fly through the rest.

Here's a few photos of us in action!

Contacting us

We've been dealing with a lot of support requests since we started fulfilment. Many of the questions we've been fielding have been unnecessary and have literally taken us away from sending games out.

Please read the following points and consider them before contacting us:

• Please don't ask if your game has shipped. We will tell you. Watch out for an email notification from [email protected]
• Please don't ask us to estimate precisely when your game will arrive - we don't know. The best we can tell you is that delivery will take 3-5 days (Europe) or 5-7 days (rest of the world) from the date of dispatch.
• If you need to contact us with anything other than the above issues, please send one message via our contact form and we will get back to you as soon as we possibly can.
• If you need us to send your pledge to a different address, please tell us the new address in the first message.
• Sending multiple messages via a combination of Kickstarter / Facebook / Twitter / BGG / MySpace will not produce a faster response - it will just take up time that we could be spending helping other people, or sending out games.
• Remember we love you ;-)

What's next & what to expect

We're spending most of next week focused on UK Games Expo. We'll post a "Villagers at UKGE" report on Monday 3rd June, probably.

We will start fulfilment of US pledges on Tuesday June 4th. We are not doing tracking. You'll be excited to get a surprise game in the mail ;)

You will receive a shipping notification email from us when your pledge has shipped, and we'll post brief progress updates on the Kickstarter comments. There will be a full update when we finish US fulfilment.

Thanks once again for reading, and when you get your game please tell us all about your first play on social media: @thesinisterfish on Twitter, and on the Villagers Facebook group.

That brings us neatly to the production schedule thingy, which I keep forgetting to include! I haven't even had to change the due dates since last time :)

Much love,

Dave, Carly, James, Haakon, and the happy helper elves!

Progress Update #13: So Many Games!
almost 5 years ago – Sat, May 11, 2019 at 01:36:07 AM

Apologies for bothering you again so soon, but we have a couple of important announcements.

Address changes. For real this time!

As of Monday 13th May, we can't process any more address changes. If your pledge goes to the wrong address because we were not informed of a change, we will have to wait for the package to be returned to us before we can relabel it and send it on to the correct address. Any extra shipping fees incurred are the responsibility of the backer.

Villagers has landed!

The first container arrived today, a few hours behind schedule but better late than never! It contained ~20 pallets of Lumberjack and Wood Carver pledges. Why don't I just show you...

And finally...

Some backers have expressed concerns about the order in which we intend to fulfil pledges to certain regions, so I felt it would be helpful to explain our choices in a bit more depth.

We are using Royal Mail’s International Business Parcels Priority shipping service for our international (outside the UK) fulfilment. This service takes 5-7 days to deliver to all destinations outside the EU. Inside the EU it takes 3-5 days. Royal Mail does offer slightly cheaper Standard and Economy* services, but with non-EU delivery times of 14-21 days and 6-12 weeks respectively, the decision not to use them was an obvious one. 

The main takeaway here is that it doesn't really matter which countries we fulfil first and last, because delivery times are roughly the same to everywhere. We do accept that not everyone will receive their pledge inside these quoted times, but any delays that do occur will be due to customs agencies in destination countries, and as such are unpredictable and out of our control. These cases should be the exception rather than the rule.

So, for the last time: UK backers are getting their pledges first because Villagers will be on sale (for 3 days only) at UK Games Expo at the end of May. All other backers will get their pledges before the global retail release, because our distributor is waiting for a green light from us before they ship anything out to stores. Accordingly, we will give our distributor the word a week after we've dispatched the last pledges, and from then it will take at least another week for games to filter out onto shelves.

Lastly, I just want to say what an absolute pleasure it has been for me to work on this campaign, and what a fantastic bunch of backers you all are. Haakon and I are hugely excited for you to finally get your hands on Villagers, and we hope you'll have many happy hours playing it.

Much love,

Dave

www.sinisterfish.com

* There is a shipping service unique to Sinister Fish Games which is even slower than Royal Mail Economy; we call it the "Rude Backer Special Delivery Service", and it is very slow indeed. Really terribly slow.**

** THAT WAS A JOKE - EVEN RUDE PEOPLE GET THEIR GAMES IN 5-7 DAYS ;-)

Progress Update #12: Boxes and Boxes and Boxes!
almost 5 years ago – Fri, May 10, 2019 at 02:58:56 AM

Dear everyone,

Who wants a copy of Villagers?

Fulfilment is about to begin!

Both our container ships have docked and the entire shipment of Villagers is on English soil. Your games are even now being loaded onto the trucks that will bring them to our warehouse. We have deliveries scheduled for 9am on Friday 10th (that’s today since it just turned midnight here!) and Monday 13th, so we hope to start shipping boxes out before the end of next week. There's a bit of logistical stuff still to do before we can start, but nothing major.

We will ship to UK backers first, followed by the USA & Canada, then Europe and the rest of the world. Brexit is not happening in the foreseeable future so there will be no complications with shipments to the European Union. I’ll post short progress updates as we finish shipping pledges out to each major region.

Translations

We have a number of publishing partners who are making localised versions of Villagers (expect several of them to show up at Essen Spiele this year). We will make a PDF version of the Villagers rules from each publisher as soon they become available. These publishers and languages are:

• Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean - CMON
• French - Gigamic
• German - Kosmos
• Polish - IUVI Games
• Spanish - Arrakis Games
• Italian - MS Edizioni

We will be in touch with everyone who offered to translate into languages not covered above - apologies for the delay with this.

Can you hear buzzing?

The very nifty Tabletop Together website has a Tabletop Together Tool which lists Villagers as the #2 hottest game at UK Games Expo 2019.

This accolade is generated by convention-goers using the app and making lists of the games they’re most interested in buying and / or playing out at the event. We were in the same position on the Tool for UKGE 2018, while the Kickstarter campaign was live, and the Sinister Fish Games booth was absolutely inundated with visitors. Hopefully this means we’ll have another busy event and introduce lots more people to Villagers. Do stop by & say hello if you can!

Rahdo Runs Through: Villagers!

YouTube board game reviewer extraordinaire, Richard Ham (aka Rahdo) posted his playthrough & review of Villagers earlier today. Here’s his “Final thoughts” video and you can find two gameplay run-through videos on his YouTube channel.

Interestingly, Villagers was the #1 requested video from Rahdo’s viewers in May, as you can see on his poll here. 

Spoiler alert: Rahdo thinks Villagers is “great” 🙂

What's Next For The Fish?

Someone asked in the main comments what Sinister Fish is doing after Villagers. It’s a very good question, and we do have a number of projects on the go. I’m not going to spoil all the surprises right now, but there’s two things we can talk about. There might well be a new game from a certain unfeasibly tall Norwegian artist & designer coming in 2020, and maybe if you swing by the Sinister Fish Games booth at UK Games Expo you could see if we leave any clues lying around...

I can be a lot less cryptic about the other thing. I really like the way the wooden coins we did for Villagers turned out, so to give myself a relatively simple project to tackle once the Villagers fulfilment marathon is over, and definitely after having a holiday, I’ll be running a Kickstarter campaign for two brand new Coin Chests.

I’m teaming up with Army of Cats* (who did the new Sinister Fish logo) to produce two themed sets of 100 wooden coins in an even fancier box than last time! Each set will have a different theme, but I need some help deciding on which to go for. I have 8 themes in mind, so please head on over to this conveniently placed poll and tick some boxes for me. Your input will have a very strong influence over the final decision!

Time for bed!

I have to be up in 6 hours to go & watch a shipping container being unloaded - I might even take some pictures for you!

Much love,

Dave

www.sinisterfish.com

*This is, of course, the name of a graphic design company, and not a literal host of felines.