Frosthaven Preorders (Q1 2023)

Mistaken alert
over 4 years ago – Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 02:57:57 AM

Hello! Sorry for the extra update, but we accidentally sent out an alert today to people that were not involved in wave 1 telling them to lock in their shipping address, and this alert should be ignored. It's not even possible to lock your orders at the moment, since the pledge manager is not live as we prepare for wave 2.

We're sorry about sending this out and causing the confusion that it did.

So, for clarity, the email you should ignore looks something like this:

-

Subject: Last call to update your shipping address for Frosthaven

---NO REPLY NEEDED---

Looks like Frosthaven is about to ship your rewards soon!

If you do not need to update your shipping address, you do not need to take any further actions. You're all set!

If you need to update your shipping address, please make any final changes  here.

-

Obviously we're not about to ship Frosthaven. No action is needed by anybody right now, so, again, please ignore this message.

Sorry again for the inconvenience, and I'll talk to you again on Friday!

Wave 1/1.5 shipping dates
over 4 years ago – Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 04:09:46 AM

Hello! I hope you have had a great week. It has been pretty productive around here and I have a couple things to share.

The main thing is that I wanted to nail down some dates for shipping wave 1/1.5 products. I'm not going to reiterate any information from update 44, I just wanted to give you this handy chart of when we expect fulfillment to actually begin for wave 1 and 1.5 for all the various regions of the world. 

Keep in mind these are still estimates, and it is when fulfillment will begin. We have a lot of stuff to ship out, so don't expect to receive a shipping notification exactly on that day.

Also, importantly, these dates do not include shipments of Forgotten Circles, which will happen in a separate fulfillment. There were some production delays on the new printing, so we are now expecting to fulfill that in late August / early September. We still don't have a firm timeline on that, but I'll let you know when we do.

One last note is that if you ordered both Forgotten Circles and the removable stickers for Forgotten Circles, the stickers will also ship later with the copy of the game. (If you just ordered the stickers and no game, though, it will fulfill at the normal time listed on the chart.)

-

We are still on track to open up wave 2 of the pledge manager in one week, so look for that if you didn't complete your pledge manager in wave 1 or need to make changes.

-

And finally, things are still moving along on the development side. I'm seeing a lot of guest design work starting to come in, so that is exciting. There are some really cool ideas I'm looking forward to implementing.

I have also done significant work on all the locked characters' perk lists and attack modifier decks in preparation for more extensive play testing we are gearing up for. The play testing will still be internal and done primarily over Tabletop Simulator.

Which brings me to an interesting question that has been rolling around in my brain. Would there be any interest in me streaming some (probably solo) play testing on Twitch? I would most definitely be playing around with locked character classes, so spoilers would be prolific. But it might just be a good way to get a little extra feedback and perspective on what I am working on. Let me know what you think.

With that, I'll leave you with some more summon art from Alexandr! You can probably guess what class this is from:

Pledge manager locks down and Forgotten Circles cards available soon
over 4 years ago – Sat, Jul 04, 2020 at 01:44:56 AM

Hello! There are just a couple small things I want to cover in this week's update.

First of all, the wave 1/1.5 pledge manager is now fully in the books. We've locked everything down and have attempted to charge cards one final time. For the next couple of weeks, you won't have access to the pledge manager while we reboot it for wave 2, but don't worry. It will be back for you to finalize wave 2 items, and we won't be charging cards again until somewhere around November.

-

Second, because of a significant demand for decks of new Diviner cards from the second printing of Forgotten Circles, we are currently working with Drive Thru Cards to get a low-cost solution for all those interested. It will still take a few more weeks to get up and running, but soon you will be able to order a set of Diviner cards from DriveThruCards.com for $2.99 USD (plus shipping). I will let you know when they become available.

-

And that's pretty much it for the week. I've been doing a lot of internal play testing on characters to refine their ability cards and create higher-level ability cards, and I'm getting really excited about how all of them play.

We're down to the last couple sculpts for the character miniatures that need to be finished, and they all look amazing. We really wanted to prioritize this so the molding process doesn't delay everything else, and so we're knocking that out.

Alexandr has been working on more artwork for the summons and the 17th class, so as a final tidbit, I'll share the Necromancer's other level 1 summon, the Raging Corpse:

See you next week!

Let's talk about map tiles and scenario books
over 4 years ago – Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 10:59:11 PM

Hello! It has been a busy week for Cephalofair Games with the closing of the wave 1 pledge manager and the subsequent launching of Jaws of the Lion. I want to talk about both those things, for reasons that will become apparent, so let's start with the pledge manager.

I really just wanted to remind people that participated in wave 1/1.5 (which includes the game play all-in pledges) that if you were expecting to pay something, and your card has not been charged, something probably went wrong, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to check on your pledge (frosthaven.backerkit.com) to help the payment go through. If you have already been charged, then there is no need to do anything.

The bottom line is that we will spend another week attempting to charge cards, and at the end of that week, if we are still unable to receive valid payment, your order will still get rolled over to wave 2, just like everyone else's, but anything you ordered from wave 1/1.5 will not be sent (you also won't be charged for it, of course).

-

All right, so now let's talk about Jaws of the Lion. I normally wouldn't bring this up again, since it is not part of this campaign, but since its release, I have been fielding a lot of requests to make the scenario-book-as-play-surface format in that game available for Frosthaven (and Gloomhaven). For reference, this is what I am talking about:

There are various pros and cons to this format, so let's go through them.

Pros:

• Significantly decreases setup time
• Significantly decreases the number of components
• More immersive artwork tailor-made to the scenario

Cons:

• Limitations on space, even with a supplemental book (this can be alleviated somewhat by making the book bigger)
• Significantly increases development time to make artwork tailor-made to the scenario
• Limits versatility of section breaks and hiding information
• Can cause some confusing interactions with destruction or movement of obstacles or other printed-on features.
• A little awkward with page transitions
• Limits after-market scenario creation (community-driven campaigns, promo scenarios, fan-made content, etc.) with lack of versatility
• Random dungeons are also not feasible
• I've already promised you tiles

Basically, it is great for reducing setup time, but lacks the versatility of tiles, which is something that is very important to me when designing Frosthaven. And that last point - that I've already sold you a product with promises of what is in the box - that is a big limitation as well. Even if the majority of you agreed to do away with map tiles in favor of books, that wouldn't be fair to those of you who wanted the map tiles that were offered to you.

Plus, I think the Gloomhaven community's creativity is one of its greatest assets, and I would hate to limit that in Frosthaven by not giving you the tools to create your own content.

So here's what we are going to do. We are going to move forward with designing and producing Frosthaven with map tiles, but we will also begin development on play surface scenario books for both Frosthaven and Gloomhaven that can be purchased separately by those who would prefer them. The books would certainly be bigger than 8.5"x11" to accommodate the larger scenarios, but they would still fit in the Gloomhaven/Frosthaven boxes at maximum.

At this point, I don't have enough information on how long the process will take to determine whether we will be able to offer them in the pledge manager to fulfill in wave 2 without significantly delaying that fulfillment. So don't expect to see these books when the pledge manager for wave 2 opens in a week, but know that we are working on them, and they will be available at some point in the future, possibly through our webstore. When we know more, I will relay that to you, as well.

-

And finally, Price wanted me to relay to you an image giving you an approximate size of the "Envelope X" add-on. There have been some complaints about the extra shipping on this from people who think it is an envelope (though if you think it is an envelope, you probably shouldn't be ordering it in the first place). So here it is (obviously not final packaging), with a banana for scale. Also just a reminder that even though it is for Gloomhaven, it won't be shipping until wave 2.

Final reminder: wave 1/1.5 closed today
over 4 years ago – Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 11:43:30 PM

Hello! Since we already had an update on Wednesday, I will try to keep this brief.

I just wanted to remind everyone one final time that the wave 1/1.5 pledge manager is closing today, in approximately 3 hours from this post, at 3pm EDT. If you wanted to order something from that wave (Gloomhaven or Forgotten Circles related products), or you pledged for the all-in game play bundle, which includes those products, please complete your Backerkit survey as soon as you see this, if you haven't already. If you are not interested in ordering any of those things, then feel free to ignore this message and wait for wave 2 to open up.

When will wave 2 open, you ask? We were advised by Backerkit to make sure all payments from wave 1 are resolved before opening the system back up, and that could take up to 2 weeks because of failed payments. So we will plan on launching the wave 2 pledge manager on Friday, July 3. It will then stay open until around November.

Payments won't delay the release of the Gloomhaven Digital Steam keys, though. As soon as the pledge manager is locked in, we'll start working on sending the database of keys out. You should receive a key (if you purchased one) either later today or tomorrow. Gloomhaven Digital is also launching a new Guildmaster mode on June 25 that I've gotten a look at and is very cool, so this is a great time to jump into the game.

One last bit of business is that I have posted all the changes made for the second printing of Forgotten Circles on BGG, as well as a folder of all the PDFs of the changed cards and books.

-

And finally, I also wanted to send out a small reminder that Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is coming to Target stores in the US this Sunday, the 21st! (If you are not in the US, it will be in normal hobby distribution at the start of August.) I am super-excited to finally get to share this with everyone. A lot of work from me and other talented people went into making the game as approachable as possible while also keeping the content and presentation as high-quality and entertaining as Gloomhaven, if not more so. I really think this is something you'll want to check out, whether you are new to the world or just looking for more content to play before Frosthaven comes out.

Here is a fun promotion video we made for it!