New KS project kick-off // Replacement parts update // Late Pledge Opportunity
about 5 years ago – Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 11:44:47 PM

Fellow Mercenaries,

today we are officially kicking off our next KS project, 

CACTUS TOWN,

a tactical simultaneous action-planning game for 2-3 players. Set in the Wild West, CACTUS TOWN is a game that is easy to learn and fast to play (15-30 min), and features fun gameplay mechanisms that will have you swear and cheer while trying to outwit your opponent(s). CACTUS TOWN is an advanced filler game for gamers, for old and young, you will want to repeat as soon as you have played it first. We are sure you will love it!

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Game development is 95% finished, we are now getting into prototype production for reviewer coverage, making sure you don't get to hear only our own opinion (quite obviously, we are hyped). KS launch is likely in Q4 '19. Do you have a special request for reviewer choice? Do you have contact to someone you'd like to propose? Let us know.

Also, sign up to our mailing list to get upfront info on the game and special early bird deals.

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Replacement parts update

Our Monster Lands "replacement parts" operation is coming to an end, the factory started last Friday to send out envelopes, dispatching about 100 every 2-3 days. 300 shipments are already on the way, the rest will be finished during next week. 

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The postal carrier will send out tracking codes to you by email, but unfortunately they won't do that until end next week, when ALL shipments are on the way. Given the shipping time of about 1-2 weeks, this means that in some cases you might receive the package BEFORE the tracking code, we are sure you won´t mind ;)

We won't celebrate until all replacement parts have been delivered, but at least this is looking very good now and we want to use the opportunity to thank our manufacturer LongPack for working on "setting things straight" and above all to thank YOU, the affected backers, for your understanding and your patience, while we were solving the issue. You rock, while understandably some of you were disappointed when receiving faulty product, there was plenty of positiveness in your reports all around, we are truly humbled by how great a backer crowd we have.

Let's hope we can declare this chapter as closed with our next update.

Late Pledge opportunity

After the replacements are delivered, we will soon open a limited late pledge window, allowing late pledges for the MONSTER edition and MONSTER UPGRADE PACKS, to upgrade a retail to a KS MONSTER edition. 

These will be VERY limited in number, only about 150 packs, and we already have 300+ people on the waiting list, without advertising it. If you are interested or know of friends who missed the KS campaign and might be interested, make sure to sign up in the waiting list here, this is where we will inform about the shop opening (you will have to be fast once we open).

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Other Plans

Apart from CACTUS TOWN described above, we are also working on the co-operative tower defense game B-SIEGED II, with very exciting new features, as well as a strategy card game that should rock your bones. Oh, and maybe something else...

Stay tuned!

Second Gate Games

Update on the replacement production & new plans
about 5 years ago – Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 01:55:55 AM

Fellow Mercenaries,

we are very excited with all the feedback and positive vibes received over the past months, thanks a lot for the many kind words and the praise for the game. There are plenty of fantastic user reviews on BGG, giving the game a very solid ranking of 7.5. Have you shared your own rating? (maybe we can move a little higher ;)

We also thank you for your patience while we are setting straight the unusual production issues we have suffered. As a reminder, we had a nightmarish number of 600 replacement claims, most of which were small issues of missing items, but some of which had problems that never should have happened, as admitted also by the manufacturer. 

Luckily, we were able to already serve 30% of these claims with replacement parts on hand, and the production of further replacement parts is ongoing in China, with the following status:

- paper material: all printed, but requiring re-printing of some punchboards and cards, as quality control rejected part of the first run. Expected readiness. This Sunday, March 24.

- wooden pieces: in production, expected readiness: Next Wednesday, March 27

- dice: in production, expected readiness: Monday, April 1st.

These dates are a slip of 2-3 weeks versus the last estimates we received, which is unfortunate, but at least the reason is quality control, giving us a good feeling that the replacement parts you get will be top notch. 

When the parts are ready, LongPack will ship items directly from China with China Post in small envelopes. Tracking codes will be sent to you, so you can follow the whereabouts of your package. 

So much for now, beginning of April we will send another update, as soon as envelopes start going out.

CONTINUE HAVING A GREAT TIME PLAYING THE GAME!!

The guys at Second Gate Games

PS: more than 50 videos have already been posted on Monster Lands, have a look here!

PS2: want to know what we have up our sleeve next? We will start releasing more information in April, but we can already tell you that we will GO WEST with our next next Kickstarter this year, a fun 2-3 player simultaneous action planning game. 

B-Sieged II is also in the making, as a reassurance for the many of you who have been requesting new work on this line. It will take time to see the light, 2020 is likely.

But that's not all, can you figure what kind of game this component planning is for? No, it's not Agricola :D

Monster Lands wrap-up... what's next?
over 5 years ago – Tue, Jan 29, 2019 at 09:43:44 PM

Fellow Mercenaries,

time to share news regarding the latest on Monster Lands, review the progress on the "replacement operation" and ask ourselves what's next.

MONSTER LANDS REVIEWS

As you may have followed, there have been plenty of reviews of the game, the latest being Dice Tower's review of the Expansion (OMG, the BOX!!!). 

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Have a look at this youtube playlist for plenty of coverage from all over the world, if we are missing some, let us know.

We are very happy with how the game has been received by you and by reviewers, if you haven't done so yet, please leave your own comments and rating of the game on BGG here. The rating chart shows a healthy curve, although it is also true that some people rate the game very low, and that drags down the average over-proportionally.

BACKER-MADE MINI-EXPANSIONS

There was one goodie of the campaign that we wanted to share with you when you got the game, rather than when we presented it. With so many stretch goals, we thought we'd leave one last pleasant surprise for the moment of delivery... but then the "production nightmare" hit us, and we figured it just wasn't the right moment to announce. Now that the replacement operation is on track, we throw it out at you:

Make your own KS exclusive mini-expansion and let others play your rules!

We have started a thread on BGG in which we collect your proposals for backer-made mini-expansions, using the affinity tokens we have added to the Kickstarter boxes.

Think about mini rules sets that involve these tokens. Use them for scoring, for settling, for boosting mercs or monsters, etc. Decide how to obtain them, lose them, use them, trade them. Whatever you can think of, each and every proposal is welcome.

REPLACEMENT OPERATION

As you will have followed in the last updates, we have been hit by an unusual rate of incidences around production, around 20% of backers put in some sort of claim. "Normal" rates are around 1%, so you can figure how bad this was for us. Together with our manufacturer, we take full responsibility for this, though, and have committed with everyone to send replacements.

We have now wrapped up the claim collection and all of the affected backers should have received a claim receipt some weeks back. For some lucky ones (about 200) we were able to send you replacements immediately. But the large majority of replacements will have to be produced, and current status is that LongPack will manufacture them right after Chinese New Year, which means end February/beginning March. 

They will finish production, assembly and sending of envelopes until end March, which means you should expect your delivery March/April. Luckily, the problems we have seen don't prevent the affected from playing the game, they are mostly aesthetic.

WHAT'S NEXT?

We vowed not to talk about next projects until Monster Lands is delivered to everyone and until the replacement operation is in full swing. But now we can start teasing ...

Are there going to be next projects? Hell yeah, you bet there will be!

Will there be a KS this year? Could well be.

Will we see more games in the Monster Lands/B-Sieged ambience? Likely, but definitely not only that, we have other projects in the pipeline first.

Any more info? No, not quite yet ;)

Wishing you all a great 2019 with lots of fun at the gaming table.

Second Gate Games

Error reporting deadline and MERRY CHRISTMAS
over 5 years ago – Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 09:24:47 PM

Fellow Mercenaries!

with Christmas approaching, we want to update you on where we stand with fulfillment and with the management of the "replacement operation" of the various incidents we have been seeing.

FULFILLMENT

99+% of backers have received their product. There are still a few outstanding ones, unfortunately, mostly because of "returned-to-sender" problems and in some cases (Canary Islands) because of administrative procedures with customs. Fulfillment has been a monster of its own (we are about to defeat it), it is extremely time consuming, given the amount of incidences we had to deal with.

If you haven't received your shipment yet and are NOT in direct contact with us about it, please write urgently to [email protected].

REPLACEMENT OPERATION (MANUFACTURING ERRORS)

As you know from our various updates about this topic, we have experienced manufacturing errors with a significant number of copies, something that both we and our manufacturer LongPack are very sorry for. The final tally is around 20% of KS copies, which is HUGE in terms of production benchmarks. A normal production has an incidence rate of below 1%. 

We have asked you to report your incidences to [email protected] by beginning of December and many of you have done so. To be honest, we weren't prepared for such an onslaught of issues, and we are still struggling to deal with it all, because of the complexity and the limited amount of resources we have to dedicate to this. 

If you have written, you should have received an "automatic response" saying we received your message, with a promise that we will send you a "Claim Receipt". We have sent the Claim Receipt to about 300 of the 500 backers, so there are still many of you out there who we need to work off over the coming days and weeks. SORRY to those who are awaiting their confirmation, we are not happy with how slow we are and understand your impatience.

Please note that the Claim Receipt itself is not slowing down the replacement operation, because all your cases are already registered in the replacement files we use with LongPack, whether we sent you a Claim Receipt or not. Please be patient and accept our apology, we had to prioritize working on the solution over the communication with each of you.

Also note that we need to CLOSE THE ERROR REPORTING WINDOW TOMORROW, so that LongPack can start the manufacture preparation of the replacement production. If you haven't sent an error report, you have until tomorrow night, afterwards we will still  try to solve your issues, but cannot guarantee and reserve the right to charge shipping cost. For those of you who have not received the product yet (see Fulfillment above), we will extend the reporting period to "two weeks after receipt".

What's next? LongPack is working through the data and defining a course of manufacturing/assembling/shipping. Current outlook is that production will be before Chinese New Year (beginning Feb), and assembly afterwards, but we won't know for sure until 2-3 weeks from now, because it all needs to fit into LongPack's general production schedule. 

They are giving this priority because they take on the responsibility for this, but they also need to make sure that things don´t go wrong again, so they must not rush. Also, assembling hundreds of envelopes, each with a different configuration, is not LongPack's standard business, so they have to put up new systems and control mechanisms.

Beginning of the year we will hopefully have an update on the timeline, for now we are maintaining "Delivery Feb/March" as projected timing for when you get your replacements.

At the same time, we are solving some of the issues already from Barcelona, whenever we have the respective replacement parts at hand (unfortunately, that's only a small subset of you).

Finally, we wish you all a very merry Christmas and a great start into 2019, maybe you get the chance to play a session of Monster Lands in this festive period. We have seen tons of positive feedback so far, we hope you have lots of fun with the game! 

All the best from Barcelona!

Second Gate Games

Shipping update
over 5 years ago – Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 12:17:13 AM

Fellow Mercenaries,

another shipping update is due, we are well above 95% delivered product, and heaps of positive comments have been made by many of you, thank you for all the great feedback.

But there are also still a few outstanding deliveries which we need to solve, and those of you who are still waiting for your product are understandably anxious, so below an overview. 

Before we dive into it, a word on the "replacement operation" for defective or missing components (if you haven´t done so yet, please make sure to have read our last update!): on the positive side, the percentage of affected backers seems to be lower than we first feared. A big thank you to the large majority of you who reported errors in a very positive tone, acknowledging the overall quality of the game and project. Sorry again for those mistakes that happened.

But on the not so positive side we also have to admit that we were not prepared for the onslaught of several hundred very detailed error reports, it is taking us much longer than expected to get through all this, record it and prepare it for further processing. Apologies if you sent an error report and haven´t received an answer yet, we will get to it. 

So here an overview of the fulfillment. If you haven´t received your product yet and are not yet in contact with us about it, please write a mail to [email protected] and include the text MISSING SHIPMENT in capital letters in the message header, this will help us identify your report easily and prioritize it over replacement reports. We know we are not as fast in answering as you would like us to be in these weeks, but we will resolve each case as fast as we can.

US

99% fulfilled. There are 10 backers still waiting for their packages. The reason for this is that these packages were filtered out by QML in their picking process, showing damage to the box. As we don´t have excess KS product at QML, we will contact you separately in the coming days to tell you that we will send the damaged boxes first (so you can at least start playing and enjoying the game) and then send you replacement boxes later. 

CANADA

100% fulfilled. There are 3 backers which will receive replacement product, having received the wrong product in the first place. 

ASIA

We don´t have an exact percentage of fulfillment yet, greater China, S. Korea, Japan, Malaysia are all delivered, and the countries working through hubs are mostly done, too.   

AUSTRALIA / NZ

As of November 9th, 100% of the product has been shipped by Aetherworks and many of you already reported back that you got it. If you haven´t received it yet, it is likely still on the way (especially NZ). Please give it time until November 20th, if you haven't receive it by then, send a mail to [email protected] and add the text MISSING SHIPMENT in the header.

SPAIN

More than 95% of the product has been shipped and received, but there are 9 pledges which haven't been sent out yet, because there has been a mix-up of product in some shipments (Cantarero was short of product in the end). We are in the process of resolving this with Cantarero, we may have to send your product from Barcelona next week. Sorry for the wait. There are also a few instances of confirmed shipments which haven´t arrived yet, these we are trying to resolve case by case.

EUROPE & ROW

More than 95% of the product has been shipped and around 90% received. There are 13 pledges (including one group pledge) which couldn't be configured by Happyshops because product was missing. We still don´t understand WHY this happened and where that product is, but at least we have been working on a solution and can send the product next week from Barcelona. If you are one of these 13 pledges, you will have received a mail by us just before this update. There are also several shipments that have been sent but not received, and some returns, these we are working with you on a case by case basis.

So much for now, once again, apologies for not being able to get through this fulfillment jungle as fast as we would hope to, the problems with production/assembly quality have taken us by surprise and we weren't ready for this. Our fault, not yours, for sure, but please understand that not getting an immediate response doesn´t mean that we will ignore your claim.

Cheers,

Second Gate Games