Railroad Ink Challenge

Finally… The Shipping Update! Check your Addresses!
about 5 years ago – Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 12:49:09 AM

Dear backers,

We made it! After what felt like an eternity (for us too, believe it!) we finally got notice that the containers are correctly embarked! Your rewards are officially on their way to your homes! Soon we’ll also receive the complete ship tracking information that will allow you to follow them in their voyages toward each hub, so stay tuned for the next update!

The fulfilment process for our kickstarter is divided into “lanes”, one for each continent.
We worked closely with the factory to optimize the production, and with a huge effort from all involved parties, we managed to load all the goods destined to the European Lane, the Australian Lane, and the United States Lane on the corresponding ships before the Chinese New Year holidays!

Just for a quick reminder, here’s the Lane division:

• EU Lane (served by Fulfillment Europe): EU, UK, rest of Europe, Africa, South America, Rest of the World (our EU hub acts as a bit of a wild card!)
• AU Lane (served by VR Distribution): Australia, New Zealand
• US Lane (served Quartermaster Logistics): United States, Canada, Puerto Rico
   

The fourth lane, the “Asian Lane” (covers China and the rest of the Asian area), will be picked up by truck after the Chinese New Year break by our Asian hub, VFI. Once they check and separate it, they’ll either proceed to fulfill Chinese orders or send the stock to their secondary hubs to fulfill the other Asian regions.

Just as a quick note for our UK backers: we still have no news in regards of the Brexit situation, but it is our firm intention to let you receive your pledges with no additional costs. We are working with Fulfillment Europe on a few possible shipping solutions to achieve that, so don't worry.

It’s going to take roughly 6-8 weeks for the rewards of the US and EU lanes to get to our hubs, and we can expect a bit of delay once they (and AU lane) reach the ports due to the unavoidable congestion of ships linked to the difficult times of the ongoing pandemic. Please note that we expect the Asia Lane will roughly start to fulfill as usual a bit early than the rest but at this point the time tables are still not clear.

Producing and moving the stock was no easy task at all, believe us, especially with the numbers of the Railroad Ink Challenge campaign… just to give you some random but interesting numbers, we’re shipping out:

• Goods for a volume of 144 cubic meters among all the lanes.
•  More than 5000 individual Collector Pledge bundles in total.
•  15 tons of games/expansions/accessories… to the EU alone!
   

These are just a few examples of how big this campaign has become! While bringing this project to fruition was a real challenge (seen what we did there?), we are really proud of what this community helped us to create!

+++ IMPORTANT +++

While the cargo is sailing to its destinations, we’ll be monitoring the situation and preparing the last bits of information that we need to fulfill the project... your most up to date shipping addresses.

This is where you come in: we’ll be locking down addresses on February 24, so make sure that your shipping address is up to date and that everything looks correct. You can edit your address and update it through your Pledge Manager: you’ll find the link in your survey confirmation email. If you've lost your survey and need to retrieve it, you can do so on our Backerkit home page at https://railroadink.backerkit.com/

Once shipping addresses have been locked, you won't be able to update them any more (this is because we need to send them in advance to our fulfillment hubs, so that they can start preparing for the thousands of shipments that will be needed to deliver all of your rewards).

On February 22 you will receive an automatic "Final Notice" message from Backerkit. 48 hours after that, the addresses will be locked for good. After the lock, changing your shipping address will no longer be easy: if you have some doubt on your current address availability, do consider putting in another “safer” address (e.g., a relative’s house).

As usual, if you need any help on the matter don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected]

Next week we’ll post another update to give you the ship tracking information, a reminder to check your shipping address, and we’ll also finally be able to give you more details about the upcoming closed beta of Railroad Ink Digital!

As for our tradition (we do have weird traditions here), here’s some pics of the cargo being loaded. An adventure starts!

Until next time!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team

Development Update: Production starting soon!
over 5 years ago – Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 10:02:15 PM

Dear backers,

Here we are with another update! First of all, let us thank you all for the amazing feedback you gave on the rulebook previews, they’ve been very helpful and allowed us to improve them a lot. We are honoured to have such a supporting community behind this project!

Although we know it doesn’t show a lot on your end, we’re full hands on deck right now, working hard to finalize each small detail of the project and start production for all components. The plan is to finish production and ship the stock to the hubs before the Chinese New Year holidays will lock down the factory (and basically the whole country) in February, but to be honest, the schedule is pretty tight. If we will run into a major problem (or in a lot of minor hiccups) during production, the consequent delay might forcefully make the fulfillment of the campaign shift to Q2 2021. Keeping that in mind, we’re still committed to the Q1 deadline at the moment; we’ll keep you posted on any change, should it occur.

As for the UK situation with Brexit, things are still very unclear unfortunately. Our plan is to keep UK shippings customs friendly, so either we’ll ship the rewards covering customs costs ourselves, or we’ll use a new UK hub to fulfill the project for UK backers directly from their own country. We’ll hopefully have more details to share early next year.

Regarding production, we received the first production samples for most of the components, and we made some changes to improve the quality and usability of the final product, compared to our initial concepts. Such was the case of the Purple Storage box, for example. We made it bigger, so that it can now contain the Epic boards, in addition to the stand alone expansion packs, the additional Goal and Blueprint cards, as well as the additional boards and markers! Here's a few pre-production pictures!

We hope you liked this tour behind the scenes! 2020 is almost over (many would probably add “luckily”) and the holiday season is fast approaching. We wish you all a merry, safe, and healthy holiday season, and let’s all hope the new year will be better than the current one!

Until next time!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team

Another development update: more rulebook previews!
over 5 years ago – Thu, Nov 05, 2020 at 01:57:41 AM

Dear backers,

a very quick update today... we have some more rulebook previews for you! Quite a lot of them, actually. At this Dropbox link you will find the rulebooks for all 7 expansion packs, including stretch goal ones (Arcade, Eldritch, Electricity, Engineer, Futuristic, Sky, and Underground), as well as the additional rulebook including the rules for all of the other kickstarter extras, like the Solo/Giant/Epic boards, the additional Goal cards, and the Scenario cards (previously called "Blueprint cards" during the campaign).

Note that we still have a couple of our own proofreading rounds to do, and there's also a few tweaks that we still need to do here and there (we have to update the various QR codes you will find on the rulebooks, for example), but your many comments about the rulebook previews of the core games that we shared in our previous update have been incredibly helpful... so we wanted to share these additional previews with you earlier rather than later, to involve you in the process from an earlier stage.

Feel free to post your comments directly on Dropbox (which would be the optimal way to do it, but posting them here on Kickstarter would do as well, if you prefer).

We can't wait to read your comments about these additional early rulebook previews!

Until next time!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team

Development update: rulebook previews, production delays, livestream highlights, and more!
over 5 years ago – Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 12:18:24 AM

Dear backers,

it's been a pretty intense month here at the Horrible HQ, and we have both good news and bad news.

Let's start from the good ones! As we announced in our latest update, we've been working pretty hard on the layout and editing work needed to transform the game rules devised by Lorenzo and Hjalmar intro "proper" rulebooks. The first fruit of this work is ready: you can take a look at the very first early previews of the core rulebooks for both the Lush Green and Shining Yellow editions of Railroad Ink Challenge!

You'll find that some of the included expansions have seen some pretty major changes, compared to the previews that were available during the campaign... and they work much better for it. Feel free to take a look and report any typos, errors, or problems you may find in these preview rulebooks: with the help of the community, we can make these rulebooks even better! We are currently in the final stages of work on the rulebooks of the expansion packs and additional contents, and we'll share previews of those too in future updates.

Now, the bad news... in short, we are now a bit late on our schedule. Unfortunately, we won't be able to deliver the game this December, as initially planned. This campaign was a much bigger success than we initially anticipated, and we wanted to honor your support with the creation of a lot of new expansions... which means, a lot more rules to edit and layout for our graphics team, and a lot more dice and molds to plan for our production team.

We underestimated the amount of work needed to meet our planned deadlines with the increased amount of content, but as we always do in these cases, we prefer to postpone our deadlines and deliver a higher quality product, rather than rush to meet the deadline at the expense of quality. We prefer not to commit to a new delivery date just yet, but the current plan should still allow us to deliver your Railroad Ink Challenge in the first quarter of 2021. We're sorry for this delay, but it will allow us to deliver you the best product possible.

And now, surprise! More good news! Well, kinda unrelated good news, actually, but we hope you'll enjoy them nevertheless! 😊

We already introduced you to Creator VS the Game, our livestreamed web-series where our lead designers Lorenzo Silva and Hjalmar Hach play board games with other game creators and interact with your comments... in real time! We secretly tested this format with a special episode about Railroad Ink Challenge towards the end of our campaign, and we now released a shorter "highlights" version! Yes, the "Legend of Attila's Square" is included, of course! Here's a preview to the highlights episode (which will be officially published on our channel in the next few days!

If you liked of what you've seen of Creator VS the Game so far, you'll be happy to know that we also have another special episode coming on October 19th at 17:00 CEST / 11am EDT: Lorenzo and Hjalmar will play a wacky digital version of Dungeon Fighter, our cooperative dexterity game for 1-6 players where you throw dice at a target in whimsical ways to defeat monsters in a deadly dungeon (which is currently live on Kickstarter)! Dungeon Fighter is a completely different kind of game, compared to Railroad Ink Challenge, but we can assure you that it’s a blast to play… we hope you’ll check it out!

If you'd like to join our designer duo for a new crazy livestream, tune in on our YouTube, Facebook, or Twitch channels on October 19th at 17:00 CEST / 11am EDT and get ready to watch Lorenzo and Hjalmar try to throw virtual dice with a computer mouse handled from under their leg with their eyes closed! Will they beat the final boss? Will they reach the final boss?  Will they even survive the first encounter? Only time will tell! Just like last time, the funniest part will be reading your comments and answering to your questions during the livestream, of course! We hope to see you there!

Until next time!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team

Post-summer development update... and a bonus Challenge!
over 5 years ago – Thu, Sep 03, 2020 at 01:13:47 AM

Dear backers,

as the end of summer approaches, we would like to share some news on the progress of this project. Despite the impending menace of the COVID-19 pandemic still looming upon most of the world, and the Horrible team still working from home (ever since last February, actually), thanks to the magic of the internet we mostly managed to keep working as we always did (just with a lot more online conference calls than usual 😊), and the project has seen slow but steady progress ever since our last update.

We've been spending a lot of time reviewing the new core rulebooks of the Lush Green and Shining Yellow editions, with many improvements over the preview that was available during the campaign and the inclusion of the new game modes: Solo and Draft. We should soon be able to share preview PDFs of the new core rulebooks, stay tuned!

It's also been a few very intense weeks for our designers: Hjalmar and Lorenzo spent days upon days playtesting and further developing the many expansions that were unlocked during our campaign. Some only needed some slight tweaks, while others have seen more radical revisions, but we're now at a point where we are extremely satisfied with how they've all turned out. The next step will be to transform the latest designer notes into proper rulebooks, exciting work ahead!

While the designers were chiseling the rules of the expansions, our production team has been hard at work on the more technical details. The work on the (many) molds needed to produce the dice is proceeding steadily. We are working with our factory on the plastic inserts of the core boxes, and we are also finalizing the technical details of the small boxes that will contain the expansion dice. Speaking of which, here's a sneak preview!

As you can see, in addition to the sets you already knew about (Engineer, Electricity, Futuristic, and Sky) we organized the other stretch goal expansion into 3 additional sets, each including 4 dice just like the previously revealed ones: the Arcade expansion pack (containing the Galactic Invaders, Tetromino, Pluck-Man, and Rainbow expansions), the Eldritch expansion pack (containing the Investigator, Ritual, Tentacle, and Teleport expansions), and the Underground expansion (which is not a really "pack", as it only includes the 4 dice of the Underground expansion). All of the expansion packs will come inside these wonderful "matchbox" style boxes!

These "matchbox packs" will allow those of you who didn't purchase any of the additional storage solutions to still have fancy boxes to showcase in your collections and to safely store your expansion content, while for those who purchased the Storage Box they will also act as a convenient "sub-storage" medium when you put them inside the bigger purple box.

The most attentive to details among you may have noticed that the Eldritch expansion pack contains 4 dice, and not 5... this is because the Tentacle expansion, which upon reveal included 2 dice, was one of the expansions that needed the most work from our designer duo to be perfected, and in this process it became a single die expansion (but trust us, this is for the best). We realized that the old version was not always working as intended, while the new version implements the same gameplay concept with a cleaner and more enjoyable mechanism that gives you more freedom to mix the madness-inducing Tentacles with your networks.

You can preview of the new rules at this link. In short, the Tentacle die will tell you the length of the Tentacle that you can draw that round. Tentacles are drawn at the end of the round, so after you have drawn the regular routes from the basic dice. Tentacles can only go through empty spaces and/or spaces containing straight or curved routes. At the end of the game, you score 2 points for each Tentacle on your board, plus 1 point for each spare containing both a route and a "Tentacle stretch" (check the rules at the link above for greater details and graphical examples). Would you like to try it? What about a bonus Challenge? 😉

Here's a super-quick challenge where you must play 1 single round on yet another pre-compiled board crafted by Hjalmar with the final version of the Tentacle expansion. Your goal is to obtain 11 points from your Tentacles with 0 errors. Here are the board and the dice for this bonus Challenge:

Basically, you have 4 dice and a Tentacle with a length of 5 spaces to draw in a single round... but don't forget to use Special Routes and Special Structures to your advantage! We hope you'll enjoy this Challenge and, who knows, maybe we will release more bonus challenges in future updates... stay tuned!

Until next time!

Play Horrible, join the Guild!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team