Kingdom Death Family
over 3 years ago – Sat, Jul 31, 2021 at 04:58:31 AM

Dear Kingdom Death family, 

The world sure has made things tough and it doesn't seem like its gonna let up anytime soon. I offer you my words of support, that yes, you can do it! And we will get through this! And more importantly, I assure you that we have been giving the Gamblers Chest Expansion, everything we've got and more. Together you gave me the opportunity and patience to truly go wild. And together we will confront the Gambler and the fearsome Godhand!

Gambler Chest Expansion

As of this moment, we have 3 separate playtest teams aggressively running the Gamblers Chest Campaign using the simulator we built to support our new remote workstyle. Every week, the notes are complied and adjustments are made before they venture back into the darkness battle anew. The sim is shining, allowing us to work faster and more efficiently than we had even in person.

• 23 of the 26 new story events in the campaign are finished.
• Finalized rules have been complied and are going into layout monday.
• Rulebook is looking like 150ish pages.
• The King, Gambler and Godhand need more TLC. The other monsters are finished barring minor tweaks.
• With the story events about to wrap, our illustration team will focus on finishing the artwork for all the philosophies and knowledge cards next. There is probably about 60 small illustrations left to finish there.
• I managed to sneak one last suprise into the GCE, but this one might have to wait until it finally arrives. It's a small thing!

Currently, I think we will be wrapping up towards the end of this October, then it'll be most likely a month of copy editing and small final corrections. Honestly the biggest set back I foresee, is what might happen on a personal level with COVID come this school year. We may end up changing areas or back in some form of remote which is disruptive. I don't want to burn out right at the end of this marathon!

The Smog Singer and Crimson Crocodile Armors have been finished and approved. Which means all of the plastic for the Gamblers Chest is complete!

The Smog Singer Armor is my new absolute favorite!

One of our playtesters favorite moment with the Scout System described as a little comic! 

Few more favorite moments:

"My favorite moment was when we built the Scout Lantern and immediately Scouted Murder and Plague."

"Taking our fists to Smog Singers because they destroyed our backs with the Devil's Melody."

"We also had a scout do a final wound with their fists instead of performing Logistics of Death, then return to a settlement where they were the only remaining survivor."

"My favorite moment so far was our first Bone Eaters encounter. The first Bone Eater to move rolled a lantern 10, and its Opportunity card made all the other Bone Eaters gain Toned. We'd heard Encounters were on the easier side, but monster turn one they launched into us with a series of gut punches that knocked everyone down and killed one survivor. We pressed on, beaten and bruised, even though we probably should have just went home."

"Oh, there was a funny moment where we broke a founding stone because it gained frail from Impermanism. I liked to imagine the look on that survivor's face as her supposedly unbreakable weapon crumbled in her hands!"

My promise, is that we will finish development on this project this year. I have however been working on it with the intent of finishing ASAP. I typically work two shifts a day for a total of 12-14 hours. Everyday we get a little further, until the day comes when it's finished.

Oh, there are also 3 new stats for Arc Survivors here is the symbolic art for one of them.. Lumi!

Campaigns of Death & Wave 4

Here is a long comment i left in the comments section:

"Without the illustrations, photos and fluff an honest picture is sort of hard to give. I am happy to share where those things are right now.

COD - All of the expansions had a pair of developers working on small tweaks and adjustments for over a year. Those are waiting on myself and Anna to finalize. All of the Story Events and rulebooks were converted to our new files (many of them used to be PSD because I prefer to “think” in photoshop. As we are planning on reprinting all the story events from all the expansions in a single more convenient book, which will include said tweaks. The Strain system took a lot and I mean a lot of back and forth, but I had to nail it down before I could retake the helm of the GCE, since so much foundational work has been going into these two projects. I have a basic script for the new campaigns featured, and we have sculpted everything except the Resin ball for the Baron Beetle. I wanted it to have certain, specific details on it.

The Inverted mountain has seen significant development (mostly by Anna) on all the monsters, except the Mountain Man, wherein we need more finalized campaign testing to make a proper end boss. Barash and Anna have had many developmental experiments into a sub system that layers within that campaign where insanity becomes more of a mechanic, so low survival, high insanity campaign.

The Abyssal Woods have had the least work, with just the Sprial / Snail Knight seeing the most action. Currently we have a new round of developers, people with prior professional experience that our “tastemaker” is leading thru our new design process which is “Sorry Adam is too busy to teach you how to make KD content, your gonna have to bang your head against me and the playtest team until this stuff naturally flows out of you”.

Years ago Anna and myself spent a great deal of time trying to train a writing team. This lead to content that was good, but we still had to guide along every step of the way leading us to wonder… why aren’t we just writing this ourselves? I didn’t start KD with the intent of training people, but more because I had a dream and felt I needed to pursue it. Right before covid hit, we had finally made that transition to free me up to writing with much much more of my time.

The Showdown Board is still being tweaked, we really want to go the route of separate tiles, as it will allow us to make modular terrain tiles unto the future. But it is a MUCH heavier design lift. As we now need to make a base and are still tinkering for how that might work. The Wanderers will most likely ship with COD, as their base system is part of the GCE, as promised. So, even if the new round of developers does not work out, I am now in a position to at the very least, take the drafts and use that as a guiding point to either quickly finish up that monsters dev cycle, or to steer it into a direction that will work.

At this point, because we have so much content and are still challenging ourselves to make things that feel “fresh” the design process can often be starting from a pile of ideas that didn’t quite work, didn’t land or fell short of really getting us excited on the table or telling its own story thru gameplay.

Miniature wise, we are very very much ahead which is wonderful. There isn’t much left to finish model wise for wave 3 or 4.

The SIM is a huge boon. As we can now play remotely, with anyone at anytime and connect to our large database of years and years of compounded playtesting instantly. A public release of it is not my focus, but holy F**K I think you will love it, once we can do that. I know the follow up question is “when?” and for that I don’t have an answer.

My focus is only on the GCE.

Oh I should add that the story beats for the Abyssal Woods and the Ivory Dragon expansion have already been written.”

Legendary Card Pack

This will be finished printing on August 6th! Since these are small and light, we are going to eat the cost and air freight it to avoid insane shipping delays. We *SHOULD* see them reaching your hands in september.

Core Game 1.6

The first batch of these will be finished printing August 10th. I cannot perdict how shipping these will go, but I imagine there will be massive delays. Ports are backed up, there is a shortage of truckers. I have friends whom have been stuck with dozens of containers worth of inventory, unable to ship them to clients. I'll keep everyone that pre-orderd these up to date as they are shipped.

ANYWAY!

We are getting closer to that moment... wherein we can hold hands and explore the darkness together!

Gamblers Chest Expansion - Development will finish this year.
over 3 years ago – Fri, May 07, 2021 at 02:45:32 AM

Hello everyone! I bring to you today a little insight into what’s being going on at Kingdom Death. 

Gamblers Chest Expansion - TBA

We will finish the Gamblers Chest Expansion this year. We will keep pushing until I feel it's ready or we meet that deadline. That is my pledge, to you pledgers.

I'll be giving quick monthly updates on the projects status. Once fulfillment has begun, I'll fill everyone in on the various life events that have made 2020 and now 2021 such an absolute insane time. 

Development wise we are still working away, balancing philosophies, knowledge cards and monsters, creating story events wherein there are still gaps in the campaign and smoothing out our collective cognition rewards curve. Oh and the art that's being produced has become some of my all time favorite I've ever seen, in Kingdom Death or in any game!

With philosophies books averaging 4 ranks and adding around 5-9 unique knowledge cards to the overall scheme... we are looking at around 200 pieces of unique art for JUST the philosophy system alone! 

The Crimson Crocodile Armor is the next set to be tooled. Which will leave just the Smog Singer Armor and thus the creeped scope of plastic will finally be at an end! My hope is still to have everything ready to print just as the plastic is finished, and we'll see how that plan goes together, month by month.

Here is a closer look at the Death King Armor!

The Variety of models you can make from this kit is stunning! 

And here I have a Lovingly painted Death King Armor to share by our very own Inventory and Shipping manager here in our tiny NYC mailroom. If you ever got a little illustration randomly in your order here from HQ, you have him to thank for it. Thanks Joe! You are one of the reasons I have kept sane (mostly) this past year!

Legendary Card Pack

It has Arrived! We are busy proofing the physical contents so we can begin its production run. Due to an error that made it to print on our Survivor Token sheets we are formulating a much more rigorous QA process. 

Kingdom Death 1.6 - Reprint

Our physical sample arrived today! We have upgraded its shipping armor, with a 2nd layer of cardboard box and hard edge protectors that hold the line between the foam and the box.

We are going to check all the assets and if it looks good, we can start its production run too!

Team Building

We have started to build up our team again! Both so that we can have fresh eyes on our content before it hits print and also move MUCH more swiftly thru the remaining projects from this kickstarter. The Gambler’s Chest Expansion and Campaigns of Death ended up being very heavy lifts for me personally, but thankfully they have set the stage and scope for Wave 4 content. 

Basically, I am finally finished fussing over the new systems the two projects have introduced. 

Our way forward has been remapped and I feel confident bringing in new team members to pick up where we had paused many projects so we could hyper focus on GC and COD. This is a very good and healthy thing and I am quite pleased.

Gencon

We will not be attending Gencon this year as exhibitors. We love and truly miss the show. We hope that in 2022 we can finally reunite!

Other Things!

The sculpting team has moved on to start working in earnest on Wave 4 armor sets! (Now that we know what kinda gear they'll have and how it'll work and all that good stuff ^^)

Here's a quick WIP of the Oblivion Mosquito Armor Set

Oh yeah! Here is the massive Dung Beetle Baron's ball!

Work on the showdown board continues! its been quite a task, ensuring that its a nice and flat surface area to play on, even tho it appears to have tons of depth! We got some serious design trickery at work!

KD SIM

The KD Sim has turned into a true boon and has allowed us to develop even tho we are now so far apart! Slowly its been evolving into quite its own little thing. We even have our database of death connected to it, which has increased our testing capabilities and is finally evolving our development process!

Other Other Things!

I love Kingdom Death! I am still so thrilled to be working on all of this!

Thanks! See you next month!!!!

Death King Armor Kit in Hard Plastic!
over 3 years ago – Wed, Apr 07, 2021 at 05:03:49 AM

Yesterday a humble package arrived, its contents PLASTIC FRESHNESS!

I have in front of me today, the Death King Armor Set, crafted from the node 4 quarry monster, the King. Featured, in the Gamblers Chest Expansion.

I also have Nightmare Adam in plastic finally, but gosh does it feel weird to put it together! I think I’ll ask someone else on the team to do that and share it next time!

That means that there are only 2 more Armor kits to tool and the plastic side of the greatly scope creep bloated Gamblers Chest Expansion will be FINISHED!

Tho.. these new armor kits now span 2 sprues instead of 1, so really its a total of 6 more plastic sprues. @_@. I think that officially means that there is more plastic in the Gambler’s Chest than the core game, but who’s counting anyway right?

Gamblers Chest Expansion

This isn’t in print yet. We are still play testing and finalizing  gameplay. Since we are still waiting on those last 2 armor kits, we have a bit more development time to take advantage of! And after having delayed it this long, we are gonna take that time! I'll have a better sense of where this is for our May 6th update. Right now it feels so close, but I don't wanna over estimate.

Legendary Card Pack

We have approved the digital proofs and the printing process has begun! Next step will be approving a physical final. I think they said 55 days from approval of the physical final which should be here April 14th.

Kingdom Death 1.6 - Reprint

We also just approved the digital proofs and this is on similar timeline to the legendary card pack. Looking like 55 days from approval of the physical final would should be April 21st. This means our estimated May date isn't gonna happen. We will be reaching out to everyone that pre-ordered this to let them know.

The coins have been minted! 

Each has a unique serial code which will correspond with the person that earned the coin, so no two coins will be exactly alike.

Today's update will be kept short and sweet, I'll swing back around in a month (around May 6th) with more information, as there are so many things to touch on!  I apologize as its been quite some time since we've had an update, a lot of personal life events kinda went down. And while I have ZERO shame and am happy to share It will have to wait for another time.

Until then, happy belated Easter!

Wave 3.1 Fulfillment Update - Containers Stuck in Rail Yards
almost 4 years ago – Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 12:13:27 AM

The impact of COVID-19 on freight and logistics has been incredible, setting records for the most challenging shipping season to date. Our lovely containers on both the US and UK sides of the world have been patiently waiting in a rail yard since last year to be picked up. We have been informed the situation is complicated and vast, covering both a lack of man power and the need to continue dealing with incoming containers so things can be unburied.

Being totally honest, I don't think we will see things moving until febuary. They are THAT backed up.

As it stands now, we are working around the clock for updates and to get these shipments released. Once in hand, they will be a priority at the warehouse to be put in your hands.

We understand the difficulty here and recognize your great patience.

We also recognize the increasing challenges in regards to fulfillment within the EU and have been looking for more warehouse partners since the middle of last year. For future shipments we plan on having more hubs, while the UK hub only handles the UK. 

Brexit and taxes are a hot topic right now and I assure you we are doing our best to mitigate it's impact on you guys.

In normal ass human terms. Between lockdown, the pandemic and brexit. It's a hot hot mess. But we are working like crazy to do our best by everyone here. Please have patience with us and give us the room to fix issues as they arise.

I am confident with enough hard work, things will got smoother.

Thank you. 

Black Friday 2020 - Wave 3 part 1 of 3 Shipping ASAP - Gamblers Chest Expansion Grand Overview
about 4 years ago – Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 10:19:47 PM

As of right now, Pinup Collections 1-5, Stone Faced Base Inserts and the hard plastic Satan are landing in fulfillment centers and are getting ready to ship! Please finalize your address and covering your shipping fee as we will start dispatching these December 3rd!

I apologize but due to the impact of COVID 19, the price of shipping and fulfillment around the globe has increased on every channel. As we are formally splitting this wave into 3 parts, we are aiming to absorb around 33% of the shipping cost, instead of passing them all directly onto you. Thank you in advance for understanding.

Here is what is fulfilling in Wave 3, Part 1 of 3:

- Pinup Collections 1-5
- Individual Pinups
- Hard Plastic Satan
- Stone Face Base Inserts
 

At this time we are not accepting add-ons or preorders for these items anymore. After fulfillment they will be available for normal purchase thru the KD web store! IMAGINE THAT, NORMAL TRANSACTIONS! WOOO!!!

Pledge Manager is Open!

The pledge manager is open! As always please pledge responsibly. Saavy backers might notice a pair of new pledge items that have joined everything else.

*Legendary Card Pack*

Indeed the time is now! The long anticipated set of cards that fixes a number of typos that have long plagued our community! The Legendary Card pack also includes everything you need to upgrade your 1.5 core game to 1.6. This includes some balance adjustments, some replaced cards and maaaaybe even a new card or two!

*The Legend Continues*

A member of the community suggested that we release balance / fix card packs like this on an annual basis and, I think it’s a really good idea! The main hold up on this card pack, was like many of the projects here at KD on me. I was trying to add too much content, which was dependent on too many other moving parts of the project and I let the scope of even this simple card pack get out of control.

As a way to resolve this going forward, the plan is to post balances and tweaks on our website, then have a cut off point wherein everything we have adjusted up until that point goes off to the printer and becomes the next card pack available to you.

Estimated Shipping date: Feb 2021

*Kingdom Death: Monster 1.6*

We are in the middle of a reprint for Kingdom Death: Monster had have decided to include the 1.6 updates with it. If you already own Kingdom Death, there is really NO REASON to pick this up. Please just grab the Legendary Card Pack.

However if you are looking to secure a copy of Kingdom Death: Monster you may pre-order it here, thru our backer kit store.

Estimated Shipping date: May 2021

Gamblers Chest Expansion

Estimated Shipping Date: July / August 2021

Wave 3, part 2 of 3.

(Ideally Goes into print production in February when CNY ends and factories reopen, 45-90 days in print, final samples meeting approval + 4-6 weeks on an ocean freight container.)

The Gamblers Chest has come a long, long way since 2017 when this kickstarter ended. Initially, a bonza box filled with miniatures and small rules sets, the fine nectar of ambition has blossomed it into a massive game expansion, our biggest expansion to date! 

 Some Last Minute GCE Additions!

Updated Lucks Fighting Art, Art.

Atnas Related Story Event

King's Coin

Our process is finally complete! King's Coin's will be fabricated each with a unqiue number and sent with a signed certificate of authenticity. They were earned by amazing fans that participated in the dark chef's instagram cooking challenge! We will unveil more of our plans with these community driven coins next year. Thank you guys so much you really made us crazy happy!

 https://www.instagram.com/p/CF2xgXYnt-k/ 

And a fancy gold render, tho the coins will not be gold:

Campaigns of Death

In the not so distant future, we'll make a big update that brings everything that is in the campaigns of death together, like we did here for the Gambler's Chest Expansion. For today, we have a little work in progress of the Dark Flower Armor, a synergy armor set made from cultural exposure to both the Flower Knight and Slender man.

Hard Plastic Showdown Board

Just a few new renders as we continue to make passes on this. We have been slowly going over the board enhancing detail and ensuring the level of all the highest points are the same so that playability on it feels as good as it looks!

Alpha Showdown Tracker 

We have made another public release of the Alpha Showdown Tracker! Just like last time, it's available on our webstore for free for people that own Kingdom Death: Monster. Just put in the code IOWNKDM when you purchase it and it will make it free. 

2020

This year was whack. For pretty much the whole planent! I don't wanna get it into, but let me just say I love you all and thank you for your patience and support. Our goal remains unchanged, to create the best experience we can muster! No shortcuts! Suddenly being unable to work in person, on a board game project was a challenge. I want to give a huge shout out to our new Game Dev team, fo really saving the day and providing us with a Virtual Version of Kingdom Death that integrates with database and tools. Our internal version of the Showdown Tracker is far more advanced then what we are releasing publically. Who knows, perhaps at some point in the future we'll have a full blown KD:M hobby simulator! But for now, the main focus remains on this Kickstarter and fulfilling the promises we have made. 

THANK YOU TEAM!

Oh and here is a tiny bit more!

Thank you for fans, backers and bakcers! 

KEEP THE SONG IN YOUR HEART BRAVE! REACH INTO THE DARKNESS WITH YOUR SILENT HYMN! AWAIT THE AWAITED ONE! BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY STRUGGLE, SURPASS AND SURVIVE!!!!!!!