Production update
over 3 years ago
– Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 03:20:48 AM
Ladies & Gentlemen,
Production of all items related to Dark Ages is almost finished, and we expect this to be ready in the next 20-25 days. This would still be technically before the Chinese New Year, but unfortunately the good news stops here.
As we have posted in a separate update on a different project, there are nowadays major issues with shipping out of ports in China, due to a shortage of containers and vessels on the Chinese side. This shortage of containers has made shipping our of Shanghai between 4x and 7x more expensive, and even at those prices space on board is not guaranteed. The situation is similar for all destinations except what can be covered by road from China (SE Asia countries).
We have made the first attempts of booking space towards Poland, USA and Canada, but without much success. We are now almost sure that we have to wait until after the Chinese New Year to be able to move Dark Ages out of China towards fulfillment centers.
We apologize for the upcoming unavoidable delay, and we will do our best to keep this delay to a minimum. Based on the information we have now, we expect to be able to ship out around 15-Mar, which means that actual delivery can be expected towards the end of May.
As soon as we have updated information about the status of shipping we will come back with another update.
Have a great week,
Andrei
Cards charging in BackerKit. Custom resources.
over 3 years ago
– Tue, Jan 05, 2021 at 10:00:37 PM
Ladies & Gents,
First of all, Happy New Year and may 2021 be much brighter and less pandemic stricken than 2020 :)
We want to let you know that on Thursday 7-Jan we will charge cards in BackerKit for add-ons and shipping. If your card will have issue, no need to worry, BackerKit will send email updates asking you to provide new card details and then we will do the same if the problem does not get solved.
We have received also photos of the customs resources - the final product - which you can see below:
Have a great week,
Andrei
Production ongoing
over 3 years ago
– Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 08:59:47 PM
Ladies & Gentlemen,
This is going to be a very short update :)
Production is ongoing for all Dark Ages elements and until the production is over there won't be a lot to talk about, as now we're playing a waiting game. News from the factory are encouraging, all files we provided are OK and we're expecting to see progress, but without the ability to travel to China, we won't be able to provide on site photos and videos.
As soon as we have a clear deadline for the end of production we will of course let you know. For now we seem to be on track with everything.
Have a great week,
Andrei
Realistic resources
over 3 years ago
– Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 03:06:24 AM
Ladies & Gents,
For those of you who added the realistic resources, here's a mock up of how they will look like:
Have a great week,
Andrei
Project status
over 3 years ago
– Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 02:11:42 AM
Ladies & Gentlemen,
It has been a while since our last update, so here is where we stand with Dark Ages...
For HRE box all the print files are ready and we are going to submit them to the factory next week. This includes cards, punchboards, rules, box, etc. For HoC box, we are still proofreading the rules and we expect that to also be ready within 2 weeks.
We have also green lit the mass production of the miniatures, as the molds have been ready for a month. This is the most time consuming process, because there are so many miniatures in each of the two boxes.
As of today, we're still on track for delivery in time, but we have identified several potential threat to our proposed timeline, among them the most important ones are related to the COVID pandemic:
- our latest shipment from China to EU/US have encounter significant delays due to 3 reasons: the difficulty of fining space on vessels out of Shanghai; the increased time to process export and import customs (our last shipment stay in EU customs for 22 days, about 7 times as long as our average of 3 days); the difficulty to find road transport from warehouse to fulfillment centers. We're working all angles trying to not let this become an issue for Dark Ages
- difficulty to ship to certain countries: we have been relying a lot on the postal services to ship to countries outside US and EU, and the post has a long list of places they can only ship by sea, or by air or not at all. This is an everchanging list, updated weekly. For our previous campaign we managed to find workarounds, but some came with a great expense, for example shipping with FedEx created issue both on our side and on our backers' side due to custom processing fees. To this we do not have a solution for the moment.
- when it comes to production, the workflow of factories in China, while mostly back to normal is still affected, and we have experienced some delays which are connected not with the pandemic directly but with its fallout: increased workload over short periods of time, working from home, and overall state of discomfort which affects productivity.
We are confident that we will be able to deal with all of these with some degree of success and while delays on 1-2 months are not out of the questions, we believe that we can keep this on track.
Have a great weekend,
Andrei
