Finished Game

Pre-order stop and delivery

As I am writing this, the first wave of game delivery is at customs in Germany. I am still anxiously waiting for it to arrive into my business partner's depot in Belgium to pick it up for Spiel next week and to send the preorders out.

If for some reason you have pre-ordered and chose to have it sent to your home address while planning on visiting Spiel, you might want to save on the shipping costs with a partial refund by contacting me for a Spiel pickup option.

The second pre-order wave stops this Friday, setting the price back to 65 EUR for the standard game box (including VAT). The miniatures will be available online until then as well. Afterwards, we will sell out our remaining stock of miniatures at Spiel.

We managed to get 100 boxes by air freight for Spiel, but 900 boxes in about 7 pallets are still on its way by sea freight. All orders that follow the Spiel event will come from the second wave, which will be expected to arrive end November begin December. Ideal for Christmas and New Year holiday tips. This is especially interesting in the Northern hemisphere with longer dark and hopefully starry nights!

If for some reason we are sold out of standard boxes at Spiel, we will provide a limited access code for a price reduction during Spiel to get your hands on a copy from the 2nd wave via sea freight.

UniCool production feedback

I would be not speaking the truth if I would say this was a smooth ride. Taking into account that this is a passion project for a first time publisher, I feel the need to arrive at a certain standard in the board game industry while popularizing Astronomy. In order to realize this, I had to leave my work at the popular observatory to fully immerge into the industry. This way, I could lift the game into visual developments. With a niche product and a distaste for marketing, I tripped over crowdfunding experiences and found out that the approach for this project needed to be revisited. After working with other factories and after the need of redesigning graphic changes as a result of stripping the Solar System module, I had a hard time rewriting the rules at a point that I hit a wall.

Thanks to Miguel Conceição and Paul Grogan I was able to save the derailing of the rulebook. Furthermore, Board Game Wizard has delivered a powerful tool to support the players with the rule nuances while playing the game.

Before production, the redesigning gifted me with a new wave of pre-press nightmares and the preproduction copy was a disaster in my honest opinion. Where everything seemed to run smooth with the doubled layered player board and dice production while working on the second prototypes with Panda GM, it sometimes felt like I had to teach a professional board game factory the fundamentals of current dial designs and player friendly die colour printing. The pre-press even felt like instructions on a DIY printing course instead of an assisted service. But why was the factory switch necessary? It was necessary to downsize the production scale from 2000 to 1000. As a consequence, it felt like starting all over again with prepress.

Luckily my frankness and exhaustion made me less soft in pointing out some of the concerns I had about some procedures, especially after I had been through a new period of factory quote selections.

And of course, the final production cost also turned out to be more expensive than first quoted. Every component choice needed to be scrutinized. One extra cost was the design and production of both token trays. After tests and feedback, this was really a necessary evil. Seeing the final result, I certainly have no regrets making that decision.

Let's not talk about the air freight costs due to delays resulting from redesigns third party availability and holidays. This would really spoil my excitement for Spiel.

By frequently facetiming with the UniCool team, we managed to align our work focus and build up a good relationship in helping each other through the hick-ups.

For this final stage I want to thank Billy Long, Ann Zhang in particular and David Law for their patience, understanding and willingness to persist in my wish for a certain standard quality.

Interview by Peer Wandiger

As a final note I want to share an interview with me that was conducted in English by Peer Wandiger for the German audience. You can follow his page for the German version here: Armillary Games Neuheiten, Astrophysik, Erweiterungen, Pläne und mehr News

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Peer Wandiger (right)

Anticipating the final product in your hands and hearing from your feedback,

Ad Astra!