The games have not yet been sent.
over 6 years ago – Fri, Sep 01, 2017 at 08:59:49 PM

Hey!

Here’s the short version: the games still haven’t been sent out. Our distributor has assured us that they’ll be out by the end of this week, but until I get confirmation that they’ve been sent, I don't want to commit to anything.

I’m incredibly sorry, and I understand if you’re mad. If you want to rant and rave in my direction, the comments of this post are the place to do so. I take full responsibility for overpromising, and I apologise.

Here’s the longer version: When our rep from SFC told me that the games would all be shipped by the end of the week, I excitedly came straight to Kickstarter to share the news. He was so confident, and I was SO keen to get the game out to everyone.

(The timing of the Ninjitsu! campaign was specifically planned so it would launch after everyone had gotten their copy of Dracula’s Feast. That campaign ended over a week ago, and Dracula's Feast is still sitting in the warehouse. It’s immensely frustrating.)

I had made a lot of assumptions: Firstly, that the estimate was accurate.

Secondly, that because he was so sure they’d ALL be sent within a week, many of them must have been sent already.

Thirdly, that nothing would go wrong.

At the start of this week, I sent him an email to confirm that the last few packages had gone out. In an apologetic tone, he let me know that no, not only had they not all been sent out...none of them had.

They totally underestimated both how many games had to be sent and how busy they were going to be. On top of that, a number of entries in the spreadsheet were missing zip codes, and so they kept getting errors when they tried to process it.

(Nicole has since gone through the orders and manually transferred each zip code. In future, we’ll be doing this BEFORE sending the spreadsheet to a distributor.)

As of tonight, all the orders should be sitting in a pile, ready to go. As of Monday, they should start putting them in the mail. As of Friday, the first packages should start arriving. As of the end of the month, everyone should have their game.

That’s what should happen. But I’m not going to say it definitely is.

I think I may have an optimism problem. Optimism is really great when it comes to stuff like “coming up with ideas”, “telling people about the projects I’m working on”, and even “running a company”.

If I wasn’t an endless font of optimism, I’d never have started a business, I’d never have believed in a game for long enough to move it from “idea” to “finished product”, and I certainly never would have moved to Canada, a country where I knew no one and had never been before.

Jellybean Games is now a real business. Dracula’s Feast is a great game, and I’m incredibly proud of it. And 48 hours after moving to Canada, I met Roxy; we’re now married, pregnant, and blissfully happy together.

I love being optimistic, I really do. But it’s not fair to share the best-case scenario as if it’s definitely happening - it results in frustration on all sides.

I’m truly sorry about the delays on this project. Nicole is making detailed notes on every part of the process (from art to printing to fulfillment), so we can estimate timelines much more accurately in future.

But I’m even more sorry for misinforming everyone last week, and incorrectly telling you the games would be out before they are. Sharing unconfirmed best-case scenarios does nobody any favors. That’s entirely on me, and it won’t happen again.

You will get your copy of the game, and I’m confident you’ll love it. We’re dedicated to making beautiful, fun, replayable games for all ages. That dedication to quality was a big reason for some of the early delays, and I’m confident that when you get your copy of Dracula’s Feast, you’ll agree that it was worth the wait.

When I receive word that the packages have definitely, definitely sent, I’ll post an update immediately. We'll also mark them as "sent" in Backerkit, and start sending out tracking numbers to anyone who added one.

Like I said, we’re making sure to learn everything we can from this. As much as I’d like to, I can’t promise that something like this will never happen again, but I can promise that we’re going to do everything we can to avoid repeating our mistakes.

Thank you so much for your patience and support,
-Peter C. Hayward
Getting better at this every day!

All orders shipped out + pictures of the final game!
over 6 years ago – Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 11:38:00 PM

Hey!

I have exciting news!

First of all - as of Friday, the last of the packages will have been sent out! That means that as I write this, the vast majority of them are already on their way to their destination. So far no one has yet contacted us about receiving theirs - will you be the first?

As we always do, once 100% of the orders have been sent out, we’ll be sending out a “test package”. Three test packages, actually: one to me in Canada, one to Tania in Tasmania, and one to Nicole in Florida.

Once we’ve received all three of the test packages, we’ll know that everyone else should have received theirs, and we’ll be posting a special update to say “Hey, it’s time to let us know if you haven’t yet got your game!”

Until you see that update, there is no need to panic. Once we’ve gotten all the test packages, we’ll know that something has gone amiss. On our last project, we had something like 2-3% of the packages go missing; frustratingly, that’s actually fairly standard for a mailout of this size.

Game-teleporting technology: let’s get on it, folks!

If you’re one of those 2%, we’ll be sending a replacement package with tracking. Never fear - we are 100% committed to making sure you get your copy of Dracula's Feast!

If you have any questions about the fulfillment process, please let us know! We’re still a fairly new company when it comes to this sort of thing, but we’re really starting to wrap our heads around how it all works.

I’m extraordinarily excited to get your game(s) to you!

The second piece of exciting news: we had one copy sent straight from the factory to me (currently in Melbourne!)

It arrived!

It. Looks. Amazing.

I could go into detail about how nicely everything fits into the box, or how all the colors came out exactly as we expected, or how great it feels to touch and smell and actually play the final copy of this game I’ve been working on for 5 years, but I’m just going to let the pictures speak for themselves!

That’s all for now! Remember, once you get your copy of Dracula’s Feast, let us know on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - we’re @PlayJellybean most everywhere, or you can use the #draculasfeast hashtag!

Thank you so much for your patience and support,
-Peter C. Hayward
Hoping that everyone had a rad time at Gen Con

P.S. In each of these updates, I like to link to a currently-running Kickstarter that I think you might enjoy. Our current campaign, Ninjitsu!, has just over 48 hours left, but this project also caught my eye:

It’s a relaunch of a project I linked to a little while back - “There She Is!”, based on the classic web animation. It’s less than $30, and looks like a super fun little co-op game. Check it out!

Dracula’s Feast is on its way!
over 6 years ago – Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 10:48:09 PM

Hey!

The final spreadsheet with addresses has been sent to our distributor. Final payment has been made, and the moment Dracula's Feast arrive at SFC, they’re going to start mailing it out.

Everything is completely out of my hands. It’s simultaneously a big relief, and sort of terrifying.

NOTE: A few people ordered an additional promo pack or two with their order! If that’s you, please either email me on [email protected] or send a message through Kickstarter - the way we ended up putting together the Kickstarter version of Dracula’s Feast meant that it didn’t make any sense to include a separately-packed promo pack, so I’ll need to refund your money or work out something else we can add to your order instead.

Send me a message and we’ll get it sorted! :)

A few people voiced concern in the comments about our use of SFC - never fear; we’ve actually used them before! They were our distributor for Scuttle!, and we had very few issues.

We researched the best way to deal with shipping ahead of time, and learned that when you’re dealing with a Chinese distributor, you need to be very specific about how you tell them to package games.

As more and more games are sent from China, they’ve definitely gotten better at realizing that the game “box” is actually a valuable part of the product, and not something that's thrown out after the package arrives. 

We sent Scuttle! out using SFC, and instructed them to use two layers of bubble-wrap; as a result, we had fewer than a dozen copies of the game arrive damaged, out of the 3500+ copies mailed.

No matter who your distributor, that’s pretty darned good.

The boxes for Dracula’s Feast and Cthulhu and Friends are nice and sturdy, and we’ve again asked for two layers of bubble-wrap. Obviously nothing is for certain, but the odds are pretty good that your game will arrived undamaged...and if you're one of the unlucky few, just send us an email and we’ll get it sorted out for you.

After many long years of working on it, Dracula’s Feast is so dang close to being published that I can taste it.

To celebrate this momentous occasion, I thought I’d put together a designer diary!

Designer Diary: The Death of Dracula

Dracula’s ability hasn’t changed a huge amount over the course of the game’s life.

I’m not going to go through every iteration; instead, I’ll give you the very first Dracula and the final, printed Dracula.

Dracula 0.1:

In every game. Once you are named (or after naming someone incorrectly) flip your card but don't leave the game. On your next turn, you may have one last attempt to demask the party.

Final, printed Dracula:

Fun fact: I’ve never actually compared those two directly before. Amusingly, “In every game” was removed very early on, and only put back (at Tom Lang’s insistence) very late in the process. 

Until now, I hadn’t even realized it was included in an earlier version.

So, a few quick definitions: “named” (from the original Dracula) was the old old way of accusing one specific person. “Leave the game” became “banished”, and was then removed entirely and replaced by "reveal". “Demask” was the old way of saying “accuse”, before someone (embarrassingly late in the process) pointed out that the word I was looking for was “unmask”.

But here’s the big difference between the first and last Dracula: when the original Dracula was banished, he would get a bonus accusation on his next turn.

This might seem like a weaker ability, but getting banished used to completely eliminate you from the game - Dracula was the only character who got a second chance, when any other character would be dead.

Turns out Drac is hard to keep down.

This was helpful in a few ways - he could take more risks, throw Van Helsing off the trail by banishing himself (robbing her of the chance to throw him out of the party), and then sneak back and take a second chance at unmasking the entire party.

(That was particularly useful because one person attempting to win will often trigger a lot of other players - if the turn got back to Dracula, he was almost guaranteed the win.)

When we removed player elimination, we re-strengthened Dracula by letting him accuse immediately after he was revealed.

And that’s where the problems started.

Before I get into that, here’s a fun diversion: this ability of Dracula’s was what inspired the whole “horror” theme to begin with. I remember coming up with his ability to “come back from the dead”, and someone suggesting that I replace the presidents-and-spies theme I’d been messing with, and basing it around monsters.

After all, monsters are easy to theme.

I immediately took to the idea, and started writing monsters. Pages of them. For months and years, this was my go-to project when I was stressed and wanted a distraction. Over the course of this project’s life, I’ve designed well over 100 different characters for the series...if I could only work on one game for the rest of my life, it would definitely be Unmasked.

So, back to Drac. If he was revealed, he’d immediately get a chance to accuse. Here’s the issue:

Order of operations is one of the trickiest areas of game design. If you’ve ever played Magic: The Gathering (or just read the rules for fun), you’ll know about the Stack, a clever solution to a huge problem: when players can cast spells at any time, in what order do you resolve them?

Most European-style games will avoid this problem by having players only take actions (slash only having their abilities only take effect) when it's their turn. Cooperative games will sometimes solve it by simply letting the players decide the course of action. Lighter games dodge the issue by eliminating passive abilities or reactions entirely.

American-style games, however, love passive abilities, and reactions, and counterspells, and and and...

Everyone comes up with a different solution. “Effects are resolved from the active player, and going clockwise around the table” is a common solution. “If two things would happen at the same time, they happen in the order of the current player’s choosing” is another one.

For a while I was pushing for “Effects are resolved in the alphabetical order of characters’ names”, but Tom Lang overruled me on that one.

Dracula’s Feast is simple enough that it shouldn’t need a resolution order. In the end, we added one to the rulebook (largely for the sake of forward-compatibility; in case future characters have some kind of rules clash) but we also wanted to go through and eliminate any simultaneous resolutions we could find.

The specific issue here is simple: when Bride of Dracula answers No to a query, she immediately reveals the querying player and accuses.

Dracula (as he was) would accuse immediately when he was revealed.

If Dracula asked Bride of Dracula if she were, say, Van Helsing, she’d answer No; immediately reveal Dracula; and accuse.

Dracula, however, accuses as soon as he’s revealed.

Bam! Order of operations conflict.

They’re tricky little things, and they’ll sneak up on ya. I play this game in my head a lot, so I suspect I was the one who caught this conflict, but it may well have been Tom Lang and his equally-obsessive brain.

Like an opposite storyteller, I opened this little problem with the solution: we moved Dracula’s “upon reveal” action to the end of the turn, so there’s no overlap.

There are a number of different characters who accuse as a reaction: Boogie Monster accuses after any dance (or after her dance request is refused), Werewolf accuses immediately before any other accusation, Mr. and Mrs. Dracula are covered above...and that’s before we even get into the expansion.

For now, we dodged the problem by giving each character a distinct time at which they out-of-turn accuse: after a dance, before an accusation, after passing a whisper card, and at the end of turn. As more characters come into play, however, avoiding double-ups is going to get trickier - looking at my notes for Night of the Mummy and Monster’s Ball, I can already see a character who can accuse before any dance…

The rulebook includes the sentence “If two abilities ever take effect at the same time, the player whose turn it is chooses the order in which they occur.“

Based on our testing, that sentence doesn’t technically need to be there. But with 9 characters in the base game, 5 promo characters, and 5 expansion characters (not to mention the Artifacts, which add a whole new layer of interactions) we didn’t want to risk there being a rules ambiguity that wasn’t covered. I’d rather have a superfluous sentence than an unanswerable rules question.

And with new sets coming in the future, anything could happen…

Our first game, Scuttle!, was based on a game I used to play as a kid - Cuttle. In the original Cuttle, the “2” card had a unique power - it could be played as a response, to cancel another card. No other card could be played as a reaction.

For a long time, that’s how I kept the 2 in Scuttle!. But the more I played the game, the more uncomfortable I was with it - it was a card that needed its own set of unique rules, just to deal with timing issues. It didn’t fit into the pattern of the other cards.

Ultimately what swayed me was that it simply wasn’t fun - having someone immediately cancel your action isn’t an enjoyable experience, and I enjoyed the game much more once it was gone.

(Scuttle!'s sequel, Ninjitsu!, is now on Kickstarter. I promise you, it has zero weird timing issues, and I’m not intending on adding any!)

Dracula was always fun. But by simplifying his rules and removing the awkward fiddliness of order resolution (which, I promise you, is NOT the reason people play games - especially Jellybean Games), there was nothing standing in the way of that fun.

That’s all from me this week! I’ll be back next week, hopefully with news that the first backers have started receiving their games! If you take a photo of your game when it arrives, tag @PlayJellybean on Twitter, or use the #draculasfeast hashtag on Twitter or Instagram.

Looking forward to it!

Thank you all so much for your patience and support,
-Peter C. Hayward
Happy that my spouse never causes me order-of-resolution issues.

P.S. In each of these updates, I like to link to a currently-running Kickstarter I think you might like. This week, it’s Algobrix - LEGO-compatible programming blocks, designed to teach kids the basics of computer programming! This seems seriously cool; check it out!

24 HOURS LEFT to update your address!
over 6 years ago – Fri, Aug 04, 2017 at 01:27:12 AM

Hey!

First of all - and most importantly - you have 24 HOURS TO UPDATE YOUR ADDRESS!

To update your address, just go to https://draculas-feast.backerkit.com/ and follow the prompts.

In 24 hours time, you WILL NO LONGER BE ABLE TO UPDATE YOUR ADDRESS. Unless you’ve emailed Nicole to hold your order (for people in the process of moving or unsure of their current address), the address we have on file for you is where the game will be sent!

Nicole can be reached on [email protected] - again, you need to contact her in the next 24 hours if you want your game shipment held!

Secondly, and most excitingly - this deadline has arisen because the game is currently en route to our distributor! We send out our games through a company called SFC; Send From China. They will be mailing it directly from the warehouse in China to YOU, wherever you may live!

Once it gets to SFC, they should start mailing it out straight away. The speed of delivery can be a bit variable, but it ranges from about 3 days to about 3 weeks; I’d be surprised if you get your copy of the game in August.

Once all the Kickstarter orders have been sent out, I’m going to order a copy for me in Canada, a copy for Nicole in Florida, and a copy for Tania in Australia.

As soon as we’ve all received our copies of the game, I’ll post another update - if you haven’t received your copy by then, we’ll work out exactly what happened and get another copy out to you. About 3% of Scuttle! backers didn't get their copy the first time around, which is fairly standard for a big mailout like this.

What I'm saying is: if you see other people getting their copy before you get yours, don't panic! I'll let you know when it's time for concern.

If you have any questions about the shipping process, let us know in the comments! We’ll be happy to answer any queries you may have.

Exciting!!

Card sleeve sizes

If you like to sleeve your cards, I have a link you’re going to love: one of our backers has put together a comprehensive sleeving guide for Dracula’s Feast! I sent him a list of the card counts and sizes, and he’s made this handy list of what you’ll need.

(And yes - the game + expansion should all fit in the box, even when sleeved! We haven’t actually tested this yet, but we try to size our boxes to accommodate sleevers.)

Guys I am so pumped for this, you have no idea. The game I’ve been working on for more than 4 years is going to HAPPEN. 

I'm so pumped to see people receiving their game, admiring the art, rubbing the cards on their face. I genuinely think it's a fun game with a bunch of depth, and I'm keen to hear what you think as well!

Eeeeee!

Thank you so much for your patience and support,
-Peter C. Hayward
itshappening.gif

P.S. In each of these updates, I like to highlight a currently-running Kickstarter that I think you might enjoy. This week, it’s Murder at Blood Mansion, a murderlicious game of bluffing and deduction. It’s almost 300% funded, and has two weeks to go - check it out!

Addresses need to be confirmed!
almost 7 years ago – Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 12:09:44 AM

Hey!

I have a few things to talk about today, but firstly (and most importantly): you have one week from today to update your address!

Addresses can be updated at https://draculas-feast.backerkit.com/ - in six days I’m going to post again with a 24-hour warning. After that, we are locking down addresses!

If we don’t lock them down, we risk further delaying the shipping, and I think we can all agree that no one wants that.

I’ll say it one more time - you have ONE WEEK to finalize your address. Whatever the Backerkit has listed at that point is where your copy of Dracula’s Feast will be sent!

(If you’re between addresses or need your shipment delayed for any reason, email [email protected] with your backer number and a date we can safely send everything out. We can delay the mailing ONLY if you warn us ahead of time!)

If you have any questions about that, let us know in the comments!

Okay, that is enough yelling about addresses. Onto the good news!

After the shmozzle that caused printing to be delayed, we made some changes in the way we communicate with the printer to make sure that will never happen again. 

Our Operations Manager Nicole now has a weekly Skype with the printer, to make sure that nothing gets lost in email. This has the side benefit of hugely cutting down on the amount of back-and-forth that goes on when you’re printing something as big and complex as a game.

As well as that, we are now going to get written confirmation that printing has started, instead of assuming that it’s going ahead. 

Lessons: learned!

During Nicole’s last Skype, our printer was able to confirm: Dracula’s Feast will finish printing on Monday the 31st of July.

That’s just a few days away!

Once printing ends, Dracula's Feast will be loaded into a truck and sent to our distribution center. They load all the items into their system, and start shipping everything out!

Orders take anywhere from 4 days to 3 weeks to get out, so if it all goes as planned, the majority of backers will have their full order by the end of August.

There’s always the chance that things will be delayed, but I’m feeling good about this!

Last time we mailed everything out, our orders to Canada took an inordinately long time to arrive - up to 3 months, in some cases. Since then, we’ve talked to the distributor about a different method of delivery. We ran some tests, and the sample packages arrived within the week. I can’t promise all Canadians will get their packages that quickly, but it definitely won’t take the “months and months” that our last game took to deliver.

The other piece of exciting news I have for you is: we just launched a Kickstarter campaign for our latest game!

 

It’s called Ninjitsu!, and it’s the sequel to our first game, Scuttle! It’s been online for almost two hours now, and we’re right on the cusp of funding!

Like all Jellybean Games, it’s gorgeous, kid-friendly, and features all sorts of interesting decisions. You play as the head of a ninja clan, trying to steal treasure from the other players, and be the first to collect 21. It’s a game of stealth, subterfuge, and bluffing

If you have kids, like games, or enjoy fun, you should definitely check it out!

That’s all from me this week. I’ll be back in 6 days time to remind you again - addresses must be FINALIZED by this time next week! https://draculas-feast.backerkit.com/ - don’t forget to make sure you’ve got your August address listed!

Thanks so much for your support,
-Peter C. Hayward
So, so excited to get Dracula’s Feast to you