More Gloomhaven is Coming

November 13, 2018

It's a bit of a lackluster title for a blog, but I think it does the trick. It covers all the topics I want to talk about with a single vague umbrella. You see, there are three pressing things to discuss. First of all, there is a Gloomhaven expansion, Forgotten Circles, releasing soon. Then there's also a new set of community-driven scenarios launching tomorrow. And finally, I know a number of people are curious about the status of the fourth printing of the base game, which is also on its way. Many things to talk about! I should probably have just written three separate blogs, but that's not how we do things over here. Around here, we combine a million different things into one giant package, and you'll like it that way.

Forgotten Circles

If you've subscribed to my newsletter, you've probably already been made aware of this, but I just want to make sure I'm covering all my bases here. Forgotten Circles, which I've discussed at length previously, is finally ready for the printer, and so I've launched a pre-order for it. It's not a fancy Kickstarter or anything, but I just wanted to make sure everyone who wanted the expansion was able to get it without going through the hassle of ordering it elsewhere and having to worry about whether that order will be fulfilled. We're trying to print enough to meet the demand of retail, but, as always, it's difficult to gauge exactly what that is, so pre-ordering through me is the sure bet. Forgotten Circle is going to be amazing, by the way! All the scenarios Marcel designed are unique and very challenging. It will create a very diverse and dynamic experience, with a scenario book that is set up to hide stuff from you, allowing for lots of puzzles and secrets. The only down side is that you'll need to finish the campaign from the main game before delving into the new one, but you can still play the new class, the Aesther Diviner, right out of the box, no matter where you are in the campaign.

Community-Driven Expedition

Like, say for instance, you wanted to play the Diviner in the new community-driven scenarios, that is totally something you could do! "But wait!" you say. "Forgotten Circles isn't coming out until February, and the community-driven adventure is starting tomorrow! How does that work?" Well, I will be releasing a print-and-play of the Diviner class tomorrow along with the first community scenario. The Diviner isn't necessary to play the community campaign, of course, but if you wanted to get a feel for the class before the expansion arrived, I don't see any harm in doing just that. The community campaign will also share some themes with Forgotten Circles and will be focused on inter-planar travel. Sort of going beyond the bounds of the known world and exploring the weird and the wild. As always, I can't wait to see where it goes! (In case you are unfamiliar, it is a community-driven expedition because players on Board Game Geek can vote on what happens next. I have no plans on what will be coming in the future and just make up everything as we go along.) It's going to start tomorrow, so be sure to check in on the Kickstarter updates or BGG to get the first scenario and play along. In addition, I will also be playing the first scenario in a BGG live stream Thursday night (10pm EST) from BGG.Con with Scott Alden, Jeff Anderson, and Tim Schafer, so check that out to!

Gloomhaven Fourth Printing

I've been getting lots of emails and comments about when more copies of Gloomhaven will be available, so I wanted to touch upon that briefly as well. We are currently in the middle of the fourth printing. The factory is pumping them out as fast as they can as we speak. In order to cover the demand in distribution, however, the current print run is for 80,000 games. 80,000 copies of Gloomhaven. You know, that giant, 20-pound monstrosity of a game? I want you to just take a minute and visualize 80,000 Gloomhaven boxes. Normal games are packed in a carton of 4 to 6 copies. Gloomhaven is so big, cartons only hold a single copy. And a normal pallet can hold 30 cartons - 6 layers of 5 boxes. And a normal shipping container. You know, one of these: can store 20 pallets. So one of those can hold 600 copies of Gloomhaven. So now you'll have to imagine 133 of those to get a picture of what 80,000 copies of Gloomhaven looks like. My point is that it's a large job that takes a lot of time and effort to both manufacture and ship. From the point where we started manufacturing, roughly 4 months ago, it will take about 5 months to get them all made. And then add another month or so to get them all shipped to where they are going. Of course, the factory doesn't just sit on the 132 containers while waiting for that last one to ship. We've already started sending out shipments to various distributors to hopefully fill up stores in the next month leading up to Christmas. I know Amazon has already received a lot of copies and has fulfilled a lot of orders from the fourth print run. Other than that, I don't really want to go into specifics about which distributors are getting them when, mainly because I leave all that up to my distribution broker, Impressions. It's a little tricky, especially because not everyone is going to get their copies before Christmas. A lot will be arriving in January and maybe even February, but we are doing the best we can over here in the face of a demand that can only be described as "overwhelming." If you want to be mad at somebody about it, I'm cool with you being mad at me. I'm the one who dreamt up this giant beast of a game, never anticipating that I would have to figure out how to print hundreds of thousands of copies. Like they say, it's a good problem to have, but it is a problem, and I am sorry if it causing you problems.


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