Innovation Ultimate

Happy April 1 everyone, the day for the most reliable news and information from around the Internet. On this day (yes really), we have opened up the Pledge Manager for Innovation Ultimate!

Pre-orders are also available for anyone who missed the campaign, at https://innovation-ultimate.backerkit.com/.

Note: Our last update has more images of the updated art and graphic design on the cards, if you missed it! (Double note: Due to a small bug, you need to reload the page once you go to the update, to get it to load)



You should receive an email from BackerKit shortly with a link to complete the Pledge Manager. In there, you can add copies, change your tier, enter your address, and put in your payment info to pay for shipping / any add-ons you've purchased. The add-ons are very simple! You can add on additional copies of Innovation Ultimate for $69, or case-quantities of 12 for $540.

Retail Level Note: If you are a store and need to be exempt from sales taxes, that is a manual process and you'll need to contact me with details after you put in your order. Don't worry, we won't run any credit cards for a while yet, so you've got plenty of time to contact.

We were able to keep shipping costs close to our estimates, but they are generally a couple dollars higher than our guesses last year.  We will be shipping from hubs in China, France, the UK, USA, and Canada. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Schedule: We're almost done laying everything out, and will be sharing proofreading versions of the game soon. We spent the last couple weeks doing rulebook tidying up along with a large wording consistency pass across all five sets. Turns out when you make cards over a decade and a half, your use of language evolves over time! 

We anticipate the game shipping to backers and pre-orderees early this Fall. We'll have production samples at Gen Con and will be running many demos there, but its quite unlikely it'll be available that quickly. 

Happy April everyone and thanks for being part of bringing Innovation Ultimate to life! The large response from backers is what's allowed us to invest so much effort in the art and playtesting that we've done over the past months, and we can't express our gratitude enough. 

Hello friends, we are here with an update!

Gameplay

We've been hard at work getting everything ready for print, and we're happy to say that we've reached gameplay/rules completion this past week. What this means is that all card text and rules concepts are "locked in" and we're going through now to ensure we've got wording consistency, no typos, and that everything fits on cards. Big thanks to everyone who's playtested the game on Yucata, BGA, or in person at conventions over the past half-year. Extra eyes are always a big help!

Proofs

With lock-in set, I'm going to be doing the big data-merge export from our card info spreadsheets through InDesign next week. With hundreds of cards, automating this part of the process ensures we don't wind up with transcription errors. From experience, copying and pasting thousands of icons? Not fun. Here's an extremely accurate illustration of the process:


Once we export all the cards, we'll be doing our own check through for errors, along with having the fresh export available on Yucata and a proofreading website for any backers who want to take a peek. We're pretty confident there aren't any major issues left, but a small lurking typo could be anywhere! We welcome anyone who wants to take a peek :) 

With the rules locked-in, we'll also have the rulebook PDF available in the next couple weeks. When all of that's approved, we'll be pushing the print button! Hurray! Definitely a little later than we'd anticipated, but the game is better for all the effort that's gone into it over the past several months. We want to deliver the best possible Innovation to everyone, and we're excited to do just that. 

Artwork Updates

Work on the card icons for The Unseen is complete, and we have a handful of other icons to create for cards that changed titles between 3rd edition and Ultimate. That should be done in the next week or so.  Meanwhile, we've been finishing up work on the new card backs, and we're really excited about how they've come out. Each age's schematic depicts what an innovator of the time might dream of building. We've used building and architecture styles from around the globe, with each illustration created as a monochrome sketch. The set (base or expansion) still determines the color of the card back, which you can see examples of below:


Each expansion also has its symbol beneath the age number to assist with identification, especially for folks with color vision issues. You can also see on the card fronts that elements of the schematic art are carried over on the left edge, to give a little bit of age-driven flavor to your board.


Having played with the updated cards in person, we're really thrilled by how all our changes have come out. The font size increases (especially for card titles) and our updates in color scheme have made the game both more usable and more beautiful.

Schedule

The time to the next update's going to be much smaller as we're rapidly moving into the proofing stage. Expect more news in the next two weeks! We'll be discussing packaging then, along with links to the proofread-ready things mentioned above. 

Hello friends and backers! It is 2024, and I for one am glad to put 2023 in the rear view mirror.  PAX Unplugged was a blast, we got to see lots of folks and try out the new cards in person, with a smattering of expansion play. Unfortunately, a week after I got pretty sick and that ran just about through the holidays. Not fun! COVID tests negative, but still an unenjoyable experience. This slowed me down personally for the month of December, but we've been making progress on icons, art, and getting things closer to print. 

Aside from the artwork, Carl and I have continued to refine the new gameplay bits and card wording based on feedback and testing. We got a bunch of valuable insights from the in-person play (especially from brand new Innovation players!). The new latticework styles looked great in person, and we'll be doing some physical print testing of the new card back structure in January. 

We're looking at this going to the presses shortly after Chinese New Year, so we're probably a couple months behind our initial estimates.  Gameplay testing has proven to be a bit longer than we'd anticipated, but we really believe it's worth it. We want the game to be clear, clean, easy to play, and easy to learn. This is especially true for expansion play. Our main goal is to have adding in 1 expansion to only require minor rules/complexity overhead for teaching folks. Adding multiple expansions is definitely still something for experienced players, but it's been very very fun in my experience. I've played a number of 4 expansion games now, and it's a wild but enjoyable ride! 

Apologies for being out of touch during December, but between sick, holidays, and trying to get as much work done as possible, my plate was full (which is supposed to be a November thing, but Turkey Day is a distant memory!) 

The Pledge Manager will be opening ideally in January sometime, but our priority right now is getting the game done. Collecting more money can wait! 

Greetings, Innovators from around the world. We've been hard at work on many many things related to the game, and wanted to share what's been going on!

Artwork & Graphic Design

As we mentioned during the campaign, we've done a redesign of the card backs. We've also changed the previous checkerboard pattern on the card fronts to a design that is related to that age's back artwork:


What you can also see here is that we've done a full redesign of the latticework that connects icons when piles are splayed. In 3rd edition, we had the latticework change from age to age. Since we're doing the background art differences, this freed up the latticework to do an important new duty: Color identification!


Now, the lattices differ by card color, not age. They now have shapes related directly to the shape surrounding the card's age/value in the top right. Our goal here is for this to provide a significant distinction between card colors to anyone with color vision difficulties, and will also make each color's splayed grid look more consistent.

We're also working on making the 150+ new card images for The Unseen, Age 11 cards, and a handful of card identity changes across the other sets. Lots of cool new things to represent!

Gameplay Updates

With the playtesting resources we have available on Yucata and BoardGameArena, we've been able to play a LOT of Innovation over the past couple months, as have many of you! We've been taking in feedback and adjusting card balance based on our experiences and others. Some highlights:

There are many many more changes to cards (small and large) that we've been making as we go. We're getting pretty happy with where the game is, but there's still testing to be done.

Effects / Wording Clarity

One place we've been making a number of changes is card wording clarity. Removing extraneous phrases that were confusing, general streamlining, and making cards from different sets that did similar things more consistent in their wording.

An example of this is the new keyword self-execute which replaces wording like "execute all non-demand effects on [card]. Do not share them". We've also isolated visible to only refer to cards in a stack. A splayed stack has all cards in it visible, an unsplayed stack's top card is the only one visible. Other effects that refer to icons, hex/card images, bonuses always now only refer to those on a top card or those revealed by a splay.   

There is one potential wording cleanup that we'd like backer input on - cards like Masonry: "You may meld any number of cards from your hand, each with an [A]. If you melded four or more cards in this way, claim the Monument achievement." 

We're considering the following options:

There's a poll attached to this update (hopefully?) that allows you to vote for the option that you think works best. Thanks for your input on the topic!

Pledge Management/Schedule

We haven't yet opened the pledge manager, and we're probably not going to until December at this point. We need to do some back-end things with BackerKit to do with shipping before we can get that running, and frankly right now - getting the game finished is more important!

Our aim was to send the game to print around December 1, but we've undertaken a good amount of extra work with the cardbacks and more balance updates than we'd initially thought. We still very much want to submit the files to the factory by the end of the year, but it might slip a couple weeks beyond that. We still aim to deliver in the Spring - none of this was going to be on presses until after CNY regardless.

PAX Unplugged: Booth 3246

We will have a demo set of Base + Unseen (maybe one other expansion, we'll see - I have to cut them by hand) at PAX Unplugged the first weekend in December, and we'd love to have you stop by! We'll have a giant inflatable Plumplim, as is tradition. It's majestic. 

It is the final day of the campaign! We're wrapping up at 7PM Eastern time, in just 12 short hours. We'll be hard at work in the coming weeks on finalizing gameplay balance adjustments, artwork and design updates, and all the other things that go into submitting a final product to the factory. 

I wanted to offer a quick update on localization - I'd hoped to share more details before the end of the campaign, but the situation I mentioned in the last update has prevented me from finalizing contracts and doing a formal announcement of partners. I can say that we're confident that there will be forthcoming editions of Innovation in Spanish, French, German, Chinese, with strong possibilities of some other languages as well. These versions will all carry the same look and design presentation as the English version, with some small adjustments for language as necessary. 

Work on those editions cannot start until our version is fully complete, so it will be early 2024 before we share files with our localization partners - their versions are not part of this campaign nor will they be available from us directly in the pledge manager. 

We're really excited to wrap this campaign up and thankful to everyone who's backed and supported us! Have a great Friday, everyone :D