Innovation Ultimate

Hello friends, associates, and innovators! We're entering the last few days of the crowdfunding campaign, ending Friday at 7PM Eastern. We remain overwhelmed and incredibly grateful for the support of each and every person who's chosen to back Innovation Ultimate. We've pushed well past our projections, and it's wonderful to see a game that's close to 15 years old see such love. I'm proud of how much fun we've been able to deliver to the world with Innovation over the years, and excited to see even more come from this new edition of the game.

I'd like to address and apologize for the quietness of the back half of this campaign. My original plans were to be more active streaming plays on BoardGameArena and Yucata, among other things. Unfortunately, as some of you are no doubt aware from my posts on other projects and elsewhere on social media, it's been an extremely difficult year for me personally. Without going into too much detail, there's a family medical situation that's been taking much of my time, and in particular over the past couple weeks I've spent many, many hours going back and forth to the hospital and otherwise dealing with things. I sincerely appreciate the well-wishes, thoughts and support I've received. The good news is that things seem to be trending in a positive direction with regard to the situation. I'm hopeful that I'll have more time and energy for game-things during the Fall. 

While I've been largely sidelined, work has been continuing in a variety of areas on the project. As we shared in the last update, we're working on new images for the card backs. We've got three more of them in various stages of completion and sketching, and will be showing some of that art in the coming weeks as we progress toward print-readiness. We're also working on the individual card images (the hexagons) for the Unseen, the new Age 11 cards in other sets, and a small handful of other icons across existing cards that need updates. We're also still poking at the card-front template, making small adjustments as we prepare to create all the cards in the updated style. InDesign adventures are coming, hooray! 

On the game design side, lots of playtesting has been going on both on BGA and Yucata, and we've been amassing feedback from all of the game's fans who've helped us out by playing the game! Lots of things are working great, but a few things may still need some tweaks for balance, fun, or just wording clarity. It's been super valuable to have so many eyes on the game, and I think it'll result in even better quality than we would've had without that participation. 

Thanks again to each and every one of you! We couldn't make great games without people who want to play them, and your early support for Innovation Ultimate here on BackerKit helps us significantly in bringing Innovation Ultimate to you all in its best possible version.

Hello! The campaign is cruising along, with close to 2700 backers and $180K in support, which we are very pleased with - a sincere Thank You to everyone who has chosen to back this project. With so many folks interested, we're going to be able to do some Cool Things.

First up, we've enabled our Retailer Pledge option, for 12 games, at $540.  We're thrilled if any stores want to be part of the campaign, but we also understand that it might be easier for you to use your normal distribution/wholesale channels. We do plan to have Innovation: Ultimate in stores through normal distribution, although we will be shipping to all our backers first.  Shipping for the retail level is free in the US, and $40 internationally. If you're a retailer and you have any questions, feel free to shoot us an email to stores (at) asmadigames (dot) com.

Gen Con was super fun! We had a demo table rotating between Innovation: Ultimate, Aegean Sea, and some Good Puppers here and there. One thing that surprised me a bit was the number of folks who came by and had never heard of Innovation. It was great to show some new folks the game. Innovation's one of my favorite games to demo because the rules aren't too tough, and the journey of discovery they go through in their first game is really enjoyable to watch.  To anyone who backed from seeing us at the show, welcome aboard! And to everyone else we got to chat with, it was great to see you.  We did get to play some games with The Unseen, and some exciting hijinks ensued with the Slot Machine.

Licensing: Many folks have expressed interest in whether the game will be available in other languages. We have a number of discussions going on right now with partners across Europe and Asia, and we're hoping to have confirmed announcements on many of those starting next week. Those versions won't be part of this campaign - but I don't mind at all if you'd prefer to wait for your preferred language version of the game. There's a lot of text here, after all :)  I do apologize for being coy about which languages are in progress - but we prefer not to announce anything until a contract is signed.

Art and Design Updates: Innovation Ultimate represents an evolution of the card design from 3rd Edition, and some of that's already been shown on the campaign page and elsewhere. Given the level of support for the campaign so far, we're able to invest in more updates. We're still in the early stages of work on this, but we'll have more to show soon (and during the campaign). The focus will still be on clear, clean presentation and ease of use, but we think you'll all enjoy what we're working on. In particular, we're looking to enhance the appearance of the backs of the cards. 

We're up over 2000 backers, which is pretty awesome! Thanks to everyone who's already supported the campaign, we're going to be hard at work over the coming months making sure everything about this box is as amazing as it can be. It's been fun seeing games launch on BGA and Yucata, the feedback we're getting from folks on the Unseen and all the other changes we've made is super valuable. 

This week at Gen Con, we'll have our prototype copy of Innovation: Ultimate on hand. We're in booth #1731, and if you'd like to stop by for a demo or just to see the marvel of my hand-cut cards, we'd love for you to stop by! We'll also be showing off Aegean Sea, with a limited number of copies available for sale. Come say hi! We'd love to see you. 

After we return home, we'll be back to focusing on our work on the game. There's a lot of artwork to be done, and some refinements we still hope to make to the card templates - we're still tinkering with how Demands are highlighted, for example. 

Thanks again to everyone who's supported already!