Big Pre-production update + Manufacturer spotlight
Manufacturer Spotlight
The 1st Edition of Mothership was handled by a company named WinGo which is known for a few Kickstarter games. They were great to work with and the minis were fantastic, but quality issues with some of the printed materials and increasing costs made us look elsewhere for a new factory.
We chose a new manufacturer before the Kickstarter began, a process that took about 4 months. Out of a short list of about 5 companies, we chose Boda Games. They were kind enough to send us a sample (ie a full game!) to show us the quality of their work. They sent Bunny Kingdom which they produced (published by Iello) and we were very impressed.
So far their communication and diligence in getting the quotes correct and working with the massive list of extras and SKUs have been excellent.
Actually, let me emphasise that point a little further...the entire Mothership project is HUGE.
How Big is Mothership?
The project is split up into five main SKUs: The base game, 3 expansions and 1 upgrade pack.
Then across those SKUs are 40 unique item numbers. That includes things like PN001 Box, PN005 Base game Deck, PN033 Gas planet etc...
Across those 40 parts and 5 SKUs, there is a total of 1275 individual parts.
And then there are the extras...
Can you see how important it is to pick a manufacturer that can handle a job this big and complex?
A small screenshot of a spreadsheet I have spent too much of my life looking at...
What have I been working on?
The bulk of the pre-production work finished a month after the campaign. Since then, there have been heaps of emails back and forth changing items, rejigging the rule book (like heaps) and double-checking everything. You can see now why a lot of Kickstarter projects get bogged down at this stage. Managing a game with 40 unique parts can be overwhelming if you don't have experience in the field.
Thankfully there has be been only minimal dramas so far. I wouldn't even call them dramas, but here's what's been going on:
Changes to the Guardian Cannon Model
I mentioned this a few weeks ago as a possibility - my Guardian Cannon model was too complex for the same type of plastic as the other minis so we negotiated to simplify the model. In the end, I wish it could have the same amount of detail as before, but it's fine, you won't notice it while playing and it does match the other models more closely.
And since the Guardian Cannon changed in appearance, I had to go through all the rule books and box art to update the renders to match...that took forever! I could have just left it as the older model but that would have driven me crazy.
Plastic Tray Insert + Box
This has caused the biggest delay. As you know, all 5 SKUs are meant to fit in the box. This has taken some real Tetris-level engineering to get that to happen and look half decent. I believe it to all be settled now (about 4 revisions later and pending one more sample). The final tray design can be seen below:
The original design of the campaign had separate compartments for the Beacon tokens, cards and artifact tokens. That ended up being a really inefficient use of space and I decided to create a large, multi-use compartment to fit all the cubes, dice, tokens and whatever else you want to put in there.
In a few weeks, I will be uploading a video of all the components, including the tray and showing off a cool feature of the ship lid.
