Pond is fully funded, so what's next?

First, I think its important to address the elephant in the room: The Gaslighter-in-Chief's new insane tariffs.

There is a LOT to say about these tariffs, but people much smarter than I am have already written about them, so I'll link to some of the best articles so far on the matter:

For now, I, Brother Ming Games, is taking a wait and see approach. I currently have a small project mid manufacturing that will be ready to leave China in 2 months. If the Tariffs are still in effect by then, I'll just have to eat those costs.

I am hoping POND will be ready to leave China between 8 to 12 months from now.
However if 54% Tariffs are still in effect by then, then I will be doing the following:

First, thank you so much to everyone who participated in the first playtesting program! We got a LOT of valuable feedback and playtesting data from it.

I will be added 3 and 4 player modes to Tabletop Simulator and Screentop by the end of the month and opening up a second round of the playtesting program for people who still want to earn a free shirt to participate!

The pledge manager for POND will also be opened by the end of the month. This will let you confirm your cart items, pick your designs and sizes for t shirts, or adjust your pledge levels. Shipping and taxes will be not included however. When the project is closer to fulfillment (Sometime between 8 and 12 months from now), the pledge manager will be sent out again to everyone to re-confirm their shipping address and shipping fees and taxes will be added then.

Finally, the artist of POND is currently under the weather, and therefore we weren't able to get the enamel pin designed for ya'll mid campaign. That said, she is releasing two new friends to her collection of plushies TODAY so if you want to cheer her up, go adopt her adorable new friends!!! 

Currently we still have some assets that needs to be finished before POND can go into production, plus I want to do a lot more playtesting, so here is our road map for the next 2 months:

If everything proceeds smoothly, I am hoping to have polished prototypes ready to show off at Gen Con (I do not have a booth, I'll just be doing ticketed event demos).

I'll be posting monthly updates around the 5th of each month to keep you all up to date~

Thank you all so much for your support. POND received alot more support than I had originally estimated, having even more backers than my first game Re;ACT, despite a HUGE pivot in theme, though for people who have played both, I think you'll still feel my design philosophies of high player interaction with asymmetric gameplay across both games.

The final guest artist reveal is from a FROG expert: chibigreen! THIS🎵 FROG🎵 IS🎵 ON🎵 FIREEEEEE!

Get this Fire Frog card and over 40 unique guest artist frog cards EXCLUSIVE to the Backerkit edition of POND!

There's several more guest artists to be revealed still but I'll be using them to accompany our production updates so please look forward to more whimsical frogs~

This means every backerkit edition of POND will now contain WOODEN lilypad tokens for the frog meeples to sit on instead of punchboard tokens!

I genuinely cannot thank everyone enough for their excitement and support. I can't wait to make POND into the best version if itself for everyone!

I also feel like I have to share this compliment I received in my discord server recently from one of the playtesters of POND. Going to be riding this high for a while.

So if you are still on the fence about backing POND, please consider giving it a chance! You won't regret it!!!

Also Nolan's Tarnished Frog absolutely crushed the poll in a landslide in who would win in a fight, BUT now we have to ask, WHICH FROG WOULD YOU ADOPT???

On this lovely April day of Fools, we welcome the most esteemed of guests to the POND, the Hen with a Necktie!

Henxtie is an incredibly talented anime illustrator who has given birth to many VTuber models and was also one of the artists on my Genshin Tarot fan project!

I absolutely love her adorable mascot and am so happy to bring the most adorable and totally normally named chicken to the game in the Backerkit exclusive Art Friends expansion~

I feel very blessed that I have so many artist friends who have joined POND as a guest artist so not all of the cards will be revealed before the campaign ends. Instead I'll be revealing them with every update as we go through production.

At this point there are over FOURTY artists in the Guest Artist expansion. That is a TON of adorable gameplay content added to every Backerkit Edition of Pond for free! Seriously what an incredible value!!!

We also only have 2 more days before the campaign ends and we are SO FREAKING CLOSE hitting the 100k stretch goal!!!

With so many way too bad ass guest art frogs, we have to do another poll. Which guest artist frog would win in a fight?