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.

If you are attending GenCon, I will be hosting ticketed events for all of my games in the event hall! I unfortunately do not have my own booth but if you are interested in demoing POND, Re;ACT, or my next upcoming game Re;MATCH, event tickets are available now!

There will be some sweet swag for those of you who sit down and play through a ticketed event demo of any of my games like my pinny arcade pins, hand fans, and frog stickers!

It's been a month since POND funded and we are making some slow but steady progress!

A nicer physical prototype was printed which will be sent off to a professional board game playtesting and development group to help me refine the game and really nail down game balance. (They are known as Gameweaver games and are local to Atlanta and I've been seeing their great work since the very first ProtoATL I attended in 2018!)

There are still a lot of assets we need to get done before we can go to print, including adding the new score trackers to the game boards for tracking player victory points! Before we were using tokens to track VP, but after several playtests, everyone agreed a score tracker that you could move up on (just like in ROOT), was much nicer to use.

This month has been busy for both myself and the artist, Pond HQ, as we are preparing for the upcoming Convention Season and simultaneously getting through flu season where we both got sick.

Still, the first thing we were able to get done this month was the Enamel pin design for the poll winner: Wizard Frog!

He's absolutely ADORABLE and to be honest, we were surprised he won the poll! Good thing we asked haha. Wizard frog is the best~

Next, we were also able to get the token designs created for the Megaphone, Crown, and Lily Flower tokens!

The crown was a token that was in the game at the start of the campaign. While VP tokens will no longer be used to track each player's VP, we'll still have these Lily Flower tokens as a resource for certain cards that want to play VP tokens on top of themselves or leave them in ponds to be picked up. Finally the Megaphone is a new resource allows players to march their frogs and declare attacks! Your megaphone tokens are reset to 2 every single turn, and certain cards can get you more to use each turn (like frog with a knife!).

That's all for this month. If anyone is attending Pax East, I'll be having my own booth for my first original anime IP board game, Re;ACT in the tabletop section, so please stop by!

I'll also be demoing my next board game, Re;MATCH, which will launch around the time POND has been sent off to manufacturing. Its an asymmetric 1 vs 1 marble puzzle fighting game, very unique and SUPER fun~

You can follow it's kickstarter page now!

- Ming