Hey everyone, welcome to the first annual update for the Adventuring Letty campaign!

Jokes aside, each time I've authored this message, including today (geeze), something has come up that either would yield additional questions I could not answer, or details that would yield even more hypotheticals that were just too far up in the air. Most of you are connected to me directly, and have pinged me after the campaign for updates, and it's same rhetoric I gave you then ("Here's what little I know, I don't have enough answers to keep you happy") -- y'all have heard a lot, but I think I've some solid information. And all good news, I think!

Earlier today, a good friend pinged me about the update; he gave me confidence that even if the update's not perfect, just share something. I owe you all that, apologies for the radio silence. Y'all helped bring my dream to life, the least I can do is share in some of the bits and bobs of information I have - and of course what I'm excited about.

Let's start off talking about the super simple piece that's burning most: game's made, on the boat, headed towards the fulfillment center. Does the fulfillment center look strangely like my living room? Maybe. But let's talk about fulfillment in a moment.

Next burning question: "omg Mr. Nick, WHEN!?" The short answer is soon. Based on initial estimates, Adventuring Letty should land in Los Angeles at the start of February (the 7th), and make its way across the country to Chicago a week or two after that. The far-end of the estimate, like everything is delayed and takes ages -estimate, puts the game in Chicago February 28th. Now we're talkin' boats, and traffic, and yada yada, variables that could impact the estimates, but largely I've no reason to believe there have been any hang ups.

My own dear mother, insistent I share my location with her 24/7 so she knows when I'm out on a walk or sitting at my desk -- well her habits have hit me hard. While not meant to be an official record of how the game's progressing, I have been constantly refreshing this ship-tracking page every day watching the progress. While largely I'm sticking to the estimates provided by the manufacturer, it is a tad optimistic that the ship may get to port in the states sooner than the dates I am sharing. It's just what happens at the port is a big unknown. I mean, most of this was meant to be a learning experience, so chalkin' up the World Cup -like anxiety of watching the ship to part of the learning experience.

A large part of the (lack) of communication these last few months has been due to answering these inevitable questions - and not having clear answers. From our small project being reprioritized in its production to - what I can only call - weird windows for when the product could leave the other side of the world: I really wanted to give solid information when I had it. This is more an explanation, not an excuse.

Well, aside from some humble pie, everything in this update should be considered good news! So you may remember from the campaign the imagery of the thing we wanted to make was this 5x7 box with some cute Letty illustrations that Bea Joy Javier made, yeah?

At the campaign close, we had all the assets and materials we needed to bring this product to life. Our manufacturing partner, Sarah, helped us explore some options that would require a tad more investment from us to nudge the game into a few upgrades. So we kinda went ahead and did that!

The Box
We did an upgrade to the packaging. Two-piece boxes are cool. There's something satisfying about a clean open and close of the packaging of a game. And more specifically, something delightful about a magnetic closure on a game. So: we did that. What'll show up in the mail is this fancy little magnetic box that opens up to show you the instructions booklet, the new tokens (we'll get to those in a minute), and the deck of cards for playing the game.

We hinted a tiny bit at future expansions for the base game, "Adventures" we're calling them. May have gotten a little too excited at the prospect of brining those to life, so a little preview of their artwork is all over this box. "Camping," "Beach Day," and "In The City" are what you can see, here. Also Letty's tail, ha. (She knew I was distracted when we were crackin' open this production proof at the brewery.)

The Token
Throughout playtesting and development, the "token" of Letty - the two sided card that passes between players indicating who has Letty's attention - well it was just another card. It served its purpose, it was clear during playthroughs what that card represented. However, during clean up of games, and setup of future games, the Letty "token" would get a bit lost in the rest of the deck. In a few instances during playtesting, the Letty "token" would even get accidentally discarded. Anyway, we solved it: we upgraded the Letty token to a nice little punch-out piece of cardboard. Now when you play, the token won't get randomly discarded, it's bigger (wider, for sure) than a standard poker-sized card, oh and there are two! You don't need two to play the game, just one, but each token is still double sided. Since we playtested this game with some younger generations, and because it's all "this dog I love" -themed, I'm anticipating a chance that a token may suffer through some tough love. So there's an extra just in case.

Hmm, "easier to use?" How does one claim something is easier to use than a poker card? Too late, I'm rollin' with it.

The Cards
Ok so I'll swoon about card quality upgrades, but largely since I didn't send out the prototypes to everyone here, I'm not really giving you anything to compare this upgrade to, really. So even without the frame of reference, feel my excitement about upgraded card quality! *pauses for you to feel it!* (There's probably a pun in there with respect to card texture. I think I've been doing this for too long.) Anyway! Cards are a bit easier to fan out in your hands (and the hands of smaller-sized players), they're a bit tougher when performing riffle shuffles, and overall they seem to be a bit more durable. (Somewhere around 230 games is where the prototype's cards started to fringe or fade on the edges, just due to normal wear and tear. While we haven't played nearly that may games with the production-proof the manufacturer sent over, there's a noticeable difference in these cards.)

The game itself doesn't have 54 cards (think: 52 card standard deck of cards + 2 jokers), so there are two cards with some pictures of Letty (for real life!) to help round out the decks. These aren't playable cards, but adding playable cards to the game likely would've had to go through all of the testing and balancing that Perfectionist-Mr-Nick would've demanded.

There are two things (plus one optional step) that need to fall into place (besides the game getting here, of course). First: while the current "fulfillment center" does look suspiciously like my living room, we are partnering with a local organization to assist with the fulfillment of orders. They'll handle the packing, labeling, and shipping of the orders. This piece is still in motion and largely shouldn't slow the process from games-at-Mr-Nick's-house to in-your-hands. Second: The Pledge Manager here on BackerKit. Do I know where Steve lives? Yes. Does that help ship to Ann-Marie? Not at all. So we're still going to need to use the Pledge Manager to collect all'y'all's addresses where you'd like me to ship your pledge. BackerKit's Pledge Manager does allow for picking up an extra copy of the game or two, that's built in; however that's not really the motivation for the Pledge Manager. There are extra copies of Adventuring Letty available, but our main focus is getting your pledges out to you. If you had art work as part of your pledge, there'll be a way in the Pledge Manager to pick which piece of art you want, too.

The third optional step is tied to everything that happens after the pledges are fulfilled. I wanted to do something to give back to the community around Letty, and Melissa had this great idea that we take a portion of post-campaign sales and donate them to the Friends of Chicago Animal Care and Control. That is 100% the plan, but there are some logistical or operational things that need to happen to ensure we get the donations to the right place and all this legal-related-mumbo-jumbo is in place to make sure the dogs are benefitting from the donations and everything has been accounted for appropriately. This step isn't a blocker or even really affects getting pledges to y'all. It'd be nice if it was sorted at the same time as we get pledges out the door - but not necessary for you to get your game.

I think I also have a stack of stickers unrelated to the campaign around here, somewhere. If I can find them I'll throw them into every order, too.

Awesome! Since I'm spending the next few days (and weeks?) here on BackerKit with the Pledge Manager, y'all's pledge information, etc, I'll be super active. We don't have any "release party" planned for March, yet, though that is something we'll likely want to do for our folks in the Chicagoland area.

Well it's always an adventure with Letty. Lately she's been over the moon about the snow in Chicago. (Last few days have been more cold than snowy, but does that girl love the snow!) Mmm, do we -- yeah ok let's share the other something special.

So unrelated to the game, I had some friends do up a comic of "Adventuring Letty" what feels like a thousand years ago. Check out this piece that hangs proudly at Letty's place.

The immensely talented Max Bare & Melissa Sue Stanley brought this to life. I know, another Melissa, but different Melissa.

Then sometime I think as recent as just before our campaign, another comic artist and children's book creator Justin Castaneda ran a crowdfunding campaign to promote a self-published comic loosely based on his niece (super adorable). Well we managed to sneak Letty into one of the stories in that campaign - Letty, a race car driver. Still distractible by butterflies, though.

And a bunch of other cool stuff we'll share another time, because this was supposed to be about the game, not Mr. Nick swooning through photos and projects of Letty.

Ok one more.

Alright thanks for your patience both with the project and getting through all of this content. If you fancy more Letty photos, she's over on the 'gram. Expect to see more alerts from BackerKit in the coming week (singular) about Pledge Manager, refined shipping estimates (as they come in), and maybe I'll find a surprise or two to share out.

Thank you all! For all the reasons!

Cheers,
-Mr. Nick