Hail and well met Captains!

It’s been over 2 months since we finished crowdfunding and we’re still crunching towards manufacturing. We’re scanning every square inch of the production files, finalizing contract details, solidifying fulfillment plans, testing some final balance tweaks, and wrapping up the final art and design for a few of the bigger stretch goals.

We’re gonna be there! While we won’t have a booth (we’re planning booths once we have the game in hand), we will be wandering around, playing Red Tides, and just having a good time. We would love to hear if you have any interest in playing the game! Let us know here:

We're close to making a decision for a partner for our retail and brick and mortar strategies. As two creators with full time jobs we want to focus on making the best game possible and leave the wild world of retail to some serious pros. We're looking for a partner to bring vast experience into handling retail and online sales. Since you already backed, this may not matter to you but it's an important step give us more time on the game, and builds a stronger base for more expansions and games in the future. 

We’ve hired William Niebling to handle the final version of the rulebook. William has been a freelance rules writer/editor for the last 18 years, and worked within the hobby games industry for over 30 years. He came highly recommended and we are thrilled he’s taking the lead on this critical part of the game. As a designer myself, it's incredibly encouraging to get feedback on the rules from such a pro. I was mostly happy with the state of the rules given the amount of testing we've done, but William is taking it to the next level. So pumped to be working with him.

BackerKit offers a way for folks who missed the main campaign to purchase the game. We don’t have a timeframe in which we’ll keep this open but we wanted to make sure the folks who missed out can get in on Red Tides with all the benefits and value of the crowd-funding campaign. We try to keep it simple and not play games. We’ll offer this for as long as we can, but once the final button is pressed on manufacturing, the version available here will only be available to you folks that took a chance on us, (and maybe at conventions if we have left-overs). In order for Tortugas Games to stand firmly on its own two feet we can’t offer this version going forward. I think we treat crowd-funding a bit of an antiquated way, using it to actually fund the game and our dream, but our stated objective from the beginning has been, and will be: get the game into the hands of as many people as possible. 

We’ve received our final production timeline from our manufacturer, LongPack. We’re working non-stop to get the game shipped from the manufacturer before the start of Chinese New Year to make sure we stay on track for a Q2 2026 launch. We’ve built in some additional time to increase the odds of hitting that goal, but we know that unexpected things can happen so we don’t want to dawdle.

A quick note on tariffs: when we launched the campaign, we were still in the middle of uncertainty around tariffs for games bound for the U.S. We built in enough margin to absorb what we thought was a reasonable cost. Given the shifts since then (first down, then back up again) we remain hopeful that tariffs won’t affect our ability to deliver at the costs we planned. We’ll continue to absorb as much of that as possible without compromising the game or the future of Tortugas Games.

In times of uncertainty, we double down on communication. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, we encourage you to join our Discord and connect directly with us there: 

https://discord.gg/fC3NEP3Vuj

We’ve said little about the Seas of Sacrifice expansion for Red Tides outside of what we showed on the campaign page. We’re going to start to chronicle some of the lesser-discussed aspects of Red Tides and the expansions in the coming months.

The Seas of Sacrifice expansion for Red Tides came about from an intense love of history and a fascination with those tiny moments when a small change can spark a completely different world. As I researched and read about pre-Columbian civilizations, I realized that my education up to that point had been vastly incomplete, a realization that happens with all history I study. The deeper I went, the more I found it to be nuanced and fathomlessly complex, far beyond what I had imagined.

Given the setting of New Caribbea and its fantastical portrayal of a time and place parallel to our own history, I found myself constantly drawn to understanding the path that led to this moment. While we’ve imagined many different expansions over the years and worked on them off and on, the concept of a Mesoamerican presence kept pulling us back.

Though we’ll likely never publish it directly, there exists, at least in our internal canon, a chain of events that led from a small, struggling city in the middle of a vast swamp, defending itself and creating a religion to secure its place in the world, all the way to one of the greatest republics in the world of New Caribbea.

When the forebearers of the protagonists in Red Tides arrived across the sea, they discovered vast, thriving centers of human society rich in technology, religion, and all the complications that human civilization brings. Nestled among these impressive, though not unprecedented, cultures scattered across the new world was one that seemed, at first, fairly unremarkable compared to its peers: what is now known as the Azteca Republic.

The Azteca would go on to forge alliances with their greatest enemies and conquer those who stood in the way of unification. They extended north into the deserts, establishing human centers in inhospitable lands, and pushed south until they reached the rocky rainforests of another rising empire.

It was at the height of this expansion, when the Azteca Republic reached its maximum extent, that Davies burst onto the scene, upsetting what had been a delicate balance between the land-based might of the Azteca and the incredible sea power of the Seven Sisters. Seeing an opportunity, the leader of the Azteca Republic met with Davies in secret to assess his potential as an ally. A plan was hatched, and a treaty was enacted: Davies would swear that no non-native would set foot in the Azteca Republic, and no Aztecan would launch a ship into the seas of New Caribbea.

To seal the pact, the Azteca leader provided Davies with special items of power to enhance his ship, the Dead Drifter. Within the Azteca Republic, it is widely believed that these artifacts ultimately tipped the balance in Davies’ favor and led directly to his rise in New Caribbea.

Believing they had secured the better end of the deal, ceding a worthless sea to a man they were certain was doomed but gaining precious time to bring their costly war against the Southerns to a close, the Azteca withdrew from the seas.

We know the story of Davies, and as captains, you embark on a quest to remove him and his ilk from power. For the Azteca Republic, however, the story did not unfold as expected. What they viewed as an ultimate victory over their greatest rivals became instead a fragile peace meant to prevent mutual annihilation. What they saw as one man’s doomed quest to fight a juggernaut of state and culture became a legend of triumph of the determined over the entrenched. And what they believed would be insurance and protection against an exposed flank became a mark of weakness and a thorn in their side.

Hemmed in by nature, threatened with destruction by their adversaries, bound by an outdated treaty, and driven by a religion that balances the fate of the world on the feeding of their gods, the Azteca now look to the seas of New Caribbea for their future.

Having long derided the ways and means of the outsiders, the Azteca have begun to steal their technology and their ships, imbuing them with their own knowledge of the physical and spiritual worlds. They have launched their dual temples into the sea itself, bringing with them the might of the land upon which the sun god stands. Like a continent floating on a sea of lava, the solidity of their mighty ships now rides upon the water and blood of New Caribbea.

Next Up: Azteca Gameplay…