Kinghill

[The Kinghill Chronicles - Chapter 7] June 2022 update
almost 2 years ago – Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 12:37:39 PM

From my perspective, shipping is part of the risk of it if you go on Kickstarter.
      I suspected from the beginning that I would be partially paying the shipping out of the profits, which turns out to be true and I'm okay with that.

I would like to assure you that I will ship the game to all backers and I won't force anyone to pay anything extra.

      If you're more interested in board games, you can guess how big a topic shipping has been lately. And it's not exactly a short time, in fact it's all been dragging on since the pandemic began. We can discuss all sorts of views but in the end we can agree on one thing - the cost of shipping is high. So high for Europe, in fact, that VAT including makes the kickstarter price unaffordable in financial terms for many people. U.S. shipping rates have recently increased by 20% and there is probably no end in sight to further increases.

      The situation is so serious that many publishers have had to close down (and of course it's not just for shipping reasons).
      I recently watched a video where Quackalope explains quite humanly how Indie publishers are doing. If you're interested, check it out here.

Recently, several board game companies have announced their demise. Diea Games (Euthia) also recently failed. I mention this because the people around the game are from the same country as me.
      I know several of them and have discussed with them not only the Kinghill campaign. That's why I was very saddened by their failing. Seeing the the failure of people you know and who make games with their hearts and have dedicated years of their lives to it is very demotivating.

Are you interested in some numbers? They are very simple - the project raised $40,000. After paying fees (kickstarter, etc.) I have approximately $35000 left in my account.
      Campaign costs (i.e. game graphics, marketing, reviews, prototypes, etc., not counting any work) are calculated to be around $15000. The production of the game itself came out to $20,000 (it should be mentioned here that I produce more games than there are backers. So the extra games sold could make some profit).
   You don't have to be a great mathematician to figure out that I have about $0 left in my account.

   Shipping was collected through the pledge manager and thanks to you, I was also able to collect a little on addons (about $7000 for addons and $26000 for shipping). The current estimate of postage costs (I don't have the exact numbers yet) will be around $25000, and I expect a 20% increase due to the spike in gasoline and oil prices. Bottom line, after paying taxes I'm expecting to have few thousands for three years of development and work.

   I don't mention this to inspire any form of pity, I just wanted to be open minded here. After all, I'm not in a life-threatening situation like some people who have failed.

If you are asking about the future of Kinghill, there is currently something in discussion, but I can't give any details at the moment as nothing is confirmed.
    As for future games from my side, it doesn't look very bright. As you can probably understand just to produce the graphics and then run another campaign is very challenging from a financial point of view.

   Don't take my word for it - I'm really glad Kinghill did well, and I hope you enjoy the game when it arrives! The fact that I've managed to fulfil my dream of publishing a board game makes me very happy and proud.

For a long time I was wondering whether I should ask for some extra money at all. In light of everything that's going on around, I decided on the following option - I'm opening voluntary contributions. And I will be happy to offer you a little something for your support.

   Since I can't physically add anything to the game itself, I'm offering a downloadable promo pack of cards for Kinghill.

Bolur and Bergelmir are giant brothers, Gianti who have descended from the Misty Mountains and are ready to unleash hell. As the base game has a smaller number of "giant" monsters, they will certainly be a welcome addition.
The Lockjaw is another monster you can spend precious Moonstone power on, and can often devour even stronger enemies.

 
   I realize that print and play cards are not quite ideal, but I believe there are a few people for whom even a few extra cards will bring great joy.

Note: Czech version is included. Minimum contribution is 1 USD and you can pay via paypal or by credit card.

Thank you all so much for the feedback you give me and the support I get from you. I really appreciate every single comment and I really hope you are looking forward to the game!

      I should have more shipping information to share soon. Let me know if you would appreciate more detailed info on how the whole shipping process works, I'd be happy to set something up.

[The Kinghill Chronicles - Chapter 6] April 2022 update
about 2 years ago – Tue, May 03, 2022 at 03:31:54 AM

Hello, adventurers!

I finally received my pre-production samples directly from China.  It was quite a close call, because just a day later fedex suspended all mail from China to Europe indefinitely due to the epidemic wave that is prevailing. Whoa.

I'd love to share with you how the game looks like and share my first impressions. I hope you enjoy it all.

 If someone tells you that you can't have Christmas twice a year, don't believe them! :)

 English and Czech version + both addons. Let's unpack it.

Both language versions are indistinguishable from the front. In case you haven't noticed, the golden border around the picture has been reduced to a minimum which gives the picture nice and fresh look.  

First up we have the double layered board that you could get  as an extra in the pledge manager.

 When viewed from the top, you can hardly see any difference from a regular board. But you can already feel the difference clearly when you grip it. While the basic player board is just hard paper, the double layer is a quality "board" material.

 The main difference, of course, is the presence of cutouts for the "lives" and the Moonstone force. The cutouts are large enough to accommodate the tracker and overall I am very happy with the addon. 

Note: Cubes are not included, but I didn't forget about this and among the basic puch-tokens are small trackers.

 The second addon are wooden worker tokens. 

Maybe the colours could be a bit brighter but at least the worker color matches the chip color. Overall it looks cool.

 And look what I found-- the first misprint. Blue workers on red circles. Where did the mistake happen?  This need to be fixed for sure.

 The difference between the add-on tokens and the base tokens.

Abrakadabra, let the box open! Rules + Solo scenarios. There's not much to say about. I hope you will like it. 

Basic player sheet. Still looking good. The material used is quite weak, but unfortunately costs have to be saved somewhere.

 Tokens. Everything fine here.

 The game board is cleverly placed in a plastic tray and can be easily removed and folded out.

Just like that. The board is surprisingly sturdy and the material used is really high quality.

Plastic insert. It looks really very nice. I have instructed the manufacturer to be able to insert the cards in the sleeves. How do you think that worked out? Well...  not good enough and this need to be addressed.

Crystal and stone tokens. The colour of the stones is actually very light, maybe slightly towards the golden colour. I'm marking this as a minor issue and see what manufacturer can possibly do about it.

 Plastic tray in action

You can check brief unboxing video here if you wish, otherwise that it all for now.

Actually, I didn't know what to expect, because I have no experience with the pre-print sample (and not with the chosen manufacturer at all), so I am pleasantly surprised in the end. There are a few things that will need to be tweaked (wrong token colors, more room for cards), but if this is what the game ends up looking like, I certainly look forward to you playing it. Let me know what you think, I appreciate any feedback.

The good news is that everything is going smoothly at the moment. It will take me some time to go through all the components in detail, fix some art issues and also manufacturer need some time to fix reported problems.

According to last week's news, there is no delay in production at my manufacturer despite the epidemic in China. Production should therefore be completed within the next 2-3 months (end of June is pretty realistic).

The bad news, of course, is the state of international shipping. Here unfortunately I am not able to predict how/if shipping will be delayed as the situation changes every month. At the same time, the price of freight is rising steeply, especially as far as Europe is concerned. As soon as I know more, I'll be sure to update next time.

If you have any questions, feel free to stop by the Facebook group anytime, or leave me a comment here.

Thanks a lot.

[The Kinghill Chronicles - Chapter 5] February 2022 update
about 2 years ago – Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 10:40:48 PM

Since I need to finalize the number of games to manufacture, I will slowly start closing the pledge manager towards the beginning of March.  What does this mean for you ? 

You have about 2-3 weeks to change your order, add an additional game or addon.

With the closing of your pledge will also be the money charged.

After that it will still be possible to change orders, but only on request at the address:

[email protected] 

If you are planning to move in the coming months, the good news is that address changes will still be allowed even if the pledge manager will be already closed.

- Progress

I'm still putting together all the print materials for the game, including the CZ localization. The biggest challenge was to translate the complete rules, thanks a lot to the people who helped me with check and translation - Karel Matyáš, Pája Kučerová, Jiří Maličký a Ivona Mary Repková. 

Current version of the rules here:

CZ Kinghill rules Kinghill ENG rules

any comments and observations are welcome, you can make notes directly on googledrive. 

I also have finished rules translation in Polish, Greek and German, but I still need to get it into final form and then I will share it on BGG.

As I confirmed last time, the design and numbers of all components are final. The final touches in terms of balancing the heroes and finishing the help cards remain.

All illustrations for the cards have also been completed. They're all absolutely amazing. A few to show you.

- Retail and distribution

As you can probably understand, I'm also trying to get the game into stores or possible distribution, as every extra copy sold counts. I have approached various retailers and managed to sell a little bit within some countries.  It is therefore possible that you will see the game in some stores on pre-order. I would just like to point out that I am not setting the price of the game on sale and only a limited amount of the game will be available.

Last time I promised a brief insight into some of the changes I've made to the game. Specifically, it concerns the caravan cards. First of all, for the record, nothing has been removed from the game, the caravans remain in the game. Any changes I make are based on testing, where some card effects are modified, or in the worst case, replaced with different cards.

If you're in the mood for an insight into the development of the game and my way of thinking, enjoy your reading.

- What are caravans

For those of you who have no idea what this is all about, caravan cards are included in Outskirt offer deck (where buildings are). So they get into the card offer just like buildings, but unlike buildings, caravans can't be built.

Instead, it offers an action space that you can play and perform the caravan effect. Because the cards in the offer rotates, caravan cards are only available for a few rounds. In this respect, the caravan effect is more powerful than the "basic" actions.

In addition, most caravan cards offer two different effects to choose from, making them even more variable. An example is the Crystal Explorer card, which allows you to play an exploration action even with a basic worker, whereas you need a Ranger for a regular Explore action.

- History

Caravans have been part of the game from the beginning. The original idea came from having buildings in the game that contain a private space to play an action. In the end, none of these buildings remained in the game. The last building replaced was the legendary Crystal Hall, for example, where the private action has been replaced by an end of round effect.

During the early days of the game, there were more "private" buildings in the game, but they proved unnecessary. The game offers enough action to play with and there was no need to add more, and private ones at that. Action spaces were thus moved to cards that did not need to be built, and caravans were created. 

I kept the cards in the building deck and this proved to be a brilliant solution, as it rotated them through the offer, creating unique temporary actions.

Want to have some fun? Here's the oldest caravan card design I found on the hard drive, it's about 2 years old. There was still an iron resource in the game that was cancelled a long time ago. The game was still being tested for 3-4 players.

What was worse is the balance of the individual effects, but especially the number of caravans in the deck. A deck of buildings is and must primarily contain building cards. Buildings are an important part of the game and if the number of caravans was too large, there would be few buildings on offer.

With a little math and testing, I figured out a number of 4 caravans for 16 building cards.

- Present

The rules and functionality of the caravan are very simple in terms of rules. Feedback from all players here has been overwhelmingly positive. Thus, no changes have been made to the caravan cards, unless we are talking about balancing individual effects.

However, the game did include caravans that did not function as playable actions - I call these caravans special caravans.

 Originally, these were static effects that lasted as long as the caravan was in the game(offer). It was these caravans that were replaced. What are the main reasons?

1 .The most fundamental problem was the neglect of the effect in the game itself. There are already enough locations and effects in the game to keep track of and watch for, and many players didn't keep checking the static effects affecting the entire game in building offer. These special caravans were thus proving impractical.

2 . Most of the effects in place could be replaced directly with a building that you could purchase if needed. This made it unnecessary to put static effects on caravans.

3. Influence and randomness for the game. The arrival of caravan cards was largely random and this meant dis/advantage for a certain player in a given game situation. I didn't like that.

4. The "dead" card in the offer. Because the special caravans were part of the offer and there was no way to play them, it blocked the space for buildings for several rounds.

5. Complications during game setup and unnecessary rule adjustments. During testing, there were several combos that created the need to introduce additional small "extra rules" that can arise in extreme situations. This is something I want to avoid as a developer. 

- Future

I came up with a lot of interesting cards and ideas during the development process. Many of them failed in testing. However, some ideas are worth revisiting. The special types of caravans are part of this category.

Since I don't want to add anything else to the game at the moment, these ideas will have to wait for the eventual expansion. So you definitely have something to look forward to, because the special caravans haven't said the last word yet!

Thanks for your interest, let me know if you enjoyed the insight and if you would like to elaborate further.

[The Kinghill Chronicles - Chapter 4] January 2022 update
over 2 years ago – Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 06:02:32 PM

Greetings adventurers,

How did 2022 start for you? For me, as for most - work. Fine-tuning Kinghill down to the last detail, lots of work with the pledge manager and getting ready for production. 

What's the hottest news?

Although the translation was almost a certainty on my part, it was thrilling to the last minute for a lot of backers. I'll admit that I've been working on the complete localization for the last month and it's not exactly an easy task. Thanks to everyone for offering to help with the corrections.

It's not just thanks to the unlocked stretch goals that the game is getting a big batch of new art. The full art legendary buildings have been given a new GUI to make the legendary buildings stand out from the rest of the cards. The art for most of the buildings has been handled by Michal Peichl, a fellow Czech, who by the way is also an aspiring board game author. Expect more art in future updates.

I'm also very happy about the hero cards. I was a bit worried how to implement everything into the game so it doesn't look forced, but I think it looks awesome and not only the people who paid the pledge will be happy.

- In the past, I wasn't completely happy with some of the cards and game effects, but I finally managed to fix the game so that the balance adjustments only happen to the heroes anymore.

- In order to keep the rules simple to understand, I decided to remove some extra elements from the game. An example is the travelling caravans, which were triggered upon entering the game. A lot of these things are planned for future expansions.

- I've added one extra solo scenario to the game as well and all the solo scenarios are ready, just need to tweak the scripted one.

- I am updating the Tabletop Simulator version to include all the latest changes. 

Here's the schedule for the upcoming 2-3 months and details you might be interested in.

- The pledge manager will close at the end of February. I will send another update before that.

If you have not yet replied to the pledge manager, please do so as soon as possible. 

As of today we have 754 / 972 backers closed,which is around 80%. Even if you just wanted to support the game and you have a few dollars worth of pledges, I would be happy if you would confirm the survey.

- During March you will have one last chance to change your shipping address or make urgent changes to your orders. 

- At the end of March, the pledge manager will be completely locked for any changes.

- During April/May I would like to have pre-production samples available for printing so that everything can be approved and production can begin. 

So that's it for this month, thanks for your attention.

If you're a random passing by or you still interested in getting the game, do not hesitate.

Pre-order Kinghill.

The main reason is the rising prices of materials and boardgames in general. I'm not even going to mention shipping costs. I If there is a reprint in the future, there is no chance the game will be at the same reasonable price as it is now.

[The Kinghill Chronicles - Chapter 3] Pledge manager is here! Happy holidays!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Dec 23, 2021 at 04:35:35 PM

Welcome! You will receive an invitation to collect your reward in your email shortly, the header will be something like:

"Response Needed - Get your reward for Kinghill"

The email will take you to the pledge manager, where you log in the same way you log in to kickstarter - the systems are "linked" to each other.

You'll be asked a few tricky questions and then you'll be let into the heart of the pledge manager. Here you are given a credit equal to the amount you have already pledged on kickstarter. 

For a credit you can add the Czech or English version of the game to your shopping cart. You can also add another copy of the game (or multiple copies) and optional addons that are available. Or, throw a tip into the tip jar ;)

You enter your address (please fill in everything carefully) and the pledge manager will calculate how much you have to pay for shipping (and any extra things you have thrown in).

Then all you have to do is confirm the payment with your credit card and you're done.

After you respond to your survey, you can go back later and change your responses at any time before we close the surveys and get our final counts.

Any problem or questions? Check FAQ or let me know: [email protected]

Whether you're getting gifts, socks, or board games, me and my whole family wish you the most peaceful holidays and a wonderful end of the year 2021!

[ PLEDGE MANAGER ]  Does Santa exist?

Yes!!!! ;) ;)

[ PLEDGE MANAGER ] What are the advantages of pledge manager?

Once you confirm your order, the money will not be charged to your card yet, it will only be booked. After the pledge manager is closed and I confirm it will the money actually be charged. This gives you the option to change the delivery address or change the contents of the order in the meantime. I also still have the option to adjust the actual shipping (which should no longer move higher, rather the opposite).

[ PLEDGE MANAGER ] How long will the pledge manager be open?

At least until the end of February 2022.

[ PLEDGE MANAGER ] I'm a newcomer and would like to buy the game. How do I access the pledge manager?

Pledge manager is only for people who backed the game on kickstarter. Others can use the late pledge available here: https://kinghill.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

[ REWARDS ] I only backed three dollars in the kickstarter, now what?

If you're interested in the game, same process as described at the beginning. Your entry fee will be $3, plus $46 and shipping.

[ REWARDS ] What if I order an addon whose goal is not met? (Czech version of the game and addons), won't I lose money?

No. If the goal is not met, the addon will be cancelled and you will get a credit which you can use for something else (or at worst ask for a refund).

[ REWARDS ] How many pieces of the game can I order?

By default it shouldn't be a problem to order two games, however the Pledge manager is pre-set to 6 as max. If you start combining any addons etc into this, the shipping may get some crazy. In that case, email me at [email protected] with your specific request and I'll manually adjust everything.

[ PAYMENT ] Can I use paypal?

Unfortunately BackerKit can't use paypal for rewards that have a goal set. Paypal charges the money immediately and if the goal is not reached for the addon, there would be a problem with chargeback. For this reason, I have decided to cancel paypal payment for pledge manager completely.

[ SHIPPING ] Shipping costs are giving me crazy amounts

This is either due to an excessive number of games/addons, or somewhere the settings for your region have been forgotten. Either way, email me at [email protected] and let me know how much you want to order and where you're from, I'll manually adjust everything.

[ SHIPPING ] Is it possible to pick up the game within the Czech Republic?

I don't plan to do this for now.

[ SHIPPING ] Can I change the delivery address later?

Yes, as long as the pledge manager is open, it shouldn't be a problem.