Hey everyone – lot’s going on so let’s get to it!
Grove on Kickstarter – Ends 7 November!
In case you hadn’t seen, GROVE is live on Kickstarter and the campaign closes Sunday! It is the citrusy sequel to the award winning Orchard 9 card solitaire game. Its 18 cards feature orange, lemon and lime trees and a new ‘wild card’ element, glades. These open spaces without trees, combined with a new scoring mechanic, offer more ways and opportunities to increase your harvest and create a greater variety of gameplay and strategies compared to Orchard.
You’ll also find a cheeky squirrel, who can either help or hinder your fruit picking, as well as a wheelbarrow – useful if you manage to get an extra large haul. The card backs feature recipe challenges with various scoring conditions and target scores. These provide a win/lose condition (as an alternative to the standard game’s ‘beat your score’) for those that prefer it – and add even more variety to the game.
Multiple languages are available and backing now (even if just for $1) locks in the discounted Kickstarter price when the pledge manager goes live. Go check it out!
Here’s a quick update on the rest of our projects:
- Elements of the Gods: The production proof was amazing! If you didn’t see them, check out the pics on the Kickstarter update. We were able to work with our manufacturer for a few minor tweaks based on how things fit & looked. Full production should start this month & fulfillment can start near the beginning of 2022!
- Maquis: Fulfillment has begun! Most of the copies have headed out or are on their way and our backers in the UK, Canada, and Australia should start to see them this month. If for some reason you’re not in those areas and haven’t gotten a shipping notification or received the game let us know and we can figure out what the issue may be.
- Mechanical Beast: We’re a little behind schedule on this one. We had some tweaks to do but the bulk of the files will head off to our licensing partners soon. Then we can start pre-production. So likely looking closer to March 2022 for fulfillment but all things considered not too bad of a slip.
We also have signed another game! Spice Empires from Theodore Karvounis won 1st place at Epitrapezio 2018 and as soon as we played it we knew we wanted to publish it.
All great empires want to conquer the famous Spice Islands, but who will prevail? At the King’s order, you sail to these lands, eager to discover new sources of the most valuable goods. Build new settlements to strengthen your dominance, ports to take control of the maritime trade and forts to protect the colony and fend off your heinous rivals. Remember that plenty of esteemed people wait in your motherland for your ships, expecting to find them full spices!
Players explore the islands, discover spices and place buildings, either cities, forts or ports. Cities help them control the islands, ports let them trade the spices and profit while the forts let them attack their enemies’ buildings. The board is modular and the spices are placed in a random fashion so that each time players explore a different map.
This one is likely late 2022/early 2023 so stay tuned for updates as we make progress on it. It’s going to be great!
As for our next game we’re still trying to determine which is next for early 2022. It will either be Village Builder or For Northwood. We’re hoping to have a decision made this month and we’ll let folks know what’s coming next and when to expect it!
Finally, the 2022 54 Card Game Design Contest on BoardGameGeek officially kicked off on 1 November! If you’ve ever wanted to design a game, or just test out & give feedback to up and coming designs, now is your chance. Some great games have come from this contest, both published by us and picked up by other publishers. It’s always fun to see some of these new designs really blossom into fantastic games so go check it out!
As always, if you have any questions or issues feel free to drop us a line through our social media outlets or send us an email at support@sideroomgames.com. Until next time!
The SRG Team
