Thunder Road: Vendetta

All Packed Up!
over 1 year ago – Sat, Jan 07, 2023 at 03:02:25 AM

Let's start with the production/fulfillment timeline: No changes! Phew! According to Panda, "production is rolling along". At this stage of the process, that's exactly what we want to hear.

Along the same lines, I don't have much new to share, but they did provide us with photos showing the "packout" for Maximum Chrome, so I'm happy to pass those along. Basically, this is the way stuff is packed when it gets to you. It's not super clear just from the photos, but the large punchboards will be packed outside the box so there isn't any extra gap after they are punched. In a lot of games, where there are only a couple of punchboards, you can put the empty sprues underneath the insert and eliminate the gap. With so many large punchboards, we didn't like that solution. This will also cut down a bit on the overall weight of the game. (You'll also notice the finger notches to lift out the trays.) Without further ado, here we go:

And there you have it. Happy new year to everyone. Something tells me it's going to be a really fun year.

Timeline Update: Fulfillment Pushed to May
over 1 year ago – Fri, Nov 25, 2022 at 02:44:20 AM

No point in delaying the bad news: We now expect fulfillment to begin for US/Canada in May. It is likely other hubs, notably Asia and Australia/NZ, will start a bit earlier, but that is the date we are posting. I'm sorry the date slipped from our prior estimate. Here's why that happened.

Fundamentally, there are three factors that have contributed to the delay:

• Product Revisions: There are always finishing touches we put on games after we're "done" with them and before full production begins. Panda sends us both a pre-production copy and a mass-production copy to review. Throughout this process, we often make tweaks to colors, plastic molds, insert layout, etc. We just seemed to have a bit more of these for this project than others. A large part of that is just the sheer amount of stuff in the game. A large part of that is that we're perfectionists. For example, when we got the production samples of the motorcycle figures, they just didn't feel as stable on the table as we'd like. So we had to do a slight redesign. We'd rather spend a week getting that right than put a game on your table that we didn't think was perfect.
• Chinese New Year: It's something every publisher knows about (and, by this time, a lot of KS backers). Pretty much all of China shuts down for two weeks for their annual celebration. This year, it starts on January 22. If the manufacturer can't complete production of your game before it starts, they won't start until after it's over, which often means three to four weeks lost to the timeline. Our product revisions mentioned above did just that.
• Freight Delays: As most of you probably know, Covid caused a lot of disruption to the supply chain. In particular, ocean freight has been a major problem for the past year. On the plus side, the cost has stabilized from the height of the issue. And, while the summer proved to be relatively normal in terms of congestion, recent months have seen those issues pop back up. Our most recent Unmatched set, Houdini vs. the Genie, sat on a boat off the coast of Savannah for two weeks before it got into port. Our logistics partner recently advised us that they expect to see these sorts of problems off and on over the next six months at least and to add a few weeks to our freight estimates accordingly.

Any one of those factors would have resulted in a minor delay. Unfortunately, those three factors combined actually made the delay worse than the "sum of its parts". I will say that we have an extremely high degree of confidence in the new date. That was the primary reason for the lateness of this most recent update: I wanted to make sure we had the best information available to give you all a new date you could count on. That's also not to say that there couldn't be some future unforeseen event that disupts things again. Unfortunately, that's just the nature of the business. For "regular" games, you, the public, don't often get to see when things like this happen, because we don't announce street dates until later in the process. But that's the beauty of Kickstarter; you get a good look into the whole process that puts the game into your hands -- warts and all. But it's also possible things go well and we're able to beat that estimate by a bit. We'll just continue to work through things as best we can. In any case, I'll continue to keep you updated.

With that out of the way, we got some more photos of the Maximum Chrome insert that I thought you'd all like to see.  Important caveat: Apropos of the first point above, there were still a couple of tweaks being made after these photos were taken, so remember that nothing is final until its packed up into a carton and on its way to your door. These are not mass-production components, e.g., the cars don't have a wash, laser cut tokens instead of punch board, etc. (And you can also see how we continued to tweak the vehicle colors after the September 12 update.)

For those who celebrate Thanksgiving, we hope you have a happy and healthy one. Don't get too full. For everyone else, have a great Thursday.

When we said "Maximum Chrome", we meant MAXIMUM!
over 1 year ago – Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 03:43:01 PM

Not much to report in this update. The production team is putting the finishing touches on Maximum Chrome -- notably the custom insert. No surprise, but you can't make an insert to hold everything until you have all the stuff done that it's going to hold. Our amazing manufacturing partner, Panda, uses rough production copies, laying everything out like a jigsaw puzzle to figure out the best way to organize things. NOT FINAL, but here's a peek at the work in process of one of the trays.

Another fun fact about Maximum Chrome is the weight. Not official until all the components are finalized, but we just got an estimate from the factory, and it's coming in at around 15 pounds! In the interim, no change to the timeline for now.

Vehicles, Roll Out!
over 1 year ago – Tue, Sep 13, 2022 at 01:33:01 AM

We're very much in the "no news is good news" section of the process, and I'm happy to report that there is not much to report. Production is moving along according to plan. Notably, plastic molds are done and our Production Superhero, Lindsay, received the "first shot" plastics from Panda to review. They came out great, with no necessary modifications before we move to full production. The Big Rig, in particular, is working great with the way the joints between the sections give it some flexibility. Here are some quick-and-dirty snaps Panda took to tide you over until next time. You'll notice a few tweaks to the detailing, including the Final Five rider positioning, and a color shift on the blue crew.

Fulfillment Timeline Update and Maximum Chrome Rulebook
over 1 year ago – Sun, Aug 14, 2022 at 04:31:59 AM

Hi, all. I appreciate everyone's patience, as I know it's been a bit quiet here lately. On the personal side, I've been lucky to do a bit of traveling but also had some family healthy issues to deal with. As far as TRV goes, there hasn't been too much to report on in any case. We are in the final stage of preproduction. This is where our Production Superhero, Lindsay, works her magic. If you think our games look great, she's a big part of why that is, and a big part of that is she's a perfectionist. It's a lot of back-and-forth between her and Panda, tweaking colors or die lines, or finding last minute issues with the text. Meanwhile, our Technicolor Wrench, Ian, has been doing yeoman's work trying to craft the Frankenstein that is Maximum Chrome's consolidated rulebook. This proved to be a major challenge, requiring lots of revisions and edits.

With all that said, I do need to report an update to the fulfillment timeline. We now expect fulfillment to begin in January of next year. Obviously, we're disappointed in the delay, no matter how brief. You might recall that we launched the initial campaign in October of last year for fulfillment in October of this year -- one year later. This included some buffer for any issues that might arise. We canceled that campaign and launched this one in January of this year for fulfillment in November, giving us a shorter window. We still thought we could hit it, but it did remove the buffer we had previously built in, which it seems we would have needed for the additional work. And while it wasn't much of a delay, starting fulfillment in December is simply not feasible, hence the new January timeline -- ironically, the same one-year window we had in the first campaign. We do have a high degree of confidence we will hit this new target. As we are late in the preproduction process, there are fewer things that might rise up to cause an issue. This is a pretty standard production (i.e., no big electronic towers), so we do not expect any issues during that process. Likewise, logistics issues have settled down a bit from the chaos of last year (though there's always a possibility of a hiccup between ports). As always, we'll continue to keep you updated if anything changes.

As I mentioned above, one of the reasons for the delay was all the work that we ended up putting into the comprehensive rulebook for the Maximum Chrome edition. So we figured it would be nice to give you all a look at it.

You can download the Maximum Chrome rulebook HERE.