Tales from the Red Dragon Inn

Progress Report - January 2023
over 3 years ago – Sat, Jan 07, 2023 at 12:33:59 AM

Greetings Slugfans!

We are excited to share a big milestone for Tales that arrived this week. Before we dive into the pictures and details about that, though, here’s a brief run down of the game's current status:

• 24 of the 25 scenarios have transferred from dull word docs to the designed, final rule books, including the scenario instructions as well as the game content overlaid on the map art. We are proofreading these alongside completing the final scenario.
• All of the game’s cards - tracking, reminder, ability, items, player mats, etc - are complete and being proofread by SFG staff.
• All plastics have been reviewed and approved, so all the dice and minis are ready for manufacture.
• Punch-out sheets are getting final spacing tweaks and we are working closely with the manufacturer to make sure the tolerances are on spec.
• We have received the white box prototype, the next step in testing out the materials and components of the game, and what this update is about.

What this all means is that we are very close to transitioning entirely to manufacturing, and a big signifier of that is receiving yet more mock-ups from the printer. Let’s dive into the photos of the prototype!

The white-box prototype is a test run of the materials and packaging that will be used for the game. Basically we get to check out things like the “snap” of the playing cards, the thickness of the cardboard, durability of the paper, and how the packing of the box will go.

Above you’ll see two boxes that will come within the box. The larger box holds the minis, game dice, tracker cards (small deck), starter cards (normal size deck under the standee stands), player mats (underneath both decks), initiative draw bag and standee stands.

The second, very thick box you see cut-off on the right is the Vault. The Vault is an ordered deck of cards that contains all of the ability and item cards you’ll unlock over the course of the game.

We intend to package the 5 chapters of scenarios for the game in chapter packs. Each of these packs will contain the scenario book and punch out sheets you’ll need for that chapter (and in some cases future chapters). Our goal here is to keep the game setup as lightweight as possible, giving players time to get used to the game components and mechanics as they are introduced. This also has the side benefit of rewarding progress in the campaign with that wonderful feeling of periodically cracking open an expansion filled with new scenarios, toys and enemies to play with!

We were originally going to include the maps in the chapter packs, but couldn’t guarantee that there wouldn’t be some fold over or damage dealt to the maps during the packaging process. At the suggestion of our manufacturer, the map-folio was born! This folder will hold all the maps together, giving them much more rigidity in the packaging as well as wrap them all in a pocket of cardstock for added protection. Maps. Together. Strong.

The chapter packs and map folio together will all be able to flat pack on the bottom of the box, staying put during shipping, and out of the way until you need them.

We also started trying out different ways to package up the extra mini sets. On the top is the sample packaging for the Tales Extra Core Minis Pack.

The second is 1 of 2 minis sleeves that will be included in the Beer Goat and Mystery Minis Pack. The sleeve is designed to be slid to the side, revealing the minis one at a time to help prevent spoilers as you make progress throughout the campaign. We will print on the sleeve itself instructions for when you’ll need a particular mini from the pack.

And that wraps us up for the start of the year! We know that there has been some disappointment about the delay, but are excited to share the progress we have made so far. We hope you all had a great holiday season and wish you all a happy new year!

Progress Report - November 2022
over 3 years ago – Thu, Nov 17, 2022 at 07:14:54 PM

Hey Slugfans!

We’re diving into the winter season and still bashing monsters in dungeons! Progress on the game is still being made with multiple successful blind run throughs of Chapter 1 to stress test the rulebooks with newbies. These real life sessions have helped us to tweak the size and count of punchouts as well as clarify game concepts in ways that improve the rulebooks.

We are also on the way to wrapping up Chapter 3’s maps and components. That’s more than half the scenarios in the can!

We have also just launched a brand new lightweight game We have also just launched a brand new lightweight game. You’re stuck with your rideshare parked somewhere nearby, and the app is malfunctioning. Text messages are going crazy, and the driver is only responding with seemingly random emojis. It all leaves you asking yourself one simple question: Where’s My Ride?

Where’s My Ride? is our brand new cooperative game of deduction and miscommunication for 2-7 players, designed by David Kessler. You and your friends are divided into a party of Riders and a single Driver, trying to meet up for a ride-share. Riders will use a deck of quirky, autofilled text messages to try and communicate with the Driver and find out where they are parked. Unfortunately, the Driver can only react to the messages with emojis! Will you find your Driver before the app cancels the ride and gives everyone a dreaded 1-out-of-5 star rating!?!

The new game has just launched on Kickstarter with its own sweet backer-only content and a kickstarter-exclusive expansion: Meow’s My Ride?. The game is light and fast, and a great way to kick off or round out a game night with some puzzling lighthearted fun. We’ve even got a mod available for Tabletop Simulator on the Steam Workshop that you can play. So give the brief rules a skim and hop onto our Discord server to find a game!

We also have this handy how-to-play video that can catch you up to speed on the ins-and-outs of the game:

The campaign will run from now through December 8th. We will be on Twitch tonight for our Launch Day stream where you can watch the game, ask questions, and maybe even play along! We hope to see you there!

Progress Report Q4 2022
over 3 years ago – Thu, Oct 06, 2022 at 10:10:27 PM

Hello, backers.

We’re reaching out to you today because we must announce a delay in the release of Tales. This project has been complex and has taken more effort than we anticipated. As such, we no longer think that our February delivery estimate is realistic.

The new delivery estimate for Tales is June 2023.

We apologize for this delay. The rest of this update is to answer specific questions you may have around this campaign and to show you a little bit of our recent progress.

Why the delay?

This is, by a HUGE margin, the largest and most design-intensive game we’ve ever produced. Tasks like playtesting, rules writing, and art and layout, have taken longer than we anticipated. While we are very happy with the quality of the game that we’re making, that quality has come with a very high cost in time and effort.

We kinda wish we could blame this delay on the manufacturing and freight problems that have delayed so many Kickstarter projects recently, but we can’t - this delay is entirely on us. It is possible that there may still be manufacturing and supply chain-related delays later on down the line, but we believe our current estimate accounts for these surprise delays. Of course, we can’t see the future with 100% accuracy, and this current delay is an unfortunate reminder of that.

Can I get a refund?

Yes. You may cancel your pledge and get a full refund by contacting us at [email protected]. No questions asked, no offense taken.

Will refunds to some backers affect the delivered game that other backers receive?

No way! All stretch goals and content are already accounted for and will continue to be a part of the delivered game, including the bonus content promised to all backers. We would like to emphasize that the funds for the project are still earmarked for the project and we don’t anticipate any problems with that, even if some backers decide to cancel.

If I still want the game, do I have to do anything?

No. This isn’t one of those Kickstarter campaigns where everything unravels and the creators start cutting content or worse, passing around the hat for extra money. As we said above, we still have all of the funds we need to manufacture the game - it’s just taken us longer than anticipated to create the files needed to send off to the manufacturer.

What progress have you made?

A whole lot, actually! Recent work has included layout on a bunch of scenario maps (available here: SPOILERS! Map 1, Map 4 and Map 16), a full reference manual (available here: Reference Manual) and a walkthrough guide leading players all the way through chapter 1 (available here: SPOILERS! Walkthrough). In addition, our manufacturer is generating a physical prototype of chapter 1 that we can use for some in-person playtest sessions.

To emphasize again, the game is progressing and we don’t anticipate any kind of serious project failure. It’s just taking us longer than we expected, and we’d like to apologize for that.

Thanks for your patience.

Jeff Morrow

President, SlugFest Games

Progress Report - August 2022
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 09:56:10 PM

Greetings Slugfans!

This month’s Progress Report is a bit early and short as this month is packed with a bunch of SlugFest Games business-side stuff including recovering from Gen Con, launching a new Kickstarter, and starting up streaming again. Let’s dive into what’s up with Tales first:

Nothing too visually exciting is being worked on for Tales this month. The primary focus of development is now on rules consistency across the various documents that will be used to teach players how to play the game.

Last month we mentioned that the first draft for the Walkthrough and Chapter 1 have been completed. Now they are being cross referenced with our Reference Manual to have their language tightened up so everything matches across the documents. That’s dozens of pages to be reviewed between three different rules documents that are all very important to making sure you play the game right each time you set up a new scenario! We know that sounds intimidating, but don’t worry! The game is still built on many simple to understand concepts, and we are making sure that those ideas stay clear between the various places you’ll be looking them up. Considering these documents weren’t wrapped up till just before Gen Con and we only just got back from Gen Con, we’re only a few days into linking these documents together. Once this is done, Chapter 1 will be used as a template for translating the plain-text versions of the rest of the campaign to its final production quality version.

Just in case you weren’t aware, instructions on how to play the game are divided across three primary kinds of documents:

• Walkthrough Guide: A tutorial guide that will introduce game concepts on a need-to-play basis as it guides you through the first Chapter of the game. This is the “quickstart” guide for the game.
• Chapter Scenario Book: Each scenario will have its own section in a Scenario Book, detailing what special rules or conditions you’ll need to pay attention to, as well as your objectives for each map in the game. These entries will also provide brief reminder text for various recurring game concepts like the kinds of terrain your heroes will be traversing.
• Reference Manual: This is your reference guide for looking up full rules explanations for game concepts. The Appendix is there to answer borderline or confusing situations, and to explain complex game interactions.

In addition to making sure the rules are ready to help you play, we’re also working on the rest of the punchout sheets and box layout. Stuff like figuring out the best way to arrange tokens as well as the “shape” of all the bits.

Yesterday we launched the Kickstarter for Chaos in Copperforge, our latest expansion to Battle for Greyport. And it’s already funded! The new expansion contains all the content BFG fans have asked us for: New heroes to play, new enemies to fight, new mechanics to play with and new bosses to defeat.

Speaking of new mechanics, the signature mechanic for BFGC is Contraptions. Contraptions are special split cards that first come attached to monsters, providing them with a variety of challenging advantages. The two new decks of monsters featured in the expansion both utilize this new mechanic, creating some wild combinations of abilities you’ll have to overcome! That being said, when you take down one of these monsters, you’ll immediately gain access to that cool equipment they brought with them, just in time to help you take down more monsters!

We’re also going to be returning to streaming this month! The first stream is tonight at 4pm Pacific (7pm Eastern) over on Twitch. Jeff, Jen and Sam will do battle against Grommit, one of the new bosses featured in BFGC. Watch them succeed or fail live on stream while they field your questions.

And that’s it for the update! Thank you for your support, and we hope to see you on Twitch soon!

Progress Report - July 2022
almost 4 years ago – Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 02:21:53 PM

Hello Slugfans!

Another month of work on Tales is under our belt! We’re still working on layout, writing, and swanky new plastics as we move forward with physical prototyping. We also have Gen Con coming up next week and the Kickstarter campaign for an expansion to Battle for Greyport on the horizon!

SlugFest Games will be at Booth 611 this year! You’ll find us in the front near the entrances on the East end of the Exhibit Hall. We will be running demos of Red Dragon Inn, Dungeon Decorators and Tales. Come by and try a game, or just say hello! We’ll have some sweet Tales related things for you to check out, including the new miniatures and dice.

If you’ll be joining us, make sure to swing by the Gen Con Health and Safety Update to make sure you’re in the know about safety requirements for the show.

Speaking of Cool Tales related stuff, we’ve been working on a variety of production-end tasks for the game. Through June we were updating all the card text and layouts and working on the various books. Throughout July we’ve completed the first draft of the walkthrough guide and Chapter 1 scenario book and are currently working on the punch board sheets for all the hundreds of punchouts in the game.

We have also received the final production proofs for the game’s dice and miniatures and they are fantastic! The dice have a great color with excellent cut-ins for the “pips” and icons. We had mentioned in the last update that the pictured dice were painted and a bit rough. The production dice are brilliant.

The new miniatures are sturdy, made from durable injection molded plastic that has survived some drop tests and playing-with by a 6-year old. Our manufacturer has done a great job with minor adjustments to the sculpts to support injection molding while preserving their detail. In case you didn’t know, miniatures for full production runs of a board game are usually cast plastic that is injected into a steel two-part mold. If a model has a lot of dimensionality it will need additional assembly after casting, like gluing on arms and such.

The minis look great and best of all they arrived just in time for Gen Con! So folks at the show will actually get to hold the final version of the minis!

Since we had the final version of the minis and dice on hand, we decided to also update the demo version of the game for Gen Con. This was an excellent excuse to trial run the shapes and size of tokens and standees and get a real world feel for a physical version of the game. 

While there are still some adjustments to make - like altering the Ability Tiles and adjusting the shape and size of the standees - this updated demo will look great on the table and give us a solid perspective on where we need to take the punch board sheets.

Last but not least, earlier this week we shared a preview of the upcoming Kickstarter for Battle for Greyport: Chaos in Copperforge which is launching on August 17th!

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, Battle for Greyport is a cooperative deck building game. The players will recruit decks made of heroes and items, and lead them into battle with their character leading the charge. Defend your friends and save locations from attacking bands of monsters as you fight your way to an epic boss!

We are very excited about the expansion and would love your feedback! You can download the fully playable TableTop Simulator mod for BFG:CC on the Steam Workshop and provide more detailed feedback about the campaign itself on this Google Form.

And that’s a wrap for this progress report! As you see, we’re dialing in the production-end of Tales while tackling other exciting projects. Thanks for your time!