Production Update 🌱
about 4 years ago – Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 03:00:35 AM

Dear People of Pangaia,

Another two weeks went by in the blink of an eye! 💫  We made some good progress on the production front and we have the game box, all cards, the player boards and the punch board all signed off and ready for printing! Please see the updated table below reflecting our current state of production:

 Chinese New Year  🐅

Our manufacturer is preparing for Chinese New Year which is officially celebrated from January 31st to February 15th. However, many factories in China already start shutting down their production 1-2 weeks earlier because their employees must travel to their hometowns all across the country.

📣 That means for the duration of this major holiday in China our production is heavily slowed down. That's why I was originally planning to have production finished by that time, but the delays during Christmas and many asset corrections on my side changed the schedule and finally brought me here. My deepest apologies for this!

 About the Rulebook 📔 

On the bright side, at least this bought us again a bit more time to look at some quality topics. You may notice that the rulebook was marked as OK on my last update but now is back in state Corrections. That's because I received some mixed feedback about the translations and I decided to go through the entire rulebook for all languages again. With the help of some community members we found a series of integrity and comprehension issues that we managed to iron out - again thanks a lot for your help guys!! I hope that the reading experience is a lot smoother now. After all, a well written rule book is essential for every game and that's why I want to keep it in review as long as possible to avoid unnecessary issues down the line.

All rulebooks are under final grammar & spelling review at the moment and I will share them again with the upcoming newsletter in 2 weeks.

The Player Board

Some of you asked me questions about the player board, so I decided to make a small spotlight and share some details on how it plays and how it's built. The player board is quite packed with functionality, so here a quick intro on some high level aspects:

On the right you keep your treetops and seeds. The treetops can be bought for weather resources (Rain, Sun, Wind or Snow) and are placed on top of your trees to strengthen your presence on the map. When you take treetops away from the playerboard you unlock additional seeds that help your forest to grow faster and expand over time.

On the left you have 2 action slots in the form of your respective spirit. The Rest action allows you to gather additional weather resources depending on which spirit you play. The stronger your forest is, the more resources you can gather.

The Pray action is used to play your ritual cards and is the primary way to gather Life energy.

The physical board consists of 2 layers and each of them is made of 1.5mm printed cardboard. To produce a player board with inserts you need to design the top and the bottom layer individually. To avoid unnecessary printing, the bottom layer is only printed on areas that will be visible afterwards.

The top layer of the player board will be cut using a DIE LINE - a simple vector graphic that is representing the area that will be cut out of the top layer, to reveal the layer below.

Finally both layers are simply glued together. There is always a small margin of error during this process, so it's important to design your graphics in a way to allow for 1-2 mm shifts without impacting functionality.

This is the final image of the board. As you can see I made some adjustments compared to the last update. Instead of using white circles for the treetops I reduced them to white rings, feeling a little less heavy (thanks again Yön). And as announced I added two inserts following the form of your spirit for the 2 action slots on the left.

That's it from me today, I hope you enjoyed this little spotlight! I wish you a great week and until next time for the bi-weekly update!!  🌱

Best, Tommy

PPC Arrival 💫
about 4 years ago – Sun, Jan 02, 2022 at 11:52:05 PM

Dear People of Pangaia,

🌟 Happy New Year everyone!! I hope you had a great start into 2022 and enjoyed a relaxing Christmas time with your family! I have a little present 🎁 for you guys, so enjoy today's update!

📦 During the last 2 weeks the remaining packages finally arrived and I was able to review the components thoroughly. Big kudos again to our community members Jordan and Sabine for pushing the parcels through the clogged TNT logistics pipeline during Christmas! Love you guys  💚

Now that all components arrived I updated the table below to reflect the current state of production. After reviewing the components there were still a few corrections to be made, but all files are uploaded by now and we will be kicking off production of the print-components in the coming days.

The Box 👀 

Here is the first shot of the game box! I decided to keep the title "Forests of Pangaia" the same across all languages and just add a little language button on the lower right for clarity. The final box production will get an extra UV spot on all white parts - that wasn't available for the PPC unfortunately.

A Peek Inside...

As I mentioned in this update the rulebook will come in 3 parts: A 12-page Basic rulebook, 1 Advanced-sheet explaining the blessing and achievement cards and finally the 4-page Solo mode rulebook. The rulebook is made of standard 128 gsm coated paper. It all looks good so far, no surprises here.

The game comes with 4 identical 2,5-mm punchboards with a fine linen finish. I was originally pushing for 3-mm punchboards, but based on the experience of my manufacturer, 3-mm punchboards tend to have problems on the cut-out sections. On occasions the punch around the die-line would not penetrate the material a 100%. This can lead to damaged components when they are not carefully pushed out. At first I wasn't super happy but we agreed on 2,5-mm instead. Now that I received the PPC components I must say that the tiles and tokens feel nice and sturdy and absolutely satisfying. 👍

To test potential damages I pushed out all the tokens extra fast and carelessly (to simulate a worst-case scenario), but the punchline was very clean and I had 0% damaged components. Looks good to me.

In total there are 16 tiles, 48 resource tokens, 48 life tokens and 4 corruption tokens for the solo mode.

•  Resource Tokens - I noticed a color discrepancy between the tokens and the central tile icon (my bad) and fixed it. Other than that I just retouched the iconography of the Wind to iron out some alignment issues.
•  Life Tokens - The color difference between the 1-point and 3-point Life tokens is currently too subtle, so I changed the 3-point token to be significantly darker, matching the color of the premium tokens.
•  Tiles - The Rain and Wind tiles are a little too noisy imho, so I increased the transparency of the wind and cloud effects to be less prominent (some of you suggested that as well in a feedback round). That change is rendering the scene a little calmer.

After lifting the punchboards you can see the 4 cloth bags containing the trees and seeds for each player. On the lower compartment you have space for the 4 playerboards.

The playerboards are composed of 2x 1,5-mm cardboard layers with a linen finish (total height of 3mm). There are little 1,5-mm deep inserts fitting the seeds and treetops. While the seeds fit perfectly, the treetops feel a little too loose, so I tightened the area a bit.

On the left hand side you see 2 areas for the spirit actions "Rest" and "Pray". At the moment they are just printed, but after reviewing the PPC components I've decided to add 2 cut-out sections there as well, matching the silhouette of the respective spirit. That should feel a bit neater when placing your meeple on your playerboard 😊.

Below the playerboards you find two sloped areas to hold the card decks and a central compartment for your tiles and tokens. The two sloped areas come with a thumb cut, to allow easy removal of the cards. Although I noticed that the cut-out needs to be slightly larger for players with larger fingers. 

The default insert is made of 2mm E-flute cardboard in a craft paper look. As I mentioned previously it is simple but sturdy and helps to organize your components in a basic way. The PPC insert in general is still not 100% accurate because it was manually produced and not machine-cut.

And finally... 🎄

As a little Christmas gift 🎁 to all of you I upgraded the inside of the box lit with a custom print! It shows four different trees that are part of the blessing cards art collection. They represent the elements Sun, Wind, Rain and Snow. Without this the box felt somehow incomplete, so I hope you enjoy this little upgrade 💚.

And finally I want to deeply thank you again for your amazing feedback and engaged discussion on the last update newsletter #24! 😍 I'm sorry if I wasn't able to answer every single comment regarding the Blessing cards, but rest assured that I've noted everything and reading your feedback helped me a lot during the design process. I loved your suggestion to fade between both options (lower brown, upper gray) and the result looked awesome. But the background gradient also drew attention away from the main subject. In the end I went for option A but increased the contrast by adding a central background spot to let the image pop better.

I wish you a wonderful first week of 2022 and until next time for the bi-weekly update!! ✨

Best, Tommy

Cards & Colors 🎨
over 4 years ago – Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 05:01:01 AM

Dear People of Pangaia

I'm happy to announce that the first PPC components finally arrived and I'm able to show you guys some of the early pieces today! 🎉

A big shoutout to our community member & backer Jordan Macnab who is currently helping to pull some strings as part of the Fedex Customer Support team (TNT was merged into the Fedex family) to accelerate the process as much as possible! Thanks so much for reaching out and offering to help - this community is the best!!! 🙏

Overall I've received 2 of 4 TNT parcels while the remaining 2 are still stuck in customs here in Berlin. To give you an overview where we're at, let me share some details with you.

State of Production ⚙️

Forests of Pangaia has components made of cardboard, paper, canvas and wood. When it comes to mass production all those components have very different processing pipelines and requirements. To speed things up, our manufacturer sent out the first preview components in individual packages as soon as they were available and ready for shipping. In the table below you can see the components that have arrived already VS. the components that are still pending for delivery.

As you can see, the wooden premium tokens, spirits and seeds as well as the cloth bags are all approved and we started production. The cards needed a bit of refinement and I'm uploading the updated designs tomorrow.

The Premium Tokens

I must say the premium tokens are super sweet! 😍 The 4mm thickness was a good choice and the overall size of the tokens feels just right to me. The cutout sections are very clean and proportional. The tokens come with a matte varnish and all colors are matching the pantone colors I've defined (within an acceptable degree of variation). I chose rich colors that are still slightly muted, to form a harmonic palette. 

From my point of view I see no issues with the tokens and would keep the color palette just as it is. The wood cutting production has already started and so far it's going well!

The Seeds & Spirits

(Note: The trees will use the same color palette as the seed and spirit meeples)

The seeds and spirits are produced very nicely and I love the neat cutout line and level of granularity of the silhouette. I think the white screen print on the spirits works also quite well and adds an extra layer of detail.

I'm not yet sold on the colors though. I like the dark shade of red, but the yellow is too bright and cold, the light green is a tad too bright and the dark green on the other hand could be a bit more saturated. 

To be fair, the palette that I have used in my early prototype trees (as shown on the campaign page) is not 100% user friendly. While I was always a fan of the subtle autumn colors, they don't meet the minimum requirements of contrast to ensure good gameplay. Otherwise you will have problems when playing the game with slightly dimmed lights or any non-perfect light conditions. So shifting the colors slightly is part of the plan, but finding the sweet spot needs some iterations.

Here I add the treetops I used during my campaign for direct comparison. Please note that these pictures are not 100% accurate either because of differences in lighting conditions and the components reflecting the light differently. 

After some evaluation I have decided to push the yellow towards a slightly warmer and darker ocher/orange tone (some of you commented on that as well last time). The light green will darken a little and the dark green will become more saturated (Note: In this picture the yellow and dark green seeds were color corrected in Photoshop to preview the future state).

So overall my goal here is to preserve the feeling of the palette used during the campaign, while improving the user experience for dim lighting conditions and players with color vision deficiencies.

The Bags

The bags are made of sturdy canvas fabric and each have a different screen print showing one of the spirits. I like the canvas material and print quality a lot and will simply add the screen print details in here as well for completion. However not as a white layer on top but as empty areas, to show the underlying fabric instead.

Besides that I will update the colors slightly to meet the adjusted color palette above. The yellow spirit was a problem here actually, because under dim lighting conditions it almost blended with the fabric and was hard to see.

The Cards

The cards come in 2 decks:

•  Deck 1: 32 cards of size 70x120 mm (tarot)
•  Deck 2: 45 cards of size 59x91 mm (euro)

The 310 gsm black core material feels very nice and they overall make a good impression. The linen effect was not 100% consistent on all cards and I already gave this feedback to the manufacturer. Based on their reply this happens on small quantity prints and will be fixed during final production.

However, one aspect I'm not quite satisfied with is how the illustrations are rendered on the cards. It is not easy to share this impression with you, because taking a picture of a printed card doesn't reveal my perception when looking at the card directly. Even though the illustrations are painted in high resolution (2912 × 5000 pixels), some images look slightly blurry, washed-out and flat. It's not related to the image resolution, because they are all exported with 600 DPI, so that can't be it. Here my findings:

1) The brushwork used in many illustrations has indeed a soft pattern. I didn't identify that as an issue when looking at the digital artwork, but on a print that leads to an effect slightly resembling a low-resolution image. To counter that issue I decided to sharpen all images to bring out the handpainted brushwork more clearly. That way the illustrations have more pop and become a little more crisp. (Big kudos to Matthias Burgstedt for helping me here!)

2) The PPC cards were produced using a digital printer and those tend to have a lower color depth than offset printers. In the final production we will use offset printing machines, yielding richer colors and overall better quality.

Above you see a comparison between the printed card, the original artwork and the sharpened variant (Remember this is zoomed in quite a bit. Look at the pictures from some distance to get a better impression). To mitigate the common risk of sharpening a region where it's not appropriate I have carefully blended manually between the original artwork and the sharper variant, to get the best of both worlds and give the illustrations the credit they deserve. 👨‍🎨

Last but not least

The light gray background of the blessings we used so far turned out to be a little too plain and I did a few modifications to increase the contrast.

Option A is a warm craft paper look and option B is a darker variant of the previous style. Both come with a paper texture and a subtle vignette. Which one do you prefer?

Sorry for the long update and thanks for reading this far! 😘 Have a wonderful last week before Christmas🌲, enjoy the festivities with your family and until next time!

Best, Tommy 💚

PPC Updates & Blessings ✨
over 4 years ago – Mon, Dec 06, 2021 at 03:34:17 AM

Dear People of Pangaia

First of all I want to deeply thank you for engaging so actively in this project by sharing your experience and proofreading the latest rulebooks. I have read every single comment and I'm humbled by so many pairs of eyes that are checking the rulebook for errors and ambiguities and helping to improve the overall style and legibility. A BIG THANKS to everyone contributing!

Localization 🌍

Last time I asked you to share your opinion whether you'd prefer a localised title of the game in your respective language: 🇩🇪, 🇫🇷 or 🇮🇹. As the backers of this project I want to respect your expectations and adjust my plans if necessary.

Reading all your comments helped me to make a call and I want to summarize my takeaway in a nutshell: It's clear that localizing a title in general does make a lot of sense if you want to make a product more accessible across different countries. But as you all participated in this Kickstarter under the name "Forests of Pangaia" it feels too much of a disruption to change the name afterwards. The majority of the non-english speaking backers preferred to stick to the 'original' title and that's why I've decided to keep the English title across all languages.

Rulebook(s) Proofreading 🤓

It's incredible how many times you can go over a rulebook and still find so many things to correct. Reading all your suggestions was a good lesson for me and helped me to iron out many issues ranging from spelling, rule clarity to layout mistakes.

I've re-published the revised English and German rulebooks already on Friday under the same links. For the French and Italian version I can't make the calls myself and I'm working with the translators François Masquère 🇫🇷 and Florian D'Anna 🇮🇹 to look over the community suggestions for me. I will keep re-publishing the documents in the course of the week once I have the chance to go through all remaining comments.

Production Start? ... almost 😱

As I mentioned previously I'm expecting a pre-production copy (PPC) from my manufacturer. A PPC is the first physical copy of the game, to allow a creator to review the quality of the game before entering mass production. Usually you want to verify the following aspects:

• Color accuracy
• Material properties (like card thickness, sturdiness, etc)
• Surface finishing (like the linen effect and UV spots)
• Final component weight
• Overall dimensions, spacing and layout
• General user experience issues, CVD compliance, etc

🚨 Unfortunately I'm STILL waiting for the PPC to arrive (since over 2 weeks now) - as it obviously needs to be delivered by mail I'm dependant on the courier service delivery (in our case TNT). Apparently it arrived at the Berlin hub already but has been stuck there since. My customer support emails were left unanswered. 🤔 In order to keep the timeline I would now need to confirm the components by video rather than physical samples, but I'm hesitant to do so. Videos can be very misleading and are not a reliable way to check colors for correctness, needless to say that it's impossible to properly check the texture and material properties of the components. At the same token I'm burning precious time by waiting for the parcels. It's a tough call but I don't want to start production before seeing the physical samples first.

Nevertheless videos are of course a helpful tool to spot issues early on and give quick feedback. The following video I received last week shows the updated 4mm resource tokens and 10mm seed tokens that I'm supposed to get with the PPC. So far I didn't find any issues.

The video showing the trees on the other hand revealed a problem. The stacked treetops are supposed to slightly 'sink' in, so that the overall height of a tree with multiple stacked treetops is lower and stability is better. I already gave the feedback to my manufacturer and it will be corrected for the next iteration.

The Second Deck 🌟

In the past I already shared quite a bit about the Achievement and Ritual cards that are part of the first deck (70x120 mm). To fit the Blessings-Upgrade I needed to create a second deck (59x91 mm) that I want to share with you today.

The first 22 cards of the deck are of course dedicated to all the Blessing cards below (some of them are included 3x).

Next come the 4 individual player aid cards to help with the phases of your turn. I decided to also include a first player marker card. It's not strictly required for the gameplay, but some might find it useful.

I've included another set of 3 player aids to explain the Ritual cards and 2 extra aids for the Solo mode.

The Solo mode got it's own little deck of 9 double-sided automa cards (actions are on the back side).

And lastly I've added 4 promo cards showing the 4 spirits. They have no function during the game and are purely for fun :)

That's it from me! :) I was hoping to show you a little unboxing video of the PPC today but I guess that will have to wait until next time. 🤞

Have a wonderful week everyone 💚 and until next time for our bi-weekly update!

Best,

Tommy

Rule Books & Translations
over 4 years ago – Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 12:58:18 AM

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