Dear Architects,

We hope you are all well and that you have had great holidays with your loved ones.
We are back with more information on Seasons, and I’m sorry for all of you who were waiting for more about the project.

First of all, I would like to renew our gratitude for your trust in this game and the patience many of you have while waiting for the game.

We were hoping to have the game ready for the Chinese New Year, we understand that success is a gradual process, not an overnight destination, and with this, we want to apologize for not having achieved this. We had some complications in the process that will be mentioned in this update.

Even if the games were ready for freight, container prices have yet again skyrocketed to 4 or 5 times due to Chinese New Year. The saddening and very harsh situation that the conflict in the Red Sea is generating has also changed the route destined to Europe through South Africa, while the vessels destined to the USA had complications such as longer transit time due to continuous drought restrictions. These various reasons did not allow us to proceed.

Given the conditions, we will make sure that the game will be in its best shape and ready after the Chinese New Year. While this milestone was not successful, I would like to talk about what we have been doing in the past month.

Big Box Insert revision

Sometimes we think we are done with a part of this process to find that there are always ways of improving what we do. While undergoing tests we realized that the insert for seasons needed rework to make sure components would not move around. We understood that wooden components can be very exact, while cardboard thickness will vary depending on how air gets inside the layers in the middle of the piece.

We made a few changes to the other insert, but the one that got a rework was one of the inserts of Tang Garden Seasons.

Here you can see a photo of the previous version and the render of the new version that Noah from Game Trayz made for us. We are undergoing the sample phase with this again and we are positive that this will be the last change we will need to do to the insert.

Assembly and what you’ll be receiving

We also changed the Big Box depth slightly as we decided to change the assembly process by placing everything needed inside the Big Box itself instead of a different carton.

Here is a video that Ninox, our manufacturer did on how they will place a complete collection inside of the big box.

Seasons will be assembled in a separate box, and the compendium will also be shipped outside its big box. That also limits the number of picks for a complete collection to 3: The big box with base, Golden Age, Ghost Stories, extras, the Season’s box, and the compendium in your language of choice.

Preparing to avoid issues during fulfillment. Extra components added

The fulfillment of Darwin’s Journey was two months long, and we had to send more than 800 replacement parts to our backers.

We are trying to do our best to minimize the amount of work post fulfillment to the minimum by adding extra components to your box (as Lego does, by adding extra items of tiny parts that could be missed during assembly).

We decided to add a complete extra punchboard with the Pagoda Floors and their bases to make sure you won’t need more, even if you are not happy with how you assembled your first pagoda.

We understand if you feel frustrated about the delay on your game, but sending a game we will all be proud of has become our absolute priority and we hope you can understand.

We will post a new update as soon as our manufacturer resumes operations to let you know the estimated time when we’ll be able to get these games out of China.

Wishing you all the best,
Gon from Thundergryph Games