September 2023 Recap - Lunar Rush is almost here!

Hello Dead Alive Games Community!

September went by quickly, but it was a quiet month with a lot of "behind the scenes" work getting Lunar Rush ready for fulfillment and distribution, as well as getting Cyber Pet Quest's first official prototype made and sent out to content creators in October.  The big news is, LUNAR RUSH has started fulfilling (in Asia) and will be fulfilled in US/CAN/UK/EU in the next 2-3 weeks, and Rest of World in 3-4 weeks!

This Month's Topics:

• Lunar Rush

• Cyber Pet Quest

• Essen SPIEL

Lunar Rush Updates

THE GAMES ARE ALMOST HERE! Or in the case of some places in Asia, people already got their games! The fulfillment companies we are working with for each region of the world have been very busy the last month, so even though some of them had the game, they weren't able to get to fulfillment until now.  For specific regions, see the update below!

US/CAN: The ship arrived on-time in NYC port, and then arrived to Flat River Group on time on 9/25. Unfortunately they have a few other projects they are fulfilling ahead of ours, but they should be able to get to Lunar Rush in the next 2-3 weeks. We have set a "street date" of 10/20 (for US only) in anticipation of this!

UK/EU: The boat landed in early September, but there were some delays in the UK customs processing. Spiral Galaxy now has all the games and will be fulfilling in the next fortnight if no other issues pop up!

RoW: VFI was busy almost the entire month of September. They did get the game out to backers in China, Hong Kong, and nearby countries where they fulfill directly. For Australia/New Zealand, the product has been sent to Aetherworks and should be fulfilled in the next 3-4 weeks. There are a few other hubs in Taiwan, Japan, etc... that should also be fulfilling in the next 2-3 weeks. With that said, we will be having a "Launch Party" at Gamescape San Francisco on 10/21 to celebrate the game getting to most of our backers. If you live in the SF Bay Area, please keep come for some free demos, food, and raffles!

Cyber Pet Quest

For September, we worked hard on getting a "vertical slice" of the game (meaning, a small sample of the game) made into a prototype, so that we can begin to send the game out to previewers and content creators ahead of our Kickstarter in early 2024. ALL of the art for our Items, Charms, CyMS (enemies) are now done, and we're more than halfway done with the location card art.

Partial completed prototype

If you want to help us name some cards, and have YOUR NAME listed in the credits of the game, pay attention to our Facebook Group every week so you can suggest a name! If we like your name the best, that name will go onto the final card for the game AND you'll be credited in our game rulebook!

New Art

Here's some more art done by our team of artists for the game!

Top 2 images by Maria Zvonkova, middle 2 images by Zach Leo, and bottom 4 by Alex Pei

You might have noticed we mentioned that the Kickstarter is now in Q1 2024 instead of Q4 2023. After evaluating all the polish we want to do with the game, and the art we'd like to include, we decided to push the Kickstarter back a quarter to give us more time to make an awesome game for y'all. So keep checking these monthly newsletters for our Kickstarter update as we get closer to the end of the year!

Essen

Essen SPIEL 23 is coming up, and Dead Alive Games will have a booth there. It'll be in Hall 2, 2B131, sharing it with our good friend Ta-Te Wu from Sunrise Tornado. If you're at SPIEL, come check us out. We'll have Lunar Rush available to demo and purchase (limited deluxe editions), and if there's free table space/time, a prototype of Cyber Pet Quest will be there too!

Booth 2B131

An that's a wrap! Till next month!

Brendan & Bernie

August 2023 Recap - Omicron Protocol Fulfillment Complete & GenCon!

Oh boy was that a MONTH! August kicked off with the spectacular GenCon, continued with a couple smaller playtesting events, and will conclude with preparations for a SF Bay Area local convention, Pacificon! A lot got done this month, so read on to learn about your favorite games!

This Month's Topics:

• Cyber Pet Quest

• Lunar Rush

• Omicron Protocol

• GenCon Recap

• Other Cons

Cyber Pet Quest

We demoed Cyber Pet Quest every hour at GenCon, and got a lot of interest even from people just walking by our booth. Of course, the enamel pins of the 4 pets sold VERY well. So well that we have at least 2 more pins in planning for future conventions!

The one key thing we learned from all the demos (which also served as playtesting) of CPQ is, that the game is in its late-beta stage where we don't need to make any more drastic mechanics changes. The game is extremely easy to teach, fast to play, and most people who played it really enjoyed the story and adventure of these four brave pets!

Monthly Protospiel at Gamescape SF!

Choose the Next Pets Contest!

Speaking of pets, if you missed this before, we are keeping the "Suggest the Next Pet Contest" open for another month. By the next newsletter, we'll have the community vote for the next pet (or two) that will join Cyber Pet Quest as future expansions. We've already seen some very cool ideas (we definitely have enough turtles and hedgehogs, as well as other breeds of dogs), but want to give everyone who just joined the community a chance to participate too!

Just a little background for those who just joined us:
In our previous Kickstarters for Lunar Rush and Omicron Protocol, we loved having our community help with naming things in the game as well as suggesting the ideas for new characters and storylines! So in October, we're going to have the community vote on their favorite pet ideas (after we select our favorites from all the submissions), and the top winners will likely go on to become new characters in expansions of the game! As always, we will include the person who suggested the idea in the credits for the game and they will also get a copy of Cyber Pet Quest for FREE (if we successfully fund and publish the game) so they can show their friends and family their design!

Suggest your pet idea here!
 

New Art

New art is being done in a fast and furious way. Here are some more awesome pieces of art by our three main artists.

Top 2 images by Zach Leo, middle 2 images by Maria Zvonkova, and bottom one by Alex Pei

Stay tuned in our social media (FB, Twitter/X, Instagram) if you want to potentially get your name in our credits for naming some of the cards that these art will go onto!
 
For those of you wondering, we're still aiming for a late October/early November Kickstarter, but will know more as we finish September and get into October.
   

Lunar Rush Updates

The GAMES ARE ON SHIPS for UK/EU and North America! Woot! Here is some more detailed information.

RoW: VFI has been very busy and non-responsive for the past few weeks, unfortunately. We're still trying to check with them to see why only a few games have been fulfilled. The people with the Level Up Dice orders will be delayed a little bit due to some errors with the Lunethyst Gems that they shipped to us, so hopefully it'll all get cleared up in the next week or two. We'll keep pushing to get the games out to everyone in this region!

UK/EU: The boat EVER ART left China on 7/31, and is estimated to make it to port in the Netherlands around 9/3. No estimated date for the UK yet, but it should be soon after Netherlands. You can track the ship directly here. We hope to begin fulfillment sometime in September.

US/CAN: We had a few weeks delay getting on a ship to the US, due to a high volume of bookings for ships headed this way. But we finally got on WAN HAI A07 and the ship left China on 8/10. Current ETA to our warehouse in Michigan is around 9/25. You can track the ship directly here. We hope to begin fulfillment sometime in October.
 

GenCon Local Pickup: We were super excited to meet many of the backers who attended GenCon and handed them their pledges there. THANK YOU SO MUCH for the support!

GenCon Lunar Rush Promo Card

Just a reminder to fill out this FORM if you want this GenCon Promo Gold Module. This is free for those who backed us on Kickstarter or pre-ordered the game. We'll have it shipped out with your fulfillment soon!

The rules clarification for this card is as follows:
You may "boost" your ship that is in the final Medium or Slow route, whether it's Up (to the Moon) or Down (to Earth), forward and immediately arrive to the destination.  You can do this for the Fast route too, but it generally doesn't help as much.  Some clarifications below:

1. You may only use this card once per Turn, and must spend an Ore and Shard to do it.

2. You may use this card any time during the Moon Phase, except in the Game End Final Scoring period, you may use the card ONCE just before moving the ships to the market.

3. When used on the Up route, you may immediately get the resources from the ship you "boosted." The resources for this ship may be used to build Gold Modules.

4. When used on the Down route, the ship that is "boosted" sells FIRST in the Market Sale Order, ahead of any other ships.

If there are any other questions, just send us an email (or reply to this one) and we'll add it to the future FAQ!
 

Omicron Protocol Updates

Fulfillment Update

OP Critical Condition has been FULFILLED to everyone outside of North America! Thank you so much for your patience as we navigate the tricky waters of EU Shipping/VAT, and we hope you're enjoying the game and its expansions! This should be the last update for Omicron Protocol expansion Kickstarter for now, unless we have new coverage of the game to share or when we are ready to announce the next expansions!

GenCon

GenCon was AMAZING!  It was 5 full days (Wednesday was setup and 2 demo/media events) of non-stop vendor booth action! It was definitely tough to go from last year's 20'x10' end-cap booth down to an in-line 10'x10' booth, but we're glad to be there!

Setup was definitely tough, loading in the advanced copies of Lunar Rush, along with all our furniture and other games, into that small space, but we did it in the end!

We now have a "merch/cute" side (right) and a games side (left) to the booth. With Mr. L. P. Moonie prominently featured everywhere.

And this was just one of the snapshots of how busy it was doing interviews, demos, and pitches to the record-breaking crowd at GenCon (70K+ attendees, Saturday sold out!).

It was an exhausting week, but we can't wait to do it again next year, with Cyber Pet Quest in tow!
 

Other Conventions

2D Con

Brendan attended "2D Con" in Minneapolis, and was able to show off Lunar Rush and Cyber Pet Quest. Also got to hang out playtesting other local desigers' games!

Essen Spiel 2023

Bernie will represent Dead Alive Games officially this year at Essen Spiel, the largest boardgaming convention in the world! You can find us at Booth 2B131, and the main game featured there will be Lunar Rush (with some Cyber Pet Quest on demand)! More info to come in the next newsletter!

An that's a wrap!

Till next month!

Brendan & Bernie

Dead Alive Games

Black Lives Matter

Origins Online has been canceled. They have alienated the community of Black game designers they were trying to support, to the dismay of much of the gaming community. By the time they finally made a statement, many exhibitors, designers, and publishers had withdrawn from the convention - rightly so.

I grew up in south Minneapolis. You may have heard the term "Minnesota nice" used to describe the stereotypical behavior of us Minnesotans: courteous, reserved, mild-mannered. This behavior also has a dark side: an aversion to confrontation, the desire to "not make a fuss". But silence is one way that systemic racism perpetuates itself, by maintaining the status quo. Refusing to take a stance is not acceptable. I'm proud of the people of Minneapolis for speaking out now and making a fuss, because it is hard for us to just say what needs to be said sometimes.

With that, here is what needs to be said: Black Lives Matter. 100%

Sincerely,

Brendan Kendrick

Dead Alive Games