It would be cliche to say it’s been a wild year. To remark on how far we’ve come in spite of the daily challenges. The ever-deepening stratification between the rich and poor. The political division that sets us all apart. The popular decision to vote in inflationary tariffs, corporate tax cuts, and maintaining an undocumented underclass. It would be cliche to start off this way, so instead I’ll start with what we’ve been up to, and then what we’re planning on doing in 2025.

2024

Eating bugs, (<— hyperlink to bug post), testing the game in school, and designing the game since March of this year, this game has been a lot of work. And a lot of this work would not be possible without getting the grant for $15,000 from the Missouri Humanities Council (Especially after we decided to forego Kickstarter funding). You would think getting funded would be the end of it, but that’s where things really began.

You’ve all seen the original prototype, but there were a lot of things about it that we wanted to fix.

This was cool but it had a lot of issues.

That glossy finish was great but the box was too way too big. At nearly a square foot, it was cumbersome and we knew we could get this smaller. Our punch board had way too many tokens on it. It also turned out that the trivia cards here had some minor inaccuracies from mixing up federal and local level legislative terminology. (whoops!)

There was also another big problem… It would be expensive to make. And that ties into the next problem for our company. There’s a lot of relevant political concerns with manufacturing American goods abroad. Why not manufacture here in the states? Cost.

Going through our original choice of manufacturer, were only able to make 500 units. Which isn’t terrible, per se. Or it wasn’t for us at the time. We didn’t know how much this should normally cost. And we originally planned to use the grant funds to make only 500 kits. After talking with other independent game manufacturers and design studios like Objex Design, we learned that the most financially viable way to produce games are to manufacture abroad. Namely in China.

We had no connections to any board game manufacturer. We started conceptualizing the product we would make through prototyping companies, and even got a recommendation from a Smithsonian Exhibits for a manufacturer (This is how our big prototype got made).

Things changed for us when we stumbled upon Wingo Games. A board game manufacturer based in Hong Kong. There was admittedly a bit of trepidation when we first considered manufacturing abroad, but after reviewing other games they’ve had a hand in producing, and talking to some of their staff (thanks Viva!), we were well on our way to making the process better for cheaper.

I won’t go into details myself (for fear of disrespecting our NDA), but here’s an 11-year-old Board Game Geek post that pretty much sums up our experience so far. To summarize though, they were very helpful, detailed, cost-efficient, and worked with us every step of the way to ensure that our game looked great!

I’m writing this only two days after our final meeting of the year to review our 3rd manufacturing prototype (which I can hopefully show you all soon). I couldn’t be more pleased with what we’re releasing later this year.

That is 2024 in a nutshell. And you know what’s even funnier than 2024…?

2025

Our plans to release the game still aren’t completely decided but I can talk about the things that are. Things like;

Free Shipping!

It was a delight to find that not only could we provide free shipping, but that doing fulfillment ourselves would be more feasible and cost-effective. We originally planned on going with Amazon as our storefront, but in our initial calculations, Amazon would basically be taking nearly HALF of our revenue. And if we stored our inventory in their warehouses, the longer we kept any unsold units, the more we would have to hand over to Bezos month after month. It’s less feasible to sell through Amazon as a small business. Handing over our revenue and fulfillment to Bezos just doesn’t make sense for us.

Donating Boxes!

We are going to be donating at least 50 boxes to schools in and around St.Louis. The primary goal of this project is to educate. And as a lot of native St.Louisians (or Americans in general) are well aware of, all of public education is NOT equally resourced. We are trying to give away boxes and working on ways to get more games out for free or discounted.

If you are a part of an educational institution in need or want more information about our process for donating games, please let us know through our contact form.

CONFIRMED RELEASE WINDOW!

The biggest news… We are set to release the game in the SPRING OF 2025! So thank you for your support and look alive in 2025!