A Kabula for Valentine
about 3 years ago – Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 01:02:35 PM

Sup party people,

Are you ready for an update? ARE YOU REAAAADYYY???

If not, here is our tl;dr:

• Our team is growing, just not how you would expect.
• website down, making a new one.
• 3D Sculpt submitted - print files almost ready - new expected delivery June 23.
•  Updated map layout - Updated player mat

For you hardcore party goers, here is the actual update. 

Put one hand in the air and use the other one to scroll down!

Team 

As from the 4th of February, our team member Kyriakos became a dad! Wuuuhuuuuuu!! Our best wishes to him and Claire and of course the new arrived, Nikolas! We couldn't be happier for them and look forward to teaching young Nikolas how to play Kabula...possibly when he is 14!

Website

Some of you may have noticed that our website kabularpg.com is down. This is also the reason why we did not send a newsletter two weeks ago. 

We had been wanting to switch to a Stranger Games Studio website for quite some time, but we were also rushed into our decision by some unexpected changes in the plan we were using. We couldn't really plan ahead this time, sorry for the disruption. We count on having the new website up and running within 6 weeks :) In the meantime, please feel free to message us here if you need anything!

Manufacturing Update and Timeline

We finally submitted all the sculpts for the miniatures! The guys at BangWee Games ran a second proof and we are waiting for their feedback any time now.

In the meanwhile, we have been formatting most of the print files following their requests. This is a very scrupulous job and not one you crave doing at night after your regular job...but we are so close, it kind of gets exciting nonetheless!

Our project manager let us know that we need to approve samples of every component before they start with manufacturing. We envision to finish this process within 4 weeks at the latest. Manufacturing itself should take 6 weeks, plus about 4 weeks of freight to the different hubs. If these things are true enough, we should be shipping your copies in June. The submission of the files is on us, and we hope to get it done this week. After this, our control on the process will be very limited, but we'll keep you updated on what is going on. Thanks for your patience and support!

Updated components

After printing the most updated prototypes in November, we have been playing quite a lot in person.  Aside from very minor changes that we made to cards, mostly for our own satisfaction (we wanted everything to be as impactful as it could, there was nothing really wrong or unbalanced), we did spot one actual problem:

1) The map! When going up to a mountain space from a plain, you consume 2 steps, while getting down you only require 1. On the map, this is marked by a double line of which one is an arrow, you only pay the extra step if you are following its direction. The prolem is, some players would forget if the arrow points upward or downward.

To make it extra clear which areas are mountains, we changed slightly the shape of the arrow line, to give them more of a 3D effect. We also included a brown fade on the internal border of mountain spaces. 

2) Player Mat...alright there was nothing really wrong with the player mat, aside from the thing that its theme was ONLY used for the player mat. When we started designing Kabula, our ideas on game and graphic design were still shaping up, at this stage we think that using a single theme for both the map and the player mat is neater (it also looks prettier!). By the way, we are using it for the reminder cards as well! 

And this is it! Thanks a lot for reading! Hope you are doing great and if you want to share your opinion on any of these topics, we are looking forward to reading your comments!

Speak to you soon!

Big Pharma wishes you a good year of the Rabbit!
about 3 years ago – Tue, Jan 24, 2023 at 01:59:32 PM

Hello all, welcome to another Kabula update!

We hope 2023 is treating you well and you are treating yourselves even better :)  

No ground breaking news today, so we'll entertain you with our schedule to production and finish with a design diary about Gotzo, our conspiracy theorist.  Unless you still haven't completed pledge manager on Backerkit, no actions required from you!

Schedule to production

We are in the middle of the Chinese New Year celebrations!  

Our manufacturing partners at BangWee Games are enjoying some well deserved holiday and the plan is to get all the revised 3D sculpts to them in a week time, so they can run a second 3D proof as soon as they're back. We really hope we can start moulds manufacturing within February, which means keeping the schedule of shipping in April. Unfortunately there is little we can do to speed up this process. We'll keep you updated!

On the print files, most of the work needed at the stage is on the labels for the boxes and the reminder cards. To keep ourselves happy, we are keeping playtesting which occasionally leads to minor changes. A new version of the rulebook will be up in the usual folder in about a week time.

Pledge Manager

While our pre-order store is closed until manufacturing starts, backers who still haven't completed Pledge Manager for shipping/taxes can still do it. It goes without saying that we won't be able to ship the game without having your address. If you are unsure just drop us a message :)

Gotzo

And here we are again with a design diary on one of our heroes!

Gotzo was in the middle of the delivery of a sushi box when he was summoned to the Island. He immediately realized what had happened: Big Pharma and the Government had teamed up to get rid of him. He was too close to find the Truth, he had to be stopped. 

But it didn't work! Nothing can stop Gotzo and the Island of the Kabula is full of lies and secrets waiting to be exposed!

His unique power is Streetbike and Bus-pass which allows him to 1) spend Guts instead of Legs to move and 2) transfer to one City to another without paying any transport fee. This makes him the fastest hero in Kabula! 

Truth itself is his weapon. Or at least, it ends up "working" as his weapon. Whoever listens to his ranting escapes as fast as possible, not caring for cliffs and potholes!

Push in Kabula is usually in a random direction (rolling a Compass Die) and it only inflicts damage when the target is pushed from a mountain-space to a plain-space or vice versa (and nausea if a target is dumped into a river). Therefore, until you get another weapon, attacking with Gotzo is quite a gamble! Nonetheless, as the attack does not end your turn, you are free to repeat it over and over again until you have Parts to spend! According to your positioning, this weapon can grant you amazing results or hilarious fails. 

As for all heroes, three paths open in front of Gotzo, according to which #traits you develop during the game!

When #creepy #violent, Gotzo decides to exterminate the conspiracy at its root cause: Humanity. As a rioter, he will place bombs and trigger explosions from a safe distance! To speed up developing this personality, he can use his power Arson, which makes a shop on the map unusable for the rest of the game (this is on the other side of the card!)...not that he cares, with Bus-pass he can move to another City and simply shop there if he needs to! 

As #naturelover #romantic, his mistrust for Humanity takes a different turn...in which he develops a different kind of love for his pet animal. The power of Love increases the longevity of both you and your familio, making you a tough duo to deal with. Nonetheless this power is useful only until the couple is united... Make sure you protect your one true love!

The third personality of Gotzo includes New Winning conditions! As #lazy #generous, Gotzo will be in total denial of what happens around him: He won't even acknowledge that the Kabula exists! (generous often means naïve in Kabula!)

As a Kabula negationist, he won't be able to steal or hold our favourite Tree. But his strong belief that the Kabula does not exist would take a hard hit if another hero stole it and defeated the Guardian, so he won't let it happen! Unlocking save the dissident, he will dive in front of the Guardian to protect it from attacks, and make sure all other heroes die a horrible death. It doesn't matter if this costs his life, he will have died happy, avoiding any stupid doubt to undermine his belief. 

 Gotzo comes with the Conspiracy Expansion, together with the Guardian Shaggy and Bibi&Bobu. He's maybe not the hero you want to play for your first game, until you are comfortable with how Push works, but he is a lot of fun! He can go everywhere and attack multiple times and somehow this makes the gameplay really feel sillier and more carefree. Due to his excellent guts feeling, he is the only hero who starts with a single Part type: 7 Guts tokens! Aside from working well with the abilities in his cards, this allows him some extra fun combos when he gets other cards with grey actions which use Guts (grey actions do not end turn!).

This was supposed to be a short one...but how can you stop when you start describing such a character?!

Thanks a lot for reading and supporting Kabula, all the best for the next 4 weeks and hopefully we'll bring you great news for the next update :)

Christmas in Kabula - 2022 recap and 2023 news!
over 3 years ago – Tue, Dec 27, 2022 at 02:36:44 AM

Hello everyone!

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas and got all the presents you wanted. Well. Not all, as you don’t have the bestest game out there in your hands yet. Yes… we mean Kabula. 

It’s been a big year for us here at Stranger Games Studio. So, in our final update of 2022 we would like to give a brief overview of what we have achieved so far and what to expect from us in 2023.

We also have a little gift for you at the end :)

We’ll start off with our greatest accomplishment: Kabula, our first board game as a company, which was successfully funded thanks to all of you. We are very grateful to those of you who stuck around from our first campaign in October '21, which we cancelled one week in, those who joined the campaign in February'22 and those who supported us during pledge manager. All of you, at any pledge level, have been amazing and all your comments and feedback helped making us stronger! Thank you!

Since the successful funding, we have worked tirelessly to revise the game to become the best it possibly can become. This involved countless hours of playtesting online, going through cards over and over again, back and forth with the manufacturer and of course interacting with you to get your feedback on Kabula. We also ran not ONE but TWO giveaways. Much of this happened on a short notice, so if you are interested in extemporary communications, you may consider joining our socials:

Our Instagram and Facebook, as well as our Discord server. So we get the chance to share with you all the exciting upcoming news from us, and you can join us through playtesting to help make our future games even better!

Throughout all the craziness of 2022, we also had to change manufacturer. We did this out of growing concerns over the quality of our communications and we are very glad we did so (though if we had done it 6 months earlier it would have been even better). After starting to work with BangWee, we realized the sculpts for the miniatures needed several adjustments. The 3D artist who made the sculpts, Rod Tinapay, is working on them right now* to make sure you get the best possible Kabula monster and Hero minis! (*he may actually be enjoying family right now, but we swear he is working on them). 

We hope to finish revisions in January so we can roll onto manufacturing ASAP.

In our previous update we mentioned prototype copies which is something very exciting for us because we can finally get to play Kabula in person with a version as close to the real one as possible. Even though we loved working on the online version, having a physical copy helps so much with play sessions and spell checks. Since receiving the prototype, we have played with friends and strangers in homes and cafes. We are not stopping though, we will inform you of any new meetups, so if you are close by, you can join us!

We are currently reviewing the rulebook one final time and finalising the cards to send to BangWee for manufacturing. The situation is looking much better with shipping so we should not have any delays on that…. Hopefully! We will keep you posted on this though in future updates as we get closer to finalizing manufacturing and getting ready for shipping.

To give you a small idea of what to expect in 2023:

We are focusing 90% of our efforts on getting Kabula in your hands but in the meantime, we are slowly working on two new games. One game is a more fast paced and less “heavy” card game whose placeholder name for now is Dice Havoc. As you can tell, it’s not only a card game but also involves dice! The game is based in the Kabula universe and keeps some of the craziness but at a much lower complexity. Hopefully we have this ready by the end of 2023!

The second game is a story driven, campaign board game with some very cool new mechanics. Let's call it Dark Chrone for now. We don’t want to give away too much on this, but we expect to launch this game in 2024/25 so you will definitely want to stay tuned and follow us everywhere to find out first about it!

Finally, we have a little gift to thank you for all the support and for making our first game possible...a gift who is still looking for its twin and may well do so during your Kabula games! Despite not reaching the stretch goal, during sculpt revision we were able to sneak the Weretesticle in, so we are unlocking it for you! Merry Christmas! May its howling warm up your coldest nights!

From all of us at Stranger Games Studios we wish you all a Happy New Year and hope to see you all around in 2023!

A Kabula of November News
over 3 years ago – Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 11:56:54 AM

Hello all,

Whether you celebrated Thanksgiving or not, we hope you had a great time! Since, statistically speaking, not all of us can be having a great time all of the time, we at least wish you are keeping your fight stance and pushing through with some optimism!

Here things are reasonably good, we are not as fast as we hoped to but there are continuous progresses :) Today we'll talk about prototypes, events and rules, and how we acted upon your latest feedback. But let's start with some brief news on the manufacturing status! Aaaaaaand...

....we're not manufacturing yet :(

Fixing the sculpts is taking longer than planned, we had been overly optimistic thinking things could be fixed in a few weeks. Reasonably, we won't be done before January. What we can say is that things are moving forward every week. Our very trusted Rod Tinapay is back on the project and sculpts are being tended to like babies (not like Isolde's babies, luckily...). Given the current shipping situation, April delivery is still feasible, but please bear in mind this is an estimate, we won't know for real until things are shipped.

Nonetheless, we have not been idle. After a thorough revision of all cards and print components, we sent some copies to print. This has nothing to do with scale manufacturing, we are talking about prototype copies. Nonetheless this is like the beta version of Kabula, all content is supposed to be final. We will be playtesting it live with as many people as possible and fix any issue we may potentially find. The idea is that as soon as the moulds for the miniatures are ready, we'll be able to send everything to print with 100% confidence that the files are perfect.

Playtesting events and presentations of the game are planned in London, Brussels and Palermo. First it will be London, on 10th and 11th December! We were thinking of the Bad Moon Cafe for one of the dates, but nothing in set in stone, please do write us here or in a private message if you have suggestions :)

We also worked on a new version of our rulebook, which as usual, you can comment on! Thanks to all of those who are contributing to make it as good as it can be!

With regards to your feedback following our last update:

1) We added two little arrows on the compasses on the board to show which direction gets priority when two are equally viable for an NPC. They are small, as you are not supposed to look at them for most of the time but should serve as a refresher in case you get confused.

We also included many examples with figures in the rulebook, to make sure everything is as clear as possible.

2) Regarding Clayton, we modified the "farmer" ending to make sure he has one potential positive outcome for the relationship with his dog. We are very happy with it, the previous set of skills for this card was not as unique as the others, and we had been discussing about having the dog almost as a second familio for a long time; great you pushed us to improve this!

Some of you asked us why the sad story with the dog is necessary in the first place and if it shouldn't just be removed altogether. This is the reason why we won't change it:

If you don't like using the Poor Doggy attack, it is ok. Nobody should play a xenophobic lying politician and feel too comfortable while doing so. You are playing a bad character and are doing nasty things. At the same time, some people may not be comfortable playing as a mother sending her kids to fight (they die like flies, 1 hp and no possibility to block) just so that she can steal a magic tree and deprive a whole Island of its Immortality. Similar observation could be made for most heroes, monsters, items etc.

In Kabula, many of the choices that you will make are questionable. The trade off of what you feel like doing is all yours. Will you do what is most convenient to win the game, what you believe is right or just what is sillier?

We hope this doesn't sound defensive, we loved the feedback, it made the game better and we appreciate all comments! Just trying to be transparent on how we choose what is best for the game. Clayton was missing a chance of redemption, which we always try to give (up to a point), turning him into a lovely hero was simply not the intended direction for him :)

This is it for this time! Any comments or questions?

We'll give more info on the events soon and will definitely share some prototype pics for the next update! Thanks for all your support along these months, we hope to make you proud very soon!

Pumpkins and Kabulas
over 3 years ago – Tue, Nov 01, 2022 at 02:46:25 PM

Hello you scary people,

Hope you are having a great Halloween or in any case enjoying life :) 

Today we are giving you some updates on design and production and, as usual, we'll close with our Design Diary. 

Production

As from our previous update, we are still adapting the sculpts for injection moulding. Work is not finished yet, but it moves steadily forward and we have no additional delays to announce. For now we confirm the March/April delivery timeline. Sculpts still look great too, which was our main concern!

We shared many images with our previous newsletter, but here you have a quick example :)

Final Touches

Graphic design for all components is finished, at this stage we just go around fixing typos and organizing files. 

Nonetheless, we are still thinking of alternatives for the item cards background. What would you think about a much lighter one? It's definitely clear, not sure if it's too anonymous. Do you like the table presence of the lighter cards?  

Playtesting and Wording

Playtesting through our discord server is never stopping! In the past weeks we have been exchanging playtests with a few game designers. We had a great time and we'll share their projects with you when they are closer to publishing. Luckily they all enjoyed Kabula and we haven't found anything we need to change. Nonetheless, as the road to perfection is a never-ending one, we spotted some wording that may not be as clear as we thought it was. Let's see what you think!

Whenever figures which are not directly controlled by a player move (wild monsters, guardians, hero automas etc) and two different paths are equally viable, Kabula rules say that the figure will move in "the most clockwise direction". With this we mean the direction further along the clock. In the example above, a wild Polar Rhinoplast is moving towards Hot Springs; North and North East are equally viable options for its first step. Following the rule, the Rhino will move NE, as NE is further along the clock than N. Does our current wording "most clockwise" make any sense to describe this direction? Should we say "further along the clock"?? "Further along the compass in the clockwise direction"??? "To the right of the direction of the movement"????

Please enlighten us with your backer wisdom!    

Design Diary

 Our design diary today is about Clayton, one of the most influential figures in modern politics.

After many tough years of not doing much, and sophisticated studies in my dad pays the bill, Clayton was eventually summoned to the Island of the Kabula, and realized it was the right moment to share his skills with the natives! He joined KNP, the Kabula Nationalist Party, and his mission is getting all those annoying Earthlings out of the Island. Let's admit it: Things were better before they arrived!

Clayton's skills are just as devious as his mindset. He got a dog mostly to get votes, but he treats it so poorly that it hurts to watch. This is literally his weapon.

Unlike for physical attacks, which roll for aim and can be blocked by armors, the only way to defend against Poor Doggy is spending a brain token. As wild monsters and guardians do not play by spending Parts, this translate into unblockable damage for them, and also for heroes this is quite an annoying attack to deal with (if it wasn't clear already, brains are not THAT common in the Island...)

His unique hero power Opportunistic also allows him to get any Part he may need by discarding two other Parts from his mat. Quite convenient!

Let's have a look at his personality cards :)

#creepy/#practical: This is just what you'd expect he may become. Never taking responsibility for any problem and blaming somebody else instead of taking action, with this personality Clayton unlocks It's THEIR fault, Get them! With this he can redirect an attack towards another target in range. It costs you a Raging Brain, but oh boy if it's worth it :) 

As you may have noticed, the artwork is an obvious tribute to V for Vendetta!

#generous/#lazy: This personality is the exact opposite of the previous one …which somehow doesn't really make it that much better :) As an Idealistic, Clayton is engrossed by any little thing that is not exactly as it should be. And he ends up doing nothing about it, you never know somebody may get offended otherwise. Good thing is that everybody loves him, his Bodyguards will sacrifice themselves erasing all incoming attacks, if he gives a good enough speech! Fun fact, with his Inconsequential Outrage, you can make this personality trending faster, simply by placing a Brain in your Rage Box and doing nothing with it.

#naturelover/#romantic: Ok, you can indeed play Clayton as more of a nice guy...he just has to leave any political ambition to do so! Probably his happiest ending, with this personality card he drops his political career and starts working for real as a farmer! But his cheaty nature never dies, what about planting the Kabula in his garden just to get bigger carrots? Thanks to Homegrown, Clayton's familio gets pretty beefed up, both in attack and defense, while at the same time Clayton becomes more resistant to Monsters and Guardians!

Disclaimer: If Clayton reminds you of one specific public figure, you should watch the news more often. They all learnt from Clayton!

As always, thanks for your dedication to this project! Next KS update on the 28th November, but we hope to hear from you before then too :)