Pledge Manager!
over 3 years ago – Mon, Jul 11, 2022 at 11:07:58 PM

Hi all!

Pledge Manager and Pre-order store for Kabula are now open and you should receive an invitation to the survey very soon!

We locked all prices for backers, so if you backed the campaign you can upgrade your pledge at the same discounted prices.

Please note: If you want to switch pledge level, instead of adding items on top of it, you should do so from this MICROSCOPIC LITTLE LINK on the first page of your survey!

Also, until you insert your address, shipping cost will default to the highest, do not panic!

Thanks to the backers who took part in the smoke test, it was thanks to them that we could spot these little bumps on the road!

A few updates:

• We are happy to offer the neoprene map as an add-on! Many of you requested it explicitly and we're glad we managed to include it! Note that this is an unlockable add-on but it only requires 30 copies to be booked which we should get to pretty easily! 
• Including the Weretesticle in the monster roster requires an extra mould, and we are already "personally" absorbing many expenses. But this will not stop us! We are determined to unlock it as planned, as a stretch goal! The goal is set as 55k EUR but this includes shipping and VAT (which we obviously cannot use in production), if you guys share a bit of Kabula love through socials and board game groups, we are sure we will make it soon!

To share the project with non-backers, you need to use the link for the pre-order store!

In case you missed these, after the campaign:

• We included extra cards in the Conspiracy Expansion: 10 encounters and 5 dungeons .
• We added an extra player mat in the Conspiracy Expansion, bringing the total to 6. (Game is officially for up to 5, but if you have Chastity you can now house rule 6 player games, we’ll give you suggestions on how to do it as well)
•  Shipping cost of the Huge Package is always lower than shipping the Big Package or the Core Game + Conspiracy Expansion, and sometimes lower than advertised during the campaign.

Information on offers:

• if you have a free Chastity extra hero, you should find it in your cart.
• If you are the winner of a giveaway, you should find it in your cart.
• If you 1) are getting a Huge Package and 2) shipping to your region costs 60 EUR or more, then you are entitled to a 10 EUR discount. We could only identify a few of you, the others need to contact us to enjoy this offer, unfortunately we could not automate this functionality before getting your address!

For any issue with the following, please contact us through Kickstarter and we’ll get back to you asap!

With this out of the way, we know many of you are on holiday, please do enjoy that and have a toast for us! No major hurry for completing PM, you have until the 20th of August and we’ll send other reminders on the way!

Speak to you on Monday for the usual KS update, talking about Hero Automa this time!

Neoprene Map unlocked//Hero Automa design diary//Share the love
over 3 years ago – Mon, Jul 11, 2022 at 11:07:38 PM

Hi all,

As promised, we are back with a "design diary", skip to the bottom for PM related info and some personal requests :)

Hero Automas

In our previous newsletter we wrote a massive chapter on the differences between our six Guardians, this time we are focusing on Hero Automas.

First of all, what are they? They are cards which replace a human player at the table. They can be used when playing solo, but also when playing at a lower player count.

Kabula is a chaotic game and we like to add one or two Automas any time we play a two-player game for example, to remove that chess-like feeling and add some random disturbance.

To reduce upkeep and set up time, they work with a single card and, similarly to wild monsters and Guardians (when they fight), during their turn they flip one or two coins to determine behaviour. HP and Farz are tracked with the dials of empty player mats, one per Automa.

Hero Automas are double sided tarot cards. Just like heroes guided by players, in the first part of the game Automas roam the board, powering themselves up and collecting #tags token related to their #traits. They do so in different ways depending on the hero! For example, the nerd version of Zack can Trade rare cards (flipping encounter pins on the board) to collect Brain, and each Brain on its mat gives extra power to his Placebo Block.

When there are three #tags tokens on the card, it flips to its other side. This is marked with a cute Kabula icon, as the Kabula is now the main target of the Automa!

Automa cards flip to this side also when someone else steals the Kabula, disregarding the number of #tags on the card.

Once this side of the card is revealed, heroes will either move towards the Kabula, if this is available, or flip a coin (or two, depending on the card!) and perform one of the combat actions.

When selecting their targets, unlike wild monsters and Guardians, which can be easily tricked by distance on the board etc, Hero Automas are "smart". If they have the Kabula they will do their best to put down the Guardian and win the game. If they don't, they'll ignore all other targets but the Kabula owner, to try to steal the tree.

Are they as smart as humans? Will the new Blade Runner be about Automa Cards developing consciousness? Most likely not. Nonetheless, they are often overpowered enough to win a game if you are not careful! Also, they never need to Rest, which is quite advantageous to the agendas in their little cardboard minds.

There are eight Automa cards available in the game and they all differ quite a lot. As you can see above, naturelover/generous Jessika spawns a lot of monsters and, although she starts with no defensive actions, she collects armour cards during the game. Naturelover/violent Isolde can explode Dungeons (pushing everybody around but also giving them items) and create encounter Pins, and she has massively powerful attacks when in combat mode. Body Guards will save the life of generous/lazy Clayton, while his cunning creepy/practical version may convince you to leave him alone and attack another poor target in range, instead. And yes, of course, practical/creepy Isolde uses her kids :)

With all game content now complete, we are keeping polishing and playtesting and slowly started to prepare the files for printing. Thanks a lot for your comments on the rulebook, we'll be back to it very soon!

Pledge Manager

Pledge Manager is going well and it has been super nice to talk again with so many of you!

The Neoprene Map was unlocked way earlier than we thought! With many backers still having to complete PM we are probably looking at doubling orders, not bad, not bad at all!

All the funds collected until now come from you guys, not just paying your shipping, but also upgrading your pledges, for which we really feel blessed, really appreciate all the support!

Starting this week we'll start pushing to get new backers for the pre-order store. 

If you do want to help, we would ask you to share our pre-order store link with one friend who you think may be interested.

If you are active on board game groups on any platform, and you want to share our project, that is of course really appreciated too!

With some help we are sure that we can unlock the next goal!

Speak to you very soon, we'll keep you updated on any relevant activity we do in this period in which we may need your input!

As a note: 

• A few backers ordered everything included in the Huge Package (or almost) but as individual items. In some cases it may be intentional, but if you hoped the order would automatically translate to a Huge Package, it's not the case. Please read the previous update on how to switch pledge level and save yourself some cash :) 
• We are arranging group collection in Milan and Palermo, if you live close to these cities and want to save some in shipping, please get in touch! If some backers want to arrange group collections in other cities too, get in touch and we'll help you do that!

Good news, Kabula people!
almost 4 years ago – Wed, Jun 15, 2022 at 11:28:27 AM

Good news, Kabula people!

Shipping and Pledge Manager

After our previous update, we were notified that our shipping estimates would need to be updated due to the war and fuel cost increase. These changes affected some regions more than others. Luckily, we had been conservative and the prices we showed in our campaign page are almost spot on!

• For most countries, cost of shipping for the Light and Big Packages are nearly unchanged. Pheeeew!
• More often than not, cost of shipping for the Huge Package is lower than expected, due to everything being fitted in a single box. Hooray!!
• For a few countries, cost increase was so high that the other factors could not balance it. Since we were already discounting the Huge Package in those areas though, the difference with respect to the estimates will still be minimal.

Giving the global situation, it seems like things went alright. Nobody should pay more than 1-4 euros more than expected and many of you will hopefully save something!

We are almost done with setting up Pledge Manager and we will soon submit it to Backerkit for approval. Reasonably, it will open next week!

Survey Results

With our previous  NEWSLETTER, we asked for your opinion on a few subjects. 

Thanks to all of those who shared their thoughts, it was massively appreciated! (Thanks also for spotting a few mistakes and commenting on them. Thanks to you we were able to fix them right away!)

You guys also seem to really like neoprene mats, and the quotes we just received are good enough, so you can expect it as an add-on during PM :)

We are still processing your feedback on the t-shirts, more info coming soon.

Cool Stuff

Showing off some of the latest artistic achievements of our team!

Game Making

We are constantly working on balancing and improving our content. The last two weeks we focused on:

• Rebalancing some of the playable heroes asymmetric powers. They all look ripped now.
• Streamlining the hero automas and pushing even more their thematic differences.
• Reworked some graphical aspects.
• More general balancing on everything, guardians etc.

Everything is looking pretty sharp! To be honest our biggest issues are with Shaggy the Guardian: It's cool, but still not as awesome as the others. We are trying a slightly different solution for it and will be testing it extensively in the next days.

How can you help? 

• We will be having almost daily playthrough during the next two weeks. Our goal is to get everything finished by June, so if you want to jump on our Discord channel for a game on Tabletopia, just please do!
• Version 14 of the rulebook is up on the usual folder, still not a final version, we have to turn the glossary into an index etc, but if you want to comment there it would be really appreciated! 

Is this it? I think that's it. If you have any questions please do ask! 

Thanks for reading and see you in two weeks for our newsletter!

Monster Design//PM update//Feedback on Rulebook//New merch?
almost 4 years ago – Mon, May 16, 2022 at 11:04:01 PM

Hi all,

Here you have the MOST ANTICIPATED update of the month (don't destroy our little delusion please)!

Hope you enjoy the read, but if you only care about PM related news feel free to skip to the proper section below!

Design

In our previous newsletter, we stated how happy we were with the improvements to our monsters. Let's dive a little deeper, so that you can get the feel of what we are actually doing. 

We had two design goals:

1) Some familios were mostly useful for battle but we wanted to extend their full potential in the entirety of the game.

2) Some of the familios were obviously better than others.

Additionally, as a general rule for the whole game, everything needs to feel as thematic as possible, with as little rules as possible. Also, every change we make needs to also improve the rest of the game :)

Changes made: 

1) Many familios were given the ability to get Part tokens in different and thematic ways. These Parts can then be used by the same familio or by the Hero, mitigating the risk of finding an Item and not being able to use it , which was one criticism we got from Play Games Lose Friends and Shelfside.

2) Defend and Attack actions were rebalanced. Familios are now more even and asymmetric. 

3) A series of highly thematic and unique actions were added to many monsters, for example: 

• The Reusable Coffee Cup can now move Parts to the Rage box. This means that you can use it to boost your hero as you would with a cup of coffee, avoiding the need to Rest and allowing for more powerful attacks. 
• You can now eat the McYummy! For each Part (any token) it spends on your hero space, your hero will Heal 1 hp while the McYummy loses 1 hp. As a matter of fact you can use it as an extra hp storage.
• Sucko has two actions, a weaker attack that absorbs hp from the enemy, storing blood in its tail, and a Tail Slap attack whose value increases as its hp increases. So you can go around the map fattening that Tail in preparation for the end game battle.

These are just some examples, and it is somewhat easier to make them with monsters. A similar process is being followed for the rest of the game: Items, Hero powers and Guardians. 

We are not changing any rule really, we were happy with the game already. All the work we are doing is aimed at removing any "Meh" moments and at making the player feel more in command of how they wish to play.

Miniatures & Shipping

30 out of the 32 sculpts we need are completed. We are only missing Shaggy and Wild Willy.  

The sculpts have all been sent to Gameland last week. We are waiting for any feedback on revisions necessary before manufacturing and, according to the amount of work required, we'll book a slot for manufacturing during the Summer. 

We'll also get a final estimate on the weight and size of each package, which in turn we'll send to ShipQuest to update our quotes on Shipping costs.

At this stage, we have no reason to expect any major difference with respect to what was quoted during the campaign, we had also given ourselves some margins for extra weight, so let's be optimistic and see what happens.

Pledge Manager & Extra Merch

We have been working on our Pledge Manager and Pre-order Store with Backerkit and are almost ready. What we miss are the updated info on shipping costs. The way we will deal with shipping is through whole order weight, so that we avoid to charge you more than needed.

We may make it for May, as we originally planned, but more likely PM will open in the first half of June.

Apologies for the delay, hopefully this doesn't cause you any problems.

We are still on time to add merch if there's something you think we should offer that we haven't thought of yet. Maybe T-shirts with the Peeping Cobra? Mugs with the Weretestic...mmm maybe not that. 

One backer asked for a neoprene map during the campaign, but we couldn't afford it at the time, we may add it as stretch goal during PM if many want it?

Any other ideas are welcome!

Rulebook Feedback

As mentioned in our previous newsletter, we have been working on the rulebook and are now ready for your feedback! If you want to have a read and comment, this would be highly appreciated and make the end product better for everybody. We would also mention you in our credit section for eternal glory and recognition. Here you have the folder where we'll keep all the iterations. Please comment on the most recent one only!

PS this is a Work In Progress: Many images still have to be updated to the latest graphics and we'll finalize format once the text is approved.

Goodbye

We actually had a couple more of things to discuss and for which we need your feedback, but since this is already too long we'll keep them for the next time! 

Unless we open PM in the meanwhile, in which case we'd clearly notify you, we'll have a newsletter on 30th May and another KS update on 13th June, four weeks from now. Be well in the meanwhile and thanks again for all your support!

You can find Kabula at:

Extra content (free), New Art, Playtesting
almost 4 years ago – Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 01:01:08 AM

Hi all, we hope the last few weeks treated you well :)

Things with Kabula are coming along smoothly.

Content: We decided to include 10 extra Encounters and 5 extra Dungeons for free in the Conspiracy Expansion. Discussing with Gameland, we realized this would come at no extra cost for us and we are committed to fit as much value for you as we can. Hope you will enjoy playing with them!

Across the whole game there will be 95 Encounters and 30 Dungeons (each with 2 levels). Of these, 89 Encounters and 21 Dungeons have been written already! 

As announced two weeks ago in our newsletter, all the rest of the content (monsters, items, guardians, automas etc) is already finished and is being playtested thoroughly.

Miniatures: Our amazing Rod Tinapay has been hard at work on the sculpts! We only miss 4 right now, once they are done all files can be submitted to Gameland and we can book a slot for manufacturing (still forecasted for July!). You already knew the ScondrEgg, but we think Oscar came out very cool as well!

Illustrations: The awesome Blanka Sőre finished the three illustrations for Gotzo's personalities! 

Rioter, Kabula-Negationist and...OMG, is that a Were-Testicle he is proposing to?? That naturelover-romantic personality is definitely pushing some boundaries!

What's yet to be done? Most of the content is ready but we need some more work to balance everything and make sure all is as entertaining as it can be. The Guardian Shaggy is still a bit clunky and we need some more graphic design to make things pretty and easy to understand. Most of this happens through playtesting: Multiplayer, solo, in person and online. If you want to participate in, or witness, some of our games on Tabletopia, join us on Discord.

In the last month, we changed some minor rules, improved AI and reworked the personality traits, removing DELUSIONAL. We are now getting back to the rulebook to update everything and make it as clear as possible!

Our schedule has the next newsletter on 2nd May and next KS update on 16th May (which should be close to PM opening!). If you are interested in more occasional content, you can check our  FB  or  IG pages.

Thanks as always for all your support through this journey, we are loving making this game!

Any thoughts or question?