Keep your friends close and your flashlight closer in this one-vs-many hidden movement horror game.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
6 Hours Left on Sprocketforge!
3 months ago
– Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 07:00:21 AM
Time for one final reminder - the Sprocketforge Kickstarter is ending in about 6 hours (at 3 PM Central)!
In case you haven't been following along, we've unlocked a number of stretch goals ranging from discounted shipping to upgraded cards and mana resources. We also just unlocked our final stretch goal for a metal first player coin and passed 300% funded!
If you are on our mailing list and back at least the base pledge ($60) or higher, you'll also receive a free mini-expansion that comes with additional cards and enchantment tiles - but only if you back before the campaign ends!
We hope you'll join us in the factory and turn (or grind) some gears!
This is Jeremy, Matt, and Ethan, running out of gear puns and references...
Sprocketforge Is Live!
4 months ago
– Tue, Jul 16, 2024 at 05:06:53 PM
Fellow investigators and adversaries,
We hope everyone is doing well and enjoying their copies of The Stifling Dark! We'll keep this short and sweet - our next game, Sprocketforge, is live on Kickstarter and over halfway funded! We've included the overview infographic for it below in case you aren't familiar with the game, but if you are we hope you'll head on over and check it out!
See you in the factory!
This is Jeremy, Matt, and Ethan, turning those gears...
The Grand Finale
10 months ago
– Sat, Feb 03, 2024 at 08:23:05 PM
As they say, all good things must come to an end. Don’t worry though - we’re just talking about the campaign updates! As we mentioned in the last campaign update, this will be our final monthly campaign update. Now that the games have shipped out and the game has been out in the wild for a couple months it’s time to retire the monthly updates.
Not to fear - we will still be monitoring comments, messages, BGG, emails, social media, etc. just like we are today. We will also post occasional one-off campaign updates for special scenarios, such as the launch of a new game (cough Sprocketforge cough) or an expansion or second edition of The Stifling Dark. Those updates will be few and far between though.
Anyways, on to the actual update! The Stifling Dark portion of this update will be fairly short since not much has changed since last month. We’ll provide a final fulfillment update, share an update on the map editor, share an infographic with some cool stats on The Stifling Dark, and end it with an update on the future of Sophisticated Cerberus Games.
US, Canada, EU/UK/ROW, Australia, and New Zealand orders have all been shipped out and should be delivered as well. China, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand have all been shipped to backers and/or delivered as well. Long story short: everything has shipped, and basically everything should also be delivered!
As always, please feel free to reach out to [email protected] with any issues relating to the game or shipping and we’ll work with the respective fulfillment partner as/if needed.
Spanish Version (Maldito) Maldito will be responsible for fulfilling the Spanish version of the game to all regions. Maldito confirmed that they have received their copies of the game and were shipping them out this week, so Spanish copies are on the way!
The core functionality of the map editor has been completed, but we are still working on the finishing touches. We expect to have it completed, tested, and deployed by end of day Sunday, February 25th, and we will announce the deployment on social media. The below URL will take you to the map editor once it is ready, but for now it will just link to a placeholder page on our website:
In anticipation of the map editor launching, here are some of the basic features / steps to build a map (along with screenshots of each step). We’ll have more robust instructions (including things like the proper sizes/aspect ratios for your background image and how to print the map to scale) available once the map editor is up and running:
Navigate to the map editor and create an account (or log in if you already have an account)
Click on “Create Map” in the top menu
Give your map a name and hit “Create”
You should now have a blank slate with which to create your map! You can upload a background image by clicking “Map” in the Options window in the top right corner and hitting “Choose File” in the Background Image section. The image will load automatically once you select the file and hit “Open”
You will want to start by creating groups (zones) so you can assign them to spaces while you are modifying your map in the next step. To do so, click on the “Tools” tab in the Options window, type in a name for the group (such as “Lumber Shed”), the single-letter prefix for the group (such as “L”), and hit “Create”. Repeat this process for each zone you would like on your map (which should be 5 if you want your map to follow the standard rules)
Note that you may need to refresh the page after creating your zones in order for them to show up in the next step (we’re working on fixing that)
From there, you can modify the spaces as you see fit! To do so, click on the space in question, then make sure the “Space X” tab is selected in the Options window in the top right (where X is the number of the space you have selected, such as "Space 44")
To delete the space, simply hit the Delete key on your keyboard. All subsequent space numbers will update automatically
To change the type of space (Door, Point of Interest, Medical Item, etc.), select whatever space type you would like from the “Space Type” drop-down in the Options window
To change the brightness of the space (Dim vs. Dark), select the brightness you would like from the “Brightness” drop-down in the Options window
To count the distance between the space and all other spaces (ignoring light levels, similar to how the “Within X Spaces” rules work), hit the “Generate Distances” button in the Options window. To turn the distance pop-ups off, simply hit “Disable Distances”
To add the space to a group (zone), select the desired group from the “Group” dropdown in the the Options window
To remove a movement line (connection to another space), choose the connection in question and hit “Delete” in the Options window. To add a movement line back once it has been deleted, simply click and drag from one space to the other
Once you are satisfied with your masterpiece, all you have to do is go to the “Map” tab in the Options window and hit Download at the bottom!
Note that the map will auto-save as you are working through it, but there is not currently an undo function so be careful! That is very high on our list of new features that we will be deploying, but it will take a decent amount of work to add in.
We’ll be posting updates and monitoring feedback in a specific Map Editor channel in our Discord. We expect to have a beta version ready within the next couple days, and we'll be including details on how to join it in Discord so make sure you join if you're interested in checking it out early!
We thought sharing some stats about The Stifling Dark would be a great way to end the campaign, so please feast your eyes on this lovely infographic!
Convention season has officially begun! We are in the middle of Protospiel MN as we speak, and it’s been great getting back into the convention rhythm and seeing all of our designer/publisher friends again. The full list of this year’s conventions is below:
Protospiel MN: February 2-4, Bloomington, MN Con of the North: February 16-18, Plymouth, MN GAMA Expo (Booth 815): March 4-7, Louisville, KY Protospiel Twin Cities: May 31-June 2nd, Roseville, MN Origins Game Fair: June 19-23, Columbus, OH Gen Con: August 1-4, Indianapolis, IN 2D Con: August 23-25, Minneapolis, MN
We hope to see many of you at one (or more) of our conventions this year!
It’s the last timeline update! Now that all games have shipped, we’re going to make the final update and mark fulfillment as completed. Doesn’t it look great all filled out?
Big gulps, huh? While this is the end of campaign updates for The Stifling Dark, it also signals the start of the next phase of Sophisticated Cerberus Games.
As you may recall, we signed a game from a local designer last year and have been working with them ever since to bring the game to the finish line. We have since renamed the game from Gears of Industry to Sprocketforge, and we just received the background artwork for the box cover. We are working on finalizing the logo and will share that on social media once it has been finalized. In the meantime, here is the raw box art for your viewing pleasure:
You heard it here first though - the Kickstarter pre-launch page for Sprocketforge is now live! If you’re interested in checking out the game once it launches on Kickstarter, please give the pre-launch page a follow:
In terms of communication, our current plan is to create a separate mailing list for Sprocketforge that will have more frequent updates leading up to the campaign. If you’re interested in following along on the journey, feel free to join that mailing list as well:
We will use our core mailing list sparingly for the time being - likely only once or twice prior to Sprocketforge going live. Our current plan is to launch Sprocketforge sometime late spring / early summer, but we’ll lock that date in once we get a little closer.
Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about The Stifling Dark either! We have an entire document full of new adversary and map ideas, and our next expansion will for sure be adversary-focused since the first expansion (Nightfall) was investigator-focused. We haven’t figured out timing on that yet but will be sure to keep everyone posted as we firm up timing on that front.
We’ll end here where we ended right after the campaign - with sincere gratitude and appreciation for each and every one of you. What started as an idea between friends almost exactly four years ago has turned into something none of us could’ve dreamed of back then. None of this would have been possible without you, so thank you once again for trusting us and coming along on this crazy ride with us!
This is Matt, Jeremy, and Ethan, signing off for now…
January Post-Campaign Update
11 months ago
– Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 08:01:33 PM
Well, well, well, another year has come and gone! We hope everyone who celebrates had enjoyable holidays and will have a fantastic new year.
This marks the beginning of the fifth year of Sophisticated Cerberus’ existence, and we have to say this year rivaled last year in terms of the craziness and amount of work we got done. We can’t wait to see what the upcoming year has in store for our company, both for continued growth of The Stifling Dark and for the release of our next game, Sprocketforge.
Now that 99% of fulfillment has been completed, this will very likely be the second-to-last regularly scheduled campaign update. We still plan on publishing an update in the beginning of February to address any final items, but after that we’ll plan on going silent on the campaign update front for a while.
Note that we may post future (singular) updates down the road for important news / new Kickstarter launches, but those will be scarce. Rest assured we’ll still be active in the Kickstarter comments/messages, BGG, Discord, email, and social media though! We will likely start our newsletter back up at some point as well, and if you’re lucky we’ll maybe even start posting on our blog every once in a while 🙂
With those housekeeping items out of the way, let’s jump into the update! We’ll be providing a quick fulfillment update before talking a bit about strategy/balancing details, information on components (including tokens) and re-boxing / storing the game, a call to action on BGG, and ending with an update on the map editor. Here we go!
US, Canada, EU/UK/ROW, Australia, and New Zealand orders have all been shipped out (and the vast majority should be delivered as well). China, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and Taiwan have all been shipped to backers and/or delivered as well.
We’re awaiting confirmation from the shipping hubs, but the same should be true for South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand. Our South African hub should be receiving their shipment any day now (if they haven’t already, we’re awaiting confirmation).
As always, please feel free to reach out to [email protected] with any issues relating to the game or shipping and we’ll work with the respective fulfillment partner as/if needed.
Spanish Version (Maldito)
Maldito will be responsible for fulfilling the Spanish version of the game to all regions. The Spanish shipment encountered a slight delay, but has been picked up from our factory and is now expected to be received in Maldito’s warehouse the week of January 14th or 21st. They currently expect to begin shipping the Spanish copies out by the end of January.
We’ve seen a number of posts/questions about investigator strategies or tips for trying to beat The Butcher, so we wanted to add this section in and also introduce a new (easier) difficulty level that new players can use if they are having a hard time defeating The Butcher.
We’ll start by saying that it is entirely expected that the adversary wins the first couple games while the investigators are learning how to counter the adversary. It’s easier for a new adversary to beat new investigators, but experienced investigators should easily beat a new adversary (or vice versa).
With that out of the way, here are some tips we recently posted that will help make the investigators’ lives easier:
Follow the recommended first-time player setup. Don’t use events, play on the Sawmill map, and play against the Butcher. While The Butcher has his own advantages (such as only needing to kill a single investigator), he’s also the easiest to understand and counter.
Use the building lights to your advantage. You are essentially invincible while inside a bright building, so if you think you are about to get stabbed, try to get into a building and turn the lights on.
Don't be afraid to get stalked. Sometimes it's better to take a stalk and protect yourself than it is to reveal the adversary. For example, hiding yourself in a corner or alley and flashlighting out will usually stop the adversary from getting to you (even if you still end up getting stalked).
Embrace the flashlight hug. Investigators can do what we call the "flashlight hug", where one investigator shines their flashlight directly on another investigator so they are fully surrounded by light. This makes them invincible for a round, and the other investigator can flashlight right back to fully cover the other investigator if needed.
Don't forget to use your abilities! The investigators have helpful abilities that can do various things, such as revealing the adversary or moving more quickly. We've seen a number of games where people forget to take advantage of their abilities.
Lock those doors! Doors are another great way to put some distance between yourself and the adversary since it takes two turns for them to destroy doors. As with sitting in a corner, a great way to protect yourself is to go into a building, lock the door, and flashlight out to stop the adversary from getting to you.
You're on a timer. The longer you take to gather the evidence, the more powerful the adversary gets and the more time they have to hit you. Don't spend too much time on any given thing (like points of interest) - get what you need and get out.
Work as a team. Have someone flashlight inside of buildings (or turn the lights on for you) so you can move through them more quickly. Trade items to create a "relay race" that can move evidence and items across half the map in a single turn. Stick with a buddy and alternate flashlight usage so you don't run out of charge.
Adjacency is important. Just because your space is bright doesn’t mean you’re safe! The Butcher can attack from adjacent spaces, so in order to be fully protected all spaces around you have to be bright. If you’re at the edge of a flashlight, The Butcher can walk right up behind you and stab you.
We’re hoping these tips and tricks will help the investigators out, but we are also going to be introducing a new difficulty level in future editions of the game to help make the initial playthroughs a bit closer as the investigators are learning the game. Here are what the difficulty levels will be:
Beginner (NEW): Medical items remove wounds rather than flip them face-down, two medical items are always placed on the board during setup (regardless of investigator count), and don’t use events
Intermediate: Don’t use events (same as existing first-time player rules)
Advanced: No changes to base rules
The new beginner difficulty will make it so that medical items remove wounds, which will significantly swing things in favor of the investigators. This means Bleeding (which is still the recommended starting attack) will require three hits to kill an investigator if they use a single medical item. It also means the investigators will need to prioritize getting medical items though - they won’t do you any good if you don’t have them!
Lastly, don’t forget that house rules are a thing! If the investigators are still having a hard time winning, feel free to modify some of the rules to give them a better chance. Perhaps the most extreme option would be to require The Butcher to get two kills (the first investigator that is killed would become a spirit), but there are other less extreme things you could do to help out the investigators (such as having them start with extra items or ignoring dark spaces).
Hopefully this new difficulty option will help players who are having a hard time taking on The Butcher. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and reached out with questions!
This one deserves its own section, as the number of questions we’ve gotten on this clearly indicates that we needed to do a better job with the components page (and we’ve noted that down for future editions). In the meantime, we’ve provided a comprehensive list of all components in the base game (excluding Nightfall and the mini-expansion) below for everyone’s reference:
Note that these groupings are slightly different than those shown in the component list in the rulebook. Those changes were made for clarity’s sake and are how we plan to group things going forward to avoid confusion.
This also deserved its own section since we've seen a couple questions about how to bag the tokens and/or fit everything in the box. For starters, we realize our game has a significant amount of tokens and are thinking of ways to reduce that number for future editions. That said, we color-coded the vast majority of the tokens to try and make things easier for storage, setup, and gameplay.
The below image shows how we store the tokens in each bag for easy setup/reference during the game. Note that this excludes Nightfall once again, but Nightfall just includes more of the same token types so you can throw those in their respective bags:
Here is the listing of what is in each bag, labeled the same as they are grouped in the comprehensive component list earlier in the update. The only difference is that we put each adversary's standee(s) in with their tokens so you can just grab the bag and be good to go!
Bag 1: Setup tokens (Evidence, Point of Interest, Medical Items, Duck, Mirror Maze, and Round Tracker)
Bag 2: Player Board tokens (white tokens - Charge, Stamina, and Major Ability)
Bag 3: Investigator/Spirit tokens (dark blue tokens with white icons)
Bag 4: Item tokens
Bag 5: Objective tokens
Bag 6: Investigator standees
Bag 7: Mini tokens
Bag 8: Dice
Bag 9: Map tokens (Bright, Dim, Windows, and Secret Passages)
Bag 10: Door tokens
Bag 11: Other tokens (Supply and Obstruction, orange tokens with black icons)
Bag 12: The Cult tokens and standees (black tokens with purple icons)
Bag 13: The Horror tokens and standee (black tokens with green icons)
Bag 14: The Butcher tokens and standee (black tokens with red icons)
Lastly, here are some images showing how we put everything back in the box. Here is the insert with all the tokens and cards in it:
It doesn't really matter which tokens you put in which well, but if you're curious here's how it was done in this picture:
Left: Investigator standees and mini tokens
Second from left: Dice and other (supply and obstruction) tokens
Second from right: Doors, items, map, setup, and horror tokens
Right: Player board, investigator/spirit ability, objective, butcher, and cult tokens
It helps if you roll the bags up or fold them over when you're putting things away since they take up less space that way. If your cards aren't sleeved you'll have plenty of extra room in with the cards and can always throw a bag or two there if you want to free up a little space in the token wells. Speaking of cards, here is a list of what cards are in each card well:
Top left: Adversary cards (attacks, abilities, revealed, etc.)
Bottom left: General Items
Top middle: Events
Bottom middle: All other items (cursed items, medical items, objective items) and general item overflow (if needed)
Top right: All other full-size cards (escape, spirit, and flashlight augments (if you have Nightfall)
Bottom right: Conditions (left side) and wounds (right side)
Next up, here is how the flashlights (including the large flashlights from Nightfall) and straightedges go in:
After this, we put the lid on the insert (obviously) and then typically put the main board in next, then the mini-map, then the player boards and player aids, and finally the player screen and rulebook. The order of these doesn't really matter since they'll all fit fine no matter how you arrange them.
Don't forget to leave your punchboard remnants underneath the insert if you want to keep the components a little tighter inside the box! We can't remember who we learned that from, but it's a game-changer to stop things from moving around so much inside the box.
Anyways, hopefully these images and examples help make it easier to store the game!
As a reminder, we have posted an official FAQ thread on BoardGameGeek, which will be the primary place for people to ask questions about the game.
There are also QR codes throughout the rulebook that will take you to the rules page on our website, which will have short videos explaining each section (along with a living FAQ document).
As always, you can also post on Discord, in our Facebook group, comment on Kickstarter, or email us at [email protected] with any questions or concerns. We’re here to help and want to make sure you enjoy the game!
As many of you are acutely aware, BoardGameGeek (BGG) is one of the main sources of information for board games nowadays. We’ve been seeing a steady stream of forum posts, which is awesome! We want to do what we can to ensure The Stifling Dark’s BGG page can serve as a one-stop-shop for current and prospective gamers.
With that, we have a couple humble requests. Feel free to do any/all of these as you see fit - we appreciate anything you're willing to do!
1. Please leave the game an honest review if you’ve played it. We don’t want people spamming fake reviews (good or bad), we’re just hoping people can give it a score once they’ve given it a couple playthroughs so other gamers can see how everyone has been liking the game. We’re at an 8.3 right now (which is awesome), but there are only about 45 ratings so we’re hoping to get many more ratings in there. Thanks to those of you who have rated it already!
2. Hit the heart button at the bottom of the main section to help bump the visibility up!
3. Thumbs up the Official FAQ thread to make sure it remains at the top of the “Hot Threads” section on our page since that’s where people can go to ask questions (or see if their question was already asked).
4. If you’re feeling extra spicy, you can also vote on the game’s classification to give it an official type! There needs to be a certain number of votes before BGG will categorize the game, so feel free to vote for whatever category you think best fits the game. All you have to do is click on the little chart below the “Type” header on the right-hand side of the page (to the right of the description)!
We unfortunately ran into some complications when we were about to publish the map editor a couple weeks back, but we promise it’s real and it’s coming! We were all traveling over the holidays so that slowed down progress for a bit, but we’re back at it now and wanted to share a preview of what to expect once it’s ready.
We’ll have the default maps loaded in there (Sawmill and Amusement Park), where you can make slight modifications as you see fit. You’ll be able to add/remove spaces, add/remove movement lines, change space types, and group spaces together (to create zones). Here’s an example of some of those options:
You will also have the ability to create your own map, starting with a blank movement grid and your own background image. From there, you’ll be able to modify things to your liking by changing the spaces around and using some default assets (such as windows, trees, and other assets from the existing maps).
We’ll keep everyone posted once it’s ready, but we’re hopeful we can work out all the kinks and have it ready to roll prior to our next campaign update. We appreciate everyone’s patience!
Convention season is about to begin! We have a very busy February/early March, then we get a break until June. We can’t wait to get back out there again! The full list is below:
Protospiel MN: February 2-4, Bloomington, MN
Con of the North: February 16-18, Plymouth, MN
GAMA Expo: March 4-7, Louisville, KY
Protospiel Twin Cities: May 31-June 2nd, Roseville, MN
Origins Game Fair: June 19-23, Columbus, OH
Gen Con: August 1-4, Indianapolis, IN
2D Con: August 23-25, Minneapolis, MN
We’ll share booth details for the bigger conventions as soon as we have that information. We hope to see many of you at one (or more) of our conventions next year!
It’s the second-to-last update of the timeline! We won’t mark fulfillment as completed quite yet since there are still a couple countries whose games are on the way, but freight and warehousing is officially completed so we’ve crossed those off. We should have the final column closed out in time for next month’s update!
We’ll be in touch in February, but as always please feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns in the meantime. As a reminder, you can expect our campaign updates to come out around the 3rd of each month.
Thank you once again for your support in helping us make The Stifling Dark a reality!
This is Matt, Jeremy, and Ethan, breathing a huge sigh of relief that fulfillment is almost over…
(Almost) December Campaign Update
12 months ago
– Sat, Nov 25, 2023 at 07:34:34 PM
It’s not quite December yet, but we have some updates on the fulfillment front that we wanted to share ahead of our usual schedule. We also included an FAQ section to address some of the common questions we’ve seen so far, along with links to resources/help in case you have questions once you start playing the game.
Before we dive in, heads up that this campaign update will take the place of our usual update on the 3rd of the month. Our next scheduled campaign update (which will likely be one of our last) will be on January 3rd, although we may send out a one-off update before then if needed.
United States (Gamerati)
We’ve gotten a number of questions around the US shipments since backers received UPS tracking but haven’t seen any movement yet. We reached out to Gamerati on this, and they confirmed that this is expected due to how they handle their shipments.
They print off every tracking label before they begin shipping, which triggers a UPS email with an estimated delivery date. This UPS email assumes the game will be shipped out on the day the label is created, so the ETA is not correct. The true shipment notification is when you receive an email from Gamerati - this means they are actually about to ship your game out. The UPS ETA will update once the game has actually shipped.
Gamerati has shipped out a large portion of the games already and expects to finish the rest by the end of next week. In the meantime, please disregard any ETAs you may have gotten from UPS until you get the email from Gamerati since that’s the true shipment notice.
As always, please feel free to reach out to [email protected] with any issues relating to the game or shipping and we’ll work with Gamerati as/if needed.
Canada (Pick & Pack)
The Canadian shipment will be arriving at Pick & Pack on Tuesday the 28th, and they expect to begin shipping orders out by the end of next week or early the following week!
Once your game ships, you will receive an email from Pick & Pack with the tracking number. Please review the details on Pick & Pack’s website for any issues related to shipping and submit a contact form if necessary. You can email [email protected] with any issues related to the game itself.
EU/UK/Rest of World (Spiral Galaxy)
The EU/UK/ROW shipment arrived at Spiral Galaxy yesterday and has already been received. Spiral Galaxy sent out final address validations and expects to begin shipping games out by the end of next week or early the following week!
Once your game ships, you will receive an email from Spiral Galaxy with the tracking number. You can email [email protected] for any issues related to shipping, and you can email [email protected] with any issues related to the game itself.
Australia / New Zealand (Armarlo)
There was a slight delay in getting the Australian copies shipped out, but things are back on track now. Once your game ships, you will receive an email from Armarlo with the tracking number. You can email [email protected] with any issues relating to the game or shipping and we’ll work with Armarlo as/if needed.
Asia (VFI)
All VFI orders have now been shipped to their respective hubs, so we have updated the table below with the latest details. As always, the estimated arrival date is the arrival to VFI's hub in that region - not the estimated arrival to backers:
Note that you can always check VFI’s website to see the status of each hub once it ships out from VFI. Most hubs will also have an email address you can use to contact them in case there are any issues with shipping.
Once your game ships out from its hub, you will receive an email from the hub with the tracking number. You can email [email protected] (or the associated hub) for any issues related to shipping once your game has shipped, and you can email [email protected] with any issues related to the game itself.
Spanish Version (Maldito)
Maldito will be responsible for fulfilling the Spanish version of the game to all regions. The Spanish shipment is being picked up from our factory today and should be received in Maldito’s warehouse by the end of December. They currently expect to begin shipping the Spanish copies out in the second week of January.
Local Pickup (Minnesota and Wisconsin)
The local pickup pallets are being delivered on Monday, and pickup events are next weekend! We’ve included the details for the events below for reference:
Addresses for each location are below:
Games By James (Saturday 12/2 from 1-5 PM)
Ridgedale Center, Suite 2245
12731 Wayzata Blvd
Minnetonka, MN 55305
Boardlandia (Sunday 12/3 from 1-5 PM)
2701 N Oneida St B
Appleton, WI 54911
For those who aren’t able to make the main events, we have scheduled smaller pickup events for the following weekend at the same locations:
Minnesota (Games by James): Sunday 12/10 from 2-4 PM
Wisconsin (Boardlandia): Saturday 12/9 from 2-4 PM
If you aren’t able to make either of the events in your area, we’ll arrange alternate pickup options on a one-off basis. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone at the events!
We’ve seen some questions around token counts, specifically for the investigator/spirit ability tokens in the base game. The rulebook says there are 14 tokens included:
The token count is accurate, with two callouts. First, 12 of the tokens are small (15mm) whereas the other two are larger (30mm). Second, the token pictured right in the middle (the campfire) is actually from the Nightfall expansion. That is 100% a mistake on our part - that token is not in the base game so it shouldn’t be pictured there.
We’ve made note of these two issues and will fix them in the next print run. Here is a comprehensive list of the 14 investigator/spirit ability tokens that are in the base game:
Moving on, we’ve only gotten one question about this issue so far but we’re guessing we’ll see more so we wanted to make sure we covered it. The flashlights all come with a protective film on both sides to prevent them from getting scratched.
The protective film itself gets scuffed very easily, and it also makes the flashlights harder to see through. Make sure you peel the film off both sides of the flashlights before you play the game! It can be a bit tricky to get off, but it’s easiest if you start from the narrow edge of the flashlights. Here’s an example image in case you’re not sure - the flashlight on the left has had its protective film removed, whereas the flashlight on the right has not:
Note that the flashlights will get fingerprints and dust on them over time, you can simply wipe them clean with a microfiber cloth and you should be good to go!
Lastly, we wanted to share these resources again in case you have any questions about the game once you get it. We have posted an official FAQ thread on BoardGameGeek, which will be the primary place for people to ask questions about the game.
There are also QR codes throughout the rulebook that will take you to the rules page on our website, which will have short videos explaining each section (along with a living FAQ document).
As always, you can also post on Discord, in our Facebook group, comment on Kickstarter, or email us at [email protected] with any questions or concerns. We’re here to help and want to make sure you enjoy the game!
The infrastructure for the map editor is up and running! We’re working on the finishing touches (along with testing) and are still on track to have it go live in mid-December. We’ll share a post on social media once it goes live, and we’ll include more in-depth details on how to use it in the January campaign update.
All retailer orders that have been paid for have had their orders sent to the fulfillment centers and have either already shipped or should be shipping out within the next two weeks. If you haven’t paid your invoice yet (or if you aren’t sure), please reach out to us at [email protected] and we’ll talk through next steps!
The three of us are meeting up next weekend for the first time since convention season, and we plan on putting together some content that we’ll post on our website and YouTube (and include in the next campaign update). The main output will be an updated playthrough, but we’ll also do our best to finally film that unboxing video and get a condensed how to play video created!
We’re all done with conventions for this year, but we have quite a few planned for next year! The full list is below:
Protospiel MN: February 2-4, Bloomington, MN
Con of the North: February 16-18, Plymouth, MN
GAMA Expo: March 4-7, Louisville, KY
Protospiel Twin Cities: May 31-June 2nd, Roseville, MN
Origins Game Fair: June 19-23, Columbus, OH
Gen Con: August 1-4, Indianapolis, IN
2D Con: August 23-25, Minneapolis, MN
We’ll share booth details for the bigger conventions as soon as we have that information. We hope to see many of you at one (or more) of our conventions next year!
The timeline has once again been updated! Fulfillment is officially underway, although we left freight and warehousing as “In Progress” since the Canadian shipment hasn’t quite been received yet (but will be in three days). All other regions have completed freight and warehousing for the English version though!
We’ll be in touch in January, but as always please feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns in the meantime. As a reminder, you can expect our campaign updates to come out around the 3rd of each month (except December since this serves as December’s update).
Thank you once again for your support in helping us make The Stifling Dark a reality!
This is Matt, Jeremy, and Ethan, failing to come up with a witty ending…
