The Oceans Pledge Manager is Open
almost 5 years ago – Wed, May 22, 2019 at 03:22:24 AM

BackerKit

We are using BackerKit for our Oceans pledge manager. You will receive an email from them shortly, or you can click here to go there directly. We will leave the pledge manager open until the end of June (though we might extend it depending on where manufacturing stands at the time). 

Please fill out your survey as soon as possible. The faster we get accurate data about what everyone is ordering, the faster we can get the manufacturing started and the faster we can get your games to you.  

Shipping Costs

We created 6 different weight bins to calculate the shipping, if you add a small item that significantly increases your shipping cost, it's likely the item bumped your order into a higher weight bin.

How to Play Oceans

I will post an update tomorrow with a link to the final rules document. I would love to get feedback to make sure the document is clear before giving it to our international partners to translate. 

Stretch Goals

My Twitter account received over 500 followers since yesterday, so there is still hope that everything gets unlocked! I will consistently post new cards over the next several weeks for you to retweet (like this one). Tag your favorite reviewer on the retweet if you want to reach more people. Cheers!  

~ Dominic Crapuchettes, founder of North Star Games & co-designer of Oceans 

Final Art for the New Stretch Goals
almost 5 years ago – Tue, May 21, 2019 at 02:39:32 AM

I can't tell you how excited I am for Oceans! It keeps getting better and better as we pack more fun combos into the game and sand the rough edges. Oceans is the most beautiful and most polished game I have ever worked on. Full stop. You guys are in for a serious treat.

Pledge Manager Update

We just submitted the pledge manager to Backerkit, and they have opened it up to 5% of our backers (to test for issues). It will get opened to everyone soon. Apologies for the delay:

• There were unexpected ambiguities in shipping costs, which made coordinating with international partners difficult. 
• The new tariffs on Chinese imports creates a crazy complicated wrinkle. 

Stretch Goal - 3000 Twitter Followers

If we don't unlock the following cards, don't despair - they will be available through Backer Kit as an add-on. But I really want to get these cards in the game, so I went ahead and added two extra cards (the Sea-Rex and Kleptoparasitic) to make it more enticing. The following 6 cards will come in your copy of Oceans if my Twitter account gets to 3000 followers.  

4000 Twitter Followers

To be honest, I thought we were going to blow past the previous stretch goal, which is why I was furiously working on the next set of cards. It seems unlikely at this point, but the following 10 cards will added to your copy of Oceans if my Twitter account gets to 4000 followers. Who knows... maybe this campaign will surprise us once again! 

Add-ons for the Deep 

If these cards don't get unlocked, they'll be available for $2 each through Backer Kit (and later on our website while supplies last). We'll also offer the entire bundle for $16. 

We spent $3000 on the new art and several thousand on salaries to create these cards, but we're happy to give them to our backers for free in exchange for a larger social media platform to help us market our games in the future. In fact, more than happy -  it's been my secret desire from the start for Oceans to have 100 unique cards in the Deep. So please rally! It would make me very happy. Here are two posts to share:  Tweet #1, and Tweet #2. Thanks.

~ Dominic Crapuchettes, founder of North Star Games & co-designer of Oceans

Sparkles

You may have noticed that the text for Sparkles has changed. That's because Rachel thought the old one was a bit vindictive (so we gave the effect to a different card). And here are some gratuitous pictures of my daughter. Sparkles is her brainchild...

Zen and the art of a Living Ecosystem
almost 5 years ago – Thu, May 09, 2019 at 01:43:42 AM

Yowzer! You blew past Sparkles in a matter of hours. That's not what I was expecting. Updates are a ton of fun when we get positive responses like this. Unfortunately I need to buy more time so I can work on other things. 

So this time I'm going to bundle several cards together starting with Kickstarter backer Zack Tyszkiewicz's request for Living Ecosystem. Keep in mind that none of the art is final. These are just preliminary sketches...   

Living Ecosystem

• Cost: 1 Population
• [Forage 2 icon]  
• Before your feeding phase, migrate population equal to this species’ [Forage Value] from any Ocean board to the Reef. 

Zooplankton

• Cost: 3 population
• [May not forage icon] [May not attack icon] 
• May not be attacked.
• Gain 3 when population is migrated to the Reef.  
• Adjacent species may forage from this species board.   

Overgrazing 

• Cost: 3 population
•  Event: Instead of your normal feeding turn, each of your species without [can not forage icon] may forage this turn. After feeding, move any population in the Reef to the reserve. 

Crushing Jaw

• Cost: 1 population
• Ignores all [shell icon] when attacking. 

New Stretch Goal

A copy of Living Ecosystem, Zooplankton, Overgrazing, and Crushing Jaw will be added to the Deep (both the normal and deluxe edition) if my Twitter account (@DCrapuchettes) gets to 3,000 followers.  Please don't unlock this for a few days. There are other things I need to focus on this week!  (like writing the rules more clearly)

~ Dominic Crapuchettes, Founder of North Star Games & Co-Designer of Oceans  

Sneak Peek...

Katherine Souza gave us a bunch of great sketches for her illustration of Nomadic. Vote for your favorite option on a this Twitter poll.

• A  - top left 
• B  - top right
• C  - middle left
• D  - middle right
• E  - bottom left
• F  - bottom right

Anyone want more stretch goals?
almost 5 years ago – Wed, May 08, 2019 at 01:57:12 AM

Hi backers, 

Dominic here. I want to give a quick progress update to keep everyone in the loop, and more importantly, share some new stretch goals I've been dreaming up. 

Rules

The rules for Oceans have been finalized for three weeks. Unfortunately our graphic designer is on vacation, which means the earliest you can expect a PDF of the rules would be the end of next week. I'll post it as soon as possible to see if anything is confusing.  

The Deep

I've been re-calibrating and balancing the Deep cards to adjust for the most recent rule tweaks. This is the most fun part of my job: immersing myself in the beautiful card art and tweaking the powers to better match the art. 

It's so much fun that I've been tempted into one of my greatest weaknesses... designing more cards! No matter how hard I try, I can't keep myself from thinking up new Deep cards. I kept telling myself that I wasn't wasting time because we might turn the new ideas into promo cards at some point in the future.

And then it occurred to me -  why wait for the future? Oceans hasn't gone to print yet, which means we can tie promo cards to social media stretch goals right now. 

And so that's what we're going to do...

The first promo card I want to create is a powerful trait in honor of my daughter. I posted a call for an artist who can create an rainbow glitter unicorn mermaid, and just 20 minutes ago I found out that Anne Marie can do it! A foiled card will look fantastic in her style (and more importantly, it'll make my daughter think I'm the best Dad in the whole world).

 
Sparkles 

When this species or an adjacent species is attacked, every species except this species and the adjacent species lose 1 population to the Reef.   

Stretch Goal

A foiled copy of Sparkles will come in your copy of Oceans (both the normal and deluxe edition) if my Twitter account (@DCrapuchettes) gets to 1,900 followers.  I only have 1,565 followers and this campaign has 12,012 Kickstarter backers, so this shouldn't be too hard. 

Let's get this thing done! I've got a bunch of other ideas I would love to put into the game...

Dominic Crapuchettes, Founder of North Star Games & Co-Designer of Oceans 

Other Ideas

•  Zooplankton 
•  Imposter Cleaner 
•  Fast Life Cycle 
•  Overgrazing 
•  Epizootic Parasite 
•  Nomadic 
•  Crushing Jaw 
•  Living Ecosystem 

What an ending. You have our deepest thanks. Here's what's next.
about 5 years ago – Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 02:10:23 AM

Hi Backers, 

It's the last day of the campaign. Every stretch goal is now unlocked. As I write, more than 11,000 backers have pledged more than $700,000. We can hardly believe what this campaign has become. There's no way to thank you enough. 

Because of your feedback, we've been able to use Kickstarter the way it's supposed to be used: to improve. We've improved Oceans in all kinds of ways: the fish tokens, scenario cards, species boards, player count adjustment, trait card layouts, innumerable wording suggestions, and more. We were proud of the game to begin with and boy-howdy are we proud of it now. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.

Backers (and retailers who participated in this campaign) will receive a bunch of stuff that won't come in the retail version of the game:

• 8 foiled Deep traits - these are deep traits that are more aggressive, more chaotic, or more complex
• 5-6 player expansion - contains 40 additional fish, 2 extra player screens (or 2 bags in the deluxe edition), 2 extra bonus score tokens, and 10 extra species boards.
• 15 extra scenario cards - these scenarios are also more aggressive, more chaotic, or more complex than the base scenarios.  

You may wonder why it says 15 scenario cards above when for most of the campaign we were saying it would be 13. The reason is: 

We snuck in extra stretch goals yesterday

We've been working on extra content. Consequently, yesterday we added 2 additional scenario cards and 3 deep traits to the list of stretch goals, which, like everything else, are now unlocked. 

So now:

• instead of 40 Deep trait stretch goals, there are 43
• instead of 13 Scenario card stretch goals, there are 15

Here are the new items: 

The three Deep traits are:

• Migratory Filter Feeder -allows your species to spread across the ocean, which both raises the carrying capacity for its population and allows it to access food over a wider area.
• Tiny - being small has a big advantage: hunting a small thing isn't energetically worth it for many predators
• Abyss Dweller - this creates a mysterious creature with strange traits that hides itself way down deep where only other deep creatures can hunt it. Credit to Patrick Masterson for this one. He's one of our  playtesters, and he's also made a host of editing contributions to standardize all of the trait text.

 The two Scenarios are:

• Predation Pressure - This effect, which makes predators more effective, can toggle on and off based on how players choose to influence migration patterns, which creates an extra layer of meta-strategy when in play. Credit to Brandon Jacobson for this one.
• Dynamic Biome - this one creates an almost opposite feel. It allows for major environmental change the players can't anticipate. In most other scenarios, the players can anticipate environmental change and shape their ecosystems accordingly. Not so for Dynamic Biome. Credit to Brandon Jacobson and  smartturtle17 for this one.  We really love our playtesters.

With these additions, you'll now receive 93 Deep cards total, and 40 scenarios total. We've never worked so hard or so thoroughly to create content for a game as we have for Oceans, and we think you'll feel that when you finally have it in your hands. Speaking of... 

What's Next

In about 2 weeks, we'll open the pledge manager (Backerkit), at which point you'll see your shipping costs, adjust your pledge, and finalize it. You'll be able to add add-ons, upgrade your pledge, add more copies, etc. 

After that, we'll keep the pledge manager open for about a month, and we also intend to create a pre-order system for those who missed the campaign. 

Our estimated delivery month is September. We'll keep you informed with regular updates, so you'll know if the timeline changes and what to expect if it so. 

Note: I (your campaign manager) will close my laptop and turn off my phone for three days when this campaign ends tonight, so your comments and messages may go unanswered until Tuesday, April 30th. 

Finally

It's our dream at North Star to make games for the rest of our lives. But making a living at games is hard. It's your trust that allows us to do it at all. We can't wait to repay that trust with one of the best, most beautiful game you've ever seen. Stay tuned and we'll be back next week.

Nick Bentley, campaign manager and one of Oceans' designers