Punchboard Pictures and Production Update
over 2 years ago – Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 11:18:47 PM

Hello Everyone,

We wanted to share a few pictures of the punchboards from production.  

The punchboards contain the scenery tiles, battle tokens, buff and debuff tokens, the action order tokens and the loot counter.  Everything looks really good and considering all the work (and time and delay) that we’ve had to contend with we are very excited with how good the game is going to look on everyone’s table in the near future.  

So Where is This At?

The good news is that it’s closer to completion then it’s ever been.  The bad news is that it’s taken a long time for us to get here.  Longer than we anticipated, as we’ve discussed in other updates.  In May we had an update with a timeline to complete production by August.  We’re not that far off but the rulebook has been the wildcard.  Not the rules themselves, they’ve been finalized for long time, but the printing file.  The file for the rulebook has proved difficult to get printed correctly and we’ve had over a dozen rejections of the file by the printers.  Unfortunately at this stage we are stuck making the revisions ourselves and it’s been, quite frankly, an extremely frustrating process.  That said, we’re almost there (fingers crossed this week’s revision was the last needed).  

After that, it won’t be much time at all for the finished print run.  Despite the ridiculous amount of revisions on the rulebook all told there’s not much work left to do before we can start finalizing the plan to get these games to your door.  It’s hard to say anything more precise, and we’re sure this has become a punchline of sorts, but we really are working on it and we’re doing everything we can to try to get the game to all backers this fall.  More updates to come.

-The Brain Sandwich Team

Still moving along
over 2 years ago – Sat, Jun 25, 2022 at 10:05:06 PM

Hey Everyone,

Not much to report so this’ll be a quick one.  Last update we mentioned we were approving files.  That process is almost finished.  We thought we were going to be done this past week but it looks like it’ll be next week.  When its finished the full production run on all remaining components will begin.  That keeps us on the timetable we provided two updates ago.  As of this moment we are still expecting the games to be leaving the factory sometime mid to end of August.  We’ll do another update when full production starts.  

Thanks,

-The Brain Sandwich Team

Quick production update
over 2 years ago – Thu, May 19, 2022 at 02:28:20 AM

Hello Everyone, 

Just a quick update today.  We have received the samples for the entire dice set, including the battle dice, the damage die, the hit point counters, the scatter die and the D6.  Everything looked great in person and we approved the samples so now all the dice are being run off.  Here are some pictures…

We are approving more components this month so we are still on the timeline we included in the last update.  We’ll check in with another update in a few weeks.  

Thanks,

-The Brain Sandwich Team

An update and an apology
over 2 years ago – Thu, May 05, 2022 at 12:03:40 PM

Hello Everyone!  We know its been a while since our last update, too long, and we wanted to address that concern head on in today’s update.  We also wanted to talk about the revised time line so let’s jump right in.

Communication

Many of you have reached out to us recently in frustration requesting an update on the progress of the project.  We’ve had a few things we’ve been dealing with behind the scenes both professionally and personally and that’s led us to delays between updates.  That said, there’s no excuse for the delays and we are sorry. We have a few components shipping to us this week and we were going to wait until those came so we can include pictures but we needed to address the elephant in the room first.  We know you want to hear more from us.  We need to do better and we will.  

I’m sure some of you are starting to wonder if you are ever going to get this game.  YES.  Every single backer will recieve the copy they pledged.  There is no question of whether this campaign will fulfill, only when it will.  Secondly, we are expecting components this week from the manufacture and a lot more to follow in the coming weeks.  We will do an update every time we get something.  We want to see the bits as much as you and we’re going to make sure that we’re flowing updates in a timely fashion from here on out.  

New Timeline

The big question for all of us is WHEN will Fray be shipping.  We’ve talked a lot about the challenges we’ve faced in the previous updates so we won’t rehash those issues here.  Instead we’ve taken a look at where we are at and put together a new timeline based on that information.  

May - We are approving all the non-miniature components.  Dice, cards, punchouts, game board, etc.  From where we are today it looks like we’ll have everything approved by early June.

June - All of the non-miniature components will go into mass prodution.  This should take about 6 weeks in total.

August - The games will be complete and ready to ship.  Fulfilment should start shortly thereafter but we’ll cover fulfilment in a future update.

That’s all for today.  Thanks for your continued patience and look out for another update in about a week’s time with some pictures of dice :)

- The Brain Sandwich Team

Full steam ahead
over 2 years ago – Fri, Mar 04, 2022 at 12:48:12 PM

Greetings from the Every-verse!  It’s update time and this is a light update so lets jump right in!

Not all that much new is happening but we’ve seen several comments for an update so we thought we’d cover everything we can.  We were try to tow the line between regular updates and inbox spam and I guess this time we took a little too long getting an update out.  Apologies to all of you who were waiting to hear more and thank you for reaching out to us.  

Since the last update our factory was on a few week hiatus for Chinese New Year.  We spoke to them last week and they are back at work.  They are working on printing out the box materials and we have been in regular contact with them regarding printing status.  Everything is finally moving along smoothly so we are now entering the home stretch.  

If you’ve backed a board game on kickstarter before you probably noticed that the games are manufactured after a proof is sent to the creator for approval, then all the copies are run off at one time.  For various reasons the way Fray is being manufactured is a bit different.  The printing molds for the 25 models in the full set (core, reinforcements and KS exclusives) were finished first and already run off.  That’s right, all sets of the models have now been printed!  They are just waiting for all the cardboard components to catch up. 

We’ve talked in previous updates about some of the reasons the project has fallen behind our initial timetable.  We’ve had a lot of to contend with (power rationing at the factory, covid-related supply issues, to name a few) but part of the reason the plastic minis were produced first and separately from the rest of game was, to be completely honest, because we kept getting certain files rejected from the factory for small changes.  

None of us are graphic designers and we had trouble fulfiling our manufacturer’s exacting guidelines regarding the print files for the box, board and other gaming components.  There has been something like 8 or 9 file versions rejected because of spacing, or scaling or some such issue.  It’s been a long back and forth to get the files just right.  We didn’t sweat it as much as we would have under normal conditions because as we’ve talked about in a previous update we really had to wait until shipping costs came down before we could begin fulfillment.  The pandemic blew our original budget out of the water. The good news is that at least on the manufacturing and logistics front things are finally returning to normal and there are no longer barriers in our way to overcome.   

As of now our files have been finally accepted.  It’s going to just be a straight sprint forward until all the units are finished.  We already approved the models but we should have the cardboard components to approve this month.  That puts us around end of April to begin fulfillment.  It’s unlikely it’ll be sooner than that but it’s now a lot less likely it’ll be longer too.  

When we get the box and component samples which should be within a few weeks we’ll do an update with pictures.  In the meantime, we’ll try to do better with updates and keep everyone informed on the next steps.

Thanks,

-The Brain Sandwich Team