Hey everyone!

For all our U.S. backers—Happy Thanksgiving! For our international backers, everyone comes from different countries, so it makes it hard to find one universal holiday, so Happy Monday!

Shipping Update

We'll start with what's on most everyone's minds: "When will I get this awesome, life-changing game that will make me the center of any gathering and get me promoted at my job?" While I can't promise Catharsis will get you promoted (unless you get your boss to play), I can address the timing. As you may suspect, getting timings down is a bit of a challenge because ships on the ocean can't guarantee a delivery time; sailing the ocean isn't quite like driving on a road. But, we have finally gotten some more concrete data on everything:

• For those doing the expedited shipping, your copies should have already arrived. One person got delayed, and we'll be reaching out to you directly about that.
• For our European backers, copies of the game will ship out by Friday. We are getting these air freighted or shipped (via ocean) to you, depending on the country. 
• For our U.S. backers, our shipment is arriving in Canada on the 28th—1 week from today. From there, they will get transferred to Chicago. Once it arrives in Chicago and passes through customs, we will unload and ship out the Kickstarter copies. The estimate is that the games will arrive in Chicago at the beginning of December. There will be a small delay on our end since Art and I will be at PAX Unplugged over in Philadelphia (see below), so Art won't be able to get to customs until after he returns home on the 5th. But once he's back and picked up all the inventory, he's going to be a mailing fiend and get those games out to you guys ASAP!

Long and short, minus a couple of small delays due to the vessel taking a bit more roundabout route to North America, games should be in your hands in the next few weeks! Yay! 

I want to thank you all for bearing with the deadline slip throughout the campaign. We've been learning a lot about production deadlines, shipping, and post-Covid processes, and we know we've been doing it at the expense of your patience. But the end is near, and based on the first reviews, Catharsis is everything you could want, and more!  

And to whet your appetite...

I mean, you guys are already excited about the game. But this is like Christmas coming early. We received a couple copies for us to bring to PAX Unplugged, and well, I'm going to let the reviews on BoardGameGeek speak for themselves. I mean, whoa! There are a several that are pretty detailed, but special thanks to znickle for such an awesome and in-depth analysis of the game! You rock! (And if anyone else to post a review, please do!)

And now for some eye candy:

And to really rev your engines, here's Art doing a solo play of Hidorian versus one of the paths through the Avatar deck! 

So here's proof that you can play by yourself, and you get to see a bit of one of the challenge decks. But did he get the true ending?

Dave, you keep mentioning PAX Unplugged

Yep! Art, Jane, and I will be at PAX Unplugged the whole time, December 2-4. We'll be demoing the game at our booth if you want a taste of the game, see the extras (like the art book, the clothing, the playmats, etc.), or just coming by to say hi! The demos will be just a few cards, but we'll be showcasing a lot of the characters. I'm particularly excited to be showcasing Briggs and Liara because I don't know other games that will allow two people to play as one character. 

We will also bring a few copies of the game to put in the Board Game Library if you want to gather a group and play through a boss deck together. Or just ogle the game. Honestly, we won't blame you if you just want to read over the cards or stare at the art for hours. 

Anything coming over via the boat will be available for pre-sale to be sent once Art is able to pick it all up. We've gotten some previews of everything, so you can see what's going to be coming your way soon, talk about design, or maybe even help us out as we start creating our first expansions! 

Expansions?

Since we had some downtime waiting for the boat to arrive, Art said, "Let's make some standalone expansions!" Seriously, the boat had barely left the dock, and he was already generating multiple ideas for new bosses, new characters, and new variants. No rest for the creative, eh? All of this is really early stages, and it's getting put on the backburner when the games arrive, but we have:

• A goblin grappler who chains her powers together.
• An orc priestess who channels the power of her god to smite her foes or transform temporarily into a vessel of divine wrath.
• A volcano elf who can leave lasting burns on your enemies, but sometimes his fires rage out of control and hit friends, too.
• Three players representing paragons of the humans, dwarves, and gnomes, who can play separately, but gain synergies when they play together.
• A brewmaster who can mix up drinks on the fly to buff her allies or weaker her foes.
• A forest elf whose abilities shift as he draws on the powers of his tribe's spirit totem.
• A shadow elf who can channel her pain to her shadow twin, but must be careful lest the shadow takes over.
• A dragon who attacks you while your party flies an airship. We'd have multiple locations on the ship (and each location would have multiple versions) where your party has to run around the ship to attack the dragon as if flies around or so you can activate the various devices of the ship.
• A scenario where Hidorian's manipulation of fate causes the party to time travel, and the players must declare what condition they will be at certain times or else suffer the consequences of paradox.

So, in short, we have a lot of ideas, and more on the way. Our goal is to make your game of Catharsis a game you'll be coming back to for years!

Giving thanks

You guys are awesome, and I can't even begin to tell you how excited we are that the game is almost here, and we can repay your interest in Catharsis with a game that is bigger and better than we could have ever expected. This past Wednesday, some of my students asked if they could try the prototype game I have in my office. There were 7 of them who wanted to take on the Dragon Lich, and I was just sitting there thinking that without your funding, we wouldn't have that deck, or even some of the character decks, to be able to play with that big group. And they were having so much fun that they asked if they could save their game progress (a bunch of them had papers to go finish!) and come back to it after Thanksgiving Break. That experience wasn't possible until you guys helped out. So thank you!

Until next time, may your meeples not fall over!