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Dispatches:
News from Atlas Games
Once Upon A Time sold out; reprint in progress
We've just sold out of
Once Upon A Time, our perennial favorite storytelling card game. A reprint has been ordered, and is likely to arrive in our warehouse in the second half of December.
While we no longer have it in our warehouse, the reason for the sudden outage is that many distributors have been stocking up for the holidays, a time when
Once Upon A Time traditionally sells especially well. So don't panic if you are looking for a copy for yourself or as a gift.
Warehouse 23 is well stocked (their supply should last through Christmas), as are the major wholesalers. If you are a retailer and your primary distributor is sold out, move along to your secondary suppliers, as they will likely have it on hand.
Gloom: Media Darling?
We've just found out about some more media attention being paid to Gloom!
First off, Mike Stackpole mentions Gloom in his "The Winning Edge" column in November's Comics & Games Retailer. It's in the headline and everything! In Mike's review of GenCon, he says "a lot of people pointed at Atlas Games' Gloom as a title to be looked at and, in fairness, I should note that I bought a copy at the show myself." He goes on to say "Gloom is illustrative of what I found most hopeful and best about the convention ... it's an innovative design."
Also, we just got a call from Toy Directory Monthly saying that Gloom has been selected to be a part of their Toys in Motion feature. Just go to their
Toys in Motion: Games & Puzzles page, scroll about half way down the page to the Gloom entry, and you'll see a Watch Video link that'll take you to a nifty little Media Player short showing what the game looks like. Cool stuff!
Unhappy Homes back in stock
The second half of our shipment from India of Gloom and Unhappy Homes was delivered to the warehouse early yesterday afternoon. Orders for Unhappy Homes that had been pending have been shipped; some other orders sent in to me yesterday are packed and waiting for today's UPS pickup. The base Gloom game is still in stock (it had not run out). If your favorite retailer or distributor has been OSM for the past couple of weeks, they should either have an order on the way or they are able to place an order if they need to.
Blowing Up Hong Kong Review & Others
Matthew Pook (aka Pookie) just let us know that his review of
Blowing Up Hong Kong for
Feng Shui is now posted on Pyramid. If you have a Pyramid account,
read it now!
And don't forget to check out these other recent reviews, articles, promos, and ads:
- Article on Northern Crown in Game Trade Magazine in July
- Banner ads for Northern Crown on ENworld and RPG.net in July
- Advance review of Northern Crown on ENworld in July
- Advance review of Northern Crown in Casus Belli
- Mention of Northern Crown, Ars Magica: The Divine, and Gloom: Unhappy Homes in July's ICV2 (Q3 2005, #8)
- July review of Seven Civilizations (Penumbra D20) in Pyramid
- Free adventure for Northern Crown available in August through Adamant Entertainment
- Gloom listed on Toy Directory Monthly's Best Games list in August
- Contest featuring Northern Crown on Game Trade Magazine's web site in August
- Review of Northern Crown in August's Scrye
- Article and cut-out promo card for Gloom: Unhappy Homes in August's Game Trade Magazine
- Letter Head named to "Top 10 Efficient Components" list in Games Quarterly
- Mention of Northern Crown in September's Dragon magazine
- Banner ads for Let's Kill on Board Game Geek and RPG.net in September and October
- Review of Gloom: Unhappy Homes in October's Game Buyer
- Review of Northern Crown in November's Black Gate Magazine
Northern Crown Review
We've just heard word that
Northern Crown will be reviewed in the November issue of Black Gate magazine (
www.blackgate.com). Having seen the article in advance, I'm thrilled at the positive treatment it got: "Northern Crown is an absolutely stunning piece of work, not just in its game design and the quality of its writing, but also in the amount of research that has clearly gone into it."
Victim-ize Your Friends and Family!
Victim-ize your friends and family with a
blank Victim card for
Let's Kill! Just type in their info, then print it out and draw a pretty picture, and you're ready to revel in the mayhem!
Dire Spirits on RPGNow
I've added
Dire Spirits, the introductory Nyambe adventure, to our catalog of downloads available from RPGNow.com. The file should be activated for sale within the next 24 hours or so.
Today's Updates
First, Let's Kill has shipped. Yesterday I shipped to non-US distributors; today I shipped US distributors. I should qualify that by saying, distributors who got their orders in...I'm still waiting on a couple of folks to give me their numbers. (I think some folks in Europe may be off at that show in Essen right now, and may not have time to figure out their ordering needs until they get back...)
Second, we got word from the shipping company that Homeland Security is finished with the container with the second wave of Unhappy Homes and Gloom. The container has been in the US since September 27th, but Homeland Security apparently likes to select incoming shipping containers at random, set them aside in a warehouse for several weeks, and then charge the people waiting for the cargo an extra fee for having them x-rayed. Now we face the unknown quantity of how long it will take the shipment to travel from the east coast to Minnesota; once here it clears customs and gets delivered to our warehouse. Happily, customs seems to go more smoothly; on the first half of this order we had our goods cleared and delivered the day they rolled into the bonded warehouse in Minneapolis.
Let's Kill is Here!
Truck just arrived and unloaded. Time to pack orders!
True Lineages on RPGNow
Starting this weekend, you can purchase
Houses of Hermes: True Lineages as a PDF from
RPGNow.com. We've sold out of the book in print, and plan to reprint sometime next year, but in the meantime we want to keep it available to
Ars Magica players.
January 2006: Covenants (Ars Magica)
The covenant is the home and the magi and the heart of an Ars Magica saga. Much more than just a base camp, its prosperity determines the power and safety of the characters who live there, and the challenges faced by a covenant shape the whole saga.
This book includes:
- New Boons and Hooks, for a wide range of saga styles;
- Guidance on governance and covenfolk;
- Story-based rules for determining the covenant's wealth;
- Rules for developing libraries and enchanting books; and
- Rules for personalizing and improving a magus's laboratory.
Everything you need to bring your covenant to life is here!
Authors: Timothy Ferguson, Mark Shirley, Andrew Smith, and Neil Taylor
Stock Number: AG0280 |
ISBN: 1-58978-083-3 |
MSRP: $29.95(US)
Format: 144 pages, 8.5" x 11", hardcover
Covenants: An Ars Magica Players' SourcebookShipping to Distributors in January 2006
Well, that was fast
Yesterday afternoon I got a call from one of our distributors, who had realized their order (which we'd shipped Tuesday) was not going to be enough to meet their immediate needs
for Gloom and
Unhappy Homes. Their supplementary order (I guess it's not really a "restock" if they haven't shipped out any of their orders yet) cleans out all I have left on hand of
Unhappy Homes.
As I've mentioned before, the balance of our shipment of Gloom and Unhappy Homes is still on the way, because the printer split our order into two separate containers on account of the back-up of cargo in Mumbai after the monsoons. Its arrival in port was about 10 days behind the first shipment, so my guess is that we should have it in 1-2 weeks. But we're temporarily out of stock...
Also, the majority of Unhappy Homeswas in the first container. The amount still to come only represents about 1/3 of the print run. At this point I have no idea what the reorders for the expansion deck will be like, depending on how well distributors gauged demand when they placed their initial orders. When we do get the balance in stock, it might go quickly.
Our supply of the Gloom card game itself, meanwhile, should be ample for the near term -- through Christmas and beyond, unless demand spikes a lot more than I expect. And if that happens, well, I'll just find some way to live with it. :-)
The Forgotten, and Some Errata Updates
The world of dreams can be a dangerous place.
Occult Lore provides rules for adventuring in dreams and for dealing with the natural manifestations of a dreamer’s psyche. But there are other forces lurking in the nocturnal realms. These include the Forgotten,a fanatical cult who abandoned the material world ages ago to haunt the realms of night. In the waking world their fortress are dust. But they continue to fight an eternal battle, spreading terror and nightmares throughout the world of dreams. Download the out-take on
The Forgotten by Keith Baker, which provides new information for use with Occult Lore!
Also, the errata pages for
Ars Magica 5th Edition and
Cthulhu 500 have been updated, so be sure to check them out!
Urgent Update: Gloom to Arrive Today!
Just got a phone call from our customs brokers. The first
Gloom/Unhappy Homes shipment arrived and has cleared customs; final delivery to our warehouse is being arranged. The games should be at our loading dock this afternoon. I probably will not be able to ship any today, unless the shipment arrives pretty early (our UPS pickup is typically at 3:00 or 3:30), but my plan is to work late into the night so that we can ship it all tomorrow.
Jeff Tidball to Rejoin Atlas Games
This morning I have an exciting announcement: We are hiring
Jeff Tidball; he starts work next Tuesday, October 11th.
Jeff used to work for Atlas, but he left us to pursue an MFA in Screenwriting from the
USC School of Cinema-Television. He then spent time on the staff of
Decipher's Los Angeles office (working as developer of the
Lord of the Rings RPG) and more recently for a mobile phone game company,
Tomo Software. Jeff has continued to work for us on a freelance basis now and again (designing, for example, the Origins Award winner
Cthulhu 500). We're delighted to have him back on board as a full-time employee.
Jeff will be working from his home in Los Angeles. He'll be helping in a couple of areas where we've experienced bottlenecks (such as by taking over my current tasks related to art direction and layout on
Ars Magica books), and he'll be developing and producing new card games and board games.
NOTE FROM MICHELLE: Jeff's biography is now up at
www.atlas-games.com/contact.php.
Status Report: Gloom/Unhappy Homes
I wish I had something definite to say about
Gloom this morning. The ocean freight company says they "released" the first of two shipments of
Gloom and
Unhappy Homes on September 22. The bonded warehouse where it is supposed to be arriving in the Twin Cities hasn't received it yet. It shows up as expected in their system, but they have no tracking data on where exactly it might be. Eleven days (and counting) seems rather long to be in transit from New York to Minnesota, but I can't get anyone to tell me when it will actually arrive on my dock, or where it is right now. In the meantime, I have orders from almost all of our customers, and I've already prepped the paperwork, so -- although the volume of orders is huge (almost all of the
Unhappy Homes that is due to arrive in the first shipment from our printer is already spoken for, and we have purchase orders for more than a quarter of the total print run of the
Gloom reprint already), I should be able to turn around the orders pretty quickly.
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