A game about planning and efficiency. Buy gears, produce mana, and complete orders to become the gnome with the most renown!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
March Post-Campaign Update
17 days ago
– Mon, Mar 03, 2025 at 05:20:04 PM
Spring is (almost) in the air, which means it’s time for our March update! This will be another short one since we are still in the midst of manufacturing, but we have an updated timing estimate from our factory that we’ll be sharing along with a tariff update and recap of our second convention of the year. Read on for more details!
We weren’t able to get the mass production sample in time for this month’s update, but we should be receiving it in about two weeks and will be able to share photos in next month’s update! From there, we expect mass production to finish around the middle of April. It will take approximately two months to get the games to our various fulfillment centers (exact timing will vary a few weeks based on the destination), after which fulfillment will start!
Based on these timelines (and assuming nothing goes horribly wrong between now and then), we should hopefully begin fulfilling around the middle or end of June. Some backers may get their games in June, but it’s likely that most of the games will be delivered in July.
We’re hoping to get the games received in time to bring them to Origins at the end of June (which would mean US orders would be going out at the same time), but the timing will be very tight on that. As of now we’re not going to offer local pickup at the convention since we can’t promise the games will be there on time, but if things change and we’re confident we’ll have the games there we may make that an option for those of you that will be attending Origins.
As we’re sure many of you are aware, there have been blanket tariffs applied to all Chinese imports to the US (which includes Sprocketforge). The tariffs are currently at 10%, but those tariffs are planned to increase to 20% tomorrow (at least as of the time we’re writing this). There have also been threats of levies against Chinese freight ships (and shipping companies who have Chinese ships in their fleet), which would result in even more expense passed on to us.
These are massive incremental expenses that we hadn’t planned for back when this campaign was happening, so we’ve been exploring options behind the scenes since the tariffs were first announced. We’re secretly hoping that the tariffs will be resolved by the time the games ship out, but we also need to be prepared in the event that they aren’t.
We have some options in our back pocket for the time being, and we’ll keep an eye on how things develop over the next month. Rest assured that we'll still deliver your games despite any challenges we face due to the increased cost. We’ll continue to be as transparent as possible as we decide what (if anything) we need to do in order to continue to exist as a company and bring more games to your tables.
We had our second convention of the year already, and it was a blast as always! Con of the North is a local convention here in the Twin Cities and is one of the first public conventions we ever attended, so it holds a special place in our heart. We ran five demos of Sprocketforge and they all went well, with players loving the metal gears. We also ran five demos of one of our upcoming games, Darn Tootin’ (previously known as Final Straw), which went swimmingly.
We had the pleasure of being in the Talking Cardboard room for all of our demos, which was a nice way to connect with other local publishers. Talking Cardboard is a great group of local content creators that cover all things board games, and they even hosted a panel of local industry professionals at the convention. You can watch the panel to see our friends Brendan from Dead Alive Games, Jacob from Games by James, and Peter from Faction Battlegrounds talk about a variety of board game topics.
We have a bit of a break until our next convention, which isn’t until the end of May. See below for the full schedule:
That’s all for now, but we’ll be back in touch next month!
This is Jeremy, Ethan, and Matt, keeping those gears turning…
February Post-Campaign Update
about 1 month ago
– Mon, Feb 03, 2025 at 05:27:04 PM
It’s about that time again! This update will be quite short since we’re in the manufacturing / Chinese New Year lull at the moment, but we do have one exciting reveal - we received the sample of the resin resources, and they look great! We’ll share some pictures of that sample and give a quick recap of Protospiel MN before closing out this month’s update.
Feast your eyes on the sample of the resin resources!
The earth, air, and water resources will be washed to give them some depth, whereas the fire will be unwashed but will have a gradient effect (it looks much better this way vs. being washed, trust us). These pictures don't do them justice!
We’re thrilled with how they came out and can’t wait to see how everything looks in the mass production sample.
Speaking of, right before they went on break for Chinese New Year our factory estimated that we may not receive the mass production sample until March now. We’re pushing them to see if they can get it to us sooner (ideally in time for next month’s update), but we’ll have to see what they say once they return to work.
We should have a better estimate of timelines in next month’s update as well, since we’ve asked our factory for a revised timeline once they get back to us on when the mass production sample will be ready. If that sample is indeed pushed back to March that will almost certainly push delivery back to at least July. We’ll know more once we see the factory’s updated timeline, which we’ll share in next month’s update!
We had our first convention of the year (Protospiel MN) two weeks ago, and it was a blast as always! While Sprocketforge was off the table (literally and figuratively) since this is a prototype-only convention, we got to test out some of our other upcoming games and play lots of amazing games from local designers.
All the games we played were great, with some of my personal favorites including a game by Sprocketforge’s designer (Ananda) that used marbles to make potions, a hidden-movement game about trying to find Bigfoot, a family-friendly card game about bees, a heavier game about putting on a theater production, and a game that used a Chinese checkers board in a creative way.
We’re terrible at taking pictures at conventions, but rest assured that it was a fantastic convention with lots of amazing games and designers. We’re already looking forward to next year!
Our next convention is less than two weeks away, and we look forward to seeing some of you there! See below for our remaining conventions this year:
That’s all for now, but we’ll be back in touch next month!
This is Jeremy, Ethan, and Matt, spinning their heads trying to come up with more gear-related sign-offs…
January Post-Campaign Update
3 months ago
– Fri, Jan 03, 2025 at 03:21:07 PM
We’re back after taking some time off for the holiday, and we hope everyone who celebrates was able to take some time off and spend it with family and friends. This month’s update will be a bit short but has two important sections - one about the pledge manager locking (which means your credit cards will be charged) and the other about the digitally-printed samples we received!
As mentioned last week, we will be charging cards immediately after this campaign update goes out. The charge should appear on your statements as SOPH CERB GAMES or SOPH CERB for the amount that you owed for shipping, taxes (if applicable), and any incremental add-ons you may have selected.
If your payment went through, your job here is done! Now you can sit back, relax, and (if you’re like us) be surprised when the game shows up on your doorstep because you back way too many games and lose track of them.
If, on the other hand, your credit card was declined, fear not! It's typically just your bank being overly cautious. In most cases you just have to call your bank to let them know it's legitimate and they'll remove the hold so it will go through the next time the charge is made (which we have to process manually on our end).
Per BackerKit's suggestion to reduce the number of manual one-offs we have to reprocess, we will be re-trying all failed cards once a week for the next four weeks to give people time to call their banks and remove the holds. Note that if your payment failed because you need to switch to a different card, you can do that by clicking on the "update your payment information" link in the email and it will automatically retry the charge.
If you have any questions or concerns about the payment or anything about the pledge manager, please feel free to leave a comment, send us a message on Kickstarter, or email us at [email protected]. The below article from BackerKit also provides some additional information about the various payment issues that may occur:
For anyone who fills out their survey from this point onward: your order will lock and your card will be charged immediately. Make sure you triple-check everything on your order before submitting, because once the order locks you won’t be able to change the items on your order or modify your pledge.
All backers will be able to update their addresses up until we start shipping the game out, so you don’t have to worry if you plan on moving between now and then - just make sure you keep your address up to date! As we did with the order lock, we will be sure to communicate well in advance of that deadline to remind everyone to double-check their addresses.
In other exciting news, the digitally-printed samples have (mostly) arrived! We received the samples of the base game, mini-expansion, and metal gears but are still waiting on the resin resources. The good news is we already received samples of the resin resources last month and they looked great, they just weren’t colored yet.
The samples that we did receive looked fantastic! Feast your eyes on some pictures of the samples below:
The metal gears! Pictures don't do them justice, but they are nice and chunky.
Example of what each player area will look like mid-game.
Overview of the various cards in the game.
The wooden resources! These are the slightly thicker versions, and they feel much better.
Custom insert (with lid), as is customary with our games.
The new and improved front cover!
Next steps from here are to produce the mass production sample as one last quality check before producing the entire print run. That isn’t expected until February due to Chinese New Year so we likely won't it by the time our next campaign update rolls around in early February, but we’ll see how things unfold!
Things are going to be a bit tight on the June timeframe since the digital samples took longer to get to us than we anticipated, but we built in some padding for these types of situations so we're hopeful things won't be late by much (if at all) in most regions. We'll have a better idea of timing and will continue to provide updates as we get closer to production wrapping up!
Convention season is officially upon us, with our first convention coming up in a couple weeks! See below for our tentative plans for the year:
That’s all for now, but we’ll be back in touch next month!
This is Jeremy, Ethan, and Matt, wishing you smooth rotations in 2025…
Charging Credit Cards Soon!
3 months ago
– Fri, Dec 27, 2024 at 06:31:49 PM
Only one week until surveys lock and credit cards are charged! One week from today (on January 3rd), we will lock surveys (which means you will no longer be able to add or remove items from your order) and charge credit cards (so you will see a charge come through from SOPH CERB GAMES or SOPH CERB).
If you are a Kickstarter backer you will also get an alert from BackerKit 2 days ahead of time (on January 1st). Note for preorder / late pledge backers: your orders will lock on January 1st due to how BackerKit handles late pledges vs. Kickstarter pledges, but you still won’t be charged until January 3rd.
If you have already completed your survey there’s nothing you have to do, this is just an FYI so you know that your cards are about to be charged.
If you’re waiting to fill out your survey until after we charge cards, your order will lock and your card will be charged as soon as you submit your survey (assuming you do it after January 3rd). You will still be able to edit your order before finalizing your survey if you'd like to.
Lastly, you will still be able to edit your address even though we locked orders (up until we begin fulfillment). Just make sure you update your address if you move prior to when we start fulfillment, otherwise your game is going to go to your old address!
That’s it for this update, but we’ll be back on/around January 3rd for our regularly scheduled monthly update!
This is Jeremy, Ethan, and Matt, spinning (gears) in circles…
December Post-Campaign Update
4 months ago
– Tue, Dec 03, 2024 at 05:23:00 PM
Now that we’ve mostly recovered from eating way too much on Thanksgiving, it’s time for our December update! In this month’s edition, we’ll provide a manufacturing and timing update, share a quick reminder about the pledge manager, and show off some new and improved graphic design on the seals and enchantments in the game. Let’s get to it!
We’re pleased to report that the final files were sent over to our manufacturer shortly after last month’s update, so manufacturing is officially in full swing! We’ve since received samples for the upgraded components that were unlocked as part of the stretch goals during the campaign:
The wooden resources were slightly thinner than we wanted, and the earth (gray) resources should’ve been tan instead, but other than that the updated components looked great. We also got samples of the final injection-molded plastic gears, which are very satisfying and smooth to spin:
The next step in the process is to get digitally-printed samples with all the final components (along with our revised custom insert), which our manufacturer is currently producing and hopes to have to us by the middle of the month. Not to be confused with a digital sample, these are physical copies of the game that are printed differently than the final version.
Once we approve the digitally-printed sample they’ll produce a mass production sample, which will be exactly the same as the final version of the game each of you will receive and is the final checkpoint before producing the full order! They expect to have the mass production sample ready by the end of January (due to Chinese New Year) and complete mass production by the end of March.
Freight shipping will take about a month and a half (which will vary a bit by region), and then games will start shipping out from our fulfillment partners after that! We’ll be a bit tight on the June timeframe but are hopeful we’ll be able to get most shipments out by the end of June.
As always, we’ll keep you posted with monthly updates for the time being and will provide one-off updates as we approach final fulfillment next year.
Quick reminder to fill out the pledge manager if you haven’t already - about 10% of backers still need to complete the survey. If you don’t complete the survey you won’t get your game since we won’t know where to ship it!
If you can’t find your survey or didn’t receive an email, you can look it up by entering in your Kickstarter email address at this link. As a reminder, we have step-by-step instructions available on our website in case you aren’t familiar with how a pledge manager works.
We will be locking orders and charging cards on January 3rd after we send out the January campaign update. If you have already completed your survey, this means you won’t be able to make changes to your order after this date unless you contact us. You will still be able to update your address until we lock addresses, which won’t be until right before we begin fulfillment.
As we continued playtesting during the campaign, we realized that the enchantments and seals could use a bit of a redesign to make it clearer when a given sector on a seal was triggered vs. when it wasn’t. For context for those who haven’t played the game, seals are hexagonal pieces you’re able to add to your gears to increase your production.
With the old design, a seal sector was triggered when there was a white border connected to the sector of the enchantment it was in. In this example, the seal (bronze hexagon in the center) would activate in the bottom three positions since there were white spaces around the edge of those spaces:
With the new design, the seal and enchantment sectors are “physically” connected so it is much clearer which sectors trigger when. The example seal shown below would also trigger in the three bottom sectors, which are connected to their respective sectors on the enchantment. The top three sectors are clearly not connected and therefore have no effect:
We’ve heard that the revised version is much easier to understand and makes it clearer to know when a given sector is triggered, which is great to hear since that was the main reason we made the change. We’re excited to see how it comes to life once we get the digitally-printed samples later this month!
Our tentative schedule for next year is below for reference, but please note that this is subject to change:
