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:
June Post-Campaign Update
10 months ago
– Tue, Jun 03, 2025 at 07:05:11 PM
Summer is officially in the air, and with that comes news of Sprocketforge fulfillment! We’ll have a lot of important fulfillment news in this update (including address locks and estimated timing) so make sure you take time to read through and check on the status of fulfillment in your region. We’ll also include a quick recap of Protospiel Twin Cities, which took place this weekend and was as enjoyable as ever.
As mentioned in our last campaign update, Chinese tariffs were recently reduced to 30% for a 90-day period. There was also news of a court ruling that declared the tariffs to be unjust, but that ruling was quickly appealed and put on hold for the time being. We’re hopeful that this ruling will ultimately prevail, but for the time being we’re still at 30%.
Assuming the 30% rate holds or decreases, our plan is still to import our US shipment immediately after it lands at our Canadian warehouse. As a reminder, we made the decision to ship our US inventory to Canada while tariffs were still at 145% so we could get it closer to the US and ship it more quickly once tariffs were reduced (which just so happened the day our shipment was picked up from our factory in China). We will not require backers to pay for the tariffs but welcome optional donations for those who are willing and able.
The address lock will be initiated for UK/EU/ROW and Canadian backers right after this update is sent out. US backers will have their address lock initiated two weeks from today (June 17th).
Once we initiate the address lock, you will receive an email from [email protected] with the title “Last call to update your shipping address for Sprocketforge: A Gear-Turning Engine Builder!” It will include your address and phone number in the email, along with a link to your survey in case you need to update your address. Your address will be locked 48 hours after this email goes out, so make sure you update right away!
We mentioned this in an earlier update, but it is worth repeating: if your survey is not completed or your payment has not gone through by those dates, you will not be included in the cutoff for the first (and primary) wave of fulfillment so your game will be delayed! This means that any UK/EU/ROW or Canadian backers who haven't finalized their survey yet have missed the cutoff and will be included in the second wave. US backers still have two weeks to complete their surveys.
It’s time to get into the fun fulfillment details by region! See below for details in your region:
US/Canada
This shipment is on the VIENNA EXPRESS, which is expected to land at the Canadian port on June 7th. It is expected to arrive at Pick & Pack (our Canadian warehouse) approximately 2 weeks after that. Pick & Pack will unload the container, take their inventory, and ship the rest of the container down to our US warehouse. They expect that process to take approximately a week.
Canadian fulfillment should begin in late June, whereas US fulfillment will likely begin in July. We’ll provide more details in next month’s update (or earlier if there is a major development).
UK/EU/ROW
This shipment is on the CMA CGM KERGUELEN, which is expected to arrive in the UK tomorrow (or today if it’s already June 4th where you are). It will take around 2 weeks for it to be delivered to Spiral Galaxy, and they expect to begin shipping to backers within 2 weeks of receipt. As such, UK/EU/ROW fulfillment should begin in late June or early July.
Asia/Australia
VFI began shipping to some of their hubs last month already. As a reminder, you can view updated status of their shipments on their website. See below for the current status, noting that “In Consolidation” means they are currently waiting for there to be enough product from other campaigns to consolidate and ship together. Once they have enough inventory they’ll get a shipment sent to the respective hub for fulfillment:
Local Pickup (MN/WI)
Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about our local pickup backers! Our current plan is to ship extra inventory to Gen Con and bring that home with us. As such, local pickup is planned to occur in early August once we’re back from Gen Con and have the inventory.
There is a chance we might be able to have them ship some inventory to us prior to Gen Con so we can do local pickup sooner (late July), but our distributor is in the process of changing warehouses so things are a bit chaotic at the moment. Keep an eye on your email, as we’ll be sharing more details/dates on that in next month’s campaign update once we know more.
Our first backer hangout for those of you who contributed to the $25 tariff fund is coming up on Sunday, June 8th at 12 PM US Central Time. Details were included in the ZIP file you received when you completed your order, but we’ll plan on sending a reminder email out ahead of time as well.
We attended Protospiel Twin Cities this past weekend and had a blast (as always). We unfortunately also forgot to take pictures (as always). Nonetheless, we got in playtests of all four (yes, four) of our upcoming games, including some that have yet to be announced. We also played a ton of other great games from our local designer friends, including games about who can have the loudest farts, a set of Christmas-themed games, and a game with a unique skill tree / ability builder.
As a reminder, we unfortunately won’t be attending Origins this year. We will, however, still be attending Gen Con! In fact, the BGG Gen Con preview just went live yesterday and we’d appreciate a thumbs up if you’re interested in checking Sprocketforge out!
Speaking of Gen Con, we officially have our booth number! We’ll be at booth 2539, not too far from the Family Fun Pavilion and the entrance to Hall F. We look forward to seeing everyone there, and we’re hopeful that we’ll have some shiny new copies of Sprocketforge to sell!
That’s all for now, but we’ll be back in touch next month (or earlier if we have some important fulfillment updates)!
This is Jeremy, Ethan, and Matt, wishing you smooth rotations…
Mini Tariff Update
11 months ago
– Tue, May 13, 2025 at 05:56:09 PM
We wanted to provide a quick update on where we’re at given yesterday’s tariff news. For those who missed it, tariffs on Chinese imports have been reduced to 30% for a 90-day period. This is still 30% more than it was at the start of the year, but we’ll take 30% over 145% any day! With that, we have good news and bad news.
The good news is that 30% is low enough for us to absorb (special thanks once again to those of you who donated to our tariff fund), so the plan is to get inventory into the US and begin fulfilling as soon as we’re able to!
The bad news is that we had already made the decision to ship the inventory to Canada and it was too late to reroute the shipment by the time we heard the news yesterday. In other words, all of our US/Canadian inventory was already packed up and heading to Canada. See below for a picture of just how full the container is:
Had we known about the reduction a couple days earlier we may have been able to reroute the shipment, but the booking had already been in place for well over a week by the time the news broke. As such, the shipment had already been picked up from our manufacturer and was at the port by the time we got in touch with our freight forwarder. We’ll have more timing in our next campaign update at the start of June, but the ship is currently set to sail out tomorrow so things are in motion!
TLDR: lower tariffs are fantastic and will allow us to get the inventory into the US, but it has to be received at our Canadian warehouse first before we transfer it to our US warehouse. The good news is those warehouses are only 5 hours apart, so that process won’t take long and we won’t lose much time!
More details to come in our next update, but we wanted to send something out now given the news on tariffs.
This is Jeremy, Ethan, and Matt, turning the gears of industry…
May Post-Campaign Update
11 months ago
– Sat, May 03, 2025 at 02:06:03 PM
We’re back for our regularly-scheduled update! We have some new details on our tariff plan / US and Canadian inventory, tariff donation rewards, fulfillment updates for the UK, EU, Asia, and Australia, and an update on the future of Sophisticated Cerberus Games. There’s a lot of great info no matter where you live, so don’t miss out!
We’ve had some more time to weigh the pros and cons of our various tariff plans and have decided the best move at the moment is to ship our US and Canadian inventory to Canada instead of the US. This has the benefit of getting Canadian backers their games sooner while also getting the inventory significantly closer to the US.
If/when the tariff situation calms down, we can quickly ship the games from Canada to the US and begin fulfillment. We expect a massive rush on shipping containers and boats from China once tariffs lift, so this will also get us ahead of the game (literally and figuratively) and avoid what will likely be a surge in pricing and lack of capacity similar to what we saw during COVID.
We’ll have a better estimate on timing in next month’s campaign update, but we have already made the booking request to our freight forwarder so we’re hoping the shipment will be picked up soon. We’ll begin Canadian fulfillment as soon as our Canadian warehouse (Pick & Pack) receives the shipment, whereas US fulfillment will depend on the tariff situation at the time the inventory lands. Needless to say, we’ll continue to keep a very close eye on how the tariff situation develops.
Speaking of tariffs, thanks once again to everyone who contributed to the optional tariff donations. We’re pleased to announce that the tariff rewards have all been created and will be distributed to supporters shortly after this update goes out!
Anyone who contributed five or more dollars will receive an email from BackerKit titled something along the lines of “New Digital Content for Sprocketforge” that contains a download for a ZIP file. The ZIP file will contain the reward(s) for your respective level, along with a “Read Me” document that has instructions on how to use the file(s). For those who chose the $25 publisher hangout option, the dates and details for the hangouts are included in the "Read Me" file.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any issues accessing your rewards or using the files - we’ll be happy to help!
In case you have no idea what we're talking about, here’s a quick recap: we announced an optional way for backers to contribute some funds towards our impending tariff expense in our April campaign update. As a token of our appreciation for anyone who contributes, we’re offering small rewards at each level. Each level includes all of the rewards from the prior levels as well:
Not to fear if you missed this - the rewards should automatically be sent out for new donations going forward. We will also refund the donations on the off-chance tariffs are completely removed, but you get to keep the rewards either way!
Time for a fulfillment update! The Asia/Australia inventory has been received at VFI, addresses have been locked and sent to VFI, and we’ve paid for the shipment so Asian and Australian orders should start shipping soon.
Keep in mind that VFI typically ships from their warehouse to a local warehouse or retailer in your country who then ships the game to you, so it will still be a little while before you get your games. You can check the status of your country’s shipment on VFI’s website, as shown below:
The UK/EU shipment was picked up last week and is currently expected to arrive at the UK port in early June. It will take a week or two to get from the port to Spiral Galaxy, who said they expect to begin fulfillment a week or two after it arrives at their warehouse. Putting that all together, UK/EU fulfillment will likely begin at the very end of June or the beginning of July. We currently plan to begin locking UK/EU addresses immediately after our June campaign update (a month from today) but may start the process a bit sooner if the ship arrives early.
For those of you who like to nerd out and track your game, the UK/EU shipment is on the CMA CGM KERGUELEN. The ship is currently on its way to Morocco, after which it will head north towards the UK.
While the tariff situation has been quite the upheaval and has caused a lot of angst and stress here at Sophisticated Cerberus, we love board games (and our second jobs as publishers) too much to throw in the towel. As mentioned in our last update, we had to make some difficult decisions to ensure we can continue operating and hopefully release more games in the future.
We already announced that we are cancelling our attendance at Origins this year, and today we’re announcing that we are officially delaying development of Deathveil, the upcoming expansion of The Stifling Dark that we were hoping to launch around Halloween of this year. We don’t have an updated launch date yet but will share that once we’re able to lock it in.
Not all hope is lost though! We will still be attending Gen Con and are holding out hope we’ll be able to have Sprocketforge here in time. We are also shifting our development focus to a game we signed last year but haven’t announced yet. This game’s artwork is already done, will be substantially cheaper to produce than Deathveil, and is much farther along in the development process.
We’ll be sharing a sneak peek of that game tomorrow, so keep an eye out on social media (Facebook, Instagram, X, and Bluesky) to get a taste of what we've been stirring up!
Our convention schedule for the remainder of the year is a bit shorter since we won’t be attending Origins, but we still have a local Protospiel and Gen Con to look forward to!
That’s all for now, but we’ll be back in touch next month!
This is Jeremy, Ethan, and Matt, always grinding forward…
Tariff and Fulfillment Update
12 months ago
– Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 07:07:05 PM
As promised in our last update, we wanted to send out an off-cycle update now that we’ve had two weeks to wait out the tariff situation. Read on for details on our tariff plan, fulfillment updates, and a convention update.
First off, we want to thank everyone who contributed to the optional tariff donations we introduced in our most recent update. Every little bit helps as we prepare to deal with whatever the tariff situation ends up looking like. We forgot to mention this in the last update, but if tariffs go down to 0% we will refund 100% of all donations we received since they will no longer be necessary.
We had secretly hoped that the tariffs would’ve been rescinded by now, but instead they’ve increased to the exorbitant rate of 145%. Seeing as they are almost three times higher than two weeks ago, we have no choice but to continue waiting since we can’t afford to pay 145% tariffs on our US imports. That’s the equivalent of 1.5 more print runs and getting absolutely nothing for it.
The only potential “good” news is that things have been changing at a moment’s notice, so for all we know things could improve soon (although that’s definitely the optimist in us speaking). Until then, we unfortunately have to sit tight and try to wait it out.
We don’t expect tariffs to go back down to 0%, but we’re hoping they get back down to the 10-20% range before we ship things out. We do have an alternate option if things never get better, but we need to give it some time before going that route since it is far from ideal.
Rest assured: manufacturing is complete and we will get the US and Canadian orders delivered one way or another! We just ask for some patience for a bit while we wait things out and hope for the best.
If you’re not in the US or Canada, we have some actual good news! The UK/EU/ROW shipment to Spiral Galaxy is departing this week and is currently expected to be received in early or mid June, with fulfillment beginning shortly thereafter. The Asia/Australia shipment will be received at VFI soon, and as such we’ll begin the process of locking Asia/Australian backers’ addresses immediately after this campaign update is sent out.
You will receive an email from BackerKit asking you to confirm your address and will have 48 hours to do so before it is locked in, so please keep an eye on your email and make sure your address is updated.
The address locking process is very important: if your survey is not completed or your payment has not gone through by the time addresses lock in your region, you will not be included in the cutoff for the first (and primary) wave of fulfillment so your game will be delayed!
Note that you do not have to wait for the address lock notice to update your address if you have moved! You can always go to https://sprocketforge.backerkit.com/ at any time to update your address.
We will give updated timing on when we expect to lock UK/EU/ROW addresses once we have a better ETA of when the inventory will land. US/CA addresses will not be locked for a while yet since we’ll wait until the boat is on the water to start that process.
As part of our tariff contingency plan, we made the difficult decision to cancel our attendance at Origins this year. Our reasoning was two-fold. First, we need to save as much money as possible for the impending tariff bill and conventions are one of our biggest expenses (booth, housing, travel, shipping, etc.). Second, Sprocketforge won’t make it here on time so we won’t have that incremental revenue to help offset the cost of attending / the cost of the tariffs.
Conventions are always the highlights of our year since we get to see many of you in person and share our games with new attendees, but the reality of the situation is that we just couldn’t afford to attend this year knowing that we will likely have some sort of tariff expense coming down the road. We still plan on attending Gen Con regardless but are sincerely hoping the tariff situation is resolved before then so we can have Sprocketforge available.
That’s all we have for now! Our next planned update will still be on or around May 3rd, although we’ll likely do another off-cycle update if the tariff situation improves before then and we get the US shipment moving.
This is Jeremy, Ethan, and Matt, hoping that tariffs do a 180…
April Post-Campaign Update
about 1 year ago
– Thu, Apr 03, 2025 at 06:39:27 PM
Spring is officially in the air, at least as much as it can be this time of year. We went from 80 degrees on Friday to 35 and snowing on Saturday, which is the epitome of Minnesota during early spring. Anyways, on to the details! We have a couple of updates this month, most notably around mass production and everyone’s favorite topic: tariffs (including an optional way to help offset the cost if you'd like). Let’s get to it!
We received the mass production sample on schedule and everything looked great!
The whole package!
There weren’t any changes we made based on the digitally-printed sample other than improving the packaging for the metal gears, which are now shrink wrapped and packed much more tightly:
The beloved foam roll
Shrink wrapped nice and tight
There was a slight issue with the insert shrinking more than expected with the mass production sample, but LongPack resolved that issue within a couple days (while the rest of the sample was on its way to us) so we didn’t lose any time there. After a minor tweak the insert was ready to roll!
The custom insert, sans lid
The insert has three card wells, slots on the right-hand side for the enchantment and seal tokens, plenty of storage in the middle for the resources, and slots for the gears at the top. The factory boards and player aids sit on top of the cards and resources, and there is a lid to keep things held in place.
We’re currently going through safety testing and finishing the rest of the mass production run, which is still expected to complete in mid-April. Up until yesterday's tariff announcement, there were no changes to expected timing from last update, which was that US and UK shipments were expected to arrive around mid-June with our Canadian shipment following after since it is being sent from our US warehouse once it’s received there. The US (and by extension Canadian) timelines are now at risk based on yesterday's tariff announcements. More on that shortly.
Asia backers will likely be the first to receive their product since we’ll be fulfilling from VFI. Australia will be a bit after Asia since we’ll be shipping from VFI to Australia before fulfilling. Some backers may receive their games in June, but it’s likely that most will be in July (again, US and Canada may change due to the tariff situation).
We currently expect to lock addresses for most backers sometime in May once the boats are on their way, but we’ll provide more specific details on that in our next campaign update. Asian backers may have their addresses locked prior to May depending on how quickly VFI receives their shipment, but you will receive a notice on BackerKit before they fully lock. Speaking of boats shipping out…
We had this whole section written up and ready to go yesterday morning and had to rewrite the entire thing after yesterday's announcements. For those who haven't heard, tariffs on Chinese imports are increasing from 20% to 54% next Wednesday. Yes, you read that correctly - tariffs are now 54%. As if that wasn't bad enough, there is a 25% tariff on countries that import Venezuelan oil that could go into effect at any time. Any guesses as to what country is on that list? If you guessed China, you'd be correct! That would increase tariffs to an unimaginable 79%.
Our original plan went completely out the window due to this unprecedented increase. We are now looking into other options (such as holding the US/Canada inventory back in China for a bit and hoping things calm down, only shipping a small amount of inventory to fulfill backer orders and holding our distribution/convention stock back and hoping things calm down, etc.) but need more time to evaluate the pros and cons of each option before deciding.
Had this happened while the campaign was still live (or before it launched) we simply would've updated the US price accordingly and been fine. The issue is that this happened after the campaign and pledge manager had already closed, literally a week before manufacturing wraps up and shipping was about to begin (and there was basically no notice or rationale behind the change).
We will send out a one-off campaign update once we've decided our plan of attack for the US and Canada inventory. To be clear: this does not affect fulfillment in the rest of the world. It does unfortunately affect Canada since we consolidate our US and Canadian shipments together to reduce freight costs. We then ship the Canadian product up to Canada once it arrives at our US warehouse. To our northernly neighbors: we apologize.
While our plan to mitigate the tariffs isn't fully clear yet, what is clear is that we cannot afford to eat the entire cost of the tariffs. With tariffs climbing to 54% we are looking at over $25k of incremental and unplanned expense. In the interest of transparency, the actual tariff cost for a base pledge comes out to around $5 and the actual tariff cost for an all-in pledge comes out to around $25 (the metal gears are quite expensive to produce).
We greatly appreciate the support from those of you who reached out or commented on our last update regarding the US tariff situation and offered to help offset the cost. As part of our mitigation strategy we wanted to ensure we had an optional way for people to do that. For those who are willing and able, you can go to our Sprocketforge webstore and “buy” one of the tariff support items at the bottom of the page if you want to contribute.
This is by no means required, but we sincerely appreciate any support you’re able to provide. As a token of our appreciation for anyone who contributes, we’re offering small rewards at each level. Each level includes all of the rewards from the prior levels as well:
Again, this is entirely optional but we wanted to at least give something back to anyone who is willing and able to contribute, and every little bit helps. We’re still working on the actual rewards so those won’t be available immediately, but they will be shared with you via email once they are ready (likely around the time of next month’s campaign update).
We have a bit of a break until our next convention, which isn’t until the end of May. That said, we are pleased to share that we’ll be in the exact same booth as last year at Origins: booth 921, right in the middle of the hall! See below for the full schedule:
