On to Logistics
6 months ago
– Wed, Oct 01, 2025 at 08:56:21 AM
For the rest of the production and fulfillment period we will be posting an update on the first of each month going over where we are at in the process, what we are working on, and what is still ahead.
As of the end of the campaign we are in very good shape to get our portion of the project finished and uploaded to Panda ahead of schedule. We will do one last pass of everything to catch anything we may have missed design-wise.
The biggest consideration right now is making sure all of our localization partners have what they need to complete their files within the timeline. We’ve shared all of the design files with them, with the base game files being shared in mid-August at the latest, and the expansion files being complete and shared before the end of September. We’ve communicated costs so they can approve the final volume they want to order, which will allow us to settle on our final quote with Panda and start the payment process.
The full project, including all localized versions, needs to be uploaded to Panda before any production can begin so that’s our top priority at the moment.
Once all files are uploaded and our deposit is paid the production process will begin.
We’re also working on getting the Pledge Manager set up on Backerkit.
Again, thank you everyone for the support,
Kevin & Jacob
Chugging along and Canadian shipping update
6 months ago
– Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 10:02:40 AM
We’ve spent the last week behind the scenes getting our expansion files completed and shared with our localization partners to make sure they have enough time to translate and return the files to us by the start of our production timeline. (Reminder, we have partnered with five companies to translate both the base game and expansion into Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese, more on that here. Those versions are not part of this campaign, we can only offer the English version. If you prefer one of those languages please keep an eye out for the companies to open up pre-orders as that will be the best way to get them.)
Tim, one of our playtesters, posted a review of the expansion content on BGG.
And finally, we have an update for our current and potential Canadian backers. We have connected with Board Game Bliss and worked out how Canadian friendly fulfillment will work. We’ve updated the shipping table to reflect the expected rates for backers and we’ve added the ‘Canada-Friendly Shipping’ badge to that section.
Thanks so much for your support as we head into the final week of the campaign!
Kevin & Jacob
It’s been (almost) one week
6 months ago
– Mon, Sep 15, 2025 at 10:06:43 AM
We have been live for 6 days and the support has been incredible. We have surpassed our original Railways of the Lost Atlas Kickstarter and we have 15 days left!
We don’t have a lot of news to go over today but a few things we wanted to share.
Two recent written reviews on BGG from Jay Cat Five and Chris Shaffer (who lead one of our playtest groups). Check them out!
We did want to highlight in case our messaging was not clear enough, the reward tiers on this Kickstarter are the exclusive price - once the pledge manager opens we will be moving to the retail price which will be $45 for the expansion and $90 for the base game. We just want to make sure anyone who definitely wants it during this campaign is not surprised!
We are working on Canada friendly shipping, we will report back once we have a plan in place.
If you are local to us in Minnesota - we will be at 18North in November. This is the inaugural run of this event and we are looking forward to it!
Last update it was requested that we show and discuss some of our playtesting changes for this expansion, how the internal prototype morphed into what we are planning to manufacture once this campaign ends. That’s a fun topic so read on if it interests you too.
Our approach to prototyping and playtesting is to put together a nice prototype with near final components but quite a bit of wiggle room for changes, and even some aspects we know will change once new groups start playing. In this expansion we had our eye on a few landmarks that we thought needed work, and we needed more eyes on the Metropolitan Transit Department to bring it to its final state. We also knew at the time that Coupling was the least powerful of the four new Minors, but we didn’t know if it would be seen as too underpowered (spoiler alert, it was). We are hoping to do a more in-depth designer diary at some point so this is more of a hit-the-high-points look.
Metropolitan Transit Department - Playtesters called-out that the Met shares were consistently better than everything else in the later stages of Long games because they continued to upgrade their trains with no obligations or setbacks. The train limit was adjusted to mirror Minor Companies which solved most of those issues. Later in testing we settled on the final form that is subject to rusting and negative earnings are paid by shareholders rather than being carried over to the next OR. This gives the Met a more integrated feel and allows a player with just a couple shares to have a bigger impact on others who may have over-invested in it (though it takes some work to keep earnings negative, we like the possibility).
Coupling Company - Going into prototype production we knew Coupling, with its ability to link trains together to run as a single big train, was the lowest performing Minor but we liked the flavor a lot and the other options we brainstormed and playtested didn’t have that quality. So playtesters got their hands on it and got to work. Initial feedback was fairly neutral but as more games were played they noticed the same thing we did. The main problem was that making its ability useful meant building a map where it was already at a disadvantage because if a Company is near a Capital or Distant Destination they would rather run that twice with two trains than link together to run further for less money. It needed a boost to close the gap with the other Minors.
The initial suggestion from playtesters was to allow it to also split trains into multiple smaller trains, while we tossed in the idea of being able to run/build through Distant Destinations as an option. In the end it was decided that the Distant Destination ability felt too disparate and would work better as a standalone Minor for any potential future development of the game, but at the same time allowing splits of multiple trains was too powerful in the mid-late game. One of our players suggested allowing the split while it has a single train rather than all the time and that made all the difference. It simplified the rules and toned down the split ability just enough to be powerful and useful but not overwhelming for the player running it.
Landmarks - A few landmarks were adjusted during testing:
Void originally allowed two teleports and used tokens to track them. This was both a rules and analysis paralysis beast in addition to often being game warping (kind of flavorful but not what we were aiming for). So we landed on the very simple solution of limiting trips through the wormhole to once per Co/Corp per OR and it feels more balanced and special now.
The art for Grand Junction has gone through a couple changes. Here’s the original version before we uploaded files to Panda:
It works, but… this is a family game. So we made suggestions for an update:
Much better, more dynamic. The building supports looking like track continuations caused some confusion during testing (every entrance/exit is able to connect to every other entrance/exit without any shared track, so you can go in one and come out from the one right next to it within the normal route tracing rules). So this is the final version:
Cleaner, easier to understand at first glance, might still confuse some people so hopefully the written rules clear that up. Flavor-wise, there’s a big Rube Goldberg machine in the middle that flips and spins the trains around to the exit they want.
Wildflower Valley is meant to be a pleasant detour that passengers pay a bit extra to ride through. We originally had it be a very restricted tile with only two entrance points:
The only change we were considering on this one was a change to the access points. The main issue we had was that the tile was difficult to place during map building a little too often. Sometimes it dropped into a perfect spot, bridging two peninsulas together beautifully, others you had to work to integrate it after placement just to make it accessible. We made the decision to update the tracks towards the end of playtesting and we’re really happy with this version:
We made a small adjustment to the colors and texture as well to bring it closer to the other landmarks.
Events - We love events and may not ever play another game of Railways without including them. That’s not true for all groups and we get that. The feedback we got was either, “these are fun and not too warping” or, “we aren’t really interested in trying these, do we have to?”
The main suggestion we got was to offer an alternative way to play them where the event stack is face-up and players can plan ahead. We didn’t end up including that in the rulebook but that’s a totally valid middle-ground to include them in your games without any variance.
We identified a couple Events that weren’t really pulling their weight and decided to repurpose their slots in the card files into new Distant Destination revenue cards that will be more widely used.
That’s it for this week, thanks so much for reading!
Kevin & Jacob
