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Envelopes of Cash: The College Football Recruiting Game

Created by Envelopes of Cash by Andy Schwarz

A Euro-style board game where players use impermissible payments to recruit elite college football athletes to maximize star points.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

short but important update (and heartful thanks)
over 2 years ago – Mon, May 02, 2022 at 06:03:07 AM

I had hoped to bundle this news with more artwork but that artwork remains TBD, so rather than keep delaying the great news, I did want to tell you all that we're well past the $25,000 threshold so we've unlocked the second stretch goal.  A giant thank you to all of you, both the OG backers from March but also to the flood of newcomers from the last week.  It's been incredibly gratifying to see the influx of new names on the backer list.  For new folks, if you're interested in behind the scenes stuff, I'd recommend reading through the back issues of these updates, which are on the Kickstarter page.

When the artwork update is ready, I'll pop back into your inboxes, but for now I did just want to share the good news that everyone's game will include the Recruiting Board objective cards as a standard part of the game as released on day 1.  Huzzah!  and THANK YOU.

checking off the boxes!

Always be Crootin,

Andy

It's the final countdown ... dodo doodoo
over 2 years ago – Sat, Apr 30, 2022 at 12:49:04 PM

A very happy Saturday and final day of April to you all. This is Andy, and I have a fairly big update for you today, covering a range of subjects.

In terms of the campaign itself, as you probably know, we have less than a week left until the Kickstarter draws to a close (we close at 5:34pm Pacific time on May 4), so we are smack-dab in the long-promised Final Marketing Push™. So far it has been very successful, with the anticipated spike beginning more-or-less seven days from the end of the campaign.

You can’t tell from that chart but as I write this at 6am on Saturday morning, we’re just $270 short of unlocking the second stretch goal. If you’d asked me to place a bet on Monday whether we’d get there or not, I would not have accepted even odds. Now I think it’s almost certainly going to happen. Which is great for you, the backers as it makes the game more fun and also makes it just a little easier to deal with the “what do I do” problem on the first time anyone plays. I won’t re-explain what the second stretch reward is, but for the many new backers, you can read more about it in this previous update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/envelopesofcash/envelopes-of-cash/posts/3486326 (scroll down just past the Oil Baron alum with the photo of my very handsome father next to it). Plus Melodi told me the other day that she realized a common theme in what she likes in a game is if it has this feature. And so having something my wife likes in the game is a big win for me, personally.

Logistics: On Friday, I had a meeting with Funagain Logistics, and we agreed that yes, they will be the official fulfillment partner of Envelopes of Cash. They will be responsible for taking possession of the games at the port of Ningbo (where Gameland, the manufacturer, will deliver them “F.O.B.”) and essentially freighting them to Medford, Oregon, where Funagain has a warehouse. This would include all of the rigmarole involved in clearing U.S. customs, paying tariffs and also port fees, getting them onto a truck out of the port (probably Oakland, Vancouver, or Seattle) and then driving them to Oregon. If they do come in through Oakland, I might ask if I can see them before they head north, but not sure if they can crack open a palette like that. Oh, and for those who are curious, Funagain told me the full order of 500 games will likely take up four cubic meters, which will likely fit into two palettes.

Funagain will be the ones who ship the games to individual backers. For Backers in Asia or Oceania, I will do my best to see if we can avoid having the games go from China to Oregon and then back to, say, Japan or Australia, but that’s some of what I will be working out as the game gets closer to production.

[Note that for those of you who either purchased posters or adopted cards and are getting a free poster with that adoption, I will be handling the poster shipping myself. We will print the posters domestically and thus have them on hand much sooner than the games themselves are available, so you should have those sometime around the start of the college football season.]

Artwork: Miah and Rese got through a test run of all of the games tokens for the prototype sets I am sending to game reviewers, and with a single exception, everything looks great. The exception is that the green envelopes accidentally got omitted from the token sheets, and I (Andy) did not notice until after they’d gone to the printer and were mailed to him. I have no one to blame but myself because my job was the QC and I missed it completely. Thankfully, I’d arranged for a secondary supplier to provide some additional prototype tokens, on the theory that the first supplier might get delayed, and that second supplier agreed to add a sheet of 100% green tokens to the order. Those are arriving next week, so the copies I sent out last week, which had 5 beautiful sets of colored envelopes, and then one “runt of the litter” set of tokens with hand-applied stickers to turn them into green envelopes, will be sent a replacement batch. And the new prototype sets going out next week will include these replacement tokens so the token drama should finally be in the rearview mirror.

The silver lining here is that this major “oops” happened on our test run of 15 prototypes and not on the full set of 500!

Despite that whole token megillah, tokens have not been Miah and Rese’s primary focus though, since that order went in some time ago. Rather, they’ve been working on the illustrations on cards, with the soft goal of having almost all of the cards with some sort of “faceless” art by the time the campaign closes on May 4, to then allow the team to focus on adding faces – either those of the adopters of specific cards or more generic ones for the “orphan” cards that remain unadopted. It will not be too late to adopt a card during the Pledge Manager phase of the campaign, but beyond that, the art will have to be set in stone so Gameland can actually begin printing the cards. So if you’re considering an adoption, or know someone who is, Tempus Fugit.

As for those faceless versions of the cards, they have been progressing nicely too, with Rese doing a major push on them just prior to her resuming classes at school this month. Here are a few of those illustrations – I don’t think I’ve shared any of these before (but if I have, let’s blame it on my age, my excitement for the campaign’s success, and my age. Oh and did I mention I’ve started forgetting things at my advanced age?)

Playing the Angles
Color Commentator Alum
National Alumni Base
Ties to an Advertising Agency

Online Update: I was able to squeeze in the time to update both online platforms on which you can play EoC for free to include all the latest card updates. The links are below.

Tabletopia: https://tabletopia.com/games/envelopes-of-cash-eh978h/play-now

Tabletop Simulator: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2715972217

Also available is Tabletopia Solo: https://tabletopia.com/games/envelopes-of-cash-rtwxks/play-now

If you are not hip to how to use these platforms at all, starting with Tabletopia is (to my mind) easier. I’m able to help backers get started, just ping me, but if you want a full tutorial on the game, that takes a bit longer. There is an add-on available in the Kickstarter options. I also sometimes announce on twitter when I have some openings for a slot or two in a teaching session, and indeed, I probably have 1 or 2 slots for a session on Sunday, May 1 at 2pm Pacific. If you’re interested in meeting a couple of strangers and learning/playing the game together online, send me a email at [email protected], or just message me through the Kickstarter system.

I hope to have a second update this weekend, with some more exciting news, but I am going to leave you in suspense on that for now. However, I will remind you (or inform all the newcomers for the first time) that you should Always Be Crootin!

Andy

Illustrations and the Illustration process
over 2 years ago – Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 05:24:25 PM

Today I am really excited to share some new artwork with you and to let you all in on how the illustration process works here in EoC World. Both of our Illustrators, Miah Rose Serdone and their assistant, Therese Ureta, live in Manila, Philippines, and our collaboration is mediated by the time difference. However, while Therese, or Rese as we call her, keeps fairly normal hours, Miah is a night owl and so thier prime working time overlaps more than you might think with early-bird Andy. They are technically working together on different days, sometimes, as it will be after midnight on, say Thursday in Manila and mid-day Wednesday in the East Bay in California where Andy is, but it works.

In any case, Miah is hard at work right now on the much-anticipated box cover. That is not quite ready to be revealed, but in the meantime, I did want to share some of Rese’s great work as she has been diligently working on the composition of some of the remaining cards, including the Head Coach cards now that we’ve unlocked that Stretch Goal.

The process for illustrating a card begins with Andy spewing a lot of thoughts about what the theme of a card means. Regular readers of these updates (or of any of Andy’s prose) know that word-spewing is one of his real talents. Andy then tries to upload as many pictures from his google searches as he can find to capture the image he’s trying to explain. The next step is that Rese does a sketch of the composition typically without any facial features or detail, and then works with both Miah and Andy to make sure the colors work – Miah for artistic color issues and Andy just to make sure there isn’t a game-related (or football related) reason a certain color is a problem. One example lately was that one of our cards was adopted by a Texas A&M fan who specifically asked for some of the coloring to reflect that, but Rese’s first draft used Burnt Orange. Obviously, Andy had to step in and override that choice for customer-service reasons!

I just love looking at Rece’s work in this intermediate state and so I had to do another update to share with you six examples she sent to Miah and me yesterday. The  first three are from regular cards, Accounting Wizard (this one was from earlier, but she revised it slightly), Hire Recruits Relatives, and my favorite of this batch, Small Buyout Clause. I love the slump in this coach’s shoulders as he's being shown the door.

Accounting Wizard, Hire Recruits Relatives, and Small Buyout Clause. All available for Adoption still.

The other three are super-exiting as well because they are brand new concepts, representing three of the twelve Head Coach cards. I am not going to show you the art for the ones that have been Adopted, because the Adopters have paid for the right to be involved in that process and get some say in what things look like, but here are three unadopted cards (though of course, you can always upgrade your pledge if you want to change that and start getting involved, suggesting changes, etc.) that I think are fun and capture a little playfulness for these stretch goal HC cards, which as I think I’ve mentioned before will actually be printed on cardboard tiles, so they will be quite sturdy.

The three images are, from left to right, the Media Favorite, the Martinet, and the Riverboat Gambler. 

Media Favorite, Martinet, Riverboat Gambler. All available for Adoption still.

The Media Favorite (male -- there is also a female version coming soon) has decided to dress and talk like a pirate while giving his mid-week press conference.  You can guess which coach might have inspired that concept. Antics like this lead to a lot of free media coverage (in game terms this translates to a $2BB discount on your marketing campaigns). 

The Martinet is such a fierce disciplinarian that we figured we’d illustrate his inner self-conceit by making him look more like a tin-pot dictator than a football coach, but he is able to squeeze two free points of movement per turn out on the recruiting trail, which can make the difference between signing that 5-star or being there a month too late. 

And then, with apologies to a certain NFL coach with the same nickname, we have the Riverboat Gambler who gets two free bets on the “Vegas” track every turn, which can mean a lot more ECs over the course of the game, and he’s gone all-in on his image as well.


Process-wise, at this point , Miah takes over and applies their talents to getting all the details exactly right and so the big over eggheads turn into real faces. This is how they were able to turn my father into the Oil Baron, etc.

Miah's magic transformed a retired CFO into an Oil Baron determined to help recruit talent to his Alma Mater

So once we have the box cover art locked down (and don’t worry, I will be sharing that as soon as we’re ready to share it – the handshake placeholder is long past its expiration date), then we’ll be working with Gameland, our manufacturer, to make sure every element of the game (other than the cards which will be the last thing finalized) is set to go. At the same time, Rese and Miah will be working like a Head Coach on the hot seat to finish the artwork for all of the unadopted cards, and Miah will also begin using the photos we’ve received from Adopters to personalize the adopted cards. Miah has a busy spring & early summer ahead of her.

There is also the possibility that we hit $25,000 and unlock the second stretch goal, which would add Recruiting Goal cards to the base game. Many games start with an initial secret goal each player has that differs from that of the others – for me, these will always be known as “Ticket to Ride” goals because of how important those initial tickets are in TtR. If we unlock this goal, we’ll include some number of cards (or perhaps cardboard tiles – Andy will need to work with Gameland to make it price out precisely) giving each player a specific goal for what their roster needs. Perhaps you’ll need two DBs, a DL, a QB, and a Kicker. And there will be a decent end-game bonus.

this is what an actual recruiting board looks like -- the cards will look like this but also tell you the reward points you can earn

This adds asymmetry to each player’s game-long goals, helps focus the player from the start on one thing they can do to score points, and it will also encourage the players to travel outside of their region even beyond the normal incentives of trying for a good end-game score for recruiting as many positions as possible. It provides a little more value for certain duplicates, and above all, it means you cannot, for sure, know who is going to win just by analyzing the public information of the game. These cards only exist on Andy’s development spreadsheet right now, because with so much other artwork needed to get the game finished, there is no point in bothering Miah and Rese with yet another illustration unless we unlock this second goal. But since we’re only $6,000 away right now, it’s starting to feel like this might be a good problem we may have to deal with. And we will do so happily, because with these TtR-style goals, the game can reach Andy’s full vision for how it should be played.

If we don’t quite hit this goal, look for a mini-expansion (probably in 2023) to provide these goal cards, but if they aren't unlocked for the base game, we will not be working on them until we get through the process of shipping out the base games to everyone -- you are our priority. Either way though, these will eventually be available, but for them to be included without additional cost (i.e., in the base game rather than as a purchased-separately expansion), we need to get about 75 more backers at the board-game level or higher. It’s a stretch, but hey, that’s why they call them stretch goals, right?


I keep hoping I'll hear back from the logistics partner so I can tell you that piece of the puzzle has been solved, but alas, that will have to wait for another update.  In the meantime, if you do know anyone who might want to adopt these (or any of the other "orphan" cards -- the full list is here: Card Adoption List  -- be sure to share this update around.  And as we're fond of saying hre at EoC World HQ:


Always Be Crootin,

Andy

Details on our final two-week push
over 2 years ago – Mon, Apr 18, 2022 at 11:20:56 PM

Things are falling into place, finally. Miah, our lead illustrator,  was able to get our token designs into a state where the prototype tokens could be printed, and I expect to have the machine-made tokens in hand by the end of this week or, at the latest, by sometime next week. Hence review copies will get sent out within a day of the receipt of those tokens.


We’ve contracted with two video providers to provide new promotional materials for the game, one for a quick hitter, one for an extended explainer. The shorter of the two will be with “Board Games in a Minute,” a very cool channel I’d recommend for getting a good perspective on games you might also like other than Envelopes of Cash (on the odd chance you might feel the need for any other games besides EoC in your life). The homepage for BGIAM is https://www.boardgamesinaminute.com/  and the EoC video should make an appearance just before the campaign draws to a close on May 4, which should still be useful for the Pledge Manager phase.


More substantially, Envelopes of Cash will finally have a true “How to Play” video made. We’ve had the very good, in-depth preview by the Gameboygeek since the day the Kickstarter launched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxh4buUeZu4, but while that video does a great job synthesizing the game into 15 minutes, but it’s not quite a “you can toss out the rule book and just learn online.” Now that we are within reach of having a professionally printed prototype (including the longed-for machine-cut tokens), we’ve decided to spring for a “How to Play” made by Boardgamegeek.com themselves. Given the Token Scarcity Crisis of 2021-22, it’s likely this video will also be unveiled after the Kickstarter campaign closes, but it will be very useful for all of you backers as you begin the process of learning the game, and it will also be helpful to attract new customers during the Pledge Manager phase of things.

For both of these videos, I’m eager to see how the individual game analysts do at taking the game and chopping it into either 60 seconds (which would challenge me to no end) or being complete (which I have tried but my video skills just didn’t do the game justice).


Other marketing is also afoot. There is an advertisement now running on Boardgamegeek.com, and there will be two game-related newsletter mailings with mentions of the game’s final weeks as well. I hope we will merit a little print coverage in those newsletters in addition to the graphical ad, but that remains to be seen, as in general the editorial side will only pick some of the advertisers to feature.


On the sports side of our marketing push, the big outlet will be the Extra Points newsletter again, where we will be in an emailed newsletter, in an ad on the  podcast, and, though the details are still being finalized, I also hope to be a guest on the podcast. If I am, we’ll talk about a variety of topics, but definitely the discussion will go deep into the game, Maybe I’ll find a way to explain why gamers should like it even if they don’t like sports and why sports fans should like it even if they’ve never really gotten into games before.


I am also hoping to get coverage in at least one more sports-related print/online media outlet, perhaps two, but those are still in discussions. Best not to overpromise you in case I can’t deliver.


Where we stand as of today is we have over 180 backers, with an average pledge just over $100. Twenty-three backers have supported the game at an amount at least equal to the lowest the “Adopt-a-card” level and almost all of those people have gotten in touch with me about the process of becoming the adoptive parent of their cards. I will keep reaching out to the few folks who have not gotten in touch, but hopefully that list of non-responders shrinks to zero soon. If your initials are KW or DD and you haven’t gotten emails from me about this, ping me asap. Oh and check your spam because I’ve been spamming. My hope is we close off May at over 200 and it’d be great if we finish the Pledge Manager phase having crossed 250 sold, and while I am not sure that’s truly a realistic ambition, I am undertaking marketing with the thought it’s within the realm of possible. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.


As the final element of today’s update, here is the current state of all of the cards – you can see many more have their basic “faceless” art than was the case at the start of the Kickstarter. Soon the illustrators will be adding in Adopters’ faces, but they still have a few dozen cards in need of base-level art. Still, it’s looking really good and I love every update I get from the art team. If you see a card on this list and you think you might know a good potential person to adopt it, first check online to make sure it’s not spoken-for, but then, by all means, tell your friends about the game and encourage them to back it and to adopt cards. Everyone thinks it’s cool to be in a game, right?  Here are the six sheets of cards in the current state of design.


Ok – more on freight next time, I hope. In the interim, remember to always be crootin.

Andy

Three weeks to go! A Fulsome Update
over 2 years ago – Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 07:36:27 AM

This is another update from Andy and there is a fair amount of things to report.   The TLDR version is everything is moving along, the campaign ends in 21 days, we've signed a manufacturing contract, we'll be running more ads, making tokens is hard, scroll down to see a cool picture, thanks bye.


For those of you who like more detail, here you go.

The campaign officially closes in 21 days, which means we are now in the more normal length of a Kickstarter campaign. I made EoC’s longer than normal as a way to overcome my own inexperience in crowdfunding. The longer campaign has given me the time to see how this process works, to react and adjust the marketing with time to spare, to decide on a Pledge Manager, etc. But now we are at the short strokes part of the campaign and it’s going to mean a last flurry of activity before things officially close on May 4. Here’s a little of what’s been going to get ready for that on since our last update.

Logistics

1) We are officially in contract with Gameland to make the game, with a minimum order of 500, and a 30% down payment made to secure us a place in the production queue to speed up production once the Kickstarter is done.   If by some odd and wonderful quirk of fate these last three weeks (or the “late pledge” period after the Kickstarter Ends) results in our passing 500 units, the contract has the flexibility to go up to 1,000 or 1,500. So don’t worry – you can recommend the game to all 700 of your closest friends and if they all back the project, I won’t be complaining we sold too many games.


2) We’ve decided to use Backerkit for the Pledge Manager, but until the campaign closes, they cannot officially offer a price and test that website. But trust me, on May 4 around 6pm, I will be clicking that button to start that process. What will then happen is about 5% of you will be sent a very short list of questions to test the system. They call it a survey but it’s really more of an address and order double-check, to make sure Backerkit got the correct info from Kickstarter. Once this “smoke test” is run, then everyone will get that same survey, asking you to confirm your shipping address, that we have your pledge correct, etc. And you will be offered a chance to buy additional copies of the game, but if you are happy with what you got during the KS process, this Backerkit process will not cost you anything more. The shipping you’ve already paid for what you’ve already ordered will cover you 100% unless you add to your order. Though by all means, do feel free to add more games because Envelopes of Cash makes a great stocking stuffer.   (I recommend getting big stockings though.)


3) We’re trying very hard to nail things down with Funagain logistics, to handle everything between the game production in Ningbo, China and the game arriving at your doorstep many months from now. Funagain should be able to get the game in Ningbo “FOB” (Free on board) and then arrange for it to be freighted to the US, get through customs, stored in their warehouses in Medford, Oregon, and then, using the Backerkit information, mailed to everyone at their address. I believe there will be one final chance to change your address before things ship if you’ve moved in the interim, as there will be quite a gap between when we fund/check your address and when the game reaches Medford and then is ready to ship to you. I’ll let you know when Funagain has confirmed we’re set, but there are other firms if somehow this one doesn’t pan out.


Game Development

Game-wise, we have also been doing a lot of small, necessary but not necessarily earthshattering stuff. Miah and Rece have been illustrating a lot of the cards that were still empty as of the Kickstarter launch, and will soon be ready to start drawing in the faces of our dozens of Card Adopters (we’re really very grateful to those of you who contributed that extra money and I can’t wait for Miah and Rece to wow you with their work).  As just one example of a card that was blank that now has what I call "adoptable" art -- hint hint-- I like the vague allusion to a martial arts film in the art of the "Circle the Wagons" card, as the three coaches under siege form a defensive circle, with each having the other’s back.  if you have a couple of friends you'd like to have your back forever on a card, this might be a good choice to adopt.

Circle the Wagons

I finally sat down and over the course of a weekend recalibrated the “put it into play” value of each card, lowering the point values of the cards with really juicy benefits and goosing up the value of the cards with the more pedestrian effects. Cards now range from 1 to 6 stars, rather than 1-4 In the process, I also upped the end-game value of a few of the End of Game cards, all with the goal of making card value a little more important in the overall end-game score. The small number of games played since that revision have (so far) confirmed that my edits were directionally correct and I still have about 2-3 months to tweak my tweaks before the card art gets locked into place, so I will continue to be running demos and test games, but I am very happy with these new values and think things are set in place.

With some help from some of the demo game players, the cards have also been further proofread, but anyone who writes for a living knows proofreading is a journey, not a destination, so I will also continue to constantly force myself to re-read with fresh eyes, and to ask (hire) someone else to do a final review before we go to print.


Marketing

The most important thing the EoC team needs to do for the next three weeks is to find every way we can to spread the word more widely that Envelopes of Cash exists. You, the loyal backers, will end up having a better lifetime experience with the game if more people buy it because it’ll be more likely to be implemented at an online gaming site like Yucata or BGA (which then means you can play in a scripted environment where the computer does all the fiddly envelope counting, etc., this is different from places like Tabletopia which offer you the game but do not have the rules programmed in).  We are still planning to have an online Envelopes of Cash league, and so the longevity of that will probably hinge on how many people know about, and buy, the game as well.


And of course for me, reducing the game’s losses down to a more manageable level is a really motivating exercise! Heck, a small profit is possible if somehow we get into the 400s.


To that end, we’ve booked one final run of ads on Boardgamegeek.com, including a featured position in a late-April email specifically about crowdfunding games. On the sports side, we’ve booked ads in a newsletter and one podcast and I am working on getting ads into another of each. I will also be making at least one podcast interview appearance, all with the goal of getting the word out that EoC exists and if you like (a) classic Euro games or (b) College football recruiting, you’ll like EoC, and if you like both (a) & (b) you pretty much HAVE to buy it.


The one spot we’ve really had trouble getting right, even with the extra-long Kickstarter campaign length, is getting physical copies of prototypes of the game into influential board game reviewers/podcasters hands. Interestingly, the real hold up has been tokens. Namely, it’s not hard for me to get prototype boards and prototype cards made up in the US. It’s expensive relative to the ultimate costs for the game as it will be produced in Ningbo, but for a copy or two or five, it’s manageable. But the going price for ONE SET of the EOC tokens is over $400. Admittedly, this is from a site that (despite the claim they have no set-up fees) drops the per-unit price dramatically once you cross 10 units, but even for 15 units, it’s going to cost more than half as much as the full 500 run when we produce in China.


So for the 3 prototypes that exist in the world, the tokens you’ve seen people playing with have all been hand-made by a volunteer artist named Melodi Dewey.  Let's give Melodi a round of applause.   Melodi is great at many things but she may have erred when she agreed to marry me years ago as it has now led to her cutting tokens with an X-acto knife late at night when she also has work to do.  But I am grateful she did marry me and also that she's been willing to make a few sets of tokens.


As good as the work is for hand-made tokens, it just did not seem like something we could get away with when sending the game out to people whose job it is to take up or talk down a game, nor could I ask my wife to make 15 more sets by hand.  But now having bitten the bullet to pay for 15 sets of tokens, we’ve hit some production hurdles (which I suppose is good training for the real thing over the summer).  I think we are one more China-US-Philippines-China-US cycle away from solving that and then the Tokens will be in production and on their way here.  [did I mention that even though presenting as a US company, the small batch token maker is still actually in Asia?  but I digress]


So, for these prototypes for reviewers, I’ve gotten the most recent game boards in, I’ll be ordering the revised cards today, and then we’re hopefully just a few days away from solving the token issue. So we’ll get those review copies out just in time for … the campaign to be over. /sad trombone


But it’s really not all that bad. As mentioned above, the Pledge Manager will be up and running in May and June and likely beyond and because I’ll have to make at least 500 copies, there will be plenty of product available if we get a great review in late May. So I am forging ahead despite the fact that it is now clear to me we’ve missed the window for getting good reviews via prototypes in time for the Kickstarter itself. Note to future self or other would-be game publishers: get your token situation squared away before you launch because it’s not easy or cheap.

This really leaves only one sore spot in our marketing efforts, and I'll phrase it in the form of a question: why don’t we yet have a real box cover? And for that I can only say, we will have one, obviously, but the art is not ready yet. I’m hoping I can get the boxes made with the real art in time to include with review copies, but realistically, we may not have it ready for that.  Fortunately, the real deadline for a stunning box cover is the day before we start printing YOUR box covers. And from the sketches I have seen, I think you’re going to really like the look of the box.  Maybe that will be what we tease with the next update.

Ok, that’s probably enough of an update for one day. I would like to encourage all of you to take the game out for spin if you haven’t yet. The cards are not yet updated to reflect the changes discussed above, but they will be by next week. As a reminder, the two online sites where you can play are

Tabletopia: https://tabletopia.com/games/envelopes-of-cash-eh978h/play-now

Tabletop Simulator: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2715972217

And the Rules are here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iXIMMsiIPGcv91i1qxJYtFHe4CysyoUI/view?usp=sharing

I look forward to sending out more good news, or perhaps some more game art in my next update.

Until then, always be crootin!

Andy