Brass: Birmingham and Brass: Lancashire Deluxe Editions are STILL available for purchase on the Roxley website:
https://roxley.com/products/brass-birmingham-deluxe-edition
https://roxley.com/products/brass-lancashire-deluxe-edition
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Status Report - 2017.07.26 - Surveys Coming August 2. Iron Clays Revealed.
over 6 years ago
– Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 01:22:42 AM
TL;DR - Surveys going out August 2, Iron Clays revealed below. Graphical rulebook layout begins as we now begin our march toward submitting print files.
Surveys
FINALLY! We will be sending out on August 2, 2017!
Iron Clays Reveal
IMPORTANT NOTE: All images shown below are conceptual! The design of the Iron Clays are subject to change to meet manufacturing requirements.
As of right now, all of these designs have been approved by the factory. That said, it is important for everyone to note that we are in uncharted waters here. To our knowledge, what we are trying to do with Iron Clays has not been done before. A two color insert molded set of chips with this level of intricacy in their design is not something we or our factory has ever seen before. As such, please understand that the designs and / specs may change.
In fact there has been a change in the chips weight. Due to the intricacy of the designs, the factory has needed reduce the size of the iron core. This means a weight reduction from 14g down to 9g. There is no way around this weight reduction, but we are extremely happy with a 9g weight.
Without further ado, on to the Clays! Big thanks to Mr Cuddington for using Chad Michael's work to create the renderings below.
This has been the most challenging component we've ever done. BY FAR. We are trying to get an amazing vintage illustrator to conform to the nebulous engineering requirements of a factory. Every revision needs to go Chad > Gavan > Jack (GPI) > GPI Hong Kong > Factory. They then give feedback and it comes back up the line to Chad. It has been a huge balancing act between beauty and engineering. The process has been extremely taxing on everyone involved, and I'm so eternally grateful to everyone for their unending patience.
70 Iron Clays in 4 denominations will come in every copy of Brass (100s are not included). We will also offer 100 Iron Clays in 5 denominations as an addon that you have the option to purchase when the survey is sent on August 2.
Estimated price: We are still waiting to hear back on pricing of the packaging, but we estimate the of 100 Iron Clays to be between $30 and $50usd. The retail price will be between $50 and $70 usd. We will try to give a discount for purchasing 2 packs.
Note on box: the Iron Clays box shown above only comes with the addon. The Iron Clays included in Brass will simply be held in a plastic insert.
Brass Final Development Tweaks
Banners & Player Colors - We've done a bunch of small tweaks to the boards and components. We will be starting to reveal these next update. Originally we decided to use the colored banners on the board to act as simply a visual aid to find locations. However we recently came to a realization that we could actually make them legitimately useful. The secondary function of these banners will be to show the player which location cards are present in the 2 and 3 player decks.
Locations with a red banner will not be a part of the 2 or 3 player deck, and yellow banner locations will not be a part of the 2 player deck. This will allow players to easily identify which locations are and are not in the deck for their player count. Of course under the Roxley rules, you can still build in all locations regardless of player count.
Player Count Consistency - We've also made some very slight tweaks to the 2 and 3 player decks to ensure that the probability you can build a specific industry at any moment remains reasonably consistent between player counts. This ensures the consistency of the experience when playing with 3 players, ensuring it is more congruent with the 4 player experience. In other words, you'll never have a rail phase where there are only 2 cards in the entire deck that can possibly build a shipyard.
But if you are a purist and just prefer to play Lancashire with the original rules, do not fret as the Lancashire deck will include all the cards of the original game as well as a section in the rules that describes the original game setup!
Rulebooks & Graphics
Gavan has begun laying out the graphical rulebook. Birmingham rulebook is still getting some final tweaks, but our editors are nearly finished. If you were one of the people who volunteered to provide final critique on the rulebooks, thanks for your patience. We will invite some of you in to have a look this week!
Once final tweaks have finished we will begin the translation process.
Roxley at Gen Con 150 with Santorini!
Roxley will be at Gen Con 150 offering the last of the original Kickstarter copies of Santorini! As a backer of Brass, we would like to offer you an opportunity to pre-purchase one of the last original existing Kickstarter copies before they are extinct. Click here or below to preorder Santorini for Gen Con pickup.
There are 200 of these copies available for prepurchase. We will also have 300 copies available for purchase from Roxley's booth.
Going to Gen Con? Come say hello at our booth on Entrepreneur's Avenue Hall G, #2753
Characters
Each update we will feature the profile of another one of the Characters featured on the Brass turn order tiles. Beautifully painted by Damien Mammolitti.
From Wikipedia:
"
James Watt FRS FRSE (30 January 1736 (19 January 1736 OS) – 25 August 1819) was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1781, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world.
While working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt became interested in the technology of steam engines. He realized that contemporary engine designs wasted a great deal of energy by repeatedly cooling and reheating the cylinder. Watt introduced a design enhancement, the separate condenser, which avoided this waste of energy and radically improved the power, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of steam engines. Eventually he adapted his engine to produce rotary motion, greatly broadening its use beyond pumping water.
Watt attempted to commercialize his invention, but experienced great financial difficulties until he entered a partnership with Matthew Boulton in 1775. The new firm of Boulton and Watt was eventually highly successful and Watt became a wealthy man. In his retirement, Watt continued to develop new inventions though none was as significant as his steam engine work. He died in 1819 aged 83.
He developed the concept of horsepower, and the SI unit of power, the watt, was named after him.
"
The Low Road by XGen
It's been over 2 years since Roxley released Super Motherload, and the game continues to sell at a very solid pace. We will soon be on our fourth print run of the game.
Many people don't known this, but Super Motherload is based on a videogame of the same name that was released back in 2013. Super Motherload (VG) was developed and published by an indie studio in Edmonton, Alberta called XGen Studios. XGen Studios was run by an amazing game designer by the name of Skye Boyes.
Skye believed in Roxley. In fact, he believed in us so much that he was the one who funded the first print run of Super Motherload. We will never forget the kindness and trust that Skye put in us.
Skye passed away 6 months after Roxley released Super Motherload. But XGen did not die with him. Skye's amazing and brave wife, Kaelyn Boyes, decided to take up the reins, continue on with the company.
Two years later XGen is back with their newest release: The Low Road, which was released to Steam today. The Low Road is a point and click adventure game with a beautifully quirky visual aesthetic and some amazing story telling. Have a look at the trailer below.
As always, if you have any comments or questions, please email [email protected]
Keep rollin' sixes,
Team Roxley
Status Report - 2017.07.12 - First Iron Clay Design Approved!
almost 7 years ago
– Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 12:58:50 AM
TL;DR: Finally one of the Ironclays (pokerchips) designs was accepted. Lancashire and Birmingham Text Only rulebooks are in their final stages.
Iron Clays
Tonight we FINALLY received approval for our first Iron Clays design by Chad Michael. This took a few rounds of revisions. We are super thankful to Chad Michael, and Grand Prix for their patience. Chad will now go back and create the rest based on the challenges we've overcome with the factory.
After we have the 3D model, the factory will immediately begin the process of creating a mold, and we will be on our way to production.
The Iron Clays are the most time sensitive part of this game, as it is the only molded component we are producing. In order to ensure we stay on track for January, we must focus on these now. And yes, we are still very much on schedule for a January delivery!
We are very sorry that we don't have a mockup to show you yet of the chip, but we just received word back literally a few hours ago. We will provide a mockup in our next update.
Rulebook
We are done the drafts of the rulebooks and are nearly complete editing the text only versions! A huge thanks to our amazing rules editors: Michael Van Biesbrouck, Simon Rourke, and Ricky Patel. We would like to seek a bit more commentary on these, but we should be ready to start the graphics version of the rules layout this week. Exciting!
Attention Rules Editors!
We are looking a few volunteer editors to provide commentary on the near-final edition of the text only Birmingham and Lancashire rules editing. Please, please do not volunteer unless you have some time to spare, knowledge of Brass, and technical writing / editing experience.
When editing rules, we've discovered there gets to a point where there can be too many cooks in the kitchen. So we will likely only call on a select few editors at a time. Depending on the number of people who volunteer, some volunteers may not be called upon at all.
Please note, we will be releasing the rulebooks with imagery available for review by all backers when they are complete.
Character Portrait Turn Order Tiles
We wanted to do something interesting with the turn order tiles in the game, so we commissioned the help of Damien Mammoliti to create character 8 portraits (one on each side of each tile) for the turn order tiles. Each character will be an actual Industrial Revolution entrepreneur that operated within England.
These turn order tiles are sized perfectly to make it easy to spend your Iron Clays onto and then rearrange the stacks and discard the Iron Clays at the end of each round to determine turn order for the next round. We went through many physical designs for the tiles and we decided the best design is circular. They will be slightly bigger than the diameter of the Iron Clays, making it easy to see the player color while also keeping the money stack easy to lift.
Over the next 8 updates, we will be sharing these characters with you... starting now!
We will also include a short biography of each character in the rulebook.
Quest for Character Diversity
Historical accuracy was of paramount importance when we decided to include character portraits in the game. However, we challenged ourselves to research whether there were some successful female entrepreneurs during the Industrial Revolution. Being that it was illegal for women to even own property in England until 1882, this initially seemed highly unlikely.
We searched the internet off and on for a month and were coming up empty. As a last ditch effort, we decided that we should seek help from someone who was an expert in this sort of thing. So we decided to contact an American historian by the name of Judith Bennett, who has written books on women's history, including one entitled Women in the Medieval English Countryside. She was very kind to help us dig up some information about some women business owners during the Industrial Revolution. Going through all of the results Judith came up with was a bit depressing, because for obvious reasons, nearly all businesses owned by women during this time in English history went bankrupt or were passed on to someone else.
However,we did find two women who overcame and went on to build and operate legendary manufacturing businesses.
One of these women was Eliza Tinsley, a chain maker fromfrom Black Country. At one point she employed nearly 4000 people, and her company still operates near Walsall.
" The Eliza Tinsley story began 165 years ago at Cradley Heath in the heart of the ‘Black Country’ – the birthplace of the industrial revolution. It was in the centre of this thriving, innovative area that Eliza Tinsley started her chain making business in the mid 19th Century.
Eliza was married to Thomas - a self-employed nailmaker. They had six children and following the death of their eldest daughter and Thomas himself in 1851, Eliza - having learnt a great deal from Thomas - continued to run the business under her own name which soon became very successful.
Eliza was know locally as “The Widow” and for over 20 years built her reputation as a fair and knowledgeable business woman visiting customers in the UK and even sending a representative out to Melbourne, Australia to set up a Company in her name.
According to the national census of 1871 around 4,000 people were employed by Eliza Tinsley producing wrought iron nails, rivets, chains, chain cables and anchors. Many of these employees were outworkers, living in chain-maker’s cottages – visiting the site once a week to collect materials and then returning the next with finished products. Chain making was incredibly labour intensive and the heat, dirt and strength involved resulted in a very male dominated industry – making Eliza’s success even more of an achievement." -- From https://elizatinsley.co.uk
Now that we have an approved Iron Clay design, we should be finally able to get the survey out in the next few weeks!
As always, if you have any comments or questions, please email [email protected]
Keep rollin' sixes,
Team Roxley
Status Report - 2017.06.28 - Rulebook nearing completion
almost 7 years ago
– Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 01:24:18 AM
TL;DR: Lancashire rulebook nearly finished editing. Chad Michael Iron Clay design being reviewed by factory. Board UI Adjustments made. Birmingham 2-Player deck tweaked slightly. Variable turn order tiles currently being designed. Update frequency now changed to once every 2 weeks. Survey will be sent out when we receive approval from the manufacturer on chip design. MORE BELOW
Update Every Second Wednesday
Because we are in a very busy time trying to get things ready for the manufacturer, we are now shifting to our standard 2-week intervals for updates. Going forward you will receive a status report every second Wednesday until the game is delivered. We will also send out an update when the survey goes out.
Current Work
Rulebooks - The Lancashire rulebook is being edited by our team of internal editors and nearing completion of this stage. We are beginning the graphic design of these rules this week. The Birmingham draft will be complete by the weekend.
Artwork & Graphic Design - We are making some final touches to the maps, including changing the direction of the income track to travel clockwise around the boards. We also made done a few UI tweaks and improved spacing between some locations. There were also a few errors in the prototypes.
Tweaking the Birmingham 2-player Deck - Prior to and during the Brass campaign, team Roxley had really made a strong effort of streamlining the 2 player Lancashire experience, the final product has become so tight and rewarding that we feel it is as tight and tense as 4 player.
While Birmingham has always had a stronger 2 player experience because it was designed from the ground up as a 2-4 player game, we have become so happy with the new Lancashire 2 player that we decided to go back and revisit the Birmingham 2 player. Revisiting this has proven to be well worth the extra effort, as the tweaking to the 2-player deck has resulted in an even better Birmingham experience.
Iron Clays - Chad Michael has flushed out the Iron Clays branding to an incredible degree. The addon box that he's created is extremely detailed and attractive. There are still edits to be made to the box, so we will not post an image of it until it is completed.
The designs themselves for the chips is what we are currently working on. Our initial Chad Michael design was rejected on account of there being a bit too much detail in the design. This was expected, as our strategy is to go as intricate as possible, and scale back until they feel comfortable with the design. We have a revised design being reviewed right now and will hopefully receive feedback on it within a few days.
We are discussing the storage solution for the 70 Iron Clays that come within each copy of Brass. There are various options for us, but the current one in the lead is a custom molded container with a lid. We've requested tooling for these. The storage for the addon will likely be a flocked nylon vac tray.
Variable Turn Order Tiles - After testing many different designs for the variable turn order tiles, we have decided that the best form factor for them is actually a round tile that is slightly larger than the Iron Clays. This will allow you to grip your poker chips on all sides, reorder them by who spent the most, and clear them with absolute ease. We are extremely happy with this solution. Mr Cuddington are working on designs for these next week and we will be able to show them in the next update.
There was a hangup with BackerKit, as we needed to import all of the Treefrog subscribers (Treefrog is Martin Wallace's company) who wanted to receive a copy of Brass. There is no way to import bulk backers into BackerKit, so they needed to have the engineers do it for us. This will be completed by tomorrow. Everything else in BackerKit is ready to go, but again we will not be sending out surveys until we have a finalized quote and Iron Clays chip design approval from the manufacturer.
As always, if you have any comments or questions, please email [email protected]
Keep rollin' sixes,
Team Roxley
Status Report - 2017.06.14 - Introducing Iron Clays
almost 7 years ago
– Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 01:26:48 AM
TL;DR - Roxley's line of gaming chips will be called Iron Clays. Chad Michael has put together a beautiful logo for us (mockup below). Lancashire rulebook draft complete and ready to be sent to editors. Backerkit surveys will be sent out as soon as we nail down final specs for Iron Clays.
Introducing Iron Clays Gaming chips. Iron Clays is the brand label that we have come up with to sell our custom gaming poker chips under. The image above is a preliminary reveal of the Iron Clays logo, created by Chad Michaels. The mockup box the logo is shown on is conceptual, and will likely change quite a bit before production.
Why "Iron Clays"? We felt this name is not only a nod to the industrial revolution, but also tells what the chips are made from. After submitting preliminary sketches to the manufacturer, they felt that the only way to achieve the level of intricacy that we are are shooting for with the design of the chips, we have had to put an iron disc into the core of each chip. Yes... each chip will now weigh 14g. This weight increase will not affect your shipping rate. The iron core acts as a heat sink allowing the material to cool faster in turn allowing for more intricate patterns. The iron core is then surrounded with clay and other custom material in the two color insert mold process.
Each copy of Brass Lancashire and Birmingham will come with 70 Iron clays.
Chad has submitted a preliminary chip design to us, which we absolutely love. Before revealing any designs though, it is important that we ensure the factory gives us the OK, to ensure that what we are presenting you is actually possible to produce.
Addon Pricing - We are still working out packaging costs with GPI. We want to ensure that these poker chips are presented with class, so that you can proudly take them down off your shelf to play a game. Once we have the packaging specs nailed down, we will reveal the addon pricing and send out the surveys.
Current Work
Rulebook - Lancashire Rulebook preliminary draft is now complete and we will be getting our editors to tear it to shreds. We will begin working on the Birmingham rulebook tomorrow.
Vac trays - We have received poker chip holder samples from the manufacturer. We are considering all sorts of awesome storage solutions for the Iron Clays and we will reveal more information once we decide what is best.
BackerKit Survey, Preorders and Retail
We are now complete the setup of Backerkit. We will not send out the surveys until we have finished all the specs for the Iron Clay addons, as it is important that we include pricing and shipping costs for these prior to sending out the surveys.
Once regular backers have received their surveys, we will send out retailer pledge requests.
Pre-orders will be live hopefully tomorrow.
Keep rollin' sixes,
Team Roxley
Status Report - 2017.06.04 - Chad Michael Studio To Design Poker Chips!
almost 7 years ago
– Mon, Jun 05, 2017 at 01:08:58 AM
Greetings everyone! It has been a very busy week of organisation for Roxley. We had to put the graphics work aside to work on a few items that needed to be resolved. This also caused a few days delay with our status report post. We will be changing them from every Wednesday to every Sunday for the next few, as we have more spare time during the weekends.
Poker chip add-ons are GO!
The major announcement is that we WILL be doing an poker chips as an add-on. Thousands of people responded to our poker chip add-on survey last week and over 1600 people said they were interested. So, we are bringing an addon to you folks.
A few people asked if they were still going to receive them in their copy of Brass. The answer is: yes, of course every deluxe edition of Lancashire and Birmingham will include 70 chips.
We need to do some final calculations on shipping when we receive weight from the manufacturer. As soon as we know this, we can set a price for the chips and the shipping cost for them.
Chad Michael to design chips
We have also have other exciting news. We've conscripted the help of one of the greatest vintage vector illustrators in the world to assist us with design of the chips and the new brand surrounding them: Chad Michael Studio. I have been a fan of Chad Michael for many years, and we are very fortunate to be able to work with him.
We are currently working on branding and design for the chips. We hope to have something to show you in the next week or two. For each design we need to get approvals from the factory to ensure that each design is technically possible.
To view Chad's portfolio of work, please visit his website here: http://chadmichaelstudio.com/
Rulebook - We are working on finishing the initial draft for Lancashire this week. We were unable to finish this this week due to having to organize the poker chips add on. This is now our top priority.
Vac tray - We've submitted some early designs and ideas to GPI (our manufacturer) for the modular vac trays. We are waiting to hear back from them in terms of feasibility, and hear their counter ideas. :)
BackerKit Survey, Preorders and Retail
We are nearly complete the setup of Backerkit. Because we are now offering the poker chip addon, it is important that we include pricing and shipping costs for these prior to sending out the surveys.
Once regular backers have received their surveys, we will send out retailer pledge requests.
We will do our best to make preorders available this week.
