Base Camp for Sept 2022

I'll be (more) brief this month.  

The pre-order "experiment" for Stone Cold Hockey was a huge success!  THANK YOU for the wonderful response! The print components have arrived, and we are beginning to fulfill pre-orders ahead of schedule. Because of the encouraging pre-orders, we decided to do a couple of upgrades:

1. The instruction manual is now in color.
2. We produced a booklet for the fictional Central Cities League
3. The game also includes a ready-to-play schedule for CCL Season One on card stock.
4. And we did a print run of two-sided score sheets, with the OT section on the back.

Why fictional teams?
We've heard several complaints about the inclusion of fictional sample teams in the core game. Here are some of the benefits of this approach:

• Cost controls - No historical set in the core game allows for a more reasonable price. Fictional teams are also much easier to produce, and the core set will never be out-dated.
• Enables new customers to try the game without having to order an historical season
• Prevents the splitting of an historical set to pull-out a few sample teams. This was a lesson learned from Dice United.
• Serves as an example for creating your own. The teams in this league were generated using the Appendix section of the instruction manual
• The CCL is a ready-to-play alternative for those who enjoy the fictional experience and those who want to do a co-op league.

What's Next?

If all goes well with the pre-orders in the field, between now and the 25th, then the game will go on sale Sept 26th. If not, it will likely delay the public release for another 2-3 weeks. This is the largest launch we have done and mistakes or over-sights can happen.

• Legends of Boxing Core Game, Print Edition, is currently out-of-stock. The wheels are already turning toward next year's 20th Anniversary Edition. We want a healthy gap of time between the last copies shipped and the introduction of a new edition. The main focus of "LOB20" is to review/revise the fighter ratings of the core set (125 fighters). More details about the development of this project is coming in the months ahead. The important thing:
  
    LOB20 will be 100% compatible with all the fighter cards you   already own.
  
  The size and format of the cards remain the same as well.  At this point, there are no plans to revise ratings in any of the expansion sets, so only the core 125 fighters are potentially affected. The PDF Edition of LOB will also be discontinued in the next few days.
  
• GridZone Core Game, Print Edition, will be back soon. We need to get some more instruction manuals printed. After the hockey launch calms down, this will be on the to-do list.

• Stone Cold Hockey for Windows
  Development and play-testing is ongoing. Our current target date is October 31st, but we should have a more confident release date in next month's Base Camp, along with some more screen shots.  
• Elsewhere... All other projects are currently on-hold until we get through the roll-out of the hockey game and 7 season sets. By the end of the year, we hope to finish the 2010s Kings of the Ring expansion set for LOB, and the Translation Guide for Dice United.

That's all I got for now.  Thanks for following the developments here at Stone Mountain Press!