One final Stretch Goal!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 12:21:24 PM

Hello folks!

With less than 24 hours to go, we have been so thrilled with the pace we've seen since the 48-hour bell that we decided to add one last Stretch Goal!

$175k Stretch Goal - Planetary Facilities with new artwork!

In addition to modified market spaces, we have been experimenting with rules for special Planetary Facilities on the Edgeworld of each planet card/tile. We will commission new planet art for these Edgeworlds, so that the two planets from the same culture will look different from one another, and we will incorporate these planetary facilities into the new artworks!

Here's the list of planetary facilities we are currently testing (all WIP):

•  Garage: Swap 1 Ship Upgrade with an Upgrade from the discard pile
•  Warp Gate: Pay 1 Credit to move your Ship to any Planet
•  Fuel Depot: Pay 1 Credit to collect the nearest Fuel Canister
•  Nexus Cantina: Start a Captain Encounter with any other player
•  Galactic Stock Market: Move 1 Market Demand token on any Planet to the left-most space of any other market row

This will bring a new level of depth to the game and unique richness to the artwork!

Now let's crush this over the 12 hours to come - thanks so much!!

Final Anomaly Report!
over 2 years ago – Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 02:47:46 AM

Good morning!

We are just about at the 48-hour bell, so things will heat up quickly! In an effort to clean up the campaign page a bit, we are going to move all the Anomaly graphics with descriptions and sketch art to this update, and then remove the larger ones from the main page. We will replace them with a simpler bullet list, and then link to this update for further details.

As of the time I'm writing this, there is just one final locked Anomaly (Space Mines), and we expect to unlock that Stretch Goal over the next couple hours! Therefore, the complete list of available Anomalies is as follows:

• Limited Promo Pack: 1
• Shipping Shenanigans: 2
• Base game: 6 (assuming the Space Mines unlock shortly), PLUS 1 more in the KS Exclusive Crossover pack (so 7 total).
• 8-pack: 8

That makes 17 total Anomalies available to date! 

IMPORTANT: As a reminder, the Cosmic Content Completionist tier (and above) contains all the content listed above EXCEPT the Shipping Shenanigans pack. If you did not pre-pledge for the Shipping Shenanigans pack on our website (prior to this KS campaign), you will need to add it as an add-on. If you did pre-pledge, we will automatically add it to your order, which you will see later on when the pledge manager opens up.

Final Anomaly Report

Here are the full Anomaly read-outs moved from the main campaign page:

Community Submissions

Have some last minute ideas to submit for the Expansive Space or To Boldly Go Anomalies? You still have time to get them in!

Expansive Space Anomaly (covering The Expanse, Dr. Who, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy):

To Boldly Go Anomaly (covering Star Trek):

Thank you!!

Once again we are so proud to have embarked on this cosmic journey with you all! The creativity and engagement from the community continues to drive both us and our products. 

Huge shout out to Darrin Horbal for pushing through with us while still dealing with his unfortunate house fire situation, to Gregory Skulnick and Timea Karolina Kiss for their tremendous help at Essen and team support throughout this campaign, and to our dear friend Scott Smith for once again creating an unbelievable game experience that is sure to echo throughout all of time...  and space!!

CHEERS! 

New KS EXCLUSIVE Crossover pack and many other updates!
over 2 years ago – Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 01:14:43 AM

Happy Sunday!

We are very near the final 48 hours now, so let's take a moment to recap and tell you about all the latest developments to this campaign!

New KS EXCLUSIVE "Crossover" pack

First and foremost, we are super excited to have added a new KICKSTARTER EXCLUSIVE content pack!:

This pack includes a new Captain tile featuring our beloved Boblin, straight from Dungeon Drop! Wish we could say this was purely our own idea, but countless fans from the Dungeon Drop games begged us to add "Space Boblin" to Drop Drive, so here he is! What's more, he's carrying forward Dungeon Drop's iconic flicking mechanism (thus far, Drop Drive has no flicking effects in the base game)! 

In addition, the ever popular Gelatinous Cubes are also making their appearance in space, as the Dark Jellies emerge! You can think of them as giant squishy cubes of dark matter :D. As an added bonus, we are also providing a Huge Monster card that will let you play with the 2 Dark Jelly cubes in your copy of Dungeon Drop!!

This pack will be included in all Kickstarter pledges at the $27 tier and above, at no extra cost, and this pack will ONLY be available here on Kickstarter. So tell your friends so they don't miss out!

Social Stretch Goals

We've had great progress on the open Social Stretch Goals, but 2 of them need a bit more focus before we can crack those canisters open! 

Here's the easiest way to help these out:

• To unlock heat-printed Fuel Canister tokens: Share this FB post.
• To unlock unique "angry face" artwork on the Hostile side of the Captain tiles: Retweet this tweet.

Livestream tonight

Scott, Darrin, and I will be livestreaming tonight at 7pm Eastern. We will be covering a multitude of topics, including the above KS Exclusive content pack, the latest Anomaly submissions, and other hot items. You can join us on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitch. 

Anomaly Submissions

We will soon be pulling together final community voting for the open Anomalies, so if you have any lingering ideas you want to submit, now is the time!:

• Expansive Space (pulling ideas from The Expanse, Dr. Who, and/or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
• To Boldly Go (pulling ideas from the massive Star Trek universe)

We will also be reviewing these submissions on our Livestream tonight, so if you get new ones in over the next few hours we will probably squeeze it in to our discussions!

New box design and size/shape

We spent a lot of time discussing the game's box size and shape over the past couple weeks, and we came to the unanimous conclusion that this game deserves a box upgrade. While we love the cube Dungeon Drop sized cube box, Drop Drive is a bigger game, with more components and a bit more depth. 

As such, we are proud to introduce our new Standard plus Deluxe Upgrade box format:

We could not be happier with how these boxes come together to create a unique ship on your game shelves!! Tell us what you think about them!

That's all for now folks... can't wait to see what the final 48 hours will bring us! THANKS SO MUCH for taking this journey with us over the past 25 days!! CHEERS!

Back from Essen - loads to talk about!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 12:03:22 AM

Good morning!

We are back from Essen and have loads of great stuff to talk about! Let's get on to it...

Essen Spiel 2021 

Essen was amazing! Not only as a way to spread the good word about Drop Drive, but also for a ton of tremendous exposure and demos for Dungeon Drop and Tavern Tales. In fact, Greg ended up selling out of Tavern Tales on Day 1, so then we quickly sent another case down from our warehouse in time for Day 3...  and then that also sold out by mid-day! It only occurred to me later on that Germany is kinda the land of beer and taverns, so next year we will be sure to better capitalize on that little nuance! :D

Needless to say, we had an absolute blast, and the trip was SO worthwhile for many reasons! HUGE THANKS to Scott and Greg for their outstanding help demoing their games, and to Timea for her immense help doing pretty much everything at the booth!

Drop Drive Box Upgrade

We decided to make an important marketing move for Drop Drive. While we LOVE our adorable cube box size and shape, we ultimately concluded that this game deserves something more. Drop Drive is a bigger game than Dungeon Drop and Tavern Tales, it's got more depth, more unique components, and so on. 

Therefore, we made the decision to modify the box to better position the game in the market, and so we are proud to introduce our new, UPGRADED Drop Drive box!

As you can see, we designed this upgrade box to be able to be stored either horizontally or vertically, depending on your preference. This box will be big enough to store all the base game components WITH sleeved cards now. And we will soon show how we are packaging the Deluxe Upgrade box, which will beautifully play off this same design approach. 

Tell us what you think about it! 

New Social Stretch Goals

We loaded some new Social Stretch Goals that should help prepare us for the all-important 48-hour trigger! 

To unlock heat-printed Fuel Canister tokens:

• Go to your favorite board gaming group on Facebook and create a post telling everyone what you're most excited about in Drop Drive, and be sure to add this link and these hashtags at the end: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/phaseshiftgames/drop-drive #DropDrive #BoardGames #Kickstarter 
• If you're not in any board gaming Facebook groups, you can just post to your own timeline, but here are some great groups to consider joining!: Board Game Exposure, The Boardgame Group, Board Game Revolution 

To unlock heat-printed Salvage tokens:

• Go to this image on BoardGameGeek and give it a "thumbs up"!
• Want to go the extra mile? Do the same thing for this image too!

To unlock unique "angry face" artwork on the Hostile side of the Captain tiles:

• Send out a Tweet telling your friends what you're most excited about in Drop Drive, and be sure to add this link and these hashtags at the end: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/phaseshiftgames/drop-drive #DropDrive #BoardGames #Kickstarter 
• Want to go the extra mile? Add your favorite picture from the campaign page to the Tweet!

ANOMALY UPDATE: Expansive Space

It seemed there were fewer submissions for this Anomaly when it was just based on The Expanse, so we decided to go super-meta and EXPAND the Expansive Space Anomaly submissions to include Dr. Who and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 

So hopefully that opens up some great new possibilities! Head on over to BoardGameGeek and get your ideas submitted here:

ANOMALY DETECTED: Pirate Port

Our third Phase Shift sponsored Anomaly for the 8-pack is the dreaded Pirate Port! There will be a special Pirate Port token/tile and advanced rules for how pirates behave in the game. Normal pirates in Drop Drive are more like scavengers, seeking out the nearest asteroid of their color...  but now they will have more teeth to them, with their targets set on YOU. 

But with that added danger comes new opportunities. There will be ways to interact with the Pirate Port, and perhaps the pirates themselves, opening up new possibilities for those with some "moral flexibility!"

ANOMALY DETECTED: To Boldly Go!

Star Trek is nearly unchallenged in terms of the breadth and expansiveness of the universe (perhaps Dr. Who comes close?). There are too many ideas to enumerate here, so the sky is literally the limit!! Let's see what amazing ideas you can come up with this time!

Please submit your Star Trek based Anomaly ideas to BoardGameGeek here:

ANOMALY DETECTED: Kastle Run

Our final Phase Shift sponsored Anomaly for the 8-pack will recreate a very iconic moment in the Star Wars universe, one that ended up deserving of its very own full-length feature film! We will create a special maelstrom tile featuring a labyrinth of winding passages you must carefully navigate if you wish to reach the center and claim its volatile but valuable riches! Special cargo tokens will likely also be introduced, with unique rules requiring they be offloaded and sold before disaster strikes!!

Anomaly Tracker

We have updated the main campaign page with a THOROUGH Anomalies section now! Obviously several of them are still in progress, but at least now everyone can see all the Anomalies we have planned in one, well organized place.

Here are all the Anomaly Tracker images, for your reference:

We will keep updating these as details are fleshed out.

Thank so much for your time today - we have great stuff planned as we head into our final week of the campaign! CHEERS!!

MULTIPLE ANOMALIES DETECTED!
over 2 years ago – Sun, Oct 17, 2021 at 11:06:54 AM

Happy Tuesday!

As we prepare to head Germany for Essen Spiel, we wanted to get the next set of Anomaly submissions going and give you a general update on all the various Anomaly activities going on!

Headed to Germany

Scott, Greg, and I are all headed to Essen Spiel in Germany, We fly out later today and will be exhibiting at booth 2-E131 straight through the weekend! We can't wait to get in front of the community and our fans at the largest gaming convention on the planet!!

While we're out, of course our availability will be limited. Please do keep posting, tweeting, and socializing the awesomeness of Drop Drive to your friends!! We're in that dreaded "mid-campaign lull," which is normal...  but the more we can keep talking about the game and all these crazy Anomalies on various groups and social platforms the better. Thanks so much!

ANOMALY DETECTED: Expansive Space

Our next community designed Anomaly will be themed to the newer, yet incredibly popular sci-fi series, The Expanse. Here's the brief writeup from Wikipedia: Hundreds of years in the future, things are different than what we are used to after humans have colonized the solar system and Mars has become an independent military power. Rising tensions between Earth and Mars have put them on the brink of war. Against this backdrop, a hardened detective and a rogue ship's captain come together to investigate the case of a missing young woman. The investigation leads them on a race across the solar system that could expose the greatest conspiracy in human history.

Collect your thoughts and then head over to BoardGameGeek to get your ideas submitted!

This will be one of the 8 Anomalies in the "Complete Set of Anomaly Packs."

ANOMALY DETECTED: Spice Planet

Since long before this campaign began, Scott and I knew we would make a kick-ass Anomaly pack for this beloved universe! While we haven't worked out all the details, this pack will absolutely feature a new planet tile, spice cubes, the ability to fold space (using spice cubes), and other iconic aspects!

This will be one of the 8 Anomalies in the "Complete Set of Anomaly Packs."

ANOMALY DETECTED: Space Beast

If you noticed the most recent Stretch Goal images loaded yesterday, you may have seen that the last one will unlock a new Space Beast Anomaly. We always knew some form of gigantic space/void beast should be represented in the core game, gobbling up everything in its path and perhaps offering a central target for players to focus on. Of course we may end up including some form of Mr. Shadow in the Fifth Element Anomaly (still in progress), so this will also afford us the opportunity to incorporate more than one interesting mechanic for how a world-eating behemoth might work in Drop Drive!

Following Stretch Goal unlock, this will be a new Anomaly added to the base game box.

Anomaly Update: A Fifth Element?!!

Scott and I did a livestream walkthrough of the many excellent submissions for this Anomaly pack. If you want to watch it, here's the link:

We will be discussing how to construct the community poll while we're at Essen, so look for more details on that either later in the week or shortly after we get back.

This will be one of the 8 Anomalies in the "Complete Set of Anomaly Packs."

Anomaly Update: Dropgate

Following the community poll, we are thrilled to announce the final results of this Anomaly study! Here's the initial writeup, with more details to follow:

The Dropgate Anomaly will feature a special spinner wheel / rondel mechanic. The idea here is that there is a spinner component or rondel board that looks like an actual Dropgate, with symbols that you are working to match or manipulate. We would incorporate 4-sided dice to represent Pyramid Ships in space, and the thought is that the Pyramid Ships would move around between planets, attempting to subjugate their cultures. If you encounter one of the Pyramid Ships in space or when landing on a planet, you would be able to move/shift the spinner/rondel based on what side is showing on that Pyramid Ship, granting you some rewards or perhaps a way to defeat that ship.

This will be one of the 8 Anomalies in the "Complete Set of Anomaly Packs."

Complete Anomaly List

With all the Anomaly activity in this sector, it's easy to get them confused! Here's a brief summary of what we know so far:

Base game Anomalies:

• Seed Ship
• Dyson Sphere
• Wormhole
• ACTIVE STRETCH GOAL: Space Beast

Limited Promo Pack Anomaly:

• Death Dodecahedron

Shipping Shenanigans Anomalies:

• Galactic Shipping Hub
• Wreck of the Everstar

"Complete Set of Anomaly Packs" Anomalies:

• COMMUNITY DESIGNED: Dropgate
• PSG DESIGNED: Belters Bazaar
• COMMUNITY DESIGNED: A Fifth Element?!!
• PSG DESIGNED: Spice Planet
• COMMUNITY DESIGNED: Expansive Space
• PSG DESIGNED: TBD
• COMMUNITY DESIGNED: TBD
• PSG DESIGNED: TBD

I intend to turn this list into a nicer set of graphics to add to the main campaign page after I return from Essen. 

Hope you're as excited as we are about all these awesome packs!! Cheers!