Production update: Save the date!
almost 2 years ago – Mon, May 16, 2022 at 12:12:42 AM

Hello Racers,

Here we are again with a fresh, albeit small, update on the project! Despite the lockdown situation still going on in their area, the factory assured us the stock will be ready for pickup by the end of this month. This means we are finally able to involve our forwarder, and we can start booking the ships that will take the stock around the world to our fulfilment hubs. At the moment, the ready date is May 25, we can expect the stock to be loaded on the ships by a week from that date (fingers crossed). We’ll publish an update as soon as we have the booking information so you’ll be able to track each ship up until the delivery port.

In the meantime, the stock will be divided in “lanes”, one for each hub:

The “EU stock” includes Europe and the “rest of the world” shipments, it’ll be managed by our German hub Fulfilment Europe.

The “US stock” covers USA and Canada shipments, it’ll be managed by our American hub Quartermaster Logistics.

The “Asia stock” includes all the Asia shipments plus Australian and New Zealand shipments, it’ll be managed by our Asian hub CFC Fulfilment. This stock will not be loaded onto ships but moved via truck. It’s possible these regions will be fulfilled a bit earlier than the rest!

It usually takes at least four to five weeks for the ships to cross the seas and reach their destination ports, and then you’ll have to factor in the ship unloading time, the customs inspection etc. Once it leaves the port, the stock needs to get transported to our hub, checked, counted, packed and then finally… Shipped to you!

We know this adventure proved way more challenging than expected, but it seems we finally managed to overcome all big obstacles and we’re finally reaching the finish line for this project!

Until next time!

Sincerely,
the Horrible team

Production Update: Collecting Collectors
about 2 years ago – Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 02:12:09 AM

Hello Racers!

We have more news on the production! The issues we found in the plastic trays were (relatively) quickly solved by the factory and they agreed to produce the necessary replacements. The process of vacu-forming, unpacking and repacking is currently ongoing but they notified us it will take a bit, especially now that the new imposed lockdown has hindered the production. As you might know, unfortunately China is going through new severe outbreaks of Covid 19 recently: under the new circumstances the factory managed to stay active, albeit with less active personnel for safety reasons. They informed us the packing process should take roughly two or three weeks in a normal environment. As for now we don’t know if the lockdown will worsen, but we are monitoring the situation and we’re in direct contact with our factory.

Printing is finally done for the rest of the materials though, and after finishing the repacking, the stock should be finally ready to be shipped out! The items will be separated in three different “lanes”, and loaded onto container ships. Sea travel usually takes 4-6 weeks, then the stock will go through customs. Finally, once it gets delivered to the hub, the fulfilment process will start! We’ll explain this in greater detail in the next update, hopefully.

In the meantime, we want to share with you all the latest samples we got! 

Let's have a look at the Power Box and the Extra Challengers box: 

The Power Box contains all the special Power cards, the lovely Battle Pup Race Car, and all the related rules and extra tokens you'll need to use them!

As for the Extra Challengers box, this box comes with extra controllers and tokens to add two more players to your races:

It also has space in the tray to contain all the Power Box items, so you'll be able to store it all together:

Designing a new game from scratch is always a challenge, from the beginning to the end. Despite all the production hiccups (and let’s not even mention the worldwide situation for once), we’re really proud of Tiny Turbo Cars and we strongly believe in the final quality of the product. We hope you’ll be pleased too once you open those packages!

Until next time!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team

Production Update: Welcome to the Jungle!
about 2 years ago – Thu, Mar 03, 2022 at 07:52:12 PM

Hello Racers!

In the latest news from the factory, we were reported that production started again after the Chinese New Year break, and based on the estimate they gave us, we expect them to finish printing and packing the items of the extra bits and expansions by the end of March. So far, so good.

On the other hand, unfortunately we've been experiencing a few issues with the Collector's Edition. The development of the ad-hoc tray that will hold all of the components from both the core game, expansions, and other extra Kickstarter bits has not been easy in and of itself, but we've now discovered that the factory mass-produced and packed in boxes a wrong version of the tray while finer tweaks still needed to be made. This is a double problem:

• as we said, tweaks still need to be made, but the usual back-and-forth of communications, samples and what not has been problematic for some time now on this project (and unexpectedly so), so we can foresee the process being not as straightforward as it should;
• additionally, all CE trays will need to be produced again when the tweaks will all be implemented, and then re-packed inside the boxes, which will make us lose even more time.

We will keep you posted on the situation, but as you can imagine given the issues we're facing, we prefer to refrain from sharing more concrete estimates for the fulfillment window until we will be 100% sure things can't go wrong any more than they already did.

Here's a picture of our discomfort while inspecting the CE sample... Which, despite the issues, is actually coming along quite nicely, and we can assure you it will be a blast of a product when all will be said and done. It will be a relatively small box (standard "Ticket to Ride" size, compared to the even smaller core box) but packed full of gameplay bits to keep you entertained for a long while. We will be showing more of the Collector's Edition in future updates!

Production progress!

Not all is doom and gloom, though. In the meantime, we received other new samples and we’re eager to show them off, this time it’s the Adventure Crew expansion pack! This will come in its own box (or inside the Kickstarter Exclusive Collector’s Edition if you opted for that pledge level, of course):

As usual, the expansion pack contains three RaceCars with unique powers, their special tokens, and two extra “Junctions” boards.

All included inside a tidy tuckbox!

Let’s have a look at the three RaceCars included: Sprintarr, Shinobike and Jungle Buggy!

The tokens inventory for this adventurous expansion includes bombs and pesky traps!

You’ll encounter traps and even quicksand pits in the new double-sided Junction Boards: as you might recall they're small board extension pieces that also come with their own special obstacles and rules to spice up your races with new challenges.

Before we finish this update, let us once again thank you for your support and patience with this project, it really means a lot to us! We hope that shedding light on the regular "behind the scenes madness" helps you to better understand all the nuances of a project like this one. We were prepared from the start, but as you can see it's always... A wild ride! We’ll send another update as soon as we receive more information from the factory as usual.

Until next time!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team

Production update: Spaaaaaaaace!
about 2 years ago – Thu, Feb 03, 2022 at 06:12:01 PM

Hello Racers!

First of all, let us quickly thank you for all the good words and encouragement we have received since the last update! We thank you again for your support and patience on this project, we are lucky to have fans like you around!

No big news on the production just yet, factories are currently closed for the Chinese New Year celebrations as before stated. In the meantime, though, we received some new samples that we can share with you, while we wait for them to get back in full force. This time we strap our jetpacks on and we fly out to space with the aptly named… Space Team Expansion!

Let’s have a look at all the content you’ll find in this tidy box (or in the special Kickstarter Exclusive Collector’s Edition of course):

First of all, the three Racecars, each with their unique power:

We already met Blargop, Speed Rover and Robotron in past updates, here you see their cardboard tiles, their powers and of course the respective racecar meeple… Racecareeple? MeeCar?  RaceMeepleCar?

As for each expansion, the Space Team also include two double printed Junction Boards: as you might recall they're small board extension pieces that also come with their own special obstacles and rules to spice up your races with new challenges. The ones from the Space Team expansion introduce us to mysterious teleportation portals (active portals!) and even an angry robot that moves up and down the track trying to smash Racecars, believe it or not!

Fulfilment Estimate?

With the factory currently closed due to the CNY break, we don’t have any update on that at the moment. We’ll know more in the next few weeks once the factories reopen after the Chinese New Year celebration ends. Rest assured that we’ll keep you updated!

Until next time!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team

Production update, delays, and a comment about the retail version.
over 2 years ago – Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 07:54:39 AM

Hello Racers!

First of all, sorry for the late update. We usually try to follow a schedule of roughly one update per month (unless there really isn’t anything new to report), but December was a bit of a crazy month at the Horrible Guild HQ for several reasons (some of which will be detailed later in this update) and we didn’t post an update last month. Even more sadly, we don’t come to you with good news, unfortunately.

Production Delays

As you all probably figured out by yourselves at this point, we are running late on our initial estimate, which was to deliver the game in December 2021.

Production did start, but things progressed at a much, much slower pace than we were  expecting. We learned to always account for delays when deciding on the delivery date estimate to announce on a Kickstarter campaign, but the last couple of years made everything much slower, and in unpredictable ways: no one could have foreseen the recurring power outages in whole regions of China, halting production for days in a row over several weeks. In addition, everyone here and at the factory did their best to have everything complete before the Chinese New Year break, when everything in China stops for their version of the holiday season. Unfortunately the initial delays and the slower-than-expected progress speed in the last couple of months made us miss this objective, which means that the production will only be completed after the CNY break.

It is an unfortunate situation that we wanted to avoid, but we didn’t manage to. At one point during the last month or so, we even considered to ship the core games to you backers earlier, and postpone the fulfillment of the Kickstarter extras only, but that was not possible: December has always been the worst time of the year to ship stuff around the world even in normal times, but for a long series of reasons (which include of course the pandemic, but also the lingering consequences of the infamous the Suez Canal traffic jam and lots more of other geopolitical circumstances) the costs for shipping anything have been on a constant and dramatic rise for the past two years or so. Things have been going so bad, that we’re now at a point where we could simply not afford the price it would have costed to ship the core games in December (even considering that we were already subsidizing part of the shipping costs for you in the first place, absorbing part of the costs to try keeping shipping costs contained for you from the start).

New Fulfilment Estimate

The factory is still working on the production of expansions and extras, but they’ll soon be halting operations for the Chinese New Year break, and they’ll still need a few weeks to complete everything when they get back to work next month, which is extremely frustrating.

Given the recent history with their production estimates, we’ll wait for more concrete news before we make a new solid prediction, but as a result of the additional delay, the start of the fulfillment will unfortunately need to be postponed to late Q1 / early Q2. Remember: after production is complete, it usually takes 1 to 2 weeks to move the goods onto the various ships, then 6 to 8 weeks for the ships to complete their voyage and for the games to reach the fulfillment hubs, then 1 to 2 weeks more for the packages to get from the hubs to your doorstep.

We hate giving such vague time frames, but since the reports and estimates we’ve been receiving lately have been so unreliable, this is the best we can do right now. To compensate for this, we will be releasing campaign updates more often in the coming weeks, so that we will be able to keep you posted more frequently as things evolve.

So far, so bad. This update has been lots of doom and gloom up to this point, so let’s take a look at some of the good parts.

Production progress!

Let’s have a look at the latest sample we received from the factory from one of the game expansions we’ve been talking about all along… The Fantasy Squad expansion pack!

 Each expansion pack contains three Racecars with unique powers, their special tokens, and two extra “Junctions”, which are small board extension pieces that also come with their own special obstacles and rules to spice up your races with new challenges. 

A Comment about the Retail Version

Regarding the retail version of the game, some backers have been complaining in the comments about it being already available in shops in some countries. Back in August 2021, we published Update #26 where we already announced that the retail version of Tiny Turbo Cars (which is missing all the additional Kickstarter content of course) was probably going to be available before we would manage to start fulfilment. Let us go into greater detail on the reasons why this happened.

When we were faced with the delays for the extra parts of the game (which became even more serious as time went by, as we explained above), and the concrete risk to miss the critical holiday season window (that promptly became reality) was getting more and more likely, we had to make a difficult choice: Holding the retail release of the game for too long would have been a huge damage to us and our partners, a risk that we simply could not afford to take with what has been going on for the past two years. Honestly and blatantly speaking, all businesses are doing their best to stay afloat in this unprecedented situation, and so are we.

“But if shipping the core games earlier was impossible for you because it was too expensive”, some of you could say, “how were your partners able to do that?”. It is standard procedure (especially for distribution partners, who import lots of games from different publishers at the same time) to “consolidate” shipments, i.e., group games from different productions together and make one single, big shipment, which greatly helps to keep shipping costs per game down. We had no other products to ship together with Tiny Turbo Cars, so that was unfortunately not an option for us.

We tried to find a suitable solution, but in the end two separated international shipments and possibly two different fulfilment processes (core game, and later, expansions) would have simply cost too much for us, rendering this Kickstarter campaign a huge loss. Let’s also specify, asking to pay double shipping costs to the backers was never on the table as an option: no reason for you to pay the price for what’s happening in the world.

None of the above is an excuse, it is just an explanation of what happened, why it happened, and why we took the decisions we needed to take. We completely understand that some of you may not be happy with the situation, this is why the offer we made you in our previous update still stands: if you’re really not happy with the course of the campaign so far, we can cancel your pledge and give you a refund: all you have to do is to simply reach out to us by direct message here on Kickstarter, or, if you prefer, by email at the address [email protected].

 Some final thoughts for this update

On behalf of the entire Horrible team, we’d like to thank you again for your support, patience, and help you gave us during this campaign. Please don’t take this message as empty, or light hearted. As a small and relatively young company from Italy, we are still in awe of the opportunities our fans and the Kickstarter platform give us.

What we want to stress out the most is this: we make Kickstarter projects for you, and for us, at the same time. Going through Kickstarter helps us tremendously in creating our games, it literally lets us make the fancier version of the games you love and we’d like to have on our own shelves.

The support and feedback from our backers is invaluable during the campaigns and even after, and we always listen, always. We really hope you had happy and safe holidays and let’s add a wonderful 2022 too just for good measure!

 Until next time!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team