For the most part I’ve enjoyed 2022 – bringing Gay Sauna the Board Game leaps and bounds further has brought me so much joy and it’s been incredible to get the positive response from the community we have had!

Not everything was rosy though, we lost someone very dear to us this year and nothing positive will ever fill the void they left.

I’ve also spent the most part of December out of action with flu anda chest infection. It’s been so tough to be forced to stop – I’m used to keeping myself busy most of the time, but when something is stopping you breathing you’re kinda not left with a choice but to respect it and just stop.

Progress Update

Thankfully progress on the game hasn’t stopped – Jose has been incredibly busy and productive, not only finishing up all our incredible visitors but also adding final touches to our icons and card layouts.

That being said, we are running a bit behind schedule. I don’t yet foresee a real delay in the final fulfillment of the games, but I’m definitely behind preparing the Reviewer and Print & Play versions. I don’t yet have an updated ETA on these, but we’ll get them sorted as soon as possible.

Pledge Manager

We’ve also extended the Pledge Manager for another 10 days while we wrap up some of the administrative things in the background. So in case you’ve not completed your address details yet, or would like to add anything to your order, you’ve got until January 10th before this is locked down!

You can grab your personal link for the pledge manager here: https://saunagame.backerkit.com/

Retail/Publishers

During the campaign we’ve had quite some attention from retailers and publishers who are interested in working together. This was incredibly flattering and super interesting for us to investigate. However after many many many discussions, we’ve come to the decision that we won’t be making any Retail or Publisher deals in the coming period for Gay Sauna the Board Game.

For the retail side, we’re just not yet at the kind of scale where we can split our inventory and our margins aren’t yet high enough for us to give retailers the kind of discounts they’ve come to expect from publishers.

On the publisher side – we’re busy now building our publishing company (ReRoll Works) and are already in discussions for future LGBTQIA+ games under this umbrella. The big draw for publishers was speeding up language availability, as we know there’s demand for the game outside of English. While this is still very much on our minds, again we come down to scale and feel we need to focus first on ensuring we have big enough success with our initial edition before venturing into other markets.

For the wider world this has a couple of consequences; firstly the game will only be available in English for the time-being. We have a threshold for new languages so as soon as we reach this scale we’ll be pushing hard to get translations and printing done to meet the demand. In the meantime we hope to be working with our community to help provide an external translation PDF to assist players.

Secondly, this means the game will only be available for sale through our website and in-person events. We’ll be keeping a close eye on key markets for us, and should there be a good opportunity we will be exploring it, but this allows us to keep things simple.

Please let me know in case you’ve got any questions or feedback on this. These things have come from lots of discussion and consideration but for sure it’s possible there are aspects we’ve not yet considered.

Until next time!

We’re excited to be welcoming in 2023 and looking forward to everything it brings with it!

Wishing you a wonderful celebration this evening and all the best for the new year to you all!