Dear everyone,

I am writing you a more serious but necessary update on the progress of the game. Some of you may already be aware of the current worldwide shipping crisis and raw material shortage, but here is a brief overview of what’s going on.

Shipping + fulfillment

The shipping crisis refers to the limited number of containers available for transporting materials (mostly from China), as well as congestion on sea freight routes and limited port capacity. Luckily, this is one of the major benefits of working with a local manufacturer instead of outsourcing to China: as soon as the games are ready, they can be shipped by truck to my house and various distribution centers in Europe.


Shipping costs have also been rising over the past half a year and might continue to do so, but I expect no major disruptions on that level, and I am committed to paying for any shipping surplus myself.


The ones which will most likely be impacted will be backers from the USA/Canada, but I am not sure how that’s going to go. Luckily, I only need to ship around 60 games to the US distribution center so I’m hoping there will be no major delays. I will of course keep you updated as soon as I know more.

Raw materials + Covid disruptions

At the same time, scarcity of raw materials such as wood, metal and paper means that production times have been increased, as manufacturers need more time to gather the materials needed to make the games. This week I received a mail from NSF, the manufacturer, in which they announced that production deadlines for all their games have been increased by 4-6 weeks!!! This is in part due to the material crisis, and in part due to a lot of the staff falling ill due to Covid, which slowed down things as well.

Production of the games was initially supposed to be completed at the end of October, which would have allowed plenty of time to have the games delivered around the world. The new planning from NSF foresees that the games will only be ready on the 17th of December, with delivery starting the following week! This is a whopping disruption of my carefully mapped planning, which included two celebratory events in Bucharest and Brussels in November and December, respectively.So what happens next?

The difficulties of shipping during the Christmas period

As the games could only be shipped starting December 20th, I gave it a lot of thought and decided that it was too risky to plan the shipping during that period for several reasons:

  • Christmas is the busiest time of year for deliveries, and distribution centers, as well as postal services, will be overbooked trying to manage the huge volume of packages of all kinds. This means that processing and shipping might take longer, and there is more room for human error. Basically, I want to avoid some of your games getting lost on the way.
  • Some services will also be closed for quite a few days during this period, increasing again the delivery time and impacting customer service availability.
  • I will also be on holiday during this time, so I won’t be so available to follow up and manage any issues which might appear along the way. Please keep in mind that I am doing all of this work myself – there is no team, no other people working alongside me to make sure that everything goes well…
  • I need to take into account that the planning given by NSF might not even be the final one, perhaps they will even need a few more days/weeks to deliver everything, so I prefer to be cautious instead of rushing things and promising a new deadline that I can’t keep. 

The new estimated planning

With the old planning in place, I was determined to do my best to have the game delivered to all of you by Christmas, so you could offer the game as a gift to your loved ones – or even have a playthrough around the Christmas tree! For myself, I was also looking forward to ending the year with the knowledge that the project is complete, and start the next year with a clean slate. Sadly, this will no longer be possible, because of this situation which is completely out of my control. So here is an update on how I think things will go:

  • The manufacturer finishes production on the 17th of December.
  • Instead of going out to the distribution centers around Europe/USA, all games will be shipped to my house in Belgium in the week of the 20th of December.
  • Both launch events I have planned will be cancelled. However, I am currently asking NSF to make an effort to ship the games on the 16th at the latest so I can organize at least the Brussels event on the 17th of December. This remains to be seen…
  • In January 2022 I will send the games to the distribution centers myself, and from there they will be shipped out to individual backers across Europe and USA.
  • I expect Europe shipping to be faster, so perhaps a January delivery is possible. For USA / Canada, it might take longer, depending on container availability. This is something I will only know next year.
  • I will organize the launch events in Bucharest (and eventually Brussels) in February next year.

So there you have it. I am really sorry that things didn’t go according to plan, and I understand if some of you will be frustrated at not being able to receive the game sooner, but there is really nothing I could do about this. On my side, I always did my best to deliver on my promises, and keep an open communication with all of you. If you have any questions or thoughts, you can reply to this post or send me a mail at olympus.races@gmail.com

Have a lovely start of the week everyone,

Tudor