Mice and Mystics - In Stores Now Hot

Mice and Mystics shipped earlier this week. It looks like it is in a few stores now, others may still be waiting for their shipment to arrive. Some stores have already sold out, and they are now waiting for more to arrive.

What a complete C.F. so far as this pre-order went. Still waiting for mine and it should be here today but still..

1) They charged me at the time of the pre-order back in May. Coming from GMT and MMP where they only charge you when an item is about to ship, this surprised me a bit but, oh well, I can deal.

2) The original delivery date promised was August. It is no longer August. It is damn near November. A couple weeks off of your estimate...so what...a whole quarter? Bad form.

3) Things are finally shipping but no tracking numbers are emailed so nobody knows if or when the game will arrive. If you ordered more than one copy, your order may be delayed. Just totally FUBAR

4) Despite promises of getting the game "weeks before" they would be available in stores, that seems not to be the case. Not that I care too much about that but again, bad form.

Colby and the people at Plaid Hat seem to be nice and you can tell they are upset about all the fuck ups. And if they had taken my money two weeks ago rather than six months ago I might not be annoyed but they did and I am.

Another reason why I will not pre-order/kickstart anything ever again.

Well it does look like if you didn't pre-order Mice and Mystics you would be waiting even longer to get it. The status of the game at the online stores is going from pre-order to in-stock and then to out-of-stock or back to pre-order very quickly. I am going to change the title of this announcement. Since I wrote it it is no longer 'In Stores.'

Jerry and Chad are just truly wonderful people. I love them like brothers. Bistro's a great guy, too. I've known them all for years and years, and they are "that guy"...the kind of guy you can have a beer with, no agenda, no facade. Just great, great guys.

Colby's all about Colby. Three times he's fucked me over. We used to be friends, kind of, but after the last one, I wouldn't cross the street to piss in his mouth if his guts were on fire. So, I'm in a conundrum...I have to get this game in trade because I want it more than pretty much any game in a long time, but I refuse to put a single dollar in Colby's pocket.

But, the second conundrum is that I want Jerry and Chad to be successful, maybe get some more gigs. Chad will do great on his own with Reaper, and Jerry used to interface with Hasbro, so I think he can really do great things when he gets out from under Plaid Hat and realizes his worth to the gaming world, so to speak. Can't sleight Plaid Hat, though, in that regard because Colby put his money on the line for Jerry.

In any event, it's a shame this sort of thing goes on.

It sounds like the game will be successful so no need to worry about the second part.

I've communicated with Colby a couple of times over the past few years and he's never been anything less than a pro. That means a lot in an industry full of amateurs.

I asked him about two weeks ago about M&M review copies, and he told me that virtually every piece they were taking delivery on was allocated out to distribution and retailers and they wouldn't be sending press copies until December.

What this sounds like is a case where a smaller publisher suddenly has a breakout hit on their hands and they simply don't have enough to go around. I doubt it's some kind of pernicious, wicked scheme to take your money and hold it until they ship your game way late. It's likely a logistical under-anticipation.

One thing that everybody should realize by now is that "get the game before it's in stores" is NEVER a guarantee.

Well, the real thing here is motivation. The motivation is to get as many units as possible off shelves and into hands. So, there's no reason he would intentionally do anything other than ship sold copies to people who paid up front.

Someone, probably in China, fucked up, and Colby gets to take the heat. Rule #1 of leadership: It's ALWAYS your fault. It is what it is. People will get their copies.

So 95% of all games come out in one of about a dozen themes, and the one about mice fighting cats sells out before it reaches store shelves.

My boys have been enjoying Mouse Guard so I may need to pick this up once the rush dies down.

S.

Update: My copy came in this afternoon. As to distribution FUBAR. As I said Colby did what he could to rectify the problems, most of which were out of his hands at that time. If there was amateurism it was in the tall talk at the beginning of the process.

As I said, I was annoyed by the delays not rabidly upset. A week from now I won't remember any of it, especially if the game lives up to the hype.

Think about it, Sag. There's a lot of gamers out there thinking that this may be their sole opportunity to beat up a little bit of pussy...

Maybe I'm just so far removed at this point that I didn't see it, but honestly, I didn't see hardly any hype at all. Maybe I just missed it. I was banned for a month at BGG

Just wanted to say I had a defect with my copy, emailed plaidhat this morning and Colby replied personally within minutes. I only have my interactions to judge from, but I've only had enjoyable interactions with the company so I have nothing but goodwill to Colby and the others. It is unfortunate to hear accounts to the contrary.

In case some of you don't already know, specifically Repoman, the game was held up at US customs for awhile. Once the game made it out of customs, the fulfillment company fucked up and didn't ship anything out in the order that Colby specified, instead waiting until all the games were packed up and palletized and sent everything out at once. They also fucked up the mailing list and didn't send notifications to most recipients due to some technical snafu. I don't know who these guys are but if any of you Kickstarters are considering using a fulfillment company to handle your shipping etc, I would suggest finding out who Colby used and avoid them like the plague.

Are you going to say anything more about this or just talk shit about someone? I know Colby personally, and he's been nothing but professional in my dealings with him.

Let sleeping dogs lie, dude. I just assumed Pete has his reasons for being pissed, but he chose not to share on those reasons given that doing so on the front page rather than in the bitchfest forum would be uncool. Plus it's not Friday.

If anyone here ever has fiery guts just burning them up you can always count on me to have urine to spare, I'm nice like that.

I believe Plaid Hat's always had the "pay first" preorder thing. Aside from Kickstarter [and, there, I try to back only established game companies to minimize risk], this is one of the few non-wargame companies I've been willing to pony up for up-front. In this case, I did want the 2 promo cards that came with the pre-order.

My copy arrived a couple of days ago and it looks nice. I would, however, like some sort of explanation as to why there's a new adventure up on Plaid Hat's site already and it costs $.99 for me to download and print the fucking thing (and, of course, cut out my own components) myself. I bought it to see what the deal was, but I won't be paying for this sort of shit in the future. If it's a matter of paying for the art in the scenario book [because the card and token would have already been laid out for the base-game components, so there's no real costs involved in updating those], here's a novel idea: plain text! No backgrounds! Just...the...necessary...info...

And, yea, I'd have prefered the fucker to be free to pre-orders considering the missed ship date. My bitching aside, I'm looking forward to trying this out with the wife. It does look like fun.

I just played Mice and Mystics tonight. It's adorable. It seems like a great family game if you have kids around 8-12 years old, especially if they are into the Redwall books. You have to play through the scenario to find out what happens next in the story.

The only problem I saw is that there was some information that should have been printed directly on cards or at least in some kind of quick reference page. We got one item whose special ability was "see page 18."

Re Redwall: If this thing get a badger expansion I'm going to lose my mind!

M&M Expansion

Now that is funny. Beats the cat paw token.

Just read the first two books (during my hurricane vacation). This game is about as close to Mouse Guard as you can get without paying royalties.