@CWO:
I have a question about this item from HBG Newsletter #38 (July 2015), which arrived in my mailbox this morning:
“The boxed game we’ve been working on is finally coming together! Plastic is in from China (round 2) and we are quality checking and assembling games over the next month. These will soon be going out to the great Kickstarter backers that have endured a long journey beside us to finish this up. Once all of our backers’ items have been shipped, we can focus on getting this game to more of you. Here are a few pics from the QC process. That’s a lot of grey plastic!”
All the pieces shown in the pictures are indeed grey. Is this because we’re only seeing German units? The HBG page for the Amerika game shows the German pieces are planned to be grey but the American pieces are planned to be green and the Japanese pieces are planned to be orange.
In one of the Kickstarter updates they said that they were doing the German pieces first because they were the largest set.
For the game itself, each faction (Allies, Germany, Japan) has 8 different unique sculpts to QC and package up for the games. The Allies have a slightly higher quantity of pieces, 80 as opposed to 60 each for the Axis powers, but I don’t know if that would really make much difference in QC and package time.
It’s the expansion pieces where you really see the difference. HBG has authorized 20 different sculpts as expansion pieces, of which Germany gets 9, Japan gets 6 and Allies get 5.
So, all totaled the Germans will have 17 unique sculpts to check, Japan will have 14 and the Allies will have 13.
Each game will have 200 total units. Each expansion set will have 100 total units. I believe Doug told me that the plastic order was enough to fill 750 games so even without expansion pieces that is a total of 150,000 pieces to QC and bag. If yo0 add just 1 expansion set per game, that brings it up to 225,000 pieces. Man, having to count and look over that many little plastic pieces could make you stir crazy.
By the way, for those of you not fully familiar with the game, the expansion pieces I mentioned are for later on when you have played the basic game a few times and want to add something new. Most of them are technological advancements that could give an edge to the Allied or Axis players. Some have potential to be added to Global games as well.
Actually, I guess you could add the expansion pieces right away if you wanted. Personally, I want to try out the basic game itself a few times to get familiar with the rules and unit characteristics before adding new pieces. I think HBG will be providing rules for the expansion pieces either with the games or as a download from the HBG site.
