Antagonistic Update

At last, all of the Antagonists orders have shipped to distributors.

Meteorological events conspired to mess up our shipping schedule this week.  We started shipping Antagonists last week, planning to do our usual stagger-shipping to US customers.  We were originally expecting the newest reprint of Gloom to arrive on Monday, and numerous distributors had asked us to hold the Ars Magica new release to ship with the Gloom reprint and other restocks. 

Unfortunately, Gloom was a day later than expected leaving its printer, and it went via LTL ("less than truckload"), meaning it was going through a series of warehouses and multiple trucks rather than a single truck driving right up I-35 to the Twin Cities.  The timing meant that our Gloom wound up at freight terminal in Des Moines right when this week's midwest snowstorm hit, and thus didn't get to the Twin Cities freight terminal until yesterday late afternoon. This morning, at long last, it was put on a truck for local delivery, which then brought it to the Atlas Games loading dock.

Jess, Cam and I spent the day packing and taping boxes and slapping on shipping labels.  Jess and I had earlier this week been packing up most of the non-Gloom parts of the orders -- both Antagonists and restocks that people needed -- so that it would go quickly when the Gloom finally arrived.  (We also paid to upgrade the boxes that our printer uses for Gloom, so that we can ship the game out in those very same cartons, which has made a huge difference in the time it takes to process big orders.)

But I'm afraid the stagger-ship on Antagonists (the idea being to time the shipping so that our US distributors all receive the new book on the same day) was wrecked. And it's possible that weather in other parts of the country may screw up the delivery times of our outbound freight as well.  So the good news is that the new ArM book is in transit...but it's even harder than usual to predict when it will be on the shelves of your FLGS.  Just know that it will be there soon!