stone valley games update 220501

Weekly Store Update: 1 May

It's hopping here at Stone Valley Games! We have just kicked off our May Board Game Giveaway, there's new items and restocks back on the shelves, and we have a few other items of interest you might like to check out. Why not pop in and see what we have going on?

INTRO

Welcome to our weekly newsletter! For our new readers I'm Eric, and Wendy and I run Stone Valley Games. This newsletter is our way to discuss both local and world-wide gaming news of interest that popped up last week. It also provides our subscribers, both local and remote, some information on the going's on around here so everyone feels like part of the action. At the bottom of this newsletter we show you the restocks, new items, and preorders added to the store last week. All in all it's not too difficult to navigate, so let's get to it!

BOARD GAME GIVEAWAY

It's the beginning of the month - and that means it's Board Game Giveaway time! 

You might remember that in April we tossed the Winter season into jail and celebrated by giving away the Lockup Bundle. We're going to continue that theme going into May. As the Spring season slowly continues to get warmer, we're not seeing it get warm quite fast enough, so we want to Ignite it to get to Summer that much faster!

ignite giveaway 03
Eric with Ignite

How better to ignite things than...giving away the Kickstarter version of Ignite, valued at over $120! Ignite is a combination of tactical combat, deck building, and miniatures game. Between the variably built board, unique race abilities, and the multitude of available cards, every game of Ignite is vastly different! 

CLICK HERE to go to the sign in page and find out more about it! There's even a review video to check out. Not much time, the winner will be drawn on 14 May 2022. Please share with your gaming groups and friends - and good luck!

LCG SALE RESULTS

Last week we kicked off a 50% sale across both the Lord of the Rings and Arkham Horror Living Card Game lines. Ever since the publisher changed their release methodology from the box and six pack to two box method our sales bottomed out on the older cards. So, to both clear stock and allow folks to possibly fill gaps in their collections, we dropped the sale. 

It turned out to be a wonderful success! It looks like someone shared our sale with Board Game Geek, and that really started pulling the people in. We also met several local players that stopped in to check out the remaining packs too. Much joy all around!

If you take a peek in those Arkham Horror and Lord of the Rings Living Card Game pages now, it's getting to look more like a ghost town every day. Especially since I'm removing the packs and boxes we don't plan on restocking as they go out of stock.

We're going to keep that 50% sale going. Once we sell the last few items, I'll refresh both of those LCG pages to match the latest. Out with the old, and in with the new!

GOTTA RECAPTCHA THEM ALL

Something else the LCG sale did, as there was a fairly good influx of new customers, was put our systems to the test. All-in-all everything worked very smoothly, except for account creation. We received reports from a few customers who could not make SVG Accounts as the reCAPTCHA checkbox did not register once checked, locking them in the sign-in page. 

We went through our usual troubleshooting of source, platform and browser but it seemed to be all over the place. Those are the most difficult to isolate as it seemingly works fine for some, and others with the same setup have difficulty. Even on our own machine it just seemed to spin for a very long time before finally working. 

svg recaptcha

I dug around and found a solution - Custom Captcha! In this way we replace the checkbox with a bit of math. All of the customers I relayed the fix to had no more issues with registering and we were back to full speed ahead.

You might be wondering why use reCAPTCHA at all, and it's because of bots, plain and simple. If we don't have some form of Captcha on the site those not-so-friendly Internet bots will absolutely flood the system with fake accounts. No joy, let me tell you, so we really do have to reCAPTCHA them all...

In any case, that turned out to be an easy fix, one that I didn't have to punt to the devs. I also carried the Custom Captcha concept forward to our Board Game Giveaway signup page too...just in case. 

THE WRAP UP

Okay, enough news for this week! Below are the Restocks, New Items, and Preorders added to the shop last week. You can click on the item to learn more, and many of the products have review and gameplay videos so you can see the game in action. If you're visiting our page and you'd like to keep up with our giveaways, sales, new products, and articles like this one just create an account here. Once created you will be subscribed to our newsletter and become enrolled in our loyalty system, instantly earning 50 Stones that you can use on your very first order. A Stone? One Stone is equivalent to One Cent. That doesn't sound like much, but you earn 2 Stones for every dollar spent and 5 for each product review, so though it may seem small, those savings add up fast! Redeem your Stones upon checkout either in-store or online, and they can save you up to 10% off your cart total. Loyalty Matters! 

Restocks

New Items

Preorders