
Weekly Store Update: 17 April
Happy Easter! We hope you are surrounded by sunshine, flowers, love and family on this special day. Check hands for chocolate before breaking out the games! Just wanted to remind you we will be open on Easter this year. No complaints this week, plenty of foot traffic and a good rotation of games into the store. Why not pop in and check out our weekly update to see who won our April board game giveaway and find out what else we've been up to!
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 customers, 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. Not too difficult to navigate, so let's get to it!
BOARD GAME GIVEAWAY - WINNER!!
We've drawn the winner of our April board game giveaway. As you may recall, we gave away The Lockup Bundle.
The Lockup Bundle contained four items: Lockup: A Roll Player Tale base game, the Lockup: Breakout expansion, the Lockup: Kulbak Pack (Mini-Expansion), and the fantastic Lockup: Plastic Crew Tile Set.
We drew the winner on Saturday, 16 April, and it was Corey from Lawrenceville, GA. Congratulations Corey!!! We're getting your game out to you now. As always, there's no cost to enter - or to win!

If you didn't win this time around, there's always next month! That's right, we're continuing our monthly giveaways for the foreseeable future, and we'll be sharing what May's giveaway is very soon. Make sure to tune into this newsletter to stay informed!
STORE HEALTH STATUS UPDATE
You might have noticed if you check us out on social media that we have our products up in Facebook...sorry, I mean Meta. We're still getting used to that. Anyway, it's a whole process to get the shop set up there, lots of hurdles to go thru. Then it's a bit of effort to set up the product listings, at least initially. After the initial setup our system keeps all the changes synched.
However, since we didn't connect the store to the Meta checkout system, it will point people back to our webstore for purchase. Now, I cannot prove it, but since we declined the offer for them to take yet another percentage off the top in order to use their payment service, things seem to move very slowly. It's just a theory, one that I won't test as I really don't want to have yet another payment system to monitor.
In any case, we've been in Needs Improvement status since we first set everything up, even though we passed all the tests and met all the requirements from the beginning. Well, here we are, a mere six months later and after not making any further adjustments, we received the 'Your Account Health is Good' banner! Yay! Yay?
I really don't know what that status update will change, but it's always interesting to see how some processes seem to be much smoother with the injection of more money. Or time.
THE BOARD GAME BRIGADE
Jill reached out to us asking for help. Jill is a volunteer for The Board Game Brigade, an effort that's part of the Marshall Fire Community Group. The Board Game Brigade is part of a 5K+ member Marshall Fire Facebook community who are currently working to support immediate and ongoing needs of the impacted fire families and their children. She reported that they have received requests for over 300 games, however, over 1000 families have been affected and they get more requests daily.
If you weren't aware, the Marshall Fire started on December 30, 2021, in Boulder County, Colorado and ultimately destroyed over 1,000 structures, becoming the state's most destructive in terms of structures lost.
The Board Game Brigade asked for our help by donating games for these families who have lost everything. We didn't want to stop there though, so we are sharing their request with you too. If you are interested in donating, just let us know and I'll share Jill's contact information with you.
A MULTIPLAYER INTERLUDE
Jason is back with another episode of his fun and informative podcast Meeple, Myself and I. As you may know if you've heard it before, and the podcast title is a pretty good hint too, that he focuses on solo gaming.
Well, he goes against the grain this time by discussing some great multiplayer competitive games. I know, crazy right! We've given it a listen, and as always Jason keeps the surprises coming. We encourage you to give it a chance and check out his small but growing backlog too. You can catch Meeple, Myself and I anywhere that you normally listen to podcasts, or at this link.
We've also just shipped off another batch of games to Jason, and we're always interested and curious how they'll do under his sharp and critical eye. I'm sure we'll be sharing that with you at a later date.
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, and they can save you up to 10% off your cart total. Loyalty Matters!