No products in the cart.
Weekly Store Update: 21 July
Our summer sale us upon us, and we're about as ready as we can be. Kicking off on Sunday at 10 Central, we hope you have a chance to stop by the webstore and check it out! There's more than the sale going on around here though. We have a few stories to share, we'd like to show you a good number of new items and restocks that just landed, and have just listed so many fun preorders too - Zombicide expansions anyone? Lurch on in and check it all out!
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 share 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. It's not too difficult to navigate, so let's get to it!
BOXED IN
Do you have some cards laying around you'd like to box up? Maybe they are loose in a game box or you're holding them together with a rubber band. Perhaps you'd like a quick and easy solution for holding tokens but cannot find anything just the right size. Do you need an oddly shaped container to hold that 'something special' and don't know where to turn? Well, we might have a very helpful and frugal solution for you.
Occasionally we stumble upon a helpful site, and this one: templatemaker.nl is just such a site. It has tons of predesigned shapes to choose from, and you can enter the dimensions you want (in MM, CM, or Inches) and it'll provide a template you can just print and cut. If you have some light gauge cardboard or heavy stock paper, this could be the answer you're looking for.
The best part is the service is free, and though they do ask for a donation, one is not required to obtain the download. Nifty & thrifty!
SUMMER BLOWOUT SALE
Well, the weeks have quickly flown by, and we're at the precipice of our Summer Blowout Sale! We hope you're as excited as we are! We'll have discounts ranging from 30 to 70+ percent off all over the shop.
Our sale will run from 10:00 Central Time on Sunday, 23 July and end at 08:00 (or 8 AM) Central Time on Wednesday, 26 July. I also wanted to reiterate that the deepest discounts will be levied on many of our older, discontinued, or singleton items. I'm warning you that the biggest discounts will be applied to items limited in quantity, so I suggest you set yourself a reminder and arrive early to snag the best deals.
We'll have an Excel file with the items on sale posted right there on the front page of the webstore, and naturally you can hunt and peck your way through the various webstore departments as well.
Also, as we have learned from sales in the past, we plan on riding that fine line between "amazingly good deal" and "steal", especially since we provide free shipping for orders over $100. For those of you who may not know, board game stores are 'reselling' the games to you from distributors - so we have to pay for them first. Trust me when I say the margins are not very good to begin with. True story though, if we could actually sell games at MSRP, we wouldn't have any issues staying in business as an industry. However, that's not the case - as retailers generally already sell well below MSRP to keep up with the Amazon's of the world. So, as you can imagine, once we start selling for less than what we purchased them for, it digs quickly into our profit margin. Hence the 'fine line' of both making customers happy and staying in business. Just one other note, there are titles that we don't have the option to put on a deep-discounted sale - requirements levied on us by the publisher. No worries though, as those are the same guidelines we follow for every one of our sales. I just thought you might like a quick peek behind the curtain.
Additionally, for our local customers who order for curbside pickup, you will automatically be entered into a drawing to win Masters of the Universe: The Board Game - Clash for Eternia! That's $109.99 value! The reason we ask local customers to order for curbside pickup is so we can concentrate on processing the online orders as efficiently as possible. Naturally we will take care of anyone who stops by, but due to our tiny employee size, we ask folks to shop the webstore for the sale. Last thing. For those in the drawing, the winner will be announced in next week's newsletter. Good luck!
THE UPS ISSUE
You may have heard that the roughly 340,000 Teamsters-represented US workers have discussed a 1 August strike unless UPS can meet their demands. This would have a significant impact on US commerce as about 20 million packages flow through them a day...of which, not too inconsequentially, several of them are ours.
As it currently stands there are high hopes a solution will be found before the deadline. After all, there's just too much riding on this for the United States economy to let the strike happen. However, we are going to set up a FedEx account 'just in case' there is a strike so we can continue our free shipping policy throughout a possible strike. It's a tad troubling though. We don't have the tenure with FedEx, so don't have any benefits built in, but we figure we can eat it for a short while anyway. As for the mechanics involved in the switch over itself, it's going to be a bit of a tightrope act as we remove the UPS option and add the FedEx option. We may have to close the webstore down temporarily while the transition happens, but I plan on having everything ready to go and just 'applying' the change. Should be seamless. Yes... I'm knocking on wood over here.
Again, hopefully it's just planning for the worst and ultimately we never transition away from UPS at all. Always better to be prepared though, just in case.
BORED ONLINE? BOARD OFFLINE BOARD GAME VIDEOS
June was a bit slower month for Baker at Bored Online? Board Offline! than normal, but he continued to put out quality product. In the videos below, he finishes off his Top 60 Best Games list with 10 - 1, provides a solo-playthrough for Leisure & Decadence, lists his May Top 3, and then both Unboxes and shows How to Play Part 1 for War Room. We encourage you to take a look! We'll be back next month to provide you a quick listing of the videos he publishes in July.
STONEMAIER'S EXPEDITIONS
The release date for Stonemaier's new game set in the Scythe universe is drawing closer every day. If you hadn't heard about Expeditions, but might have seen it in our Preorder section, we wanted to relay what the game is all about. Here's a quick rundown from Stonemaier:
It is a new day in Europa. The war is over, and peace reigns among the people. But all eyes are turned north to Siberia, where a giant meteorite has crashed and awakened ancient corruption, a seeping evil that is in need of vanquishing. The heroes of the great war head out on expeditions to achieve glory by discovering what mysteries await up north. Their faithful animal companions accompany and help them, and their gigantic hired Mech is ready to discover, overcome, and possibly even integrate obstacles met along the way, such as this bear with a very intense party hat.
This game is a different animal than Scythe, the thematic predecessor to this spiritual successor. While both games are wonderful puzzles of maximizing opportunity set in the richly immersive 1920+ world of Europa, Expeditions operates with a very different set of mechanisms from Scythe. As Tantrum House said in their review video, “In Expeditions you experience a brand new gaming experience while still maintaining a profound connection to its predecessor, Scythe.”
Expeditions allows players to build a combotastic hand of cards with a cleverly limited action selection system. Each player's personal Mech Mat offers the choice to cover one of the three available actions (Move, Play, and Gather), allowing them to take the two uncovered actions in any order. As players move around the sprawling modular hex map discovering new locations, gathering resources, embarking on quests, and melding meteorites to power up their Mech, they will also uncover corruption that must be vanquished. The race to glory is on!
We are so looking forward to this one! When it comes to Stonemaier Games, some of our customers have asked us about our drastic Stonemaier product drawdown as we used to carry everything they produced. Well, it was due to the downsizing we had to go through early this year to fit better in our small retail space. We do plan on carrying their popular base games again, but just don't have the space to hold the base games plus the myriad of expansions for their ever-growing lineup. We are waiting for this highly anticipated release to restock some of those base games. However, for our local customers especially, if you want any Stonemaier Games expansions or other products and are having trouble finding them, just contact us and we can get you a special order - no problem at all.
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!
