Weekly Store Update: 3 April

By Stone Valley | April 2, 2022

As you can see, a wall of new games hit the shop - and make sure to check out our April board game giveaway! We're loving all of the recent activity, and the spark from GAMA has everyone, from publishers to players, all in a flutter. What a punch in the arm for the hobby, and with more of us able to gather it's feeling a bit like old times. Pop on in and check out what's happening!

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!

APRIL BOARD GAME GIVEAWAY

Top News this week is we have a Board Game Giveaway going on right now! CLICK HERE to go to the sign in page to check it out.

While April may be the month kicked off by April Fool's Day, it's really the month where the long grip of Winter gets tossed back into the seasonal prison for another year. In that spirit, we're giving away the Lockup Bundle!

The Lockup Bundle contains 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. That's everything Lockup with one fell swoop!

So, what's Lockup all about? Basically, you command a squadron of captured Dragul. Gather goons and craft contraband to raise your reputation. Keep your suspicion with the guards low while establishing yourself as the most powerful crew in Kulbak. In six short days, Taron may offer you the chance to fight for your freedom!

Our giveaway is open to everyone in the United States. The winner will be drawn on 16 April 2022. If you could do a solid and share this info with your gaming groups we'd be very grateful!

Eric with Lockup bundle!

BEST SELLER'S UPDATE

We support one of our publishers' Best Seller programs, and now that GAMA is over, we have their new list for the next year. A few games have been added to the list, and we just got them in. These new titles seemed focused on nice, family-friendly and party-themed games, and include:

Love Letter, Mysterium Park, Ramen Fury, Skull, Splendor, Star Wars: Unlock, and Wavelength.

We'd like to welcome these to our shelves and hope you have a chance to check them out!

LOOKING AT YOU CROWDFUNDED GAMES

As you may have noticed if you've taken a tour around the webstore, we have a section on crowdfunded games. It's fairly extensive!

I've written about it in the past, with an overview on our process for selecting the games here, and the webstore improvements that included the crowdfunding games into our webstore here.

As I am always looking at ways to streamline our operations, I've been taking a look at...everything. You'll see a few more notes this week on the outcome of that, and more in weeks to come. Bottom line though, our crowdfunding support needs to be adjusted.

Crowdfunding is great, but with just a few of us running things, the more we add is more that we have to manage. We're still going to support crowdfunding, but at a much slower clip than in the past. I'm going to primarily focus on customer requests and items of interest from indie publisher friends we've gained over the years.

Of course, it'll be a long time to see if it helps or not. After all, it takes some of the crowdfunded titles years to release! However, by starting now we can get things moving in the right direction. Like stopping a ship on the ocean...it may take a few miles...but it'll happen eventually.

SVG EMBRACES ISOLATIONISM

We are reversing one of our long-running policies regarding our international shipping. Basically, starting April 2022, we will no longer ship to international addresses.

We evaluated our international shipping policy for several months, but it just was not making very good business sense. Approximately 80% of international requests decided not to follow-thru with the order once they saw the shipping costs. We understand shipping is expensive, but all of the time we spent securing the game and packaging material, weighing and processing the game, building the estimate and then invoice takes time. With only two of us running things, and because of all of the non-orders, we made the call to call it off to recoup that time into more positive endeavors.

If we turn on international shipping again, it will be integrated into the webstore so that the activities are all part of our regular shop operations. We do not anticipate doing that anytime soon.

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!