I'm a little late to this thread, but thanks for checking out the deck. Pretty much everyone seems to have received it by now except for a handful of orders that we reshipped and one that we're waiting out due to what I expect to be slow international shipping. Regarding the steampunk theme, I own steampunkgoggles.com so that was the original inspiration behind it. I do agree the theme is really saturated. We're diverging from steampunk projects on Kickstarter for a spell. Right now we're focusing on a couple of games projects, but I'm hoping to do another deck in October or November. We definitely learned from this last campaign and I have new ideas for the next one that I think people will enjoy. I've got plenty left. They're priced a bit higher than they were on KS but you can find them on my site in the "playing cards" category.

lol, Don I still don't think I know what that is, but I remember you explaining it to some degree once before as well. It does sound cool though.

I like those ideas, Don, particularly the lens glare concept, thanks!

Hi Curt, not nitpicking at all, that's a very good observation and I definitely depend on the community to notice stuff that I don't, so thanks!
The time currently isn't significant, however we've been talking to a few magicians about ideas for a reveal. One idea is to have a regular time on the AoS, but then I happen to have 1 last card that I can do something different with, and the suggestion was to use that for a second AoS with a different time on it, to match another card in the deck. There were a few other ideas for reveals as well. What do you think?

In the meantime, I'll definitely make a note to have him adjust the time so that it makes sense where the hour & minute hand are in relation to one another.

Separate from the hands, we got some more feedback:
1) many clocks do oddly use IIII instead of IV for 4pm, so post-funding we may run a poll to see what people prefer. From what I can tell however, it'll end up staying as IV
2) a few people suggested a skeletal format to the face of the clock, whereby you could see the gears underneath. We'll probably do a mock of that post-funding too and run another poll for backer preferences. Something like this: http://stanleyguess.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/stauer-watch-face-detail-a_.jpg

Acorn, I like the inner border and reversed background. It creates more of a solid shape out of the pattern than the Smith one, which I find more appealing.

re: the post, No worries, thanks man, glad we talked this out :-)

Re youtube channel & facebook sure it would be great to work something out. Shoot me a PM on Kickstarter...

I like the color scheme and your use of those metallic inks. You guys did great with Gold and I'm impressed by your quick launch and hitting your goal in a day. Nice job!

Thought I'd share some more of our artwork:

FYI we just posted a backers-only preview of our LE card backs. We'll be changing some of the coloring and other details but it's in project updates if anyone on this thread is a backer & wants to take a look. We'll probably release a more finalized version of the backs + tuck box to the public in the next day or two.

I like where you're going with the sketches & agree that there should be something special about it outside of 'ol JV.
I liked the Bent Castle deck a lot and it was one of the sources of inspiration for my own deck. Maybe take a look at that one for ideas.
If you look at the wikipedia page on your subject, you might get some ideas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyages_Extraordinaires

Some things that come to mind for me:

54 novels matches a deck with 2 jokers pretty exactly. You could somehow make each card representative of a different novel, though I suppose that could get messy and very laborious
geology, biology, astronomy, paleontology, oceanography - each suit could be representative of one of those, and then jokers + 2 extra cards could be representative of the 5th subject

Hey Sprouts, thanks for the feedback. Yeah, the plateau worries me for sure. That's part of the reason for the extra PR & advertising we're doing. We picked up some ads on Reddit & one of the game boards to see if they result in some movement. So far I got one backer through Reddit so we'll see. We also got a review on one of the bigger playing card sites and some press on NJ.com which has 2,000,000 uniques per month according to compete.com. Today we did a press release on PRWeb's full network and tomorrow we've got a social media campaign blasting stuff out. Hopefully it all jives together. If not, I still get some exposure for my other companies so it's all good.

We tried posting on boards but I gave up on that - other boards feel this stuff is spammy and I don't want to be in that category.

Regarding the design, I like the advice that both you & Don gave a lot. He also agrees about the smoke up the butt thing and used the same phrasing  so I think that's great to know. In our brainstorming, he did come up with a great idea that I think would appease the 4-color concept while keeping the actual colors used to two.

For the LE deck, it's too late to not offer it as a reward and only offer it as a stretch goal.

The goggles got very little pickup, I'm guessing it's just the audience, so I cut the total rewards available to free up more decks as add-ons, and made the goggles into an add-on.

The pips are on the cards but with the 4 color thing they would change sightly.

The back of the card - great idea with flipping the top & bottom - makes perfect sense. Would you do a white border or a black border on the black backs?

I'll skip the add-on cards - like you said it's complicated. Don came up with an idea for that that could possibly work, but it's too much legwork with the time I have left and could delay getting the cards out, which I absolutely don't want to do (I read too many horror stories about creators not delivering and don't want to be in that pool).

I agree with cleaning up the page - it's busy and confusing. I think I got the story out enough and can cut the text substantially. If the updates didn't auto-email to people I'd put all the extra text into a post on there. I think some people would be interested.

Tuck box - yes I agree. What do you think of the LE back? I like the SE back much better personally. I'm thinking of getting a fresh design for the LE.

Bee stock & foil - it wouldn't work with my expenses. The margins are razor thin on this project and that would put me in the hole a few grand. I think USPCC said they couldn't do the foil in our last email but I'll check again incase I misread. They did say they'd do the metallic inks for a small increase per deck, which I can absorb, so I want to do the copper as a little goal for people to get the shares of the project page up to 500 from the 350ish it's at now. LE would be the first deck to get that and there's another goal for the SE to get it after.



I am embossing the LE deck for sure.

I'm still learning about cards, but I can give a little advice on some other stuff. First, I see you started this project almost a year ago. You should make sure you can renew your quote with the printing company if it expired - I know that USPCC is doing a price increase in January and other companies may as well, so it would be good for you to lock in your pricing. It's Christmas season too, so if you still plan to launch early (I wouldn't recommend it), then just expect that the printers may be less responsive than usual due to heavy holiday schedules.

Second, I'm not sure if this was covered in one of the old posts (I didn't notice it), but be very careful when pricing out your deck & funding goal. It took me many hours to come up with some spreadsheets to account for all of the costs (art, printing, set up fees, envelopes/mailers, postage, pick/pack unless you do it all yourself, promotion and other labor). I also personally had some out of budget stuff, like some advertising & press release syndication I wasn't planning for (a single PR will run you a few hundred bucks + the writing of it by a professional). I honestly don't know how some people on Kickstarter are able to price their decks as they do. I can see how artists can do that part themselves, and most people can pick/pack themselves, and people who are already established with a following can get a jumpstart on their campaigns. Anyway, be careful on that - being off by even a little bit can cost you thousands. One other thing I realized after launch was that there will be some transactions that fail - it seems to be over 3% so consider that when figuring out your goal.

Hope this helps.