Update on the Surveys!
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Jul 02, 2021 at 06:10:03 PM

Hello Shepherds!

Earlier today, we stated that we would be sending out backer surveys this afternoon to collect information for shipping.   We had failed to take into account that today is a national holiday here in Canada!  We need to confirm a number of details, and will only be able to do so early next week.  We thank you in advance for your patience and will be sending out those surveys as soon as we can!

Happy Canada Day,

Jon and Russ

You've got GOATS!
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Jul 02, 2021 at 12:32:13 PM

Shepherds, you've got us, like, 

Thank you for joining us on this amazing two month journey.  We did it!  Thanks to your support, we surpassed our highest hopes for the campaign!  Grab Your Goat! is already on its way to production.  What's more, since we unlocked both stretch goals, all versions of the game will come with a marbled die and wooden meeple player pieces.  Your gift to us now will pay forward for every person who picks up the game in the years to come.  Thank you!

What's next?

Later today, we will be sending out our backer surveys to those of you awaiting your games.  There, you will be able to give us your shipping information.  It's very important that you fill these out as soon as possible!

Have questions for us?

There are a few ways you can ask us questions moving forward.  You can contact us directly by e-mail, [email protected], by Instagram, @mapleforged, or here by using the Kickstarter direct messaging feature!  We will respond to you as soon as we are able.

Goats Go Where Goats Go!

Today, as our goats scamper their way towards you, we were reminded of the first time Jon and I discussed this fundamental philosophy of the game.  "You mean they just wander everywhere and don't care?" Jon asked, "Even over impassable cliffs?"  "Dude, have you even heard of mountain goats?"

I pulled up this iconic image by photographer Joel Sartore, and Jon muttered, "I guess goats go where goats go!"  This phrase became a mantra for us throughout building the game.  This whacky idea we had would go where it would go, and we would chase it for as long as we could.  Today, we've got our goat, and, soon, you'll have yours!  It's all thanks to you, dear shepherd!

Thank you,

Russ and Jon

(A special thanks to my sister, featured in the 'Oh my goat!' image above, for her permission to use this family heirloom!)

Meeples Unlocked!
almost 3 years ago – Wed, Jun 30, 2021 at 03:41:34 AM

Congratulations, Shepherds!

The wooden meeple tokens have been unlocked for our game!  With this milestone we have unlocked all of the stretch goals!  

The game will now always come with custom-cut, full-color, wooden character tokens.  The art, originally hand painted in water colors by Jon, will be UV printed onto each of the tokens for a long-lasting, high-quality game piece.  These will last longer and make it easier for everyone to play the game.  We have already updated our order with our production house, and the prototype designing is underway!

With 65 hours to go on our campaign, the show's not over yet!  If you know of anyone who wants to reserve one of the first round of this game's production, now is the time to get their order in!  Thank you so much for you continued support.  Each day that we get to work on this project is a joyful one thanks in no small part to you!

-Russ and Jon

The Final Stretch!
almost 3 years ago – Mon, Jun 28, 2021 at 12:25:48 PM

Hello there, Shepherds!

We're into the final four days of the campaign, and things are looking great!  We are less than $200 Canadian from our final stretch goal.  For those of you in American dollars, that's even less! You are already set to receive your game, but if we can make this final goal the game you'll receive will be even better.  We would be immensely grateful if you could take a moment to tell someone in your circle about Grab Your Goat!.  Even one (very) generous person could be the one to push us over the limit!

What will happen after the campaign?

Once the campaign wraps up, we'll send out our backer survey.  This survey is how we will gather your contact details and address for shipping the game.  It is very important that you fill out this survey so that you can receive your game in a timely manner.

Game Design Fun Facts!

Now that the campaign is over, I'll switch from telling stories about goats on the farm to fun facts about the game design.  You can also see more behind-the-scenes content at our instagram: @mapleforged  Jon recently made a post about how he chose colorblind conscious accent colors for the game.  Check it out and make sure to subscribe for future updates on our other projects!

Did goats discover coffee?

For today's design fact: did you know that goats may have discovered coffee?  The Ethiopian legend goes likes this: one day, a shepherd named Kaldi was watching his goats grazing in a meadow.  Some of them had been eating the long, green grass.  Others had been nibbling the ripe, red berries on bushes nearby.  That night, Kaldi noticed that the goats who had eaten the berries just could not go to sleep.  In fact, they were so full of vim, that they leapt about as if dancing! He shared the story with his friends and, soon, they had invented a drink that has us still dancing today!

The legend of Kaldi and the Dancing Goats was the inspiration behind the "Coffee Bush" card!  When a player or a goat starts their turn on this card, they get to move twice that round!  We'll leave it to your own discretion whether you do a little dance as well!

That's all for today!

We'll be in touch once the campaign has wrapped up!

-Russ and Jon

Well, GRAB MY GOAT! We're 100% Funded!
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 02:42:56 AM

Congratulations, Shepherds!

With 11 days left to go on the campaign, we blew through our 100% funding goal!  As of this morning, it is a guarantee that this game will exist and soon you will be scampering over heck's half acre in pursuit of your cloven-footed friend!  From the deepest part of our hearts, we want to thank you for your support and cannot wait to get these games out to you.  Your support means the world to us, and we are overjoyed at the enthusiasm you've shown for making this dream come true!

We're not done yet!

We still have 11 days left on our campaign, and we're only about 2% away from our first stretch goal!  With this goal, we'll upgrade the directional die with a custom marble pattern that will take it to the next level of design.  

What's more is that if we can bring in 115% of our funding goal we will unlock a mighty morphin' meeple upgrade!  As mentioned in our announcement half way through the campaign, we have included these wooden meeples as a stretch goal at the request of several of our backers!  We are excited to bump the quality of the tokens to the next level.  Unlocking meeples has two major benefits that come directly from eliminating the need for standees.  Plastic standees, the small stand that holds up the cardstock character token,  are potential choking hazard for kids and children (pun intended)! Meeples will make for a safer game straight out of the box.  Furthermore, we have a preference for limiting the non-renewable elements of the game.  This unlock would help minimize the impact this game will have on the environment.

You can still help us out! Keep spreading the word about the game to your friends and family!  It is now guaranteed that they will receive a game by contributing to our project.  There's nothing to lose and so much to gain by chipping in now while their contribution can have an impact not only on their own game, but the quality of the game for all of our backers!

So, what's next?

Jon has been whipping up all of our final design documents so that they can be sent to our production partner, Panda Games.  In the coming month, we hope to receive a pre-production copy of the game that will appear exactly how you will receive it.  We will, of course, do a photoshoot of all the components so that you can see the real game you have purchased!

Our game will go in to production at the factory around 6 to 8 weeks once the campaign ends (late July or early August).  It will then be shipped to our distribution partner, arriving some time in early fall.  If all goes according to plan, then you should be receiving a copy in early to mid-December!  

If you only picked up one copy of the game so far, we do believe that it's never too early to think about your holiday shopping! :winky_face:

Real Life Grab Your Goat

It has been a pleasure to share some of my favorite goat memories with you during the campaign.  In truth, we only had goats for a few years on the farm before they had to find new homes.  As cute as they are, those darn goats get themselves into more trouble than they're worth sometimes!  It was this mischievous side to goats that inspired the game in the first place!  In celebration of our achievement, I have saved one of the longer stories for last.  In future updates, I will continue to share some more details about goats and how they influenced elements of the game, but my personal stories with goats ends here.  It's the story of when the goats left the farm (because my dad had to play Grab Your Goat! one too many times with real goats)!

Cookie, Thunder and Lightning all lived on the farm for a few years.  During that time, we had two barns: the chicken barn and the horse barn.  Don't let the names fool you!  The horse barn was home at the time to our horses, yes, but also our growing flock of sheep.  Right next door was the 'chicken barn' which housed all of our avian friends--chickens, turkeys, pigeons, pheasants and ducks--as well as the goats!

The chicken barn, shown in the picture above, is a two-story, gable-roofed beauty.  I learned how to work many of the basic power tools when we built it over a summer with several of our neighbors.  It was designed to house animals down below and have storage for garden supplies up above.  Out back, to the right of the above photo, was a small enclosure where the chickens, goats and other animals could go out during the day. 

The summer that we got ducks for the first time, the barn was already too full to house them!  From the time they arrived as chicks, we had to raise them in a pen in the other barn.  Knowing they needed a new place to live, my dad made it a project to build them a small, steel lean-to that would reside in the back paddock of the chicken barn.  

While our chickens had free range over the whole farm (and still do!), the ducks were going to create a huge mess if they got out into the gardens!  Dad worked meticulously, measuring, cutting and assembling the perfect shelter for them.  It was a triangular structure and stood about 7 feet tall at the opening, sloping down to about 2 feet at the back.   Then, he took a large length of chicken wire, which is a flexible type of fencing material, and attached it to the front in a giant horse-shoe shaped enclosure. That way, the birds would have shelter when they needed it and, when they didn't, they could be out and about in front.

Dad was damn proud of that shelter.  We spent the morning moving the ducks from the horse stall where they had been raised into the shelter.  They had one of those plastic kiddie pools that they could swim in and appeared to be settling in nicely.   Satisfied that all was well, he opened the doors so that the residents of the chicken barn could meet their new neighbors.  

As fast as their namesakes, Lightning and Thunder zipped out the door.  They took one look at the shelter and, of one mind, barreled straight towards it.  They jumped up on the small end, scampered to the slope and, without hesitation, leapt into the pen with the ducks.  Quack, quack, quack, quack!  It was a madhouse.  My dad groaned, looking at the baby goats frolicking in the pool while their mother leapt in to join them, "Aw jeeze, I thought I built a duck house and instead I built a goat trap!"  The shelter was, obviously, a bust.  The ducks went back to their first pen, and the shelter was moved to the side of the barn.

It was about six hours later that my mom heard screaming from back by the barn.  Someone was in trouble.  She was in the garden up by the house and set out at a trot to see what was wrong.  As she rounded the corner, she saw them: Cookie, Lightning and Thunder were standing on top of the barn.  All three of them were standing right over that upper-most red door on the roof! My dad thought he had built a goat trap, but he'd actually built a goat ramp!

The goats had climbed up the shelter, leapt on to the roof (on a flatter spot not pictured) and then scaled with their tiny hooves all the way to the top.  They were, clearly, meant to be the monarchs of the mountain!

Mom got a bucket of grain to entice them to come down.  They were clearly interested in eating (when weren't they?), but there was a problem: they were too scared to come down!  These little pygmy goats may have had the instinct to go up, up, up, but they didn't have any instinct on how to come down!  No amount of calling from Mom motivated them to budge; they just kept screaming. Mom called Dad and Dad got the ladder.  Up he went, and he fetched the goats back down.  

He put the ladder away and, wouldn't you know it? The goats were right back up there!  This time, he moved the shelter first and then fetched the wayward climbers.  Knowing that while the goats may not be afraid of falling, he still was, Dad came in for dinner that night with the mandate: the goats had to go. Back to the animal swap we went, and a young boy and his father took them home to make memories of their own. 

Even in the short time that we had them, those goats provided a lifetime of fun memories.  As we launch into bringing this game to you, I hope, dear reader, that you too can make new memories inspired by goats.  Thank you for the gift of your support, and I look forward to hearing what you think of the game!