Seize the Bean - A Light-Hearted Deck Builder about Berlin!
Created by Quality Beast
Thematic deck builder with brutal resource management, card drafting, set collection, engine building, modular setup & wild components!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Assembly Done, Freight Shipping Started, & Sleeves Do Fit!
over 3 years ago
– Mon, May 17, 2021 at 05:04:45 PM
The day is finally here… Seize the Bean is not just a reality but it’s on the move. This is the update you’ve all been waiting to read. We hope that it’s as good news for you as it has been for us.
That’s right: we officially approved the mass production copies and our factory has confirmed that every single game is packaged up and either already on its way or waiting to be picked up.
Cubee is the best captain to get the games to you safely! <3
Freight shipping has officially begun! Here are the details:
Boat to Germany for our EU warehouse - left the factory this week!
Boat to UK for our UK warehouse - still waiting to leave.
Boat to North America for our US and Canadian warehouses - still waiting to leave.
Boat to Taiwan for the backers of the Chinese campaign - left the factory last week!
Truck to our Chinese warehouse - left the factory last week!
Air shipment to Germany - left the factory last week! (The reason for this shipment is explained below in the "Backers Before Press or Retail” section.)
As always we want to be clear and transparent: by the time all freight shipments have left we’ll be a few weeks behind our estimated schedule. This is not something we could control. We’ve been checking with both our freight shipper and the factory every week or two leading up to each shipment. As many of you may have heard, the shipping industry is in a tough place right now, mostly due to COVID causing shortages, delays, and price increases.
Because of the state of the shipping industry, it’s likely that freight shipments can take longer than usual. We’ve repeatedly asked our freight partner for estimates and they’ve said it will depend on luck. Shipments could take 1-2 weeks longer, but if we’re really unlucky it could be more. :(
We know this is unsettling for everyone. Our plan is to stay in close contact with our freight partner and provide all of you clear and honest updates regularly so you know what to expect. As all of the boats will take more than 4 weeks, we’ll plan to do the first shipping update in the next monthly update on June 18th.
It’s our promise to all of you that we will not be sending out press copies of the game before backers’ orders have been shipped. The same goes for any copies sold to retail stores or distribution companies.
We are considering to send a few copies to content creators to make “how to play” videos or other tutorials so that there is more helpful content for you once you receive and open your copy of Seize the Bean. This is the reason there is a small air shipment headed to our HQ in Berlin. So if you have any favorite YouTubers or Twitch streamers who create “how to play” videos, please share them in the comments section!
Many of you have asked about sleeving the cards. When using Mayday Games’ 50mm x 75mm premium sleeves we were able to fit all of the content back in the box. Beware that it is an incredibly tight fit, though. Here’s a few quick pics:
Believe it or not, all the cards are sleeved in premium sleeves here. They all still fit back into their bags, even sleeved. And everything fits into the box, but it's a rather tight fit!
2 play mats go on top (because who didn't get both!?), and the contents are still just about at the rim of the box...
...then the rulebook and the expansion content rulebook (underneath it). These do push the content just above the rim. :O
But the top still fits snuggly on. :)
And since that above view can be misleading, here's the side view of how much "pop" there is from the extra squeeze of the sleeved cards.
For a more detailed look, tune in next Thursday, May 20th, to our weekly English stream on our QB Twitch, where Dylan will do a live demonstration of how the sleeved cards fit.
We’d like to keep this short since many of you did not buy the plush: the original factory we were working with was not producing results to our standard of quality. This is why you have not seen a final plush yet.
Luckily, the same wonderful factory that produced the game, Panda Manufacturing, has agreed to take over the production of the plush! This is great news because they are very reliable when it comes to delivering quality results.
We will share an update once we have a timeline from them, but it's very likely the plush will not deliver in the same shipment as the games. As this is our mistake for not switching factories sooner, we will being taking full responsibility for it and will try to offer free shipping to anyone that ordered a plush. As there are not huge numbers of you, from here on out we'll contact you directly so as not to spam everyone in the main Kickstarter updates.
On the other hand, anyone who ordered coffee should not be concerned about the delivery time. :) Due to the fact that coffee gets old, we have waited to produce the coffee closer to the shipping date. And as it is being locally roasted in Berlin, we will not have a long waiting period between beginning the roasting and packaging process, and shipping out orders to those of you who are eagerly awaiting caffeination.
Here’s a pic of us presenting the mass production copy to Pablo, one of the guys running Blaue Bohne, a partner roastery of ours here in Berlin who is roasting the coffee for you all. He’s smiling ear-to-ear under the mask, in case you can’t tell. ;)
With so many of you requesting address changes we’ll be double-checking that everyone who ordered coffee is still in a region or country that we can safely ship it to. If there are any issues, we will contact you individually.
Thank you for everyone’s patience as we take care of all the address change requests; it seems like every single one of you moved! ;)
But on a serious note: many of you may recall that we lost a support team member last year due to health issues related to COVID. :( We had hired a replacement but by the end of last year we lost them too. :( :( This has been extremely hard on us, especially since we pride ourselves on being connected to our community and supportive of our customers. We personally know how frustrating slow response times can be.
The good news is, we are currently in the process of training 2 more team members now. We’re doing our best to provide you with a level of support you all deserve. We appreciate your patience in this time of training and we estimate we’ll have both of the new team members up to speed in about 1 month.
As always, if you need any help with your pledge or have any questions, please email us at [email protected]!
That’s it for today’s update. We’ll see you in the next monthly update on June 18th. Until then, stay safe and try to play some games if you can!
Mass Production Done, Bonus Insert, & Address Deadline
over 3 years ago
– Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 11:45:11 PM
Hello there! We have a bunch of good news to share and a very important heads up about shipping addresses.
First off, we've been told by the factory that mass production of the game is100% done! Woohoo! They're now working on assembly, which should be done by April 19th as per our timeline shared in Update #53. It'll still be another week or two until the boats pick up the games, but in summary: we are on schedule as planned!
Following a very cool last-minute suggestion from our factory, we added an insert to the boxes to avoid damage in transit. It’s just a plain white, cardboard insert because it's intended to be discarded once you've unpacked your game, punched all the punchboards and bagged all the cards. If you really like it, you should be able to fit everything even with the insert, but it gets pretty tight. (And for anyone wondering, no this did notintroduce any delays or add any extra time onto the production because the factory was able to do it on our behalf. Huge thank you to Joe, Emma, and whole team at Panda for the awesome bonus here!)
We’ve prepared some photos to show you a preview of it:
Let's go through a series of unboxing photos so you can see how everything is packed in the insert... starting with the game closed! :D
When you open the lid, the first thing you'll see should be the rulebook(s). (Don't mind that we're showing off the French version here. It's the only MPC we still hadn't fully unpacked at the time of shooting these photos.)
Underneath the rulebooks you'll find the sticker sheets. You'll use these to label bags and make it much easier to organize your game. As a bonus there are also some stickers to decorate your barista meeples as you see fit! :)
And next you'll find the punchboards. So far this is a pretty typical packing strategy of putting all the bigger, flatter things together. Obviously you'll be punching out all the tokens, putting them in bags, and likely discarding the punchboard itself.
Underneath the punchboard we get to the insert itself, you can see that there are 3 walls, with 2 of them cut down halfway to allow a "shelf" for the playerboards. This is one of the main reasons for the insert; to protect the player boards from being scratched by the heavy card decks which would've slid around a lot more in a box without an insert.
If you take out the boards, you'll see 2 areas of the insert: left side for bags and components, right side for card decks. We can start to remove these so you see what's all here.
As you can see, underneath the various bags are the barista meeples and resource components. And on the right side you'll notice that the top layer of card decks has been removed. There are a total of 8 wrapped packs of cards before you begin opening and organizing them into labeled bags.
Here's the final unpacking image of the insert; underneath all of the components you find the sugar (packed separately) and the scoop. And that's it!
Now we'd like to show you some photos of what it looks like if you actually decide to keep the insert, not recycle it, but instead pack your game back into it. Remember, it was not designed for this purpose, and actually, historically inserts are really meant for protecting game parts in shipping, not for storage, so any aspect of this working and being usable is purely a happy coincidence. ;)
Remember, the insert was not designed by us and isn't meant for storing the components, but it still works quite well as you can see. It's important to note that what you see here is not just the "base game" but also cards from the Extra Founders, Add-On Customer Packs, as well as all the deluxe components (like the player Resource Bags, Resin Cups, Resin Snack Pack, and both types of Cubee Meeples). So while it's pretty packed, this impressively fits a lot more than we expected and could likely be used by a lot of you!
Once you get all the goodies and cards in, throw the player boards on top. Because the card bags are a bit wider than the cards themselves, the boards sit a bit higher than they did when unpacking. This is something that those of you out there who are pretty clever could likely tweak and find a better packing method for. We can't wait to see what you come up with!
Just to be excessive with our test, we threw both play mats on top as well. :D
And lastly, both rulebooks. As you can probably see a bit, they do pop up over the edge of the box, though not terribly.
Since the top view isn't very telling, here's a close inspection from the side of how much pop there is. It's a fair bit, but keep in mind we didn't spend a lot of time and energy trying to find the right packing method. The reason for this is that we still stand by our recommendation to recycle the shipping insert and go for a wide open box of pure gaming freedom. :D
And lastly, with the top on. A little pop, as you can see, but again, this is with basically every possible extra component you could have and using the shipping insert which isn't intended for storage. Not too shabby!
Of course, those are just photos and it may be hard to get a feel for the unpacking or storing of the game in this new insert. In case you missed it, we did a recent stream where we showed off the insert and did a live packing test with chat. You can watch the VOD on Twitch here for a limited time.
A final note about photos: we stated in the last update that we’d like to share some photos of the mass production copies in this update. We took so many photos of the games that we received, and have been so busy working with the factory and warehouses, that we haven't finished sorting and editing all the pics yet. Sorry about that, we'll make up for it in a future update as soon as we have enough time to finish preparing the photos!
We're still expecting you to receive your games through July and August, depending on where you are in the world. We’ve been warned by our shipping partner that 1 or 2-week-long delays are normal for boat shipping at the moment. We'll keep you updated as boats get on the way. But we do have some details to share regarding warehouses!
UK Warehouse
We've received a lot of questions regarding taxes and customs after Brexit. Worry not: Your games will all be sent to a warehouse inside the UK and shipped to you from there, so it'll be us paying customs, not you. Hooray for UK backers!
Canada Warehouse
Similarly, all games for Canadian backers will be shipped to North America together with the US games, but then our fulfillment partner will load them all up onto trucks and bring the games to their Canadian warehouses. So no customs bill for Canadian backers to worry about, either!
Pickup Points
Originally, we offered the option of picking up games from local game stores. We don't know yet if that's going to be possible with the pandemic. If it doesn't work out, we'll contact those of you affected by it individually.
Since games are about to leave the factory, we need to lock down your addresses in BackerKit soon. If you need to change your address, do so before Monday, April 19th. If you can't find your login to BackerKit, just email us at [email protected].
Some of you have been asking for more add-ons to be added to your pledge. We're so glad you like them! We're almost done with our stock assessment, and it's looking pretty good for you all. Thank you for your patience, we'll answer your individual messages in the next week or so!
The next update will be on Friday, May 14th, although we may send an impromptu one sooner if we have urgent shipping news. Until then, take care, stay safe, and happy gaming!
MPCs Arrived, Live Unboxing Stream, & Address Changes
over 3 years ago
– Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 02:22:37 PM
Hello patient coffee lovers! As mentioned in the last update, here's an impromptu one to let you know we received the mass production copies.
First of all, if you don't know what an MPC is: basically, it's just a copy of the final game exactly as you will receive it, shipped to us early for a final once-over. And now it's here!
We got one copy of each language, so it will take us until the end of the week to fully check everything and give the factory the thumbs-up. However, from everything we've seen so far, it looks great!
We'll share a few photos below, with many more to come in the next update, but also check out our regularly scheduled streams this week for an unboxing and live play through. The English stream is today, Thursday, at 21:00 CET / 12:00 PDT / 15:00 EDT and the German one on Friday, 16:00 CET / 07:00 PDT / 10:00 EDT. We know this information is very last minute so we’ll likely be doing live play throughs again next week as well.
The factory sent us the sleeved copies so we could see how that works with the shrink wrap and the language sticker. Here's the English copy as an example, before we opened it!
After opening and de-sleeving them, here you can see we received 1 copy of each language: English, German, Spanish, French, and Chinese! It's a lot of content to proof, as you'll see in the next pictures...
Here's all the contents of the base game, plus all your free Kickstarter extras, and the play mat. This picture was incredibly hard to figure out how to shoot; there’s too much good stuff in here! :D
Here’s a copy we've already punched, stickered, and bagged, so you can see how it looks nicely packed up in its box. (Note: the rulebooks are set aside to not cover the components from view.)
We also got the 5-6 Player Expansion. Here's a quick preview of its contents.
And we even got to play a first game of it already! It went so well, and we love it. We'll surely have many more photos of this round of play (and others) to come; check our social media as we begin to post in the following days.
We have loads more details and photos to share, but we’ll need some time to finish checking the MPCs, shooting them, and then preparing the photos to present to you all. So don’t worry, if you’re excited to see more detailed shots they’ll be coming in the next update!
Just to reassure you, yes, we're still on track for the schedule posted in Update #53. That means your games will be picked up onto the boats for freight shipping in late April. No problems or delays in production so far!
We touched on this in the last update, but we're still getting a lot of questions about shipping and customs, especially from our lovely UK backers. Our intention is to make sure you face no extra or hidden charges, and we are intending to ship to UK backers from the UK. We are hoping to confirm this in our coming update. If our confirmation is not satisfactory, you will have time to make other arrangements with us then, so please be patient! :)
As mentioned, we'll start freight shipping products to our warehouses in a few weeks. So if your address has changed since you originally submitted your info, or if you never submitted it, please write to [email protected]! You can also still write there to add any items to your pledge, or request any other changes be made to your pledge.
As previously announced, we'll post the next regular update on April 15th.
Until then, stay as safe and healthy as you possibly can, and happy gaming!
Still On Track, Mass Production Copy Coming, & Shipping Questions
over 3 years ago
– Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 05:18:23 PM
Hi all! As said in the previous updates, mass production of the game is still on track and our update today is rather routine.
We are still on track to receive our mass production copy this month. If you don’t know what a “mass production copy” is or you just want more details there is a section on that below.
As many of you may have heard, the world of freight shipping is very volatile these days but we currently have no cause for alarm. Our factory and our freight shipper have both confirmed that our schedule from Update #53 is still an accurate estimate.
As a reminder for those that do not want to look back at that update: we estimate to begin shipping the games from the factory at the end of April. If this changes, you will all be the first to know!
We mentioned this last update, but to reiterate: weexpect to receive the mass production copy before March is over. This mass production copy (also known as an MPC) is the final copy of the game, fully finished, exactly as you will receive it. We spoke to our factory this week and they appear to be on track to mail the MPC to us next week. Therefore, we anticipate to have the MPC in our hands during the last week of March.
When we have it, we will surely take pictures, share details, and of course attempt to provide a live stream play through. Since this will happen before the next routine update, be aware that we may do an impromptu update to share the MPC with you all.
We see all your questions and comments about shipping and we will be responding to them all. The main questions we are seeing are about the UK and Brexit. These will be answered in full in our next update. However, we can meanwhile summarize by saying that it’s our full intent to make sure you are not incurring any extra charges. We plan to have backers receive their games from warehouses in Asia, EU, UK, USA, and probably Canada. In fact, before Brexit even happened, we had already thought to deliver UK backers their games from a UK warehouse. We have also already worked with a UK warehouse before, so this is not something new for us.
In the case that our shipping solution presented next month is not satisfactory for you, please feelfree to email us at [email protected] so we can figure something out with you. The last thing we want is that you are facing extra charges, especially after having waited so long and so patiently for us to finish the game.
The next update will be on Thursday, April 15th. Please do note that this is before the scheduled departure of the boats. You may expect to receive a short, impromptu update after that, to make clear that the boats were loaded fine and set sail as planned.
Until then, happy gaming!
Production On Track, PNP & TTS Update, & Happy Chinese New Year!
almost 4 years ago
– Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 11:49:57 PM
Hello everyone! Production is still ongoing as scheduled, so no real news there. However, we did want to discuss some things that are coming up soon...
While the English Tabletop Simulator (TTS) Mod is fully up-to-date, you may have noticed that the Print & Play (PNP) is not. In fact, we’ve also never released PNP kits in other languages besides English. We haven’t updated the English PNP because we need our graphics team to manually adjust the tokens, and they have not been able to schedule this in yet. We also haven’t been able to schedule the time it takes to create the foreign language PNP kits from scratch. This is also why the updated TTS Mod is only available in English so far. We'll let you know once we have any news on that topic, but rest assured we fully intend to update our English PNP, and release PNP kits and TTS mods in other languages.
Celebrations around Chinese New Year are starting today, which means that the factory will be closed for at least the next 2 weeks. Of course, this was already included in our timeline, and they will simply resume production once they come back. Happy new year to any Chinese readers out there!
We're expecting to receive the mass production copy (also known as the MPC) in just over a month, around the end of March. If you don't remember what that means, they're sending us one of the first full copies of the game they have by air. That way, we can check it one final time before they finish producing and assembling all the other copies. And of course, we'll share photos!
The next update will be on Friday, March 12th. Note that this is before the scheduled arrival of the MPC, so there likely won't be much news about production. We figured we might as well stick to the schedule and just give you an extra update when the MPC arrives.
