If you are reading this in January, happy New Year! And if you are reading this later in the year then we hope the year has been good to you!
The fresh start of a new year is always an exciting time to hit the reset button and hit the ground running with new goals for self improvement. It’s like the start of a new season for your favorite sport when everyone’s record is 0-0 and it’s up to you to play up to your max potential. We treat REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat no differently and like to use each year as a measuring stick for how far the game has come and to help plan what we have in store in the coming months.
Last year we posted a similar article with our 2022 new year resolutions which you can read here if you missed it. To start 2023 off right, we thought it’d be fun to revisit our prior goals and reflect on how we did before wiping the slate clean and introducing our next batch for the new year. How did we and REDLINE do in 2022? Let’s take a look and see.
2022 REDLINE Goals
- REDLINE Siege fulfillment – Last year at about this time we were in a similar spot with our 1st expansion, REDLINE Siege as we are with our 2nd and current expansion, REDLINE: Battle of Neom. Both sets were nearly completed with printing and production and we were getting ready for final fulfillment to all our Kickstarter backers soon.
We’re proud to have been able to get REDLINE Siege in our players hands in a timely manner. Unfortunately, we had a tiny delay as a miscommunication with our producers overseas led to a misprint of all our Kickstarter exclusive playmats which meant we had to have the correct ones emergency printed and flown out before final shipments could be made. This ultimately pushed delivery back from our planned February 2022 date to April. Not a massive delay but very annoying to say the least.
Luckily Battle of Neom is proceeding nicely and should be ready for a late February fulfillment to our Kickstarter backers! More on that down below!
2. REDLINE Distribution – Last year the game found a distributor that was able to help us with shipments to our backers and to get the game in a few LGSs around the country. We are still excited to have this partnership that will allow REDLINE to grow and reach more players.
However, as more and more games were purchased, our small and initial print runs of the game have begun to dry out which means major sales to stores are currently on hold due to lack of product. This is something else we’ll be addressing in our new resolutions below So keep reading!
3. Second REDLINE Expansion – This goal was knocked out of the park as we were able to bring our newest expansion, REDLINE: Battle of Neom to fully fund on Kickstarter in the first 3 days of launch! Our newest expansion is also our biggest with a lot of powerful new mechanics like entrenchment counters and destroyable missions that will open up a lot of new gameplay and deck building strategies. And in addition, the new set also moves the REDLINE story forward as it details the massive battle between the CPM and UNE for control of the super city of Neom.
We’re very pleased with how Battle of Neom turned out and how it was received by our players. It was so much fun to design and we can’t wait for the player base to be able to enjoy it and fight for Neom on their own.
4. REDLINE Fiction This one hurts a little bit. Besides making REDLINE the best game it can be, we also want to create an engaging world around it built up with stories that take place in the REDLINE universe. We strongly feel the gaming experience is better when it’s cemented in a larger story and bigger setting. We do this a bit already with some of the stories the actual REDLINE cards tell with their illustrations and flavor text and the Digital Readout e-books, like the Battle of Neom DRO, are VERY popular with our fans.
But we had hoped to create even more stories to share in 2022 and sadly, this just didn’t happen. The only real new piece of fiction besides the Neom DRO was an article we posted on our website recently. A Failure To Command takes a detailed look into the Battle of Neom to expose the rationale behind the CPM attack and Gen. Koskof’s failure to secure the early gains achieved in the first days of the battle. It was written as a serious foreign policy scholarly article and provides a slightly different look at REDLINE than you might expect.
Unfortunately that was pretty much the only fiction we produced for REDLINE last year. Truth be told, we were working on a 2nd piece that was an origin story for CPM General Valya Serova that quickly grew into our biggest story yet. However the Russian invasion of Ukraine that shocked the world put the story on hiatus as much of the story took place when Valya was still young in Russia before the creation of the CPM and it didn’t feel right to publish it at the time. We’d like to revisit this story though in hopes that one day we can finish the last chapter and share it with our players.
The larger issue with REDLINE fiction is that the team at Saving Throw Studios is small and any time spent developing REDLINE stories has to fit in between not only game design and marketing, full time jobs in themselves, but also our regular professional and personal lives. That doesn’t leave much room for writing stories and it’s a shame as there are many REDLINE stories we’d like to tell.
We’re working on it. 😉
5. Attend A Gaming Convention – This goal was always kind of a longshot and didn’t come even remotely close to happening in 2022. The reasons here are simple as traveling outside the regular 9-5 is difficult.
REDLINE 2023 Resolutions
Now that we’ve reflected on the year that was, it’s time to take a look at the year that will be. As you’ll see, a lot of these new 2023 resolutions are continuations on the goals from before as we’ve learned a bit more about what it takes to stick the landing from last year’s experiences.
1. Battle of Neom Fulfillment – This one is pretty cut and dry. As of this writing, REDLINE: Battle of Neom is nearly finished with printing and is due to be shipped stateside soon.
Once it arrives we’ll begin fulfillment to our Kickstarter backers ASAP with a goal of late February for final delivery. Once Neom has been shipped to our backers, it will become available on our online store.
2. Our Third Expansion – Though it’s still a little “too early” to announce anything yet, we have begun a lot of pre-design work on our next REDLINE expansion. Expect more details soon, but we can share the 3rd set will add 2 new factions to the game that we think the player base will love.
As with previous REDLINE sets, we’ll look to fund the 3rd expansion on Kickstarter once the set is ready for launch Right now summer would be a safe bet as that puts it in line with previous trends, though it’s still early to say for sure and we have the flexibility to position the next Kickstarter campaign when the time is right.
3. REDLINE “Relaunch” This is also something we’re not quite ready to share “just yet” but have been working on quietly the past few months as we waited for Battle of Neom to go to print.
REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat has grown so much since we first started back in 2020. At the time, we just wanted to make the REDLINE Core Set as good as it could be and any opportunities to grow afterwards wouldnt be taken for granted. Since then we’ve tripled the card count in the game and introduced a lot of new efreets and mechanics for our players to explore.
As mentioned above, our initial production run of the REDLINE Core Set has nearly run out with the Siege expansion not far behind. The game is due for a second printing and with that, another opportunity to learn and grow from past experiences.
If everything goes according to plan, the REDLINE Relaunch will help position the game into an extremely healthy state for 2023 and the years ahead. While a second printing of the game is the catalyst for the relaunch, there are a lot of other factors in play to help justify what it means and how we can springboard from it.
Again, we’ll be sharing more details soon on what to expect and how this affects REDLINE in the years ahead. But we’re very excited about what this means from all angles of how the game is played and shared.
4. REDLINE Multiplayer – It’s coming!
Players have asked us since day 1 if REDLINE was able to be played as a multiplayer game with more than 1 opponent. As the game was designed from the ground up for a tight two player experience, multiplayer was something we didn’t really build or design for. It’s something we always wanted to do, but never had time to develop properly outside the bigger demand of expanding the card pool with new sets.
Again, we’ll be sharing details soon on how to enjoy REDLINE with more of your friends, but do know it is something we’ve been working on and it’s a fun new way to enjoy the game.
5. REDLINE Fiction And Novela – Something else we’ve been working on in the background is the development of our first REDLINE novela.
Because time doesn’t permit us to create as many works of fiction as we wanted, we’ve brought an author onboard to write the first of what we hope are many more REDLINE stories to bring to our players in the future. When finished, we intend to publish our first novela as a proper ebook that readers can purchase and download off Amazon as a way to try and reach a bigger audience for the game and share our little sci-fi world with them.
The story itself, is a small self-contained one that explores a lot of the smaller dynamics and struggles for some of the people left behind by the BRIMEA Exodus and not directly involved in the Solar War between the CPM and UNE. It still has a lot of action packed efreet battles and some cool new characters to introduce into the REDLINE universe. We’ll share more details as the book is nearer to completion in the months ahead, but hope to have it available this year.
And if time permits, we’d still like to write a few smaller stories on our website in addition to the new Digital Readout that you can expect to release with our upcoming 3rd set.
6. Any Convention! – With the coming reprint of the Core Set we hope, if the timing is right, that we’ll finally be able to take REDLINE on the road and show it off properly. This is one of the questions we get asked the most, “are you attending this or that convention” and the answer has always been no. But we have a few dates circled on our calendar for the coming year and are trying to get the planets and stars to align for us to attend at least one convention if they will only listen to us!
Ring In The New Year
As you can see, 2023 is looking to be a big year for REDLINE.
Do stay tuned as we get ready to share Battle of Neom with all our players and share all the exciting new additions to REDLINE in the next few weeks and months. You can follow along and keep track of our New Year’s resolutions by liking us on Twitter or our Facebook pages.
With appreciation to all our players and supporters, everyone at Saving Throw Studios wishes you all the best as you crush your own resolutions.