A fast-paced tabletop game where you try to outmaneuver your opponents in an epic contest of wits and steel.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
The New Zealand shipment has arrived - Please stand by!
6 days ago
– Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 05:46:19 PM
It's been a long road
It's been a long road but Cut the Deck has finally arrived safe and sound in Wellington, NZ!
This is the shipment which will go out to all the backers in New Zealand and Australia
I've counted the stock. I've checked there are no strange mistakes on the cards. I've gone to the post office and triple-checked the weights of all the items and their shipping costs. I've carried heavy boxes up three flights of stairs. I worked up a sweat. And I've admired what a huge achievement this has been! So many people pitched in to make this beautiful, silly little game!
There are just a few more small things to take care of and then we will start sending them out to you soon!
We have not started shipping yet!!
We will be sending out a final survey to collect tax and shipping; and if the option is available, let you pick it up in person from one of the game stores stocking the game. You will have an opportunity to update your address!
If you have concerns though, you can email us: [email protected] - New Zealand and Australian orders [email protected] - American, European and Worldwide orders
56 damage per bag x 500 bags = quite a lot of damage if I dropped the box on my foot
Game Knights
If you are in Wellington NZ and you're interested in learning how to Cut the Deck in person, let me know in the comments below so I can get a feel for how much space we'll need to run events at Caffeinated Dragon / BeaDnD! Thanks!
The American/European/Worldwide Stock
The American stock (which will ship to everywhere in the world; except for New Zealand and Australia) is expected to arrive at the American site either later this week, or next week. We'll let you know more soon.
Swords VIIth Anniversary
12 days ago
– Tue, Mar 04, 2025 at 04:01:17 PM
Almost there!
The New Zealand Palette of Stock has just cleared customs and I am awaiting a final delivery date. The American Palette of Stock appears to be about 1 week away - but we'll firm up that date as it gets closer.
We've been dealt a savage blow to the pocket by Trump's shiny new tariffs (Thanks Obama!), but that's something we'll attempt to mitigate by selling more copies, rather than pass the cost off to you.
As before, if you have concerns you can email us here; but we will survey EVERYONE before we send your stock because we know your lives are busy and things change. [email protected] - New Zealand and Australian orders [email protected] - Worldwide orders
Even now, we're polishing some content for launch, so we really hope you have a good time with the game!
Thank you for VII years!
In today's main news... it's Swords VIIth Anniversary! What an adventure it's been!
Nearly 900 episodes, dozens of bonus episodes, 60 episodes of Patreon Swor'nament, an Axes spinoff and somewhere in between I squeezed in a few adventures of Stars and this entire card game too! Whew!
Oh, and as always, if you're just joining us, the game is available to preorder on BackerKit
Thank you for supporting the game and for enjoying 7 years of SWORDS!
Matthew Wielder of the Birthday Blade
Thane Wielder of Adventure Modules
Customs
19 days ago
– Tue, Feb 25, 2025 at 03:59:22 PM
The New Zealand Palette
The New Zealand shipment has arrived at Customs! I am currently working through some paperwork to get it sent to Wellington.
The New Zealand shipment will cover all orders for New Zealand and Australia, and I will start by sending solo dice orders so we can iron out any little postage problems.
Teaching BlameTheRobot how to play
You will all have a chance to update your address details very soon, but if you have concerns you can email us here: [email protected] - New Zealand and Australian orders [email protected] - Worldwide orders
We know a lot of people have moved since the campaign has started, so we are going to verify each address before we ship. This will be done in the form of a survey at the time we calculate the final shipping and tax cost. Up until that point you can always update your shipping address at BackerKit, but we will still verify its correct right before shipping.
I will be arranging for pickup options at the New Zealand stores who are stocking copies of our game: Caffeinated Dragon; Wellington NZ BeaDnD; Wellington NZ Valkyrie Games; Palmerston North NZ
I haven't arranged an Auckland pickup spot yet, but I'll look at the final preorder numbers and try to do whatever makes the most sense to save you all the most money on shipping. It might legit be cheaper to just fly to Auckland and maybe Brisbane/Melbourne with a suitcase full of cards?
If you are based in Wellington NZ, feel free to reach out to lend me a hand - I'm sure I could use some help making this launch as smooth as we can!
So close, and yet
The American Palette
The American/Worldwide shipment is in Long Beach, en route to Texas. We don't know exactly how long that will take, but we know exactly where it is! And it's 10x more stock than the New Zealand palette so they've got a Herculean task ahead!!!
More as soon as we have it.
In some unrelated bits of news:
Swords celebrates its 7th Anniversary on March 5th!
If you missed the Cut the Deck campaign, you can preorder here! There are a very finite number of the Kargob Edition left for NZ/AU customers, so it's helpful if you get your name on one before stock arrives.
Thank you for your patience. We are currently working as fast as the gears of bureaucracy will let us.
Matthew Sage of Paperwork
Thane Sage of Watching Clocks
Now The Real Adventure Begins
2 months ago
– Tue, Jan 14, 2025 at 04:00:15 PM
Production... has wrapped! Cut the Deck is real! We've been holding our breath for that final confirmation a while now, but it's time to press on! Almost 5000kg of cards are on the move!
1750kg of Kargob
The stock is now on a freighter to us so we can send it to you. If we had to make an estimate based on what we've been told (and not accounting for any ships going sideways in any canals)... the game could start shipping 3-4 weeks from now.
The US-based deployment company we were going to use to make the next part easier unfortunately ghosted us(!), even after we cast "Speak With Management" (and subsequently rolled a 1). So we're rolling up our sleeves and doing the shipping DIY. It's a little more blood, sweat and tears on our end - but we owe you that much. You've all been very patient with us.
Thane and I will be splitting the workload, so most stock is headed to him and I will be taking care of the NZ/AU orders. We'll both have extra stock of everything, so you'll have an opportunity to adjust your orders and lock in before we send everything on its merry way. Then we'll ship the dice first, to get over any little logistical hurdles that might appear, before the bigger parcels go out straight after.
On the plus side, this gives us an opportunity to add some little personal touches to each order. We'll do our best to make it exciting for you.
Going forward, if you have any questions or concerns, you should email us at: [email protected] - New Zealand and Australian orders [email protected]- Worldwide orders
I just want to take a moment to thank the people who have been choosing to be kind and supportive of us while we clear these last obstacles. I know a lot of you are sick of waiting! Frankly we are too! We've had to redo all sorts of things - the box art, the playmats, the dice, the color grading and wording on pretty much every card and the artwork on plenty of them too... But the result is a better product. We've learned a ton for the future. To the people who have had lots of nice things to say : you're great. We see it and we really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
To own one of our many missteps throughout the development of Cut the Deck - we recently announced that we had adjusted the number of Move cards in the box from 6 sets to 4; and 8 sets to 6 in the Kargob Edition, to accommodate more Hero and Sword cards. Since we've had a lot of feedback from people wanting more stuff, and to be more accommodating to one-player content, we overlooked that some people were happy the way things were. We'll have the following options available at launch: - Printable .pdf Move Cards - An interactive, browser-based move card set on the website - The option to purchase a set of 12 Move cards (at cost price) with your order. We're ordering these from a different manufacturer, so the quality may differ ever-so slightly; but since each individual player always uses the same set of 12, we don't foresee this negatively impacting the game. We considered giving them a different design, but we're not trying to capitalize on our own faux pas by making something desirable.
The start of my personal collection
That's all for now. As always, more news when we have it.
Thank you everyone!
Matthew God Of Bubble Wrap
Thane God Of Postage Stamps
A 4240kg Update
4 months ago
– Thu, Nov 14, 2024 at 04:05:56 PM
Dear swordmasters,
Manufacturing is currently in full swing!
The bad news up front: we're not going to get copies out to you in time for Christmas. We tried our best.
4240kg of product. 24,000 dice. That's over 2000 great swords worth of gaming. It's going to take a while longer to get from the factory to the distributor and then to you.
If you preordered via BackerKit instead of Kickstarter and haven't been charged for it yet, we are going to charge you over the next few days - this won't include shipping which will come up later on, but it's going to help us keep things running smoothly.
In the meantime, here are some of the things going on:
There is a small manufacturing faux pas with the Hiltshire Edition, which is that the box doesn't close flush because of the folded token bag inside (which wasn't accounted for in the box dimensions). Shipping the bag separately will cause other unnecessary delays. It's the final sprint and we're making tough choices.
Each copy will be shrink wrapped and will close correctly once you put your tokens in the bag, but we apologize for the fiddliness.
Full of swordy goodness
There have been quite a lot of changes since we ran the campaign over a year ago, so here is a list of patch notes:
Patch notes
Notably, we removed the Crowdfunder card and the Location cards that we added during the campaign as stretch goals - they weren't that fun and kind of weighed the game down with extra steps, as we've discussed before. We've added a new downloadable .PDF that includes Locations with some flavour text and extra rules. We think this makes them a bit more optional for galaxy-brained players who want battles with extra quirks, without upsetting the flow of a regular match by having someone play a disruptive, complicated card. It also opens the concept of Locations up to homebrewing in the community and we'd love to keep expanding on that idea with future official .PDF updates.
Red = Heroes; Yellow = Swords; Purple = Moves
We cut down the number of Move cards in the bigger editions of the game to make room for more Sword and Hero cards. You have enough Move cards in the Hiltshire Edition for 4 players, and 6 in the Kargob edition (which is quite fitting if you're down with the lore).
We've also supplied a Foil and a Non-Foil version of every Guest Artist card, to deal with concerns about Foil cards (potentially?) bending over time. For the people worried about that sort of thing, you can keep your foil cards pristine and play with the non-foils, and for everyone else you just have more Heroes to play with! You also get a Foil duplicate of each panDEMONium backers Mystery Sword card in the Kargob/God of Darkness Edition, because those people deserve their card to be shiny.
Other changes:
Dice, dice, baby
Dice from the new manufacturer are in more canonical colours now, and have the Swords font for numbers. We're using white instead of gold now.
Who ordered the Taco Sword?
You might see some pictures of me playing with a playmat that has the zones labelled on it - we've removed those from the artwork so you can just enjoy using it as a mousepad like Thane currently does. In the original campaign it was going to be single sided, but it is now double-sided with Quest Sprout and friends on the back.
Sharp new tokens
It took some trial and error on our part, but tokens are now sword shaped and armor tokens are shield shaped! They're a lot more fun now. Just don't get distracted having tiny sword battles instead of playing the actual game...
And there are still some unrevealed secrets in the box!
Finally, since we've got a bit more time, I'll be working hard on more PDF modules over the holidays to prepare for a solid launch.
The future?
I've finished work on a small expansion for the game that won't be part of this campaign. We will wait until the core game has shipped and we've gotten feedback before doing anything else - but just know that we're ready and willing to expand your deck, with plenty of lessons learned and a much shorter turnaround time.
As always, if you're just learning about the game now, you can preorder the card game or the dice set on its own through our BackerKit page.
If you are based in Wellington, New Zealand, Caffeinated Dragon are opening their new store today on Manners Street - let me know if a playtest of Cut the Deck in the near future would interest you and I'll see if I can get something set up!
In unrelated news, Patreon now allows you to gift memberships to people, so the first 100 people to click this link will get 1 month of free access to the swordscomic Patreon - just a small way to show my gratitude that you've all been so patient with us.
