D&D’s Deck of Many Things will not ship on time due to defects

In an unprecedented move in modern times, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast is suspending shipment of its next physical release, Deck of Many Things. It was announced Friday, just a few weeks before its release date of November 14. Polygon interviewed executive producer Kyle Brink in advance of the announcement.

“We are going to be suspending the ship date until we can get to the bottom of this and re-manufacture and re-distribute copies that don’t have these issues,” Brink told Polygon Friday on a video call. “The defect rate is too high. “The defect rate is too high.” I can’t in good conscience send this stock. We need to fully inspect it, understand exactly how many units are defective — all that.”

Deck of Many Things is the physical embodiment of a magical set of playing cards first added to the lore of D&D in 1975. The elaborate boxed set, dubbed an “innovation product” by the Seattle-based publisher, includes 66 Tarot-style cards with a foil appliqueThe following are some examples of how to get started: two hardcover books: The Book of Many Things and Card Reference Guide. Pre-orders for the digital version of the first product are still due to be released on October 31. The physical edition is available only with the cards.

One of the two prerelease copies that Polygon sent for review late in October contained three quality issues.

A stack of convex and concave cards from The Deck of Many Things. — Both stacks of cards were concave. They both came from the exact same box.

An uneven stack of cards, nearly impossible to shuffle. — The 66 cards are all lined up on their short sides. Noting the differences in height.

First of all the card shapes were inconsistent. Some cards had a concave shape, and some others a convex one. It took a long time to break them in before they would lie flat on a table. In addition, the paper band used to secure cards in shipping was so tight that it damaged the foil along the edge. The cards weren’t all of the same size. This made it difficult to shuffle them. Instead of riffling smoothly, huge clumps slapped onto the surface.

There were other cosmetic issues as well. These included creases due to handling, large variations between the centering of cards and edges that looked disfigured.

Brink says his team remains confident that customers who pre-ordered the product — which has a bundle price of $109.99 on the Wizards website — could still receive their orders before the end of 2023. The product is already on its way to Amazon as well as other distributors. It will take some time for the inspection.

“We hope that our investigation will meet our expectations [and] that we will be able to get product out to people this year,” Brink said.

This is not the first quality issue with Wizards’ D&D products that Polygon has encountered, and those issues have not been limited to either its Chinese or United States-based printing partners. Brink, on the other hand, said that these issues may not be related to previous problems.

“We learn from every problem,” Brink said, “and so that problem doesn’t happen again. We don’t make a lot of cards for D&D.”

Quality issues are, according to Brink, unrelated to a company-wide cost-saving strategy at Hasbro that asks departments to “design for cost,” which was a talking point mentioned by CEO Chris Cocks during an investor call on Thursday. If anything, Brink said, some of these problems could be related to the Rhode Island-based game and toy manufacturer’s recent efforts to reduce waste in its packaging — specifically not using “cello wrap,” a non-biodegradable plastic wrapping that most board game publishers ship their cards in.

“So this is all for a good cause,” Brink said. “Obviously, we want to reduce plastic waste, and so we use paper packaging. We inspected very closely everything throughout the production process to make sure everything was going fine with that, and yet some of the problems that we are seeing here are specifically because of some of the paper packaging that we use.”

Deck of Many Things Wizards has offered a pre-order of the game for quite some time. This includes both as a physical and digital bundle, and also as a product that is only digital, without any cards. Card Reference Guide. Brink assured customers that they would receive the digital content promised in a timely manner. Pre-ordered users will be able to access the early version of the game on October 31, 2018.

#DDs #Deck #ship #time #due #defects