By Peter Chiykowski
Happy holidays, everyone! I wanted to quick check in and share a bit of bad news.
Unfortunately, we won't be taking holiday orders this year (outside of a few select regions). Any orders placed after November 11 will ship in January instead.
The good news: we've designed holiday cards you can give to gift recipients while they wait for their deck to arrive. Whether you're ordering early for Black Friday, or you find yourself in need of a last-minute gift on Christmas Eve, it just takes a moment to download and print the card, and the card comes with a link for accessing the demo deck while they wait.
More good news: we are offering a limited number of holiday orders to Australia, New Zealand, and Asia (dependent on stock in our Asian shipping hub).
Here is the holiday card for writers!
- Download the version for our Story Prompts Deck.
- Download the version for our Worldbuilding Prompts Deck.
And here is the holiday card for tabletop RPG/D&D players!
- Download the version for our Story Prompts Deck.
- Download the version for our Worldbuilding Prompts Deck.
The holidays can be both a blessing and a curse for a small business like The Story Engine. In previous years, we've had a huge surge in holiday orders starting on the Black Friday weekend. Our shipping partners have sometimes struggled to keep up with orders, and I've even shipped decks from my small personal stockpile to make sure special holiday gifts arrive on time and to take some of the load off of our partners.
The last thing I want to do is let down a customer who is waiting on a holiday gift.
This year, I brought multiple shipping partners on board to keep up with demand and get ahead of the surge. Unfortunately, our US partner had to bow out last-minute and another of our partners is short-staffed due to illness. We've brought on a new US partner and have redirected our cargo to them, but we're playing catch-up at a time I very much wanted to be ahead of the ball.
Right now we're hard at work shipping our Deck of Worlds Kickstarter pledges, BackerKit backers, and 2022 preorders.
Currently, it looks like almost everyone should have their decks before the holidays with one exception: some US preorders placed after July 28 may not receive their decks until January.
We're looking into alternate shipping solutions for these preorders, and some have already shipped using leftover stock from our temporary Canadian Kickstarter hub, but I wanted to let customers know now in case they were counting on decks for holiday gifts or urgent projects.
If you are an affected preorder customer and we cannot find a holiday shipping solution for you, we will reach out via email soon to let you know and offer some resolution options.
We will continue to keep our shipping page up to date with the latest news, and you can also reach us via the contact page for information, advice, or anything else we can help with!
