I was recently contacted by Superior POD, who due to the success of Death Mesa, are willing to custom cut the Robbers' Roost deck cards for free! This means that much of the hang up on these cards will no longer be a problem. They will also be setting up a Web2Print store online to help with simplifying the POD process. Let me quote from the e-mail I received:

"We have several DM orders that have had to be canceled and refunded because the cards are not set up to our templates and customers are either unable to format the cards properly or unwilling to pay us the design/setup fee to do so. So if you'd like, I would be happy to put all of the decks together so that they are print-ready on our end, and then set up a W2P store for the entire Death Mesa/Robber's Roost/etc lineup for you to direct people to. Again, they will have to upload the matching sets of 'print and play' cards, but this way the players who aren't design savvy enough to set up the cards to our sheets can still get professionally printed high-quality decks. We can even work out your custom sized card deck that isn't part of our standard dimension options. The best part is that we would be happy to set this up for you free of charge. We get so many DM orders ... that everyone here agrees that making the decks more obtainable to the community is the best course of action."

So this will help with both Robbers' Roost and Death Mesa in the end. There are some issues still with color-matching, and Superior POD is going to work with me to get the best that POD printing can get. They problem still won't match perfectly, but I am hoping this won't be too problematic. For one, the Dodge City expansion cards are somewhat "off" in their color in comparison to the original game cards, so this is a bit of a problem across the board. Two, several Robbers' Roost cards come from the original game to help with balancing, so you wouldn't be able to tell which card was in a player's hand by noting the color difference. Third, with the orange module, since the orange cards have to be placed in front of you anyway, there isn't much of a card color tip off. We'll have to see how problematic it is once the card prototypes arrive.

So as for getting the POD in place, I will probably need to design the cards in a custom template for the cutting, and then I will try to get a prototype to review and correct. Anyway, I am pretty excited that this will finally be happening.

For a bit more of a news tidbit, I am sorry that I have been away from this blog for so long. I have been busily working away on my own board game, and this has taken a lot of time away from my BANG! projects. I plan on getting back to BANG!, but my own project has in the past few months had priority. Perhaps when I have the instructions book up and some prototypes available, I can get some of you to playtest my game. Finally, I want to keep this blog alive. I think it has some excellent content, and I want to continue building on top of that. Anyone interested in becoming a co-author on this blog? I would like to see some of the content you have written on other sites before I sign you up, but having others to post might be a good transition for this site given how new projects have taken up so much of my time. Thoughts?