Just after we deliver our current projects (ICE Second Edition and FOUNDERS) in Q1 of 2026, This Way! will be launching the campaign for our next game: ARCTICA — and we’re super excited about it! Convention attendees and content creators who have played it already have been super enthusiastic about the game, and this could potentially be one of our most successful campaigns yet.

That said, it would be perfectly reasonable for any of our previous backers to be asking themselves this question:

“Why should I trust This Way to be on time with their next crowdfunding project, when they have been late on all of their previous ones?”

This is a VERY good and perfectly reasonable question, and one WE would probably ask ourselves if we were in a similar position as a potential backer who is assessing a new campaign. 

The very quick explanation as to what happened previously is:

A lot of unfortunate circumstances outside of our control on our first two game projects (ICE 1st Edition and FOUNDERS) forced us to launch our last campaign (ICE Unlimited) a bit pre-maturely, causing a domino-effect of lateness that’s taken us a lot of time to “course correct.”

Why ARCTICA will be different:

The course-correction is now over, and we’ve also made extensive changes in how we will deal with just about everything regarding the production and crowdfunding of our games. For those that want to simply skip ahead and see how and why ARCTICA will not share the same lateness fate as our other projects, please jump ahead to the “WHY ARCTICA WILL BE ON TIME!” section further below.

But if you’re at all curious as to what exactly happened in our past, please read on…

WHY WE WERE PREVIOUSLY LATE

This Way encountered a LOT of issues we unfortunately had little control over:

• Ambitious beginnings: ICE First Edition’s 5-layer board was groundbreaking but a nightmare to manufacture, despite Panda Game Manufacturing’s initial promising assessment. Panda eventually perfected the production, but it took several months longer than planned — and costs exploded, making the First Edition unsustainable.

• Fulfillment fiasco: Our previous small fulfillment team unfortunately constantly dropped the ball too many times, causing massive delays — including a full shipment sitting untouched for two months. (We’ve since replaced them with Naylor Games’ Back Office for fulfillment, and they’ve been flawless! 🤩)

• Shipping hikes: The above delays pushed us into the peak Covid shipping crisis, doubling costs. We launched a Support campaign just to cover shipping, which then delayed our second campaign, FOUNDERS.

• Health setback: Right before FOUNDERS launched, our Head of Comms, Anton, became seriously ill and was mostly out of commission for over half a year. With only the two co-founders left, the campaign still needed to launch — but it was now underdeveloped, and as a result it underperformed.

• Saving the company: The above setbacks put us in crisis mode. To ensure This Way had a future, we had to pause everything (including the FOUNDERS campaign) to focus entirely on ICE Unlimited, the Second Edition of the game. The good news was that it raised 1.5M euros and saved the company, putting us in a great position for the future! Unfortunately this meant launching the campaign way earlier than we should have, and we severely underestimated the workload ahead…

While the above issues were unfortunate, they were mostly bad luck. But to be fully transparent, we were not entirely without fault ourselves. These are the places where This Way messed up:

• Development overload: ICE Unlimited required major redesigns, new expansions, heavy playtesting, and over 100 pages of combined rules. We greatly miscalculated the time needed for this by several months.

• Localization delays: Coordinating multiple language editions simultaneously (which was brand new to us) created several more months of extra delays as translations, corrections, and updates bounced between the various publishers. While doing all languages together was a major savings to us production-wise, the delays ate into those savings by forcing us to launch our next project later than planned. 

Hard lessons learned, and we definitely won’t make these mistakes again!

WHY ARCTICA WILL BE ON TIME!

A great deal of time and effort this year has been put into ensuring all of the issues that we’ve faced in the past have been dealt with and are now behind us, and we are restructuring how we will handle projects going forward. Here are just a few of the reasons why we know ARCTICA will be on time:

• A new designer was hired to work just on ARCTICA only! Co-designer Rémi Mathieu has devoted his entire time working on only this game, and Rémi is fast! Any time a solution has been needed, it’s resolved immediately. 

• Development of ARCTICA will be 99.5% finished before campaign launch! This was absolutely NOT the case with our previous projects. Before, we made our best guesses as to how much further development time we would need, but we were often wrong. This time there will be no guessing needed, because the game will already be near-production-ready at launch.(The ONLY reason we aren’t saying “100%” is to allow for any backer feedback during the campaign that could potentially result in some super minor changes).

• ARCTICA will be a much smaller production. With ICE Unlimited, the Collector (Unlimited) box alone was a LOT of content due to the expansions. We are purposely NOT offering an expansion with ARCTICA’s launch because we want to focus on the core experience for now. Expansions will still come later, but in future campaigns! This will greatly reduce our production time once again. 

• Language editions will be separated. Going by our previous campaigns and the industry landscape in general, English games will always account for more than half of our production, with the rest being split into multiple languages. Because of this, we will be producing English copies separately this time for ARCTICA, which will allow for an accelerated production timeline. Backers of non-English versions of the game need not worry, however! With ICE Unlimited, dealing with localization partners was brand new to us and we didn’t know of the various procedures we would need to go through to work with them. Now that we do, we will have a HUGE head start in our process for other languages! So while non-English games still might arrive a bit later, the major advancements we will make with localization partners means those games can be delivered only a few weeks after English ones.

Despite ALL of the above time-saving measures stated above, we will still have an estimated delivery date that will be roughly 14 months after the campaign closes. Why so long, if production will be near-ready during the campaign?

Let’s break down how time will be distributed post-campaign:

3-4 Months of Post-Campaign stuff:

• The first month after a campaign is imposed by Gamefound, as we need to wait for things like the pledge manager and late pledge to be set up before we can move forward. This is likely when we’ll take a much-needed one week vacation!
• Upon return, we get to work making sure everything is 100% good to go. Any backer-suggested changes will be implemented at this time. We will also work with our localization partners these months. Even though English will be printed separately, we learned (via the ICE Unlimited campaign) a TON of valuable things and caught mistakes during this process which ultimately helped us with the English version. We want to ensure during these months that ARCTICA will be the absolute best it can be. 
• During this time we will be waiting for backers to fill out the pledge manager, which can take a while, and we can also offer late pledges.

3 Months of Manufacturing Process:

From initial testing, to the pre-production copy, to eventually the mass-produced copies, at least three months is needed here. While ARCTICA won’t be anywhere near as complicated to produce as ICE, we still have some cool things planned for the Super Collector version of the game that we will need to test.

3-4 Months of Fulfillment:

The entire fulfillment process can be quite long: from assembling and packing games, shipping them on slow boats to fulfillment centers, then ultimately to backer’s homes. A minimum of 3 months is needed here, but 4 is safer. 

3 Months of “Buffer”

To be absolutely certain we deliver in a timely manner, we’re giving ourselves a full 3 month “buffer” in case any potential issues arise. Every single one of our projects has had something unexpected happen, and we just didn’t allow enough extra time for that. This time we absolutely will.

Of course, ALL of these phases can potentially be shorter, which could potentially shave off months, in which case… if that happens, we will simply deliver before the estimated delivery date, for a change! 

But we don’t want to jinx things, so the delivery time we give (which will be far less time than our previous projects, both “estimated” and “actual”), will be what it is. The important thing is that backers need not worry about delays, and can safely know that their ARCTICA game will arrive when we say it will.

So while This Way! has always been a games company that you can count on for high-quality, innovative games, we will now also be a company with more timely deliveries going forward!