Chris, while I can't vouch for the financial legitimacy of the project, I can vouch for the owner's of the company. Rik and Torben own a brick and mortar store south of Calgary. Rik and Torben regularly attend our Calgary Boardgamers meetups and run their own open gaming events in their own shop every Sunday. They're both incredibly enthusiastic about the hobby and I'm confident that they'll do everything they can to support it. Just to give you a sense of the lengths they will go to support their customers, Rik drove out to the north end of Calgary (50 min drive) simply to drop off 2 games that I had ordered through his brick and mortar store. He then proceeded to give me a 10% discount off retail price and then asked me if "that was okay".

In speaking to Rik this past Friday, it seems like everything is lined up for the Die Macher print run. Rik is extremely psyched about the project (and future game designs) to the extent that he took most of the week off from his day job to work on the new graphics for the game. Apparently, they have a list of new and old games they want to publish, one of which they intend to submit for the Spiel des Jahres, on recommendations from 2 well-known game designers. My hope is that they can pull off the DM publication so that they can establish themselves as another premier game publisher. It would be very cool to have an in-town game publisher.

Funny - I was going to shoot you an email Jason to see what your take on it was. I'm really surprised they don't have their online store up and working - they've missed a huge opportunity with the buzz to capture 200-300 advance purchases (my rough guess). Not that they won't be able to fill their 750, but the timing of the announcement was off a bit.

Rik and Torben had told us 2 months ago that they were in the process of starting up a publishing company and that we could expect a reprint of a holy grail game within the year. As soon as I saw Kevin's (otrex) post, I knew it was about Rik & Torben's Valley Games. The announcement wasn't really made through official channels so my feeling was that the news *may* have been released a bit prematurely and may have caught the guys off guard. Based on the BGG thread, it sounds like Kevin intially posted the news about the DM reprint going on very little information. He then subsequently said that he'd provide updates as soon as he heard back from his source by email. My conjecture is that, Rik or Torben, being so enthusiastic about the project, decided to give Kevin (one of their best customers) a little bit of a teaser not realizing that he might post it on BGG. By the time the news was out on BGG, it was too late to backtrack and they decided to make everything they had to date available to the public.

While I think the initial news post was a good idea, the publishing of the website prior to it being ready was definitely a bad marketing decision. In the end though, I think people will be skeptical until they see a game box in their hands, especially when it comes to a new publisher solicitating game orders via a P750 (something I'm sure you're familiar with as a Sunriver stakeholder). The thing to remember though is that it isn't really a P750, in the GMT sense of the term. From what I gather, they will be publishing more than 750 copies of the game. They are simply offering a discount on the game for early supporters, recognizing the fact that they're an unknown entity. Hopefully that will provide enough enticement to get gamers to take a risk on them. I consider it a relatively low risk investment but for me the risk is somewhat mitigated by the fact that I know where they work, live and play.

I just did a Google search on "Valley Games" and "die macher

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=%22valley+games%22+%22die+macher

And Chris' blog came up third and the publisher's site only fifth.

You're the man, Chris.

Doei!