⛏ Terraria: The Board Game

Mini-Update: US Tariffs
11 months ago – Mon, Apr 07, 2025 at 05:55:24 AM

This update is specifically for backers in the United States. If you're outside the US, this doesn't affect your pledge.

Hello Terrarians 🌳

We imagine that our US backers are worried about the impact of the recently announced increase in import tariffs on Terraria: The Board Game. 

We want to reassure you that we're still full steam ahead with the project, but this is an unprecedented situation and we're going to need some time to work on how to best navigate it. We are currently discussing the tariff increases with Re-Logic, with our manufacturing team and with fulfillment partners to find the best way forwards.  

You can read more about the impact of these tariffs on our industry here. 

Rest assured we'll keep you in the loop via Kickstarter updates, so keep an eye on your inbox. 

As always, thanks for your support!

- The Paper Fort Games Team

March 2025 Update: Updated Timeline, Character Pack and Tray Samples, Sleeved Card Capacity, New Character Art and More!
11 months ago – Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 06:24:13 AM

Hello Terrarians! 🌳

We’re kicking off this month's update with information about our estimated timeline, followed by a feast of new art, samples and other goodies from the past few weeks. Let’s dive in!

⏰ Updated Timeline

TL;DR: We’re updating our estimated shipping date to August 2025.

At Paper Fort HQ, we’re regularly evaluating our internal deadlines and estimated timeline. Over the past month, we’ve made improvements to the game that require some extra testing time and that necessitate updates to the game’s print files. Finalising the game’s tray design (a hugely important part of the game) and getting samples of some game components have also taken longer than we had hoped. These are critical milestones in the development process, and they directly impact the quality of the final game, so we need to give them the time they deserve.

This means that the game is going to take longer to get to you than we had anticipated; we’re updating our estimated shipping date to August 2025. As backers of many projects ourselves, we understand that this can be frustrating, so we wanted to let you know sooner rather than later and re-iterate our promise to keep you in the loop throughout the whole process.

This doesn’t mean anything has slowed down in our day-to-day work on the game; there are still many, many things happening in parallel, such as the finalising of art assets, the rulebook overhaul and loads of playtesting. Our monthly updates will continue, with all the behind-the-curtain details of the game’s development and as many exciting pictures as we can fit in!

Speaking of exciting pictures, let’s take a look at what’s been happening this month…

👀 Wooden Character Pack

This week, we received a full sample of the game’s wooden character pieces. During the campaign, we planned to include 4 character pieces in the base game, but as mentioned previously we’ve decided to increase this to 8 as a thank you for your support. Therefore, the core game will come with 8 character pieces (2 in each player colour), and Hellstone backers will receive an additional 32 characters (8 in each player colour). As you might remember from previous updates, we’ve been testing lots of different printing methods and are very happy that we’ve found a technique that not only allows a wider range of colours but also permits more detailed artwork; quite a challenge on a wooden piece smaller than a penny!

Below is the full set; the 2 leftmost pieces in each colour are the base game pieces; the others are included in the Hellstone pack.

📥 Plastic Organiser Samples

Until now, we’ve been testing 3D printed version of the game’s organiser trays; this is a great initial check of dimensions and component fit, but this week we progressed to the next step - our plastic samples finally arrived!

The trays are vacuum formed. For those of you who are interested in how this process works, you can watch this short video (5 minutes). It’s not specific to board game inserts, but the process is very similar, and it shows the various stages involved in the process. 

We’re happy to report that the plastic trays are sturdy, hold all of the components well, have secure snap-close lids and fit nicely in the box:

 Eagle-eyed viewers may notice a few things in the GIF above:

• The plastic trays are all black: This is just for sampling purposes. The trays will be coloured, with the enemy tray purple to match the enemy dice, the boss trays colour-matched to the boss miniatures and the remaining trays Terraria green, colour-matched to the character dice. The lids will all be transparent. Coloured trays are on their way to us; in the meantime here’s a digital mockup:

• There’s a mysterious white box at the top left: This area will contain a foam block in the core version of the game (so things don’t rattle around); Hellstone backers can replace this foam block with their box of extra wooden character pieces.
• The card and biome tile boxes are grey: These are still our 3D printed versions of these boxes. These will be made from full-art, double-walled cardboard in the final game; we are currently waiting on the cardboard samples.
• The card box is full of sleeved cards! That’s right; read on for a sleeve-related update…

🃏 Card Sleeves + Sleeved Card Capacity

Hot off the press, we have the physical samples of the full-art action card sleeves included with the Hellstone pledge! They look *amazing*, are fantastic quality (100-micron thickness) and fit the cards beautifully. We have subjected them to 30 solid minutes of the most brutal smash-shuffling that we could muster, and we’re happy to report they aren’t showing any signs of wear, splitting or peeling.

During the campaign, we said that the insert would only hold sleeved action cards (as these are the sleeves available in the Hellstone pledge). We had some backers ask about space for sleeved mini cards and we said we’d look into it as long as it didn’t alter the overall size of the game box or adversely impact the tray. It was a challenge, but we’ve managed it!

The left image shows the card box holding the game’s cards without sleeves. Foam blocks will be provided to fill the gaps and stop the cards moving around. The middle image shows the card box with sleeved action cards, spread across the 2 action card columns. The right image shows the card box with both sleeved action cards and sleeved mini cards. Square character, armor and minion cards live in their own sections at the front of the card box and should not to be sleeved as this will impair how they work. Once mass manufacturing is underway, we'll provide all of the final card dimensions and quantities for those of your who want to purchase your own sleeves. 

You’ll also note from the picture that you’ll get plenty of card dividers (not all of them are shown here); we’ll provide a suggested layout for the card box, but you’ll have the freedom to rearrange it however you see fit. Though it's not shown in the images above, the box also has a lid. 

🎨 Character Art + Updated Player Boards

George has just finished up a complete overhaul of our 8 character cards; we’ve worked closely with the Re-Logic team to create an interesting and diverse cast of characters to choose from!

Of course, as you progress through the game, you’ll be overlaying your character with various armor and vanity sets!

It has been a very fun technical challenge to make characters, armor and vanities that are completely interchangeable; we’re excited to see them in action!

Updated Player Boards

In our last update, we mentioned that we’ve updated the player boards to include designated consumable and discard pile areas; we just received the samples and it’s looking great! It definitely helps to have these extra reminders!

🎲 Character and Enemy Dice

We have just approved the samples for the character and enemy dice, with their new, easier to read inlay colours. The marbling looks great, and it’s very satisfying to roll a handful of them in combat!

📝 Development News

Here’s what we’ve been focusing on this month:

• The major rulebook overhaul continues; it’s currently with playtesters for initial comments and we’ll publish it for backers to read as soon as it’s ready.
• ‘Blind’ playtesting is ongoing; the game is currently with playtesting groups who will play the game based solely on the rulebook.
• Removal of half blocks for the game to simplify rules; a square is now simply full or empty.
• Addition of an ‘objective focus’ token to increase interactivity and planning between players at the start of each turn.
• Alternate objectives are currently being tested; these can be swapped in to increase game-to-game variability.
• Simplification of enemy retaliation rules; less dice rolling!

👋 We’ll Be Back in April!

We’re looking forward to showing you even more next month. If you have any questions, feel free to drop us an email at [email protected].

Thank you all for your support; until next time, Terrarians!

-The Paper Fort Games team

February 2025 Update: Card Sleeve Art Reveal, Organiser Schematics, Transparent Card Samples, NPC Art and More!
about 1 year ago – Tue, Feb 25, 2025 at 05:44:17 AM

Hello Terrarians! 🌳

This month’s update contains a card sleeve art reveal, an update on the game’s organisation, lots of samples from the manufacturer, NPC art and the latest development news from Paper Fort HQ. Grab your pickaxes and let’s dig in! 😊

👀 Card Sleeve Art

If you backed at the Hellstone pledge level, your game will include full-art card sleeves for the game’s action cards. Our original plan for these was to use the pre-existing King Slime boss art, but after seeing the Terrarian vs. Wall of Flesh playmat art that George created, we knew that instead, we had to have another bespoke battle scene on the sleeves!

With Re-Logic, we decided to feature Eye of Cthulhu on the card sleeve; another iconic Terraria Boss. To contrast with the playmat art’s Underworld setting, we chose the Snow biome as the location, with a moonlit palette adding to the eerie atmosphere. As you can see from the sketch above, the Terrarian was originally going to be decked out in iron armor, instead they were upgraded to sturdier silver armor and armed with the Ice Blade, as well as a silver bow slung across their back. We are so thrilled with how the piece came out; it’s currently with the manufacturer being used to make sample card sleeves. We’ll show them to you as soon as they arrive at Paper Fort HQ!

📤 Gametrayz Schematics

After lots of back and forth we are now happy with the game’s organiser; you can see a basic schematic of how the storage will fit together below.

The Card and Biome Tile boxes will be double-walled, full-art cardstock boxes with lids and all of the trays will be plastic with transparent lids. 

It takes quite a while for the manufacturer to create the tools for making these inserts, so while they get to grips with that we’ve ordered one final 3D printed version of everything. We want to be extra sure that everything fits the way it should, and there’s only so much you can check on a computer screen!

A quick clarification based on a backer query from last month; everyone will receive this organiser in their game box; it’s not Hellstone exclusive.

🧊 Transparent Card Samples

Last week, samples of the game’s transparent cards (used for armor, vanity and minions) arrived at the office. We're really happy with the print quality and the clarity of the cards when stacked. Here’s Chris testing a couple of the cards upon arrival; very satisfying!

🐝 Bee Armor Art

Speaking of armor cards, George recently finished up the final piece of armor art; Bee Armor! The design was initially simpler, but next to the other armor sets it felt a little underwhelming. With this in mind, it has been beefed up; we love the latest version.

✨ Latest Boss Miniatures

As you’ve no doubt noticed over the past few updates, we have been reviewing and feeding back on Boss miniatures for what feels like ages! They are so unique to the game, and so iconic to Terraria, that we needed to make sure that the modular key systems were perfect, and that the colours were just right. We received our latest batch of samples this week, and we’re happy to report that the keys are correct, the fit is good and the colours look great! These are still 3D printed and airbrush painted samples (hence why the inside parts on some are white); we didn’t want to move on to creating molds for the plastic versions before we were 100% happy with them.

📸 Bee Ally 

Last month, we showed you the new Bee Ally token. It would have been better shown in context rather than just on Chris’ hand, so here it is flying through the Underground Hive!

🎲 Inventory Dice Samples

In our last update, we mentioned that the inventory dice samples were on their way. The marbled acrylic looks fantastic in blue, red, pearlescent white and yellow, but the gold infill on the blue and red dice was very difficult to read. In light of this, we’ve switched over to a white infill on those dice instead and it is much clearer.  

The polyhedral character and enemy dice also arrived, but they needed a couple of small changes; we’ll share updated samples in a future update.

💳 Coin Dial Modifications

The game’s coin dials have been altered slightly for useability; they are bigger, the numbers are clearer and we’ve added a little cutout to make turning the dial easier. These might all seem like small changes but they make a big difference overall.

🌳 High-Friction Biome Tiles

Early on in the design of the game, we knew that tokens would need to be placed into the world; as enemies and to track various states. With this in mind, we’ve been working with the team at Gameland to find a coating for the biome tiles and tokens that decreases the chances of tokens moving easily if knocked. Of course, we can’t eliminate this completely, but we wanted to do something to help if we could. We’ve tried a few different options, and have finally found a matte finish that increases friction between the biome tiles and tokens placed onto them, without adversely affecting the colours or sharpness of detail. Happily, it also has another bonus; significantly reducing glare and improving readability of the tiles, even with a bright light directly overhead.

🎨 NPC (Non-Playable Character) Art

George has also been hard at work finishing the NPC icons. These now only appear on the NPC tiles and NPC board (see below), so we’ve pivoted from full-body art to bust/ profile picture style pieces and they work really well!

📰 Development News

• The major rulebook overhaul continues; we’ll publish it for backers to read as soon as it’s ready.
• ‘Blind’ playtesting is ongoing; the game is currently with playtesting groups who will play the game based solely on the rulebook.
• Simplification of chopping and digging rules; now quicker, easier and less fiddly!
• Removal of time tokens from the game; passage of time is now baked into the threat tracker which means less things to check per turn.
• Significant upgrades across all cards; culling of any ‘lacklustre’ cards, and replacement with more interesting and diverse cards to improve the overall deckbuilding aspect of the game experience.
• Objective chain updates, including testing of variable objectives allowing for more variety between games.
• Various graphic design improvements, including a player board upgrade to include designated consumable and discard pile areas.

👋 We’ll Be Back in March!

We’ll have more next month; thank you so much for your support, comments and enthusiasm! If you have any questions, just drop us an email at [email protected].

Until next time, Terrarians!

-The Paper Fort Games team

January 2025 Update: Armor Art, Wooden Samples, Custom Dice, Gametrayz Progress and a Resculpted Bee Ally!
about 1 year ago – Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 06:35:56 AM

Hello Terrarians! 🌳

Welcome to the first update of 2025 😊. We’re kicking off the year by sharing more art, information about the game’s custom Gametrayz organiser, samples from the factory and an improved bee ally miniature. Let’s get stuck in!

🎨 Armor Set Art

As always, George has been hard at work on art assets for the game. His recent focus has been on finishing the armor sets; you’ll find the new ones below!

As you might remember, armor sets are printed onto transparent cards that are placed on top of your character card, ‘dressing’ your character and buffing their stats.  

George is currently working on a unique art piece for the action card sleeve pack (included with the Hellstone pledge); even at the early sketch stage, we’re excited! 🤩

📏 Manufacturer Samples

🟡 Wooden Pieces

We recently received samples of the game’s printed wooden components; character pieces, tombstone tokens, mana/health trackers and the day/night token. These were all upgraded with printed art during the campaign. We’ve experimented with various printing techniques over the past couple of months and we’re really pleased with how well the art has come out on such tiny pieces. You can watch a quick flyover of these components here. 

🎲 Custom Inventory Dice

Creating custom dice is quite an involved process; one of the biggest challenges is ensuring that the material textures, colours and infills all work well together. This week, the manufacturer sent us this picture of the game’s inventory dice, used to track your resources. During the KS, these were upgraded via stretch goals from plain to marbled plastic, and then from standard to customised dice, allowing us to incorporate the Andy font and include the Terraria tree on the ‘0’ face.

Creating custom dice also allows us to play with the positioning of the faces. On a normal 6-sided die, the values of opposite faces add up to 7. This is fine if you’re rolling the dice, but if you’re using them to track something, it can be fiddly to ‘count up’ or ‘count down’ as the faces for sequential numbers aren’t necessarily next to each other. We’ve positioned the faces in such a way that ‘counting up’ and ‘counting down’ should be significantly easier.  

These samples are currently on their way to us and we’re looking forward to getting our hands on them. The polyhedral character and enemy dice are also on their way. One of the most important things for use to check is that there is plenty of contrast between the dice colours and the infill colours, so they are easy to read in-game.   

Chinese New Year has now started; during this national holiday factories close down completely. We worked closely with Gameland to get as many samples sent as possible before the holiday began, so we’ll have plenty to work on while they’re away.

🍱 Gametrayz Organiser

From the outset, we knew that this game would benefit from a custom box insert. Not just to help with organisation, but also to streamline setup, gameplay and put-away. It has taken lots of time, spreadsheets, prototypes and alterations to achieve this goal, but we’re really, really close! Last week, we ordered high-quality 3D prints of the latest tray designs and Chris spent a couple of days going through them all, checking that every component has a place, that each of the slots was the correct size and that all of the trays fitted together as expected inside the box.  There are some changes to be made by Gametrayz after this review, but we’re almost there.

The prototype trays in the picture above are 3D printed in a grey material, but the final plastic trays will be coloured. The stackable trays (the setup, crafting/resource and enemy trays) will have transparent lids, as will the 6 boss trays. The biome tile and card boxes will be made of thick, full-art, double-walled cardboard and will have cardboard lids. The dice you see in the setup tray are just placeholders of the correct size that we’re using while we wait for the actual dice samples. Similarly, ‘white sample’ (i.e. unprinted) cardboard components are being used to check each component’s dimensions. Not pictured above is the enemy tray; you'll find that below:

🐝 Bee Ally Token Resculpt

As part of the ongoing review process, we recently revisited the game’s ‘Ally’ tokens (the enemies spawned by Bosses during boss battles). We weren’t happy with the bee Ally; compared to our other Allies and boss miniatures it felt flat and of lower quality. In light of this, it has been remodelled; we’re much happier with the new ally!

📝 Game Development

Here are some of the game’s features we’ve been focusing on this month:

• A major rulebook overhaul, taking into account feedback from the community and incorporating the latest rule modifications. Thank you to everybody who took the time to read the previous versions and share their feedback with us! This updated version of the rulebook is currently with external editors and will be improved further based on their comments. We’re aiming to publish the latest version online for backers to peruse within the next couple of months.  
• ‘Blind’ playtesting; the game is currently with playtesting groups who will play the game based solely on the rulebook.
• Detailed review of the Gametrayz organiser system as detailed above
• Review of manufacturer’s component samples, including wooden pieces and ‘high-friction’ biome tile/ token coating.
• Various small UI/ graphic design improvements across the game’s components.

⏳ Something From the Archives!

We recently found one of Chris’ earliest prototypes in Tabletop Simulator. In this version, the world was built from square cards (rather than rectangular tiles), which threw up all sorts of problems with mis-orientation and cards sliding under one another. It’s certainly different, but recognisable as an early version of today’s game and a great reminder of how far we’ve come!

👀 Dice Tower Top 10 Most Anticipated Games of 2025

When we returned to the office earlier this month, we were very excited to discover that Tom Vasel from the Dice Tower has chosen Terraria as one of his top 10 most anticipated games of 2025. We’re honoured to be on the list among such fantastic company!

We’ll Be Back in February!

We’ll be back next month with more art, development news, and factory samples to show you! It’s really lovely to see everything come together; thank you all so much for your support.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to drop us an email at [email protected].

Bye for now, Terrarians! 😃

-The Paper Fort Games team

December 2024 Update: PAX Unplugged Recap + Enemy Art + Christmas Promo Pack Spotlight + Crimson Biome Discovered + Failed Payment Reminder
about 1 year ago – Wed, Dec 18, 2024 at 07:06:39 AM

Hello Terrarians! 🌳

We’re back from PAX Unplugged and it’s time for our final update of the year. This month we’ve got a recap of the event, new enemy and Crimson art, and details of the Christmas promo pack. Let’s dive right in! 

🛫 PAX Unplugged Recap

From 6th to 8th December, we were demoing Terraria: The Board Game at PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia, PA. Thank you to everyone who visited the booth to play the game, check out the playmat and pick up a Town Slime balloon (as always, it was fun to see them bobbing about in the convention hall! 🎈)

It was lovely to meet backers in person, and to share the game with Terraria fans who weren't aware of the tabletop adaptation. We were very conveniently positioned just across from Contention Games, who recently published the Slay the Spire board game; lots of videogame fans visiting their booth also came to say hello to us! 

When you’re busy at the booth all day, it’s easy to forget to take photos! A huge thank you to Lana (@navigatorlana) who took the fantastic in-play shots of the demo and components below 📸.  Lana shared them with us on Instagram and kindly gave permission for us to share them in this update. You can follow Lana on Instagram here.

Highlights of the convention included chatting with backers, a group of attendees who played the game on Friday and were kind enough to come back on Sunday to tell us that Terraria was their favourite demo of the convention, and playing the demo with a group of real-life Mermaids 🧜‍♀️! 

Did you play? Let us know in the comments! 

👀 Enemies Ahoy!

George recently finished up the art for all of the non-boss enemies in the game, which are featured on the game’s enemy tokens. As always, he’s done a fantastic job and we love his interpretation of the game’s sprites; here are some of our favourites! 

🎄 Component Spotlight: Christmas Promo Pack

As this is our December Update, it seems appropriate to show you some more of the Christmas Promo Pack, unlocked as a stretch goal during the Kickstarter campaign!

Ugly Sweater: ‘Ugly’ is subjective, right? We think this knitted number is rather fetching, and it will look lovely overlaying your character card.  It doesn’t do anything, but it does look cosy!

Candy Cane Sword: This sweet sword deals decent damage, as well as preventing enemy retaliation. Great for defeating mobs, or for cutting yourself a nice slice of Christmas cake… delicious! 

Gingerbread Cookie: Not the gumdrop buttons! Discarding this tasty consumable will grant +1 mana, +1 defence, +1 action point and +1 damage; the perfect festive pick-me-up!

These Christmas items will be available in your games via the Present, an optional card that you can add to the base game chest cards. 

🎲 Manufacturer Update: Introducing Gameland

We’re very happy to announce that we’ll be working with Gameland as our manufacturer for Terraria: The Board Game. Gameland have 16 years of experience in tabletop game manufacturing, and are well known for the quality of their products, including Too Many Bones and Cloudspire from Chip Theory Games and Mind MGMT from Off The Page Games. 

They have been wonderfully communicative and very helpful in the prototyping of unusual components (such as our modular boss miniatures); the Gameland team are currently working on a wide variety of component samples for us and we’re looking forward to sharing them in a future update! 

As well as component testing, we’re working closely with the Gameland team on pre-packaging options to ensure that your games get to you in pristine condition.

💖 Crimson Biome Discovered!

At the start of Terraria: The Board Game, as in the videogame, you’ll choose an evil biome; Corruption or Crimson (or randomly select one). So far, we’ve shared the art for Corruption, but Geoge has recently been working on the Crimson biome tiles too; you can find a selection of the WIP art below!

We’ve added new critters too; which ones can you find on this selection of tiles?

💳 Failed BackerKit Payments

We recently charged for any extras added in BackerKit, and as is always the case, a small number of payments didn't go through. If you didn't add anything extra in BackerKit, you won't have been charged, so you can disregard the info below.

Failed payments aren't always a result of insufficient funds; banks can sometimes flag the charge, or payment details may be incorrect. If this has affected you, don't worry! You'll have received an automated email from BackerKit asking you to update your payment details; please do this as soon as possible to secure your order. If your bank flags the charge, you'll need to contact your bank directly. If you are having problems with the BackerKit payment system itself, please email BackerKit Support at https://terraria-board-game.backerkit.com/faq#contact-us ; they're more likely to be able to help in this situation as we don't have direct access to the payment system.

Any failed payments will be automatically retried this week, then once a week moving forward. Any pledges where funds have not been successfully collected by January 1st won't be included in the fulfilment plan.

📅 Back In January!

Thank you to Re-Logic and the Terraria community for the support and enthusiasm in 2024; we couldn’t do it without you and we’re excited to share more about Terraria: The Board Game in 2025! Happy Holidays to those who celebrate; we hope you get to spend time with your families and loved ones over the festive season.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop us an email at [email protected]. We’ll be out of the office over the festive break, so please bear with us; rest assured we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Bye for now, Terrarians! 😃

-The Paper Fort Games team