The die cutting firm is taking their guarantee very seriously and moving with all deliberate speed. They just sent us high resolution proofs for another approval. While the color for these proofs is not an exact match to what the counters will display, they very close to what will be in Total War. The Soviet gold-brown and German feld-grau are right on the mark and these are the most difficult custom inks to match. While we are busy rechecking the nearly 4500 counter images, we believe at this point that only one minor adjustment will go back to them. The Soviet Guards red is a bit too light and we will have them darken it. We will send more information as it comes back to us.

We received the 32 proofs of the Total War counter sheets and part of the box art. They look very good. We will finish checking them tomorrow and return them to the printer with our comments. We have found several small errors which should not slow the process and should be corrected at the printer’s site. We should have more information the first part of next week.

Nothing seems to be as straightforward as we thought. After we submitted our Total War print order, we were informed that the original quote (payment in 30 days) must now be approved by corporate finance. The printer had been acquired by a much larger company. We painfully completed the Dun & Bradstreet credit application. Not surprisingly, we did not qualify for a credit amount large enough to cover the current order. After some direct negotiation, we overnighted a cashier’s check on Thursday the 15th. We have been given their guarantee that the counters and boxes will be done correctly (which was the major concern paying up front) and we end up saving some money. The downside it that the delivery quote date will be moved back approximately sixteen days. We should receive the proofs the week of the 19th. We will get more information this week as they confirm our technical specifications.

We were able to talk on Friday with the printing and die-cutting company about their schedule for Total War. We should be receiving laser proofs of the counter sheets next week (sixteen sheets of 280 counters or 3,480 counters) as well as the TW box art. These proofs are not ink color correct (which are too expensive) but will allow us to check that the counter content is complete and the transfer has not knocked out any part of a counter. Once we receive these, we should need less than three days to proof and approve them.

From that point, the printers will guarantee the printing will take no more than 42 days. They will then box and ship the order back to us. This should take no more than 5 days to arrive in Denver. We will need 3 to 4 days to unload, organize and begin to collate the game material and package orders. Based on these projections, the game should begin to mail during the first week in May. We will post progress as each step finishes. Each day we will pack and mail as many orders as possible until all of the nearly 800 orders are shipped.

We should be receiving word next week from the out of state die-cutting company on the slot for our Total War counter sheets and boxes. These include fourteen Total War sheets, two new A Winter War counter sheets and the Total War boxes. As soon as we get that projected slot, we should be able to much more accurately project when that printing and die-cutting will be finished, boxed and shipped here to Denver. We will make an announcement as soon as we know.

In response to many requests for more views of the new maps, we have included the immediate are around Leningrad on the right column of this page where the Moscow map was displayed.