Hey whiskers 🐟 Happy new year! 🎆 We’re here starting the year right and continuing our work on some exciting items:

Creative Projects

As Book Two has wrapped up, our creative team has been making quick work of Book Three. The planning is already finished, and we will soon be releasing parts each week. This next book is set to expand on Last Fish! in The Great Pond and there will be Adventurers’ Guild prizes to be won near the end of the book.

In the meantime, you can always find all of our written lore on our website to read and reread while you wait 🤓

Oh…what’s that? You want to see Burt? Well…I guess we could…you know what, sure! Check out our first complete plushie sample: Burt, the Card Koi!

On our twitter, Bugabu hosted yet another spaces 📖 This time, he read the Book of Ponds Prologue. If you prefer listening over reading, the recording can be listened to here. In the same vein, our first reading of Book Two will be tomorrow night (Thursday, January 26 at 7PM EST) hosted on Twitter, once again, by our very own loresmith, Bugabu! Set a reminder: here. These readings will be released in the future for streaming at your convenience :)

Last Fish! - The Card Game by Whiskers

We are so happy to see all the interest that you have given Last Fish! over the past month. For newcomers looking to learn more about the game, definitely check out our discord in the #🦈|last-fish-info channel or our website to sign up for our newsletter.

As for the project updates, marketing has been going very well for Last Fish! We are continuing to generate more and more leads through Facebook ads and we are happy to say that as we gain more email marketing subscribers who are interested in Last Fish! we are also reducing our cost per lead - a win-win! Basically, we spend less but still find more people for you to play Last Fish! with! The creative team is also moving along in their work for the first expansion pack, which is 80% done already 😊 More news (and sneak peeks + some early testing) will follow soon.

Now to answer your burning question - when will our Kickstarter campaign launch? Mark your calendars, because we’ve decided that the official launch date will be…

🎉 February 28th, 2023 🎉

If you’d like to stay in-the-know about that, give our pre-launch Kickstarter page a follow! This day was chosen because Kickstarter campaigns typically do best on Tuesdays, and the month with the most campaign releases is March. We wanted to launch before the crowd. We’d also like to take a moment here to reiterate that our Kickstarter campaign’s goal is not to raise money. It’s about marketing, getting our name out there, and hopefully finding fans who can really fall in love with Whiskers, just like you! We’ll be setting a relatively low monetary goal, as advised by our marketing team, and we shall be using Kickstarter as our first step in bringing The Great Pond to the wider world!

For our Kickstarter, we plan on releasing a Base Edition and a Book of Ponds Edition. The Base Edition is our mass-produced version of the game, which we hope you will find in your local game stores and possibly big box stores in the future. This version has absolutely everything you need to play Last Fish! with your friends. The Book of Ponds Edition is our limited, launch-only edition of the game. A relative few will ever be produced, so they are definitely a bit exclusive. The Book of Ponds Edition includes an extra Champion card, a 24”x24” game map that doubles as a game mat, health point bits, and an art book we put our hearts into (which has even more lore for certain artworks). You may be wondering, “As holders, how do we get our games?” More information will come in the following weeks. However, we will ensure all whisker holders will be able to preorder the game they would like, with some tiered discounts depending on the number you have.

Finally, we would like to show you a sneak peak of our promotional animation. Yep, the Whiskers world is being brought to life little by little by Kagan Productions! We are super excited to see the finished version of this :)

Community

If you’ve been following us closely, you would know that we recently launched a Tiktok account! This Tiktok will serve as a new way of generating interest and sharing our content. Give us a follow if you’re on the platform!

In the Discord

We’re super excited to see more and more new and consistent faces in our Discord. Please don’t hesitate to @ the team with any questions or suggestions. We’re always here for you!

Team Updates

Interested in working with us? We are not hiring for any specific positions, but we are always open to hearing out ideas from new talent! Please send your proposal/resume/CV with a description of the role you think would be a great addition to the team to max@thegreatpond.xyz

From the Old Wizard (Rico’s Updates)

Hey all,

I know it’s been slow going and there may be some of you that aren’t happy with the direction we have gone or the road we have traveled. I want to remind you that the Whiskers were released entirely as an art and story-based project and it was only after our mint that I decided to form a company and begin building Whiskers as a multimedia and entertainment brand. This was a difficult decision in the moment, but one that I firmly believe I’ll look back on in 5 years and thank myself for. Due to the difficult market conditions immediately following our mint, a lot of our treasury (which was still stored in ETH at the time) lost tremendous value. Yes, we should have swapped it immediately to stables and hindsight is 20:20. That, together with a large tax liability (for both Whiskers as a company and for me personally as its creator), people taking advantage of my trust and goodwill, has made walking this path even harder. No one got “rich” off making the collection, not even me.

Despite facing many challenges, we have persevered and I want you to know we are still here and we aren’t going anywhere.

We might be a small team, but I believe we can succeed at just about anything we set out to do. Right now, that’s tapping into the world around us and finding fans who value what we value:  creating art, telling stories, having fun, and making memories. You shouldn’t be here if you expect to make money off of what I’ve made, but you should be here if you enjoy creating things alongside regular people who share the same values and love of games, art, and cute things as we hope you do.

Much love,

Rico & the Whiskers Team

P.S. look at one of my favorite whiskers!