Long-term players will be well aware that NSG has often struggled to meet planned timelines for the release and distribution of our sets. Understandably, this has created frustration for players whose orders take longer than expected to arrive. Supply-chain issues have also caused concern about the long-term sustainability of our support for the game.
This article aims to provide an insight into our current process for ordering, printing and delivering physical copies of our sets – a process which has changed significantly over the past year. We will also take a look at why delays and other issues have occurred with our process historically, using the distribution of our latest set Vantage Point as a case study.
Our New Distribution Process
Our new process for set distribution was implemented for the first time for the release of Vantage Point and our recent global restock of other sets. This process is the product of continued research, testing and iteration which has taken place over the past year. While this process is still being refined using lessons learned from Vantage Point, the following should serve as a reasonably accurate outline of how it works.
First, we should identify the parties involved. There are six to be aware of:
- NSG, the game publisher
- Boda Games, the printer we started working with last year
- Various international freight companies
- Regional fulfilment partners in each region we sell in
- Regional delivery services in those regions
- You, the player and customer
As a customer, you’re probably already familiar with the first and last parts of the process: placing your order via shop.nullsignal.games and receiving your cards from a regional delivery service. International shipping is a complex set of processes, so there are several other steps that go into getting your cards to their new home.
First, we the publisher work with the printer to produce the product to our specifications. For new products, we go back and forth with them to examine samples and ensure that cardstock quality, ink color, and consistency are all up to our standards. This process can take anywhere from a couple weeks to multiple months depending on the scope of necessary revisions.
Once we are satisfied with the quality of the product, NSG moves on to placing a purchase order for a print run. We determine the quantity needed of each item by comparing existing stock levels and sales trends in order to gauge projected demand. Due to the timescales of printing and shipping, this needs to be done months in advance of when we expect everything to arrive at our fulfillment warehouses.
Once printed, the product is split up and palletized in preparation for freight transit via international freight companies to our regional fulfilment partners. At this point we determine how much of the order should be sent by air (fast but expensive) vs by sea (slower but cheaper). Sea freight often takes 30-60 days whereas air takes less than two weeks.
Freight itself can be a complex process, so currently NSG use a Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) arrangement, where our printer bears the responsibility of getting goods to their final destination. The printer passes on the freight cost to the publisher and includes an administrative fee for doing the coordinating labor. As NSG’s bandwidth grows we plan to shift to a more hands-on method to reduce costs.
As freight shipments arrive, our various regional fulfillment partners receive them in their warehouses and begin packing orders. We try to time our official release dates for new sets to line up with this stage of the process. Once packed, orders are typically picked up the next business day by a regional delivery service so that your cards can begin their final stretch of the journey to your doorstep.
That’s the point at which the customer will usually be notified about shipping, and since it’s coming from within their region they can expect it to arrive within a few days in most cases.
What causes delays?
Hopefully that outline gives an idea of how complex this process can be. A global logistical operation is a lot to manage – especially for an all-volunteer organisation! Our commitment to deliver our sets to players around the world has always been quite ambitious. Many game studios of our scale and level of professionalisation would stick to distributing goods in one country – or they might outsource publishing entirely.
We don’t say that just to toot our own horn, or to make excuses for the times when we’ve failed to deliver what we’ve promised on time. While there are occasions when other parties involved in distribution make errors or encounter obstacles that are out of our control, we are aware that in most cases the problems in this area have been rooted in our own organisational issues. We have often been too ambitious in our timelines and the scope of our distribution operations.
Historically, the three main direct causes of delays are:
- Not ordering product in sufficient quantities;
- Not dedicating volunteer time to study and smooth over customs processes that can cause delays; and
- Often relying on a single person to carry out the packing of orders for a region.
We have put in the work to reckon with these issues during the reorganisation process we’ve undergone over the past year. We believe we are better positioned to deliver sets on time to as many players as possible going forward – in particular, thanks to our arrangements with our regional fulfilment partners, in most regions we are no longer relying on our volunteers to carry out the extensive labour of packing orders.
But the proof is in the pudding, and our first test was Vantage Point.
Case Study: Vantage Point
When work began on Vantage Point in Q1 2025, our original plan was to produce it via the print-on-demand services of MakePlayingCards (MPC), as we had done with all our prior sets. Timelines were set out: we were aiming for the card files to be complete in October, for release in January 2026 after quality control and post-production work.
In parallel to this, NSG was undergoing some reorganisation. The newly-formed Operations Department, comprising the Distribution team and others, set out to reexamine our options for printing and shipping sets. By the time the Studio department was starting to wrap up creating the cards of Vantage Point, Operations’ work was starting to come to fruition.
The biggest takeaway was that paying higher costs for the convenience of MPC’s on-demand services was putting significant constraints on our operations. It had limited the amount of stock we could order at any given time, resulting in longstanding stocking issues, and made it a struggle to meet our other financial obligations.
Operations’ research led to us signing a contract to print our sets much more affordably with Boda Games, an arrangement which would massively reduce our cash crunch and help smooth out these problems. In hindsight, if we had printed Vantage Point with MPC we expect that we would have run out of stock within six weeks of release; instead, we were able to overstock to cover preorders plus the initial wave of post-release orders, and have some spare to cover the time until our next restock.
Once we had signed with Boda, it became clear that the estimate of a January release had become unrealistic. As it was, we needed to go through a couple of rounds of proofing to ensure that Boda’s product would meet our standards. While this process was getting started in early December, NSG Steering Committee made the decision to push back the release to early March, and communicated this to the rest of the organization on December 13th. After adjusting some timelines, we were able to lock in the final release date of March 2nd before the end of the month, informing the organisation on December 29th ahead of the public announcement on the 1st of January 2026.
Boda told us they could finish producing the first print run of Vantage Point by the start of February, so we elected to ship 60% of the order by air to ensure we could meet all preorders as soon as possible after release day. That’s more than we’ve ever shipped by air in any previous order – an affordance made possible by the significant savings that printing with Boda has provided. As a result, the air shipped product arrived with our regional fulfilment partners in the US, Canada and Australia around Feb 20th, and they began distributing it through their local delivery services to arrive with customers in time for March 2nd.
Unfortunately, product did not arrive with UK and EU customers as quickly, partly due to some mistakes on our end and partly due to factors beyond our control. Imports into Europe are subject to additional checks which we had failed to factor into our timelines. Meanwhile, a small mixup between the international freight companies and our UK fulfilment partner meant they received the product later than planned. As a result of these factors, most UK and EU customers received their copies of Vantage Point 1-3 weeks later than customers in other regions.
Looking forward
Overall, the launch of Vantage Point was broadly successful, and an encouraging proof of concept for our new printing process. Committing to launching a new set at the same time as carrying out a large-scale restock of other sets, all while putting a new process into practice for the first time, was ambitious. That ambition led to some issues, but we hope that, as future product launches will not have this level of complexity, we will be able to iron out those issues.
Our Operations Department is now working to implement the lessons of the launch, in particular by adjusting our plans to factor in regional differences to import processes, which will hopefully prevent similar regional delays from happening in future. We have also built more post-production and shipping time into our set development timelines, so that we don’t need to commit to the extra expense of large-scale air shipping every time we launch a product.
These developments put us in a great position to avoid delays in future and continue delivering new sets to players on a more regular and consistent basis. The next step on this road is our next restock order for all regions, which has already been placed with Boda and is even larger than the restock that came alongside Vantage Point.
As always, we’re grateful for your patience and your constructive feedback. If you have any questions about what you’ve read here, you can reach out to distributionteam@nullsignal.games
