‘Rum Run’ Deluxe Artwork Finally Done– Physical Copy Inbound!!

It’s been a long time coming. The contest-winning edition of the game came out last October, then I had a deluxe edition ready to go in early January. But then Mr. Morgan Shaw had to come along and show me how much higher quality the game could be, if only I would listen to him. Well, listen to him I did, and commission box art from Lindsay Davis I did, and now, finally, order the game I did. Though thanks to a delay with The Game Crafter’s printing service, I might not get my physical copy for a good month. But we’re not thinking about that!! We’re CELEBRATING!!! I will now showcase some of the fine, stand-out new elements of the game!

The Box Art. Concept by me, created by Lindsay Davis, color-corrected and polished by Morgan Shaw. Went through a fair amount of back and forth iterations. Love the result :)

The New Game Board, where all the magic happens. Printed on a high-quality, Monopoly-esque foldout board, miles better than the flimsy mats the original Rum Run comes on. Based on the very first pass Morgan took at rethinking The Rum Run.

Here’s a few of the new road tokens. Obviously these will be on round pieces, so just imagine cutting a circle out of the middle.

The new distilleries come on poker cards, so while there will certainly be suggestions on where to place them for newbies, you’re not limited to the orientations and placement of the mats in the original Rum Run. Morgan came up the design concept, as well as all the titles, based on nicknames for various alcohols and famous bootleggers. Also, there will be a variation of the game where you approach a distillery not knowing how many barrels it holds, so the backs of the distilleries are all nondescript question marks.

Here’s obstacles. Note the border is the same as the distilleries, but it follows a ’rounded rectangle’ motif. This is for clarity in terms of where tokens can and can’t be placed. Kind of hard to see here, but cards like the rivers, coast, and mountains can actually align so it appears that the ‘windows’ are all looking at the same thing. Morgan named these after  things that were real, but non-physical obstacles to bootleggers (i.e. religion, laws, the IRS).

Here’s a completely new element: flippables. Back in January, these were cards that had a similar ‘?’/flip idea as the distilleries now do, but we ultimately decided it was better to allow these to be scattered around the board and not taking up a lot of space. Green flippables are good (extra barrel, extra road), while Red flippables are bad (lose a turn, road can never be a loose road). Oh, and the new Town Center is there too.

Last but not least, this isn’t really a designed element, but the game now uses actual barrel pieces for the barrels instead of gems. Hooray!

Whew. Whaddaya think? Now it’s time to get married, relax for a little bit, and then settle down on refining the rules.  But that should all be easy… right?