September 18, 2004: Star Munchkin Print Problem: We Are SO Hosed

We discovered today that the new printing of Star Munchkin is messed up. Every darned one of them. We are extremely sorry and embarrassed, and we don't yet know how many of them have gotten into stores or been sold. Ouch.

This is not a "collectible" print error . . . no cards have the wrong backs. But one deck, the one that's packaged with the Orb of Prediction on the front, is missing half the cards it should have, and has duplicates of other cards.

How did it happen? Long story. Basically, in reformatting the decks for our printer's new requirements, a HUGE error was made at a very early stage. It was so huge that nobody who checked it saw the forest for the trees. All the cards on the revised deck were right . . . and they were in the right relationship to each other . . . but one batch got duplicated between decks, so 28 cards are missing.

If you are a distributor, don't ship any of those. (Actually, we've phoned all the distributors already.) If you are a retailer, don't sell any, and wait to hear from your distributor on how we'll fix it for you. It's up to you whether you allow returns on those you've sold; if you can't do that, we'll take care of the customer. See below.

If you are a customer, what you need to do is pull the TWO "Chair" cards out of the set (a good set only has one "Chair" card in the first place). Send them to: Star Munchkin Disaster, c/o Steve Jackson Games, PO Box 18957, Austin TX 78760. We'll send you one of your cards back, and a good replacement deck.

How long? We found out about this TODAY. The printer hasn't given us a delivery date for replacement cards yet. Maybe a month . . . maybe a bit more, maybe less if we're all lucky.

How can you tell a good set from a bad one by looking at the box? This only matters if you are a retailer or customer who thinks a box has been on the shelf for a while and might be an OLD, GOOD one. And you can't tell from the OUTSIDE of the box. But if you open the box, an OLD, GOOD set has an ad for Pyramid on one side of the box bottom, while a NEW, HOSED set has an ad for Munchkin Blender.

Please feel free to re-post this embarrassing information to forums and newsgroups where it will be seen. The sooner everyone sees this, the fewer will leave retail stores and the less pain there will be all around.

Questions? E-mail to orders@sjgames.com.
-- Steve Jackson

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