A: We appreciate your desire to buy from us direct! We really do! But we’ve considered allowing “guest” checkouts, and concluded that it is not a good idea for us. If that means you have to get our games elsewhere, that’s the way it goes for us.

If it’s spam you’re looking to reduce, you can rest assured that you will not be signed up for our newsletter without your actively clicking a box. If you simply hate having too many passwords to keep track of, you can let yourself forget this one, and use the “forgot password” function if, at some point, you’d like to order from us again. Let us know if there’s anything we can do to make the decision easier for you, but please do what you are most comfortable with!

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A: Our fulfillment partner informs us that the packaging is plain brown boxes or mailers, but our name does appear in the return address area, and, unfortunately, that’s not something that can be changed. Our apologies.

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A: Our fulfillment partner says that none of their packing slips show prices, whether it’s a gift or not.

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A: What happens when you place an order at our webstore (any order), is that the money is reserved in the payment method of your choice. Then when we ship, we charge the account, and receive the money. The reserve exists to make sure that a) you have enough available to pay us, and b) you don’t spend it on something else before it’s time for us to get the payment.

When the money is reserved, it means it is not available for you to spend via that payment method. For example, if you have a $2000 credit limit, and place a $50 order with us, you now have $1950 of credit you can spend somewhere else (until you pay it off). If your “credit card” is a debit card, sometimes that reserve looks like a withdrawal, but it is not. We don’t actually get the money until we charge the card.

For credit/debit cards, the bank is reserves the money for about a month. Unfortunately, PayPal has a much shorter reserve window, sometimes only three days, or so. This means that, while we prefer to charge when we ship, we actually charge (get the money) from PayPal orders as soon as we see them. Let me tell you, it sucks to ship something, then bill the payment, and discover that it won’t go through.

So the answer is complicated. If you pay via PayPal, we charge it as soon as we see the order. Like a day or two later, whenever we look it over in the system. For credit card orders, we charge just after shipping. But keep in mind the money is reserved as soon as your order is placed.

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A: Well, we had avoided this because we felt it would be impractical, because could never know what promo cards someone has to begin with. The number of people who would want the exact combination of promos we put in a certain bundle is not necessarily very big, AND, unfortunately we wouldn’t be able to discount it all that much, because it would be a lot of work to put together a bundle like this.

But then we went and made the More Packs, which are kind of exactly this, so if you’re interested in buying bundles of promo cards, check them out:
Here they are at the top of a search in our webstore for “More”.

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A: Not per se. We have a discount available for teachers and others who buy in larger amounts. You can get 10% off orders over $100, or 20% off orders over $200. As of mid 2021, our online store automatically applies these discounts without having to put in a code!

We also accept POs from schools via phone, email, or even fax, and will apply the same discount to those orders. We are also working on getting into more teacher catalogs and stores to make it easier for you to shop. If you have any suggestions for where you would like to see our games, please let us know!

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A: Our webcart is not quite that sophisticated. All prices are shown in $USD. When your order is placed, the total in $USD will be sent to your banking institution, and they will do the currency conversion, and that is the amount you’ll see on your statement from them. So if you’re worried about what the cost will be for you in your local currency, check up on the current exchange rate, and do some math before you finalize the order.

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A: Well, we would have said we have no idea, but we have had people in the UK deliberately order under a certain amount at a time so that the total does not hit a certain threshold that triggers customs fees.

But hey, we found this UK government page that looks really useful:
https://www.gov.uk/goods-sent-from-abroad/tax-and-duty

We’ve gotten the most complaints from UK customers, but other countries have duties too, so, if you’re worried about it, check around for info from your local government.

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A: We take VISA, MasterCard and PayPal, and, if your checks are from a US bank, you can send a check.

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A: Is this, by any chance, on a debit card, rather than a credit card? For some reason debit card holders see the reserve on their account as a charge, even though we do not have the money. Once we bill the order (at the time of shipping) the card is actually charged, and we receive that reserved money. The bank system would normally match the reserve total to the charge, and it would appear as a single transaction.

If the total changes, however, a new reserve will be placed for the new amount, and (if this is a debit card) you’ll see that as a separate transaction. The old reserve will never be charged, however, since on our end, your order is associated with only one reserve – the new one for the new amount. The old reserve will simply expire unused.

We only have one order for you, so can only get paid for the one charge.

You should be able to get more information from your bank if you have questions about that particular transaction. It should simply disappear from your record after the reserve period. We’re not sure how long that will be. For actual credit cards, the reserve can last as long as a month.

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A: While we know what the lowest shipping is for US orders ($4), for international orders it will vary depending on the country, and we don’t know what it will be for you.

Unfortunately, this means the only way to see what the shipping would be is to start entering an order – which means you’ll need to create an account and start the checkout process. If the shipping is too high, you can just abandon the order without putting in payment method.

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A: UPDATE: As of Monday Oct 19, 2020, the last of these has been sold, so this answer is obsolete. For those wondering what it was, back in 2013 we had a lot of slower-selling older items, many of which were already being replaced by newer versions, and, to clean up things in our warehouse, we packed them all into this package at a fantastic price. It was such a good price that the shipping price would always seem out of proportion, but that’s just because there was so much in it.

—————-

Q: What’s in the “Mystery Bag Of Warehouse Swag”?

Well if we told everyone that, it wouldn’t be much of a mystery, would it!!!

But seriously, people do ask this, and, given the high shipping cost, we do simply tell people the contents if they ask. We’ll just keep this little FAQ question slightly obscure, by not linking to it. So if you’ve found your way here, and knowing this info makes you happier than you were… good for you!

10 Black Treehouse Die
1 Blue Martian Coaster
1 Yellow Martian Coaster
1 Red Martian Coaster
1 Green Martian Coaster
1 Black Martian Coaster
1 EcoFluxx (first ed.)
1 Fluxx 3.0
1 The Empty City
1 Martian Coasters
1 Fluxx Espanol
1 Pink Hijinks
1 Peace Puzzle
1 Castle Expansion
1 Promo Postcard: Aquarius Dragon
1 Poster: Treehouse
1 Poster: Monty Python Fluxx
1 Poster: Brain No TV
1 Poster: Pirate Fluxx
1 Poster: Looney Pyramids
1 Playmat: Star Fluxx
1 IceDice Playmat
50 Micro Catalog Card
1 Doorway Sticker
1 Mystery Bag of Warehouse Swag Letter

(Yes, this includes loose Martian Coasters AND a packaged game of the same. You will have some extra coasters. They DO work as actual coasters, you know…)

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A: You’ll need to wait a bit to see the full UPS data. The tracking number is generated and emailed to you as soon as our fulfillment partner packs it into a box and generates the label, but it doesn’t really enter the UPS/USPS system until it gets scanned in at the local hub.

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A: There is a minimum cost for us to ship any order, based on things like amount of human time to pick, pack, generate postage, and process the order through the system, as well as some cost for shipping materials, and the cost to store the product until fulfillment, too. We’ve got that minimum shipping per order set at $4.

We understand that for very small items, that’s a pretty high shipping cost. It makes sense to combine them with other things to spread that shipping cost over more items, and many customers do just that. On the other hand, it always surprises me how often customers go ahead and get very small orders — a single promo pack pack or just a few promo cards like that, so I guess those people don’t mind the shipping cost. It’s up to them.

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A: Packs are a great deal when you look at the price of the single promo cards, which are, yes, $1 apiece. This is mostly because they are printed in vastly smaller quantities than a full deck of cards, or even a cello-wrapped pack, so our price doesn’t go as low per card as it does on packs. Also, picking and packing single promo cards is the most laborious type of order.

So packs, obviously, are a better deal than singletons. Taking a brief survey of expansion/promo packs at this time, they seem to range from four cards up to sixteen per pack. It looks like our pricing has been a bit inconsistent through the years, ranging from $2 to $5. Licensed assets, like the Castle Expansion, usually cost more, but that has varied as well.

Incidentally, we don’t make expansion packs just so we can make a few bucks with a massive profit margin — at least not on sales of the expansion itself. Mostly we print them in conjunction with the initial release as marketing materials that we can use to promote sales of the main game when it first comes out (usually by giving them away – marketing materials are an expense, not an income stream).

So yes, we hope they help us make more money, of course, but the idea is that they are boosting sales of the main product. If they’re really popular, we’ll find a way to keep them in print when they run out, but that can really depend. Subsequent print runs for consumer sale are always much smaller, such that our margin decreases significantly, so keeping them in print for fans is something we do primarily because we like to keep our fans happy, not because they’re a major source of income for us.

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A: We always sell our games at full MSRP – that’s “Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price.” As the manufacturer, it would be rather disingenuous of us not to sell at the price we recommend retailers sell it at. We do our best not to undercut our many small retail hobby game stores. Keep in mind that when you see our games for sale at Amazon, that’s not the same as buying from us direct. You might be seeing Amazon’s prices, you might be seeing prices set by any number of other third-party sellers, all of whom are retailers in our eyes.

We know there are always going to be some retailers who choose to discount our games, Amazon among them, and it’s up to them if they want to cut their margins to lower the selling price. We don’t dictate what price they sell for, we merely suggest.

So that’s why we sell at “full retail” but some of our retailers might sell for less. We are the manufacturer, so we sell at MSRP, and there are a lot of retailers out there who would get pretty upset with us for undercutting them.

Feel free to buy our games from whatever source makes the best sense for you!

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