I will be streaming some music, some Q&A if we have an audience, and I will take your requests as best as I can! Let's hang out and celebrate a successful campaign!
<3
Aven
Bard of Many Things
Master Barista of Prosperitea
Prospritea Tearivia: Piracy and Tea on the High Seas! (repost from 2020)
about 3 years ago
– Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 06:53:34 PM
Ahoy there, Mateas!
In today's update, we are bringing you some fantastic tearivia from the brains behind St Bastian's Tea Company. This repost from our original campaign will steep you in some salty lore from the age of piracy!
Yo ho, Yo ho, those pirates loved their tea!
The history of Tea and Piracy are in fact very closely linked. Black tea was relatively cheap to produce and the dried leaves easily withstood the long journey over the oceans. The British Empire was also taxing this Chinese delight so heavily that is shaped an entire century of world history! This made black tea cakes a product incredibly ripe for the black market. Bartholomew Roberts (aka "Black Bart") in particular was known as the tea drinking pirate, famed for his piracy along Africa's west coast (where much tea would have been shipped from).
Cats were another common sight on pirate ships! They would keep the rodents at bay and make for great company on the high seas.
Due to the ease of storage, black teas were cheaper to ship and thus steadily rose in popularity in Europe and the Americas. Average colonists, unable to pay the high tea taxes, were often supplied by Dutch pirates, who had access to black market tea cakes. The Boston Tea Party, a momentous event in the American Revolution, was famously spurred on by these exorbitant tea taxes.
Green tea was much more expensive and less susceptible to piracy because it did not keep as well over long periods of time. Black tea cakes contained much less moisture, and spoiled far less often than higher grade green teas.
Tea cakes also made it easier to smuggle other goods around the world due to the dark, ambiguous shape of the cakes. Opium was famously hidden in shipments of tea because of how similar the two products appeared in shipping crates, but that...is a bit of Tearivia for another update!
Oolong tea wasn't the only dried good to be smuggled into American shores by pirates...
We hope you have enjoyed this tantalizing bit of Tearivia for your weekend! We will be back soon with more teariffic stories about our favorite beverage! In our next update, I will be going over the two NEW TEAS you have unlocked in a short video tasting: Pumpkin Spice and Caramel Apple!
Thank you all for your support, enthusiasm, and sharing our love of games and tea. It's been a wonderful ride, and the final weekends are coming up! The next two stretch goals are personal favorites of mine and if we hit them we can really turn this project into something truly unique in the game space.
Have fun, stay safe, and take care of each other.
<3
Aven Gonzalez
Master Barista of Prosperitea
The Final Week!
about 3 years ago
– Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 06:34:34 AM
Greetings, Beauteaful People!
I just wanted to take a little bit of time before heading into my day job to thank you all for the tremendous amount of support and goodwill that has been shown throughout this campaign. I know I've been lagging a little bit on the updates over the last couple of days, but life has been a little tricky and exciting this weekend and I haven't been in front of my computer enough to produce my usual quality of update. That being said, I still want to take the time to acknowledge some really cool things!
Letterpress Box!
We just passed 25,000 and we are so close to getting a letterpress box!! As a printing and vintage design affectionato this brings me a lot of joy and I think it will give you all a very unique game in your collection.
The big change I will be making to the stretch goal is that we won't actually be using letterpress to do this effect. There are now too many of you which is amazing!!
Instead we are going to be using a technique called debossing to create the relief and texture in a project of this scale. I will be working out the exact details with our manufacturer, but the goal is to put this treatment on raw chipboard as shown in the stretch goal graphic. This will help the texture really stand out from the box and provide a more authentic and environmentally friendly finish. We can get away with this because each game will be packaged in a paper sleeve, which will protect the box itself.
I will go into more details after the campaign is over but my partners and I are really excited to be hitting this goal because of how unique this is going to make the packaging.
if we can find an environmentally sustainable way to do foil, we may even do that! But that's a post for another time.
My Birthday!
Today is my birthday! To celebrate I'm going to be taking the night off to practice with my band "Arbour and the Woodlouse." We're going to experiment with streaming on Instagram live @designbard if anyone wants to hang out and join us! I'll probably turn the phone on at about 7:30 p.m. Pacific and will run until about 10:00 p.m. Pacific.
Things are going to be a little rough around the edges as this is just a rehearsal, but I still invite you all to hang out and celebrate our collective success with some punk/ folk jams!
Thank you all for your continued support and goodwill. I'll have a bit more time to put a proper update together tomorrow, but I did want to carve some time out to connect with all of you and wish you a wonderful holiday weekend, whatever you choose to celebrate during this solstice/easter.
Have fun, take care of each other, and stay safe out there!
💖
Aven
Prosperitea Review Roundup: Part 2
about 3 years ago
– Wed, Mar 31, 2021 at 10:03:49 PM
Greetings, Tea Folk!
In today's update, I'm continuing our "Review Roundup" in my effort to thank everyone in the board game communitea that has taken the time and effort to create buzz about Prosperitea. Making review content is HARD WORK. It requires a lot of energy and time even for the simplest of formats. And the board game community in it's current size and state got here in no small part because of the type of folks I am thanking in these posts.
My desire here is simply to repay the kindness and support that has been shown for our project by friends and stranger alike. And now, the reviews!
The Cardboard Stacker (Ferdinand Capitulo)
Ferdinand is a contact we met down in Orange County during our Cantankerous Cats days. Ferdinand always brings a wonderful enthusiasm and joy for games to each review and I always appreciate their perspective whenever we have a chance to head down south! You can check out The Cardboard Stacker with the following links:
AJ found us through a board game review group on facebook! AJ specializes in written reviews for analogue games, which is sometimes easier for folks to digest than watching video content. I really enjoyed the approach of calling out the highlights for a game and specifying what audience the game would be best for. And if you are a quick reader, you get a nice, in depth look with minimal time investment! You can see more of AJ's work below:
GameEnthus is a unique project that coves games of ALL kinds! That's right, video games AND board games. In the same space! Aaron also has a very chill and calm demeanor that really sets you at ease as he guides you through the ropes of the game that is being covered. If you like Aaron's rundown of Prosperitea, you can support and follow GameEnthus with these links:
That's all for this edition of Review Roundup! I hope you've enjoyed this peek at some of the faces behind the content that makes your favorite indie games possible. Outside of properly thanking content creators, I really hope to introduce you to a few new voices in the game space to round out your game research diet!
And with that, it's time to head out to the day job helping people to not die in the wilderness! And tomorrow, as promised, I WILL post some fun pirate tearivia for you.
Thank you all for your support and I hope you are having a wonderful week!
<3
Aven Gonzalez
Master Barista of Prosperitea
Backer Survey: Choose Your Pin!
about 3 years ago
– Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 11:57:17 PM
Greetinga, Baristas!
Today's update is pretty simple: Now that you have unlocked the exclusive pin, we need to see which version you want us to run!
This google survey will be open until the end of the campaign on April 11th. The final pins will be die struck, antiqued pins in Gold, Brass, or Copper. (to be decided in the next survey!) You can access the survey by CLICKING HERE.
Thank you all for your support and feedback. This has been an incredible campaign so far and I am really looking forward to unlocking the Letterpress box at 26k!
I'll be back tomorrow to shiver your timbers with more Tearivia from our previous campaign. Until then, I hope you have had a wonderful weekend and a joyful Monday!
