how we advertise on here, Conclave is bringing to Brazil the 'Game of the Year' edition of Robinson Crusoe. This edition comes with substantial modifications such as new wooden markers, a different box, a new game setting, character sheet improvements, and a completely revamped rulebook. That is, a game even better than its original!

The announcement of this edition was so well accepted that, we believe, we broke a record in the Brazilian market. We sold out 1000 units of the game in just 3 days, on pre-order. In some stores the stock did not last more than a few hours. This made us make the decision to double the initial run and make an even greater commitment to product quality! So if you couldn't get yours, don't worry, we'll have more units available as soon as we deliver the pre-order units.

But this post is not to talk about the number of games sold, but how the work was processed to bring this edition of Robinson Crusoe to Brazil.

As we have already said, the 'Game of the Year' edition does not yet exist in English. It is scheduled to be released in the US at the end of 2016. Therefore, we had to translate the manual based on the Spanish and Italian editions. Most of the translation was done from Spanish, which has already required a huge amount of work to adapt the terms. In order to avoid errors (Spanish has a huge number of false cognates in relation to Portuguese), we used the old English version as a reference, as well as our first translation, made from English.

You already managed to capture the Tower of Babel, right? That's where the "good" part comes in. We only had access to the pdfs (non-editable) of the English, Spanish and Italian versions. The edition was all made on top of the Polish version, original by Portal Games. At first glance this doesn't seem to be a problem, since it's just a matter of replacing the Polish text with the Portuguese text… But it's not quite like that. First because some fonts used in the game are fonts Polish and do not have the traditional Portuguese accent. It was not rare for us to accentuate a No it is a Z, but there was no accent for a THE, for example. Til (~) then passed far, as did the circumflex and cedilla. As a result, we had to create each of these accents and, in some cases, manually accent them word by word.

Another design complication was knowing the right places for each text. Anyone who knows the game knows that some cards have a very similar design to each other. So, how to know that a certain card is the one, seeing a text in a language full of Z, W, L etc? And how not to make a mistake? To ensure that everything went smoothly, we used two computers and a tablet, in addition to our English game cards, laid out on the table. On the work computer was the file that was being edited, with the text translated into a .doc. On another computer, the files were in Spanish. On the tablet were the files in another supporting language and on the table the material in English. So, we checked the edit file in a translation program (to have a north), we checked our translation with the Spanish and another language version (on the computer and on the tablet) and then we did the final check on the letter in English that was on the table. Only after that the file was edited and saved in PTBR. And of course, all this was only done after the translation had already been proofread.

This procedure was carried out with each card, each scenario, each character, manual, box… in short, with each component of the game. You can get an idea of the work that went into just thinking that there are 275 cards alone! 🙂 A true saga to produce one of the games that we are most proud of so far! We've already seen the proof of the components and the production is going from strength to strength and we can tell you: Robinson Crusoe is beautiful and coming very soon! 🙂