Hello Knave of Cups creative vending customers!
Hopefully all of you are doing great, hustling, and having a great time with your machines out there… and if not, we hope things turn around for you!
We just wanted to take a sec and update you on the vending side of our business, and it ended up a teeny bit longer than an email, so here we are!
We opened our own vending machine!
That’s right: We will finally be joining all of y’all in the highs and lows of running a creative vending machine! This is something we’ve wanted to do from the start, but we wanted to find the right location where we could stay focused on our game-related products. Our new machine is located in TPK Brewing, here in Portland, OR. They’re a TTRPG-focused brewery and game space, and we’re very excited to have a little corner of their front room. We got our machine in place for their soft launch and will be announcing this further on our social media pages as they approach their grand opening on October 28th!
If you’re in the PDX area, you should definitely pop in and grab a brew!
We re-launched our TTRPG game-packs!
We finally are re-launching our TTRPG game-packs, with 2 new games, a returning favorite, and plans for more to come.
It took us way longer than we expected (doesn’t it always) but we finally have new game-packs for sale! If you’re unfamiliar, our Tabletop Roleplaying Game-Packs are products designed for creative vending machines that include a zine from independent game creators and authors as well as all the supplies necessary to play! The concept is that customers could grab a game from your machine and hypothetically play it at the venue, or toss in their bag for emergency fun supplies.
These new game-packs are packaged in clear greeting card cases, replacing the holo foil bags we previously used. (The bags were always just a smidge too small!) We also added 2 new brand-new games!
These game-packs are launching as “Series A,” a mix of 3 games, sold in cases of 12 with 4 of each game.
Series A of our TTRPG Game-Packs includes the following games:
- Together Among the Stars (2 player journaling game. Includes a journal & pencil, mini card deck and one d6)
- Badger + Coyote (2 player animal hi-jinx game. Includes a journal & pencil, character sheets, and 4 d6s)
- CYST (1+ player psychedelic dark fantasy games. Includes a journal & pencil, a coin, and a d8)
We hope to have Series B completed and ready for sale by late 2023 or early 2024, which will include 3 different games, including 2 more new ones. Series A + B are not limited series, and we plan to keep printing all of them as long as makes sense.
For now, we don’t plan to bring back the cases of individual game-packs, but we’d love to hear from you if that’s something you’re interested in.
Sale on vending products
To celebrate the launch of our new game-packs, we’ve restocked and put all of our other vending machine products on sale, between $5-10 off each case. From now through Nov 1st, 2023!
Grab some art-prints, some trading cards, or some tarot decks!
Looking ahead to 2024…
Whew, what a year 2023 has been. Idk about y’all, but if we had to pick one word to characterize the year, it’d be “chaos.” We’ve been busy developing new games, buying a vending machine, starting in-person events, as well as some huge curveballs thrown at our personal lives. We’re hoping 2024 might be tiny bit more stable… but who are we kidding, we’re also strapping down for another bumpy one.
I don’t think it will shock any of you who are creating your own products for your machines to learn that our margins on these vending machine products are not very wide. That has been part of why it’s been hard for to keep some of them in stock. We love getting our products into creative vending machines across the country, and the charm and novelty of the concept has definitely opened doors for us in other parts of our business. But a big money maker it is not.
Our hope is that with our own machine, it will be easier for us to keep vending machine products in stock for all of you, as we’ll need them for ourselves as well. And we’re also looking at developing new products, both game-related and otherwise.