08/27/2025
Alright, let’s start with the bad news and just tear the band-aid off. Due to the current and ever-changing tariff situation with China, it is currently impossible to manufacture a second printing of our boardgame, Escape from Dulce, at a price we feel is reasonable. No expansions, no extra dice, no new minis.
I know we’re not the only game company facing these issues. Even the big boys are hurting, and it sucks not just for the companies, but for the fans that love board games. It breaks our hearts that everything we’ve been working towards for the past six years just has to be put up on a shelf for now.
But we Cows won’t give up! Someone once said something about when life gives you lemons… Oh yeah, it was Cave Johnson! “When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?!” I think he went on about inventing a combustible lemon and burning someone’s house down, which we don’t condone, but he was right in the first part, “Make life take the lemons back!” Check the comments for actual audio of this!
So, here’s the good news. We’re shifting gears and opening a brand-new chapter for Sentient Cow Games by creating an RPG of our Secret Unknown Stuff! While huge board games are expensive to produce and ship and subject to high tariffs as they need to be manufactured in China, books are cheaper, easier, and can be printed in the US!
This is something we’ve been talking about and toying with for many years. While we really started seriously working on this in February, we’ve been doing our homework for a while now. While the Secret Unknown Stuff RPG will be it’s own uniquely weird thing, it will also be a D20 based system and 5E compatible.
The first Kickstarter will consist of two meaty hard bound books, a Secret Unknown Stuff resource book that will cover character creation, rules, gear, monsters, lore, and other ephemera, and an Escape from Dulce adventure book expanding on the original board game. We’re keeping the overall story arc and plan we had for future board game expansion adventures, just converting them to RPG books. So, you’ll still get to explore The Mystery of Mount Shasta, go on a Hunt for the Jersey Devil, and steal a spaceship to go to the Hollow Moon, they’ll just be in a different format.
The playable characters from Escape from Dulce will return in that adventure as NPCs, but if you really love Snippy Von Bell, or Amelia Earhart is your gal, you can play them as pre-gens. While there’s a lot to love about them, the real fun begins with our extremely robust character creation!
We’ll talk about character classes, skill trees and abilities another time, so let’s start with the 16 Things, or races, you can play as. Humans, Grey Aliens, Red Aliens or Martians, Reptoids or Lizard Men, Atlantean fish folk, Sasquatches, B.W.M.D.s or two-headed cows, Primates, B.O.B. Robots, Moon Trolls, Interstellar Dolphins, Canines, Felines, Homicidal Vegetables, and then we get to Hybrids and Tribrids, which is where things get really weird!
Hybrids and Tribrids are combinations of two or three of most of the other Things plus some other possibilities thrown in. Maybe you’ll roll up a Human/Feline crossbreed, a Martian with moth wings and the tail of a Reptoid, or a two-headed human with Robot legs! I don’t know if my math is mathing properly, so let’s just say there’s a ton of possibilities!
Our artists of the original board game will be back to contribute more or their wonderful illustrations to help flesh out our ever-growing world, but we’ve also reached out to several other prominent illustrators we’ve always wanted to work with. This whole thing is going to be like wrangling a bag of cats while playing a game of chess with Death, but it’s going to be one hell of a lot of fun!
We’ll be partnering with another game company for this to tackle logistics and all the back-end stuff that we’re not that great at. Splattered Ink Games is going to be handling all this so that we can focus solely on the creative end of things and ensure we can bring you the absolute best strange adventure experience in the first quarter of 2026.
If you missed out on our original boardgame version of EFD, we still have a handful of copies left for sale on our website. When I say “handful”, I’m talking single digits and as it’s going to be a couple of years before we get back to that, you better act fast if you want one! Check out www.sentientcowgames.com for more info.
In the next few months, we’ll be relying on you, our beloved Cow Army, for your feedback, input and playtesting help. Stay tuned to this Cow Channel for more updates!
