We Left Our Game in a Banff Lodge. Weeks Later, This Landed in Our Inbox 📬
Banff sits in the Canadian Rockies, inside Canada's very first national park, protected since 1885. Three ski areas ring the town: Sunshine Village, Lake Louise and Mt Norquay, the famous Big 3. Bears in the trees (we even saw a black bear at the side of the road), powder that keeps coming, and beautiful lodges where the guests actually talk to each other. It is, in short, exactly the kind of place we built this game for.
So a while back, we tried something...
We left a promo copy of Ready Steady Slope on the shelf of a lodge in Banff. No fanfare. We just put it there, in the wild, and wrote a wee note inside the lid: found this? play it, then let us know how you got on. Then we flew home and more or less forgot about it.
This week, the loop closed.
An email arrived from LesLee: "We vacationed in Banff and the lodge had the game on their shelf. We played it and loved it. When will it be available for purchase?"
We will be honest, we read it about four times. A complete stranger, on the other side of the Atlantic, picked our box off a shelf, sat down with friends, played a few rounds, loved it enough to follow up with an email, and asked where to buy one. That is the entire reason we make this thing, landing in a single message.
There is a small irony we can't resist. Banff isn't one of the 16 resorts in the box - that honour goes to Whistler, our Canadian card, a few mountain ranges to the west. So the game travelled to a resort it doesn't even feature, got played by people who'd never heard of us, and won them over anyway. Turns out the snowhead in the chalet is the same everywhere: bad weather rolls in, the lifts shut, and someone reaches for the cards.
LesLee, if you're reading this — 💯 thank you. You made our month. We've quietly added your words to the homepage (initials only, we promise), and you'll be first to know when it's available.
The game is targeting October. Pick your resort, gear up, bomb the piste, outsmart your mates. And if you ever find a copy sitting on a shelf somewhere it has no business being — play it, then tell us how you got on. We hope you love it as much as we do! 🐻
– RSS Team 🏂🎿🃏