Robot turtles

[Nicholas Clark]

So, there is this kickstarter for "Robot Turtles":

    Robot Turtles is a board game you play with your favorite 3-8 year
    old. It sneakily teaches programming fundamentals.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danshapiro/robot-turtles-the-board-game-for-little-programmer


The kickstarter closes on Friday. We are attempting to organise a group
purchase of this in Vienna, and given the level of interest there, I thought
I'd like to point it out to the denizens of london.pm in case there is
similar enthusiasm.


So, to purchase one, with the international shipping, it's not very cost
effective (ie $60)

There is a "3-pack", which is $120 including shipping, and a "Deca-pack",
which is $340. These look viable, as they bring the unit cost down to
something like the price of a regular new board game (eg Settlers of Catan
or Monopoly ship from amazon.de for about 30 EUR)


So, I'm *not* going to organise this for London, but if anyone wants to,
here's my homework I've already done for Vienna, but converted to real money:


$34 is £21.18, but I'm suspicious that the delivery price isn't going to be
that. gov.uk takes lots of pages to say that tax and import duty are both
payable. It's 20% VAT on anything over £15, and "phone us up, because we
make it way too complicated with 14000 categories"% (typically 5-9%) import
duty for anything over £135


If I assume that VAT is unavoidably going to be charged, at 20%, but only
on the games, not the shipping, then the price actually isn't terrible:

   3-pack:  $80 * 1.2 + $40    = $136 = £84.70  =   £28.23 each
   10-pack: $240 * 1.2 + $100  = $388 = £241.65 =   £24.16 each


I don't know the UK duty rate, but they work out that (I think) duty has to
reach 23% before the 10-pack is more expensive than the below-threshold
3-pack.


I also don't know if there's an extra sting thanks to a charge that gets made
by the delivery firm for collecting the duty.


So, if you're interested, you have about 96 hours to JFDI.

Nicholas Clark

PS I'm not kidding about the 14000 categories.