Chief Technical Officer
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The first day of Gen Con is the release date, not the day we start shipping. Assuming the books arrive in the warehouse on time, we'll start shipping weeks before that.
And the order we ship them isn't as meaningful as you might think. In our industry, we sell products to distributors, who in turn sell them to retailers. We therefore ship to distributors first, because it takes an extra hop to get to the retailers. Shipping distributor orders first means that most retailers should be able to have product in store on or before the release date. But regardless of when they receive them, they aren't allowed to sell them until the release date.
We usually start shipping customer orders after we ship distribution orders (though we sometimes start customer orders before we finish distribution orders). Our goal is to get most customer orders to most of our US customers on or before the street date, but we can't guarantee it.
The bottom line here is that if you order it from us, there is a chance you will get it prior to the release date—but there's also a chance that you will get it on or even after the release date. If you buy from a store, you won't get it early, but (assuming your store has ordered enough copies, and ordered on time), you should be able to get it on the release date.
My biggest question would be: are there things I can get through preorder that I can't get at the store?
My gut call would be to look at the book at the store and then decide if I think my group will play it, but if there are any preorder-exclusive goodies I'd consider the preorder route. (I run into this issue a lot with kickstarter products, such as 13th age that came with a special die in kickstart but you can't buy it anywhere after.)
