The Crowdfunded Board Game Renaissance 57
An anonymous reader writes: FiveThirtyEight has an article about the surging popularity of new board games, which is being boosted by campaigns on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Since Kickstarter came online in 2009, board games and card games have accrued $196 million in pledges, 93% of which went to successful projects. That's even better than video games have done, at $179 million and 85%. For an industry whose yearly sales don't tend to break $1 billion, those are impressive numbers. The article attempts to explain their success: "Designers show up, explain their game idea on a Web page, often with photos and a video, and ask for pledges. That lets a designer learn, in real time, what the demand for his game is. ... Second, they are democratizing tools. Internet crowdfunding has done the same thing for game designers that blogging platforms did for writers: turned them into publishers."
Designers ! Publishers (Score:5, Informative)
Internet crowdfunding has done the same thing for game designers that blogging platforms did for writers: turned them into publishers.
Perhaps, but most of the board game Kickstarters I see are from publishers; and often large ones at that. Most designers will tell you, if you are interested in being a board game designer, do not attempt to publish your game. The amount of work involved is all-consuming as publishers do far more than simple distribution. As a designer board game enthusiast, I listen to a fair amount of podcasts on the subject like The Dice Tower and The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast. Board Games Insider, however, is by the CEOs of Portal Games and Stronghold Games, and is all about the business of board games not the playing of them. It's a really interesting look behind the curtain and I highly recommend it.
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Most designers will tell you, if you are interested in being a board game designer, do not attempt to publish your game. The amount of work involved is all-consuming as publishers do far more than simple distribution.
Interesting. Can you elaborate? What kind of tasks are involved? What makes them so difficult?
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I have some first hand experience at this. More years ago than I care to remember, I designed and self published a game (just googled it and came with an entry for it at Board Game Geek at https://boardgamegeek.com/boar... [boardgamegeek.com])
It was a very educational experience and lots of fun, but you have to treat it as a hobby. Nowadays, I'm striclty into putting games up via the web -- no printing costs, no distribution problems (uhm, also no money ... made or lost)
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More years ago than I care to remember, I designed and self published a game
I see what you mean. From the link...
Game of the Second Boer War commencing October, 1899.
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Designing the game is not the same as designing the physical product. You have a nice map board in Photoshop, but you have to figure out how to get it printed on paper, mounted on cardboard, etc. And somebody has to do the pre-production work on the rules - the layout and page design.
And they you have to deal with printers, and, if you're at all successful, a fulfillment center (Exploding Kittens got together with Cards For Humanity and started a fulfillment company to handle the 17 train cards full of card
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It's funny, the amount of times I've seen devs go back and forth in this industry is pretty crazy. "I'm tired of not having any time to actually develop games and am instead spending all my time on publishing! I'm going with a publisher!" "I'm tired of a publisher butting in on MY game design and making too many/few copies and/or not supporting it well, I'm going to publish myself!"
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I should point out that two of my favorite games from last year were both self-published. Paperback and Xia: Legends of a Drift System were stellar games, and were each done basically by a single guy pursuing his dream. Paperback is an excellent word game that will even draw in people who dislike most word games, like Scrabble. Xia's production was nicer than most games out there and will forever sit proudly on my shelf. :-) Those metal coins and painted, plastic space ships really are amazing. The wor
Real interaction (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just another hipster fad. (Score:5, Informative)
Except this "fad" has had a huge resurgence/boom in recent years, and has truly been going strongly for the past twenty years (in the U.S.), with the introduction of Eurogames (German games) to the American audience. (Settlers of Catan usually gets the credit for being the first big Eurogame to hit it big in the States back in 1995.) Board games were always something Americans played, but all we knew were the likes of games like Monopoly, Risk, Sorry, etc... Those games can be fun for a bit, but they often outlast their welcome before long. The world was simply waiting for designer board games...
Games are much more refined now and there is a ton of variety, so basically anyone can find something they like. Wargames? Sure, we have plenty... Deep strategy games?... yup! Amerithrashy fun with lots of minis and dice?... of course! Card games?... well, duh. Abstract games? Word games? Party games? Yes, yes, and yes! We are currently in the real golden age of boardgaming. There has never been a better time to be a fan of board games. I play in a gaming group weekly and we don't have any people I would label as hipsters... we're basically all geeks/nerds. heh Everyone there is a programmer or works with computers in some way. The hobby seems to attract that type. :-)
Preach it brother (Score:2)
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Testify! lol Yeah, I also have been gaming for about the same amount of time, so I can definitely agree. When I was a kid, we played Risk like something was wrong with us. lol We played it daily. Then Axis & Allies came out and we left Risk in the dust. I still have huge nostalgic love for A&A. heh Played a ton of the old Avalon Hill games like Dune, Up Front, Kremlin, Britannia, Diplomacy, 1830, Merchant of Venus, Acquire, Origins of World War II, etc... Loved them! Some still are fun an
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most people will elect to play something from the past 15 years rather than something from 40 years ago.
If you only look at the last 15 years, you will miss some great games, like "El Grande", and of course the classic, "Settlers of Catan" which was released in 1995.
Jeez, time passes quickly.
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most people will elect to play something from the past 15 years rather than something from 40 years ago.
If you only look at the last 15 years, you will miss some great games, like "El Grande", and of course the classic, "Settlers of Catan" which was released in 1995.
Jeez, time passes quickly.
Oh, I know... but it does seem true that most modern board gamers I see are very "cult of the new" and only want to play the new hotness. heh Most of the gamers in my board gaming group are like this. Meanwhile, I'm the wacko in the group with ancient-ass wargames and whatnot. heh My collection spans from (I think) the 40s until today. heh :-) If you include something like Chess or Go, it goes even further back. ;-)
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Ah! Yes, Splendor is also in my collection. :-) Definitely a fun one. I also like how zippy and easy it is. Definitely a good "gateway" game that you can easily get non-gamers to play too. Then they become gaming junkies before long and have 5 huge bookshelves full of games inside of a year. heh ;-)
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That's obviously not the case. The GP gave very specific examples of Hipsterism. These are traits that are very specific to the Millennial generation; those who are now between 20 and 35 years old. We typically don't see people older than that engaging in these behaviors, nor do we see younger people engaging in them, as well. As a Hipster, it's understandable that you may not recognize the fact that your behaviors are, to put it nicely, pretty fucking idiotic. But it's irrelevant that you choose to ignore
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The difference between "hipster" and some other interest is that hipster things seem to be done for some sort of style statement. Wearing pointless glasses, or riding old bikes or being a "lumbersexual" is just a style, not a hobby or an interest.
I suppose you could have fad board games, but actually playing board games doesn't mesh with a "hipster" style over substance mentality. People have been playing things like Eurogames for years, and for other games like Axis and Allies and more adult themed board
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I suppose you could have fad board games, but actually playing board games doesn't mesh with a "hipster" style over substance mentality.
Shouldn't it? It used to be big in America a while back, and it's less convenient than video gaming. Sounds right up their alley.
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Well, put that way, I can see why they'd be interested in it.
For all of that, I don't see much in the way of hipsters when I play. It's mostly people who grew up in the 80's and 90's who used to play games like this when we were younger.
Now that they have kids, they can't always commit to RPG campaigns or things like that. They want to have a reason to be social and have people over that is a lot more fun than a cocktail party or whatever else adults might do to be social when they invite people over. :)
I
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No. A style is something that you do or wear that tells the world what you are and shows your individuality. All of that is just a fashion; it's people saying, "Me too!"
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I'm not sure that's right, at least in this case.
I'm in my 30's and I know plenty of people, both older and younger, that DO play board games and card games, because they grew up with those and are passing them on to the kids in the family.
It's not an all-consuming thing, nor something we talk about a lot when we're not actually planning for a game night, but we don't really regard playing games as a metric of social status. Maybe it's because a lot of us are engineers or programmers or (in my night life)
Predictable (Score:4, Interesting)
Since Kickstarter came online in 2009, board games and card games have accrued $196 million in pledges, 93% of which went to successful projects. That's even better than video games have done, at $179 million and 85%.
Board games are much more predictable than video games. You need to spend approximately as much person-power figuring out the rules to a board game as you do to a video game. However the art requirements are probably the equivalent to that of a comparatively simple puzzle video game. (Which is not to say that they don't both require good art design to be effective, just that they don't need to come up with designs for dozens of worlds and hundreds of enemies, like you might in an RPG.)
After that however, you're pretty much done with the design. You don't need programmer to develop the entire platform. You need to play test the game itself, but you don't need a QA team continuously checking a whole list of things like "is it still possible to walk through the wall in quadrant three if you do a charge attack while crouching?"
You _do_ need to find a manufacturer to produce the components, but unless you've come up with something really crazy that's pretty much a solved problem. I'm sure that trying to find the best build quality you can for a decent price is a lot of _work_, but you're not going to ask them to change the color of a piece and then be surprised the next day to find that the game now crashes if you try to perform a certain move with that piece.
Board games are also much less prone to feature creep. Too many video games kickstarters get a lot of money and then decide to expand the scope of the game. Or they just fall prey to the natural temptation to add features during development. Very rarely do people working on a board game stop and say something like "but wouldn't it be cool if we also added a mini-game where you capture and train monsters?"
So if you can clearly explain your concept to the audience then they can be very confident that you'll be able to pull it off given proper funding (assuming that your intentions are honest of course) and pretty confident that what comes out at the end is similar to what they were promised at the beginning. That's reflected in the 93% success rate and feeds into the relatively high enthusiasm compared to the size of the total market.
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Board games fit absolutely perfectly with what KickStarter was intended to do. Movies and video games absolutely 100% do not and should never have been allowed on the site in the first place.
The idea behind KickStarter is that you're supposed to have a finished product, ready to be sold: say, a board game. But you have a problem: you can't afford to create enough of them to sell. For the sake of argument, let's say you can only afford to create 100 boxes that would cost you $40 each to print and assemble, w
Tip of the wedge in action! (Score:2)
Looks like the proliferation of Kickstarter games has started trickling down to related projects.
For example, somebody made meeple pillows (Meepillows) and put them on Kickstarter: The project exceeded its five-figure goal in under three days. And per Kikcktraq, its trending to over $80,000. (https://www.kicktraq.com/projects/faust1138/meepillows-an-assortment-of-colorful-large-plush-m/)
So now we're talking almost six figures worth of demand for game-related pillows, which leads me to think there may be
There is a reason... (Score:4, Interesting)
Hasbro has no interest in anything for adults. All the big board game makers are ran by morons. They told the CAH guys to go to hell that nobody would ever buy their card game.
It's proof that large corporations do not have a clue how to bring products to the world anymore and are old worthless dinosaurs that are no longer needed.
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Yes, big corporations are engines for reproducing a popular product en masse. It takes a lot of effort to make them able to be truly creative.
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Source, please? I suspect that anything they actually said was closer to "we don't want to sell this because we don't want our brand associated with it", which is a far cry from "nobody will buy that".
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MtG (Score:2)
Don't forget the big (flagship) Wizards of the Coast product... Magic: The Gathering. Most people lump card games in with board games, so that one counts, as well. ;-) Definitely one of the most successful games of all time... and is responsible for keeping many a game shop in business today.
Skewed results (Score:2)
My Favorite (Score:3)
Well, the obvious thing to do in this thread is to rave about your favorite game right?
I have a 7yr old, so we needed to find a game we'd all like, and the whole "who wins?" bit turned into an issue with a kid that age.
We finally stumbled on "Castle Panic" which is quite frankly an amazing game.
Dice Tower review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It's actually incredibly fun despite being cooperative. Everyone gets to talk about how they should approach defeating the monsters. Kids get super excited when they kill monsters. I highly recommend it. And yes, even adults enjoy this games.
Except for one problem... (Score:2)
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you have to check the game reviewers. dice tower, rahdo runs through, drive through review, and many others.
Not Just Board & Card Games (Score:5, Informative)
Ye olde pen and pap'r role playing games are thriving in the crowdfunding environment. White Wolf's classic World of Darkness line, which ended over a decade ago making way for their new revamped (rimshot) 2.0 version has been resurrected (groan), bought and licensed from the clueless buffoons at CCP games who absorbed WW. Under the Onyx Path label many original authors and developers have used Kickstarter campaigns amazingly effectively producing some excellent quality stuff that's at least as good as the original, I think even better in some cases. Projects usually get 100% funding within hours and most of the projects I followed and sent money to capped off at ~ 200-300% or more. Shadowrun, BattleTech and Call of Cthulhu are all doing well in crowdfunded ecosystem plus the massive amount of independent projects and project lines is staggering. Even better, the [total dogshit]:[pretty good] ratio has been steadily rising as well.
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Roleplaying games have the advantage of having always been an industry of amateurs. Other than a couple of big companies - TSR/Wtoc/Hasbro, White Wolf for a while, and Steve Jackson - it's all been some guy in his garage, happy if he breaks even but not expecting to make a living at it.
That means there's a lot of experience out there with the business model, for newbies to draw on, and it also means the market has realistic expectations as to production values. Good content on a Xeroxed page is perfectly OK
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I want a Crossbows and Catapults remake.
for more information (Score:4, Informative)
check out BoardGameGeek.com, it contains a list of nearly 80,000 games/components/expansions.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/b... [boardgamegeek.com]
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Great site! Despite the horrible design. heh (Pain in the ass to navigate well until you get used to it.) I'm on BGG daily. Great for news, forum chatter, rules clarifcations, and homemade additional rules or handouts. Often the designers hang out on there and will directly answer questions about their games, so it doesn't get much more useful than that. :-)
Just because the volume has increased... (Score:2)
It certainly doesn't help that the established industry has basically turned into a card game busines
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...and people are repeating the same mistakes that were made decades ago with Netrunner and Magic.
Heh... you make it sound like gaming's Vietnam.
TheGameCrafter (Score:2)
You don't even need Kickstarter, there are print-on-demand self-publishing for board games. Generally, board game publishing requires minimum runs in the thousands. A few years ago, I worked on the first version of TheGameCrafter [thegamecrafter.com], which makes it even easier. Then, once you've got a few prototypes, you can move it onto Kickstarter for a full production run.
Cards for Humanity (Score:2)