Ninety-three percent of that money went to successful projects - those that reached their fundraising goal. Since that debut, pledges to board and card game projects on the site have totaled $196 million, according to the company. That game has sold over 15 million copies.Īnd then, in mid-2009, Kickstarter launched. The Settlers of Catan, and its first English-language edition in 1996, gave many their first taste of German board gaming kultur. Magic: The Gathering, which debuted in 1993 and became a smash hit, spawned countless expansions and still boasts a competitive professional circuit. Dungeons & Dragons, first published in 1974, crystallized role-play gaming. He sees Kickstarter as the latest in a series of board and card gaming milestones. Luke Crane is Kickstarter’s in-house board game expert and resident dungeon master. David Gallagher, the site’s director of communications, told me that a board game project might need as little as $500 to get off the ground - much less than a video game hardware project, for example. Thousands of new games have been funded, and the subject matter of the games is broad, in part because of low startup costs. These dual roles have led to a flurry of board game activity on Kickstarter in the past few years. Those publishers would then typically have control over a game - they could tweak its theme, its artwork and its marketing campaign. In the absence of outlets like Kickstarter, designers would have to pitch games to traditional brick-and-mortar publishers. Internet crowdfunding has done the same thing for game designers that blogging platforms did for writers: turned them into publishers. And in return for a significant pledge - $50, say - donors typically get a copy of the game. If the fundraising goal is met, the game is made. That lets a designer learn, in real time, what the demand for his game is. Designers show up, explain their game idea on a Web page, often with photos and a video, and ask for pledges. Kickstarter and other funding platforms like Indiegogo play two roles in the board game universe.įirst, they are a handy way to gauge the market’s willingness to pre-order a game. PROJECTĭwarven Forge’s Modular City Builder Terrain Systemĭwarven Forge’s Caverns-Dwarvenite Game Tiles Terrain The table below shows the 10 game projects that have raised the most money on Kickstarter, their total pledges and their number of backers. Some games, though, have raised a mint during their Kickstarter campaign alone. The game successfully raised a relatively modest $15,000 on the site in 2012 and has gone on to become a cultural phenomenon. The most famous Kickstarter success story to date may be the bawdy party game Cards Against Humanity. “The barrier to entry is much lower, especially with board games,” Mach said. The crowdfunding website Kickstarter has become the go-to place to finance a passion board game project. and Canada, up 20 percent from the year before, according to the pop-culture resource ICv2.Īnd now there are more games being made than ever. Sales of games are swelling, too: The hobby game market had an estimated $880 million in sales in 2014 in the U.S. One of the biggest, Gen Con, set its sixth straight attendance record this year. Attendance at gaming conventions has boomed. Since then, the quantity, quality and variety of new board and card games seem to increase every year. The Settlers of Catan, first published in Germany in 1995, introduced many Americans to so-called Euro-style board games - games with elegant gameplay, deep strategy, compelling themes and attractive art. Mach had never made a serious go at creating a game before but figured why not - we’re living in a golden age of board games, after all. When I talked to Mach, he and his two brothers were about two weeks into a monthlong fundraising campaign to launch their first game, Vikings of Dragonia. That’s because he’s a board game designer. And he wants the masses of the Internet to bankroll all of it. He wants you to compete for honor and treasure and the control of islands. Albert Mach wants to help you lead a Viking clan.
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