What KICKSTARTER(S) are you BACKING and WHY?

I don't think the KS money faucet is drying up but rather starting to winnow down to more "known quantities". You'll get more money on fewer projects I suspect. I do think it will be interesting to see how the next year or so goes once backers get the shipping charges for projects backed during the early days of the pandemic . Those 150 containers of FROSTHAVEN are gonna cost somewhere around $3 MILLION just to get from China to the US/Europe. No way those costs were in the original budget.

I belong to a dozen Facebook groups involving specific interests of mine. The largest one is Twin Cities Geeks, which has over 14,000 members. Through that group, I discovered and joined a smaller group, Minnesota Board Game Exchange, which is theoretically all about buying, selling, and trading board games. But most of the activity consists of people trying to sell old eurogames or new Kickstarter shovelware. And a surprising number of people selling barely-touched copies of Oath. I joined so that I could sell my 1st edition Mansions of Madness, because somebody at TCG was actively looking for a copy to buy. But now MBGE is just a depressing reminder of the vast quantity of mediocre games that have been published over the years, especially recent years.

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to claim or imply that there’s no money left in Kickstarter but only that putting a half thought out project on the platform is no longer a guarantee of runaway success.

The thing that irritates me about all of it is how it tends to look like publishers bending to the will of the crowd. And you could argue that a crowdfunded game should maybe even do that... but there is absolutely a "too many cooks" thing going on here, and frankly taking input from some of these "experts" is pure folly.

I want free shipping and a solo mode and more minis and a box that holds all expansions and sleeved cards and also the box to have two big tits on it that you can actually squeeze.

sornars wrote: I was keeping an eye on Myth and Goal by Blacklist Games, designed by James Hewitt and Sophie Williams and Thunder Road: Vendetta by Restoration Games and both games looked pretty close to complete rules wise and had reasonable art but both Kickstarters were cancelled this week; presumably due to not seeing the sort of explosive returns the publishers were expecting.

The idea of a publisher creating a Kickstarter with a public goal — presumably so they can announce that it is three billion percent funded within eight nanoseconds — but then a private, “shadow goal,” that if they don’t hit, they will cancel … fills me with rage and makes me feel like writing off that publisher forever.

If KS was ethical (hah) they’d charge a mandatory minimum to any project that meets its funding goal.

This is the second time on this forum where the size of the Frosthaven shipment has come up. I have been following the project updates and have never seen numbers mentioned regarding number of containers they expected to be needed. Has this been shared, or is this speculation. For whatever reason I am curious.

Surprised to hear that Thunder Road has been canned. I've had ads for that popping up in my FB feed every day for the last week or so.

BillyBobThwarton wrote: This is the second time on this forum where the size of the Frosthaven shipment has come up. I have been following the project updates and have never seen numbers mentioned regarding number of containers they expected to be needed. Has this been shared, or is this speculation. For whatever reason I am curious.

frosthaven.backerkit.com/hosted_preorder...oject_updates?page=4

www.kickstarter.com/projects/frosthaven/...thaven/posts/3251930

I can’t find the 150 container quote, but I remember reading it, but here they say 90,000 copies. There is approx 10,lbs more content per box than Gloomhaven. So a bigger box than Gloomhaven, prob 50% bigger. 90,000 divided by 150 is 600 copies per container, which seems pretty plausible to me given that big a box per game.

Msample wrote: There is approx 10,lbs more content per box than Gloomhaven. So a bigger box than Gloomhaven, prob 50% bigger.

50% bigger!??! Dear lawd. Hope the box design incorporates wheels and a pull handle.

Msample wrote: 90,000 divided by 150 is 600 copies per container, which seems pretty plausible to me given that big a box per game.

A standard shipping container is 2560 cubic feet. So that would be four and a quarter cubic feet per copy, 12x12x48ish. Sounds a little high. It may merely be 120 shipping containers.

This moment is not a good time to be shipping anything anywhere in the world. The cost of renting a container has skyrocketed, about $21,000 apiece (just checked the listing, has dropped to $16,000 today for west coast ports), because no one has the transportation resources to get the empty containers back to dockside and onto ships returning to China. Containers typically go back to China empty, about 60% of all put on freighters for that part of the round trip. So they are piling up all over the U.S. because truckers are at a premium and you ship goods before you ship empty cans. To give you an idea, the cost of sending a full container back to China at the moment is just $1000.

Long story short -- shipping prices are absurdly high, and more importantly are unpredictable. Best guess is that things will settle out in the coming year. These guys may be keeping their powder dry in the face of the unknown.

Hellboy pledge manager is closing on 10/31, in case any of you were thinking of late pledging.

hotseatgames wrote: The thing that irritates me about all of it is how it tends to look like publishers bending to the will of the crowd. And you could argue that a crowdfunded game should maybe even do that... but there is absolutely a "too many cooks" thing going on here, and frankly taking input from some of these "experts" is pure folly.

I was looking at the campaign for a new game called Mythwind. The game comes with four different playable characters with very different powers, mechanics, etc. Okay, seems kind of interesting. But as a stretch goal, they're "crowdsourcing" ideas for a fifth playable character. This seems like a terrible idea to me and absolutely killed my interest in the game. Will that fifth character be playtested and edited at all? Or will it just be a collection of janky nonsense? It seems insulting to actual game designers to suggest that their job can be outsourced to a bunch of knuckleheads shouting on the internet.

This is funny:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/thedragonst...ssors-deluxe-edition

dysjunct wrote: This is funny:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/thedragonst...ssors-deluxe-edition

This is Kickstarter to the Nth degree: "For $75, we'll put a photo of YOUR FACE in the rulebook under a section titled "These people paid $75 to have their photo in this rulebook.""

Theres no way roxley will roll this back at this point, especially because their Kickstarters rake in money, but their new Marvel Dice Throne continues to wildly miss the mark in my opinion. Dice Throne is a fun, super light dice game. I don't want a version of it that costs $100 and fills up an entire Kallax cube. It's just not a game that warrants that kind of investment. Obviously I'm in the minority since 8000 people have backed at this point, but I think the very first Dice Throne was the only one that was actually correctly priced/packaged for what the game is.