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For 20% off a single order of Fat Dragon Games’ products at DriveThruRPG, use coupon code “FatMayJune11”.

Mona Saves blog is giving away two copies of ThinkFun’s Snack Attack! Typical like/follow/tweet/comment rules to enter.

Follow and retweet Eagle Games for a chance to win Railways of the World: The Card Game.

Dice Hate Me is celebrating an anniversary by giving away Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization. To enter, submit whimsical game-related pictures.

Knights of the Night podcast is giving away two passes to Gen Con. Something about feedback, so I’m sure you’ll listen before entering, right?

Answer “Who would win a hot dog eating contest? Donald Trump OR Albert Einstein?” on Gamewright’s Gameblog for a chance to win two of the company’s new games, Joe Name It and Who Would Win.

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The latest from miniatures accessory maker, Litko, are markers for the futuristic skirmish game Infinity. These markers aren’t authorized by the game’s publisher. They’re also not as good looking as some markers we covered earlier from Litko, but they’re functional, I guess.

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CorSec Engineering has produced some neat accessories for sci-fi miniatures games. The latest are status tokens for BattleTech and acrylic planets. The tokens are just rectangular or triangular plastic pieces with the words, “prone”, “jump”, “pilot check”, etc. on them. Not exciting, but useful, I guess. The planets are spheres that come with mounting rods and bases, and are available in sizes of 1.5 to 4 inches.

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This was already up a few days ago; in any case, rather quickly. From Game Craft Miniatures for only $35. Combine this with Barbie dolls to create the jihadist edition of Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman. I’m on Youtube clicking refresh.

(source)

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I post a compilation of Kickstarter [1] tabletop game projects (RPG, board, card) on Purple Pawn each week. I’ve been tracking tabletop game projects on KS pretty much since there have been tabletop game projects on KS.

Something like half of KS tabletop game projects get funded. Why? What are they doing right? What did the ones that fail do wrong? After the KS project finishes, what happens next?

I surveyed the owners of nearly every completed board and card game project on KS to find out.

Summary

I received approximately 15 responses to my survey.

On Kickstarter you can take your card game that you’ve prototyped on index cards with a ballpoint pen, and turn it into your vision. -Kevin Cook

KS is a strong crowd-funding player in the game industry, and it’s just getting started. Any competitors are far behind; they will have to grow rapidly to become serious competition. KS’s support staff is good and their site works as described. However, they have recently made it more difficult to navigate, favoring larger and more popular projects over less popular projects.

KS provides to the masses the thrills of becoming part of a community of first customers for a game, of having a direct dialog with a designer or publisher who listens, and of the possibility of helping or influencing the creative development process. KS helps create personally involved, highly satisfied, evangelical customers, as well as games that are targeted to these customers and have less initial problems.

Remember that KS is just another web page. All the old rules still apply: you need a great game, solid or appropriately priced components, and a lot of good old fashioned PR and marketing to make it work.

A KS project is a lonely entity that needs a lot of love. Simply being on KS does not mean that your project will get views, interest, promotion, or backing. A KS project needs tons and tons of promotion and publicity. For a game project, that means promotion and networking on the major game sites, starting with Board Game Geek and including other relevant, big game sites (Board Game Info [2], The Dice Tower, Purple Pawn, Fortress Ameritrash, BGDF, and others), as well as initial reviews (hopefully good ones) from well-read and respected reviewers. All before you open the KS project.

KS game projects fail due to under-promotion, poor project presentation, or simply being a bad game – the latter being a possibility that none of my respondents considered.

Game projects in the $1500 or under range are typically only for parts of games: artwork, minis, an expansion, etc. Most game projects are in the $1500 to $15,000 range. A typical first print run is a few hundred up to 5,000 copies. Budgeting a bigger print run for your first game means that you have an unrealistic idea of how the game market works, and we’ve covered many companies like this on Purple Pawn. You must have concrete interest in a good portion of a print run before you consider runs in the higher range.

Early-adopting gamers – the ones you are trying to court – are loyal, fervent, communicative, know a lot about what makes a good game, and have cash to spend – but don’t want to be cheated. They don’t spend $1 to get a “thanks”, but they will spend $25 to $40 without much thought on a board game if they think that they’ll get a quality game. They’ll regularly drop more money ($250+) in exchange for special perks.

Read the rest of this post for methodology, survey responses, and some additional analysis.

Read the rest of this entry »

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This week we also added all of the previous entries, as well as their previous contribution levels. These figures may be helpful for those projects that we mentioned last week; each week they indicate how much was raised in the previous week. For older projects, the numbers don’t mean very much this week, since they might represent a month or more worth of contributions.

Projects that were funded, or failed to fund, were removed from the list. Yeah, we should probably start adding those, too. I wish Kickstarter would give us a decent API or widget to do this automatically, but they’re dragging their feet.

In other news, GameSalute has started a Kickstarter-like initiative for board games only called Springboard. If it grows, we’ll start adding their projects to these lists.

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The Shenandoah Studio, which was almost called Project Simonsen, is a company producing iPad versions of war games.

The founders are all major board game players and/or designers who believe that game play comes before eye candy; the designers of Across 5 Aprils, D-Day at Omaha Beach, RAF, Washington’s War, Waterloo, Soviet Dawn, and others are apparently on board.

All games will include solitaire play from the get-go.

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