I believe we are in the “Age of Kickstarter”. It seems like every game we hear about this day and age is doing, or has done, a Kickstarter campaign. There are other crowd funding sites, such as IndieGoGo, but for games it seems Kickstarter has become home. At any given time there are hundreds of game projects live, from simple dice to full fledged games. It can be fun to look through those games to see what people are coming up with.
Of course, all of those options can be overwhelming. Especially when most of them look fantastic! When I first discovered Kickstarter I went crazy, by my standards. I ended up backing 3 games, and as part of backing one of them I had the option of buying the designers previous game so I did that as well. In total I purchased 3 games, and I wasn’t even sure when I was going to get them! At that point I knew I needed to reign it in so I haven’t backed anything since. Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of temptations but I didn’t give in. There have been a few I went back and looked at after they were over and regret not backing, the chief among them being Cartography. It’s just such a beautiful looking game with simple mechanics, but I had backed another area control game and couldn’t bring myself to back this one as well. Plus I had already spent too much =P Anyway, I’m not trying to sell you on a game, just saying that if you go looking and decide not to back, then don’t be surprised if later on you have remorse about not doing so. It’s normal!
Let me back up and a bit and explain, quickly, what backing a project is for those who don’t know. Kickstarter(or IndieGogo, etc) is a crowd funding website every day joes like me can log into and look at what other every day people are posting as ideas they want to bring to the world. It can be literally anything from a bowl of potato salad to an Ubuntu smart phone. Okay, so the Ubuntu Edge wasn’t an everyday person thing, but you get the idea: you can find almost anything on these crowd funding sites. Each project states it’s case as to why they deserve your money. Once you look over everything you have to make a decision about whether you want to spend your hard earned money on a product you can’t have for potentially months. For example: one of the card games I backed was funded in October 2014 and won’t be delivered until June 2015.
That’s the catch with crowd funding: you won’t receive the product right away. Or potentially ever. There are plenty of projects I have seen reported on that just never make it into people’s hands. From everything I have seen it’s chalked up to inexperience in doing what they are saying they will do and just not being able to do it on time or on budget. On the flip side there are plenty of successfully crowd funded things that are doing very well. Take Tiny Epic Kingdoms as an example. They delivered around when they said they would and everyone loves the game. Now it isn’t just available on a crowd funding website, but normal stores.
That is really what Kickstarter boils down to, a gamble. You may get a hit or you may get a dude. You as a potential backer must weigh the history of the person you are backing as well as what they are attempting to sell you and deliver.
That was more words dedicated to explaining crowd funding than I had intended!
Crowd funding has become a haven for independent game developers. It has given an avenue for developers to let the people decide if they want a game. Rather than going to a publisher and trying to convince them they put it up to the people. If they receive enough funds and backers then the people get a game they are interested in and the developer gets their game produced. It’s a model that just makes sense to me. This is why I think we’re in the “Age of Kickstarter”, and there is no signs of slowing down!
What is also a lot of fun is that most of the game projects will post print and play rules. This gives you the opportunity to try before you back, which is really handy!
New games are popping up all the time, go check them out. One that interests me is the Ghostbusters board game. I’m going to reserve judgement until we get to see some game play videos or the rules. But it is definitely on my radar!
For those interested these are the games I have backed so far:
1) Slap .45 – This looks like a really fun party game. There isn’t much info on the page, but the developers have a good history with previous games they have created. What sold me was when I watched the game play video and everyone threw up their fake guns while slapping the table.
2) King Down – I also purchased everything for The Agents, Saar Shai’s other game, through this Kickstarter. What really sold me on this one was the different take on chess mechanics. It looked like a fun thinking game with a fantasy type setting. Plus the miniatures were just plain cool! When I saw The Agents I knew I had to have that one as well. It looks like a fun card game.
3) Vye: The Card Game – I ended up backing this one after a test game or three with my wife. We used a normal deck of cards and some coins as the tokens. We really enjoyed it so we threw our money in. What really sold me was the artwork, which is just gorgeous! Go take a look at it if you haven’t seen it before. If you’re interested in trying the game let me know and I can explain how I used a normal deck of cards(the rules are available on their website).
The Gaming Cubicle 