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The Crowdfunded Board Game Renaissance
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."
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.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
People are craving real interaction. A couple decades of staring at screens and we all are realizing we don't want to raise our families by passing on the habit. There's value in gaming, the shared goal of competition. The problem is that we lost something during those years. The face-to-face personal interaction gave way to internet connected walls. No more humanity, replaced with avatars and emojis and the simulation of real human connections. Nothing shows the glaring difference from what we've become than a live game of poker. Where part of the game is to master the art of being human. It's why writers and directors think we'll still be playing the game hundreds of light years from here sitting abort starships across the table from androids and aliens.
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. :-)
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
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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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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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) athletic types that enjoy competition, but it seems to me a lot of people I know just like games.
But go ahead and bag on what everyone else likes as being "uncool", hipster.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
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?...
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.
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.
check out BoardGameGeek.com, it contains a list of nearly 80,000 games/components/expansions.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/b...
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
I've had similar experiences with a few games, some that were just really terrible and clearly had never been tested (and some that never got completed either). But I've also had some really good games come off of Kickstarter. You just have to be really careful about what you back. Projects that have a very clear description tend to be better then those that just list some components and a theme, and those do exist out there. Some of the better projects actually have gameplay videos (using concept pieces) that can give you a good idea if the game will actually be good or not. In the end it's still rather hit and miss, but not every game on Kickstarter is going to be bad.
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