My original intention was to wait for delivery of a game from a Gamefound campaign scheduled for February, then write a bit about it along with a catchup on some of the many projects I’ve covered on the blog in the past six months or so. However, manufacture has been delayed for the game in question, and April’s the current (perhaps optimistic) target for dispatch. It seems that several of the projects I’ve been looking at have also suffered delays, and some of the campaign runners are blaming the Chinese New Year factory shutdown—as if that came as a total surprise to anyone… But to cut them some slack, this is just the latest factor in what has been, shall we say, a turbulent year in international manufacture and trading.
Anyway, I thought I’d avoid delays myself, and revisit a few Kickstarter and Gamefound projects right now to let you know what’s happened with them.
The Good
Several of the projects I looked at have been very successful—a few, in no particular order, are:
DinoGenics: New Arrivals is doing very well, having passed its funding target by a factor of 10 (though, as I’ve commented elsewhere, people can game the system by choosing low targets to make the final result look good, so these statistics can be misleading—nonetheless, the absolute funding amount Ninth Haven Games achieved is impressive. At time of writing, a few components remain to be finalised, but everything else looks gorgeous (such as the cute, but oh-so-expensive UV-printed dinosaur meeples). This is one of the projects hit by the holiday in China; I think production was intended to happen before the break, but tariff turmoil last April led them to delay manufacture for a few months, with various other knock-on effects. As Ninth Haven explained in a project update, it wasn’t feasible for them to switch to a factory in a less afflicted country at the height of the tariff kerfuffle (well, one of the tariff kerfuffles), so they decided to pause. I gather that being late is the norm for crowdfunding projects anyway, and I do appreciate that Ninth Haven seem to be providing monthly progress updates.
Cascadia: Alpine Lakes was never going to be a failure, and at 43× overfunded (but, yeah, look at how low the target was), it’s done pretty well. This is one of the few projects not hit by delays, but Flatout Games’ fulfilment goal is September, well away from any significant national holidays; and they’ve also delivered the Print & Play files on time. Campaign updates are somewhat lacking, but I guess they’ve completed the design, otherwise there’d be no PnP files, and all that’s left is merely turning those into cardboard between now and September. Even so, it’d be nice to hear about progress.
Next, Burnt Island Games is doing nicely with Endeavour Deep Sea: Uncharted Waters. A very tidy sum of money, indeed. I think this particular project is the furthest along (of the very successful ones) that I’ve been taking an interest in. When Burnt Island opened the pledge manager, there were complaints about higher-than-expected shipping fees and taxes: some of this was due to tariffs, but some due to backers not reading the fine print. People are able to cancel their pledge if the increase was too much for them, but would get only 80% of their investment back (Gamefound keeps some of the money for themselves). As I’ve said, supporting crowdfunded projects isn’t cheap! Bizarrely, the most recent project updates are pleas for backers to fill in their pledge manager forms before the deadline (followed by a handful of comments from people saying, oops, they missed it, and can they sort things out now)—I don’t fully understand how someone can commit a not insignificant amount of money, then stumble at the final hurdle and get nothing for it (apart from the return of 80%, I assume). Aside from those updates, though, there isn’t much about manufacturing progress, etc.
A campaign that truly surprised me is Elements of Truth. At best, I consider this a slightly better but still uninspiring variation of Trivial Pursuit; however, more than 13,000 people disagree with me, pledging over £1M to bring the game to fruition! And all that without rulebook and playthrough videos on the campaign page. As far as I can tell, everything seems to be on target for late summer/early autumn delivery—a well-managed production process; a well-managed campaign overall, which looks like it’s getting frequent updates. All I can say is that I guess I’m not the target audience for this game, but congratulations to Veritasium on their success.
EcoLogic: Europe Expansions seems to be doing reasonably well, though again, there are delays, partly due to changing manufacturer late in the game. Borys (the game creator) admits this is ‘it's certainly my fault, mainly due to my lack of experience in this field’—always a risk with crowdfunding projects, where the creator has to be a business expert too.
Campaign Failures
A few campaigns have been cancelled by their creators or ended without sufficient funding since I wrote about them:
Labyrinth of Dimensions gained zero backers, which came as little surprise since the main focus of my article was a criticism of the almost total lack of information about the game.
Game of Gains was another whose campaign was poorly defined (but at least it had two backers). Finliti did post an update which explained that the issue, as they saw it, was inexperience of crowdfunding on their part, but that they’re going to relaunch. Providing more information about what the game is might have helped them out before they reached that point in the campaign.
Yet another with a poor campaign was STACKUP. Creators really ought to take a look at the best performing campaigns and emulate them, providing details of gameplay, a well-presented rulebook, playthrough videos, solid evidence that the game really does exist—I’m not saying that the Matuszeks omitted all of that, but they could have done better in fleshing out the campaign material. However, they do plan to make a comeback, and here’s hoping they’ve learned from the past (though the spelling mistake in the title doesn’t inspire confidence).
One I’m quite sad about is The Pawn’s Gambit. It was a neat looking little game, though the theme might be a bit specialised. While a draft rulebook was available during the campaign, the gameplay section of the campaign page remained empty apart from the word ‘soon’—bit of a shame that wasn’t developed further. David Melo (the creator) does say he intends to relaunch around the middle of 2026.
The Slightly Dubious
I simply don’t understand Storm: Strategy in Motion—the project exceeded its funding by a factor of 20, and managed this with a frankly mediocre game whose unique feature is lenticular graphics on the playing pieces. What’s more, apart from a single video of prototype pieces in carefully managed action, all of the pretty animations on the campaign page are artificially generated. There are very few campaign updates, and the comments section is full of angry posts about the lack of communication.
I was excited to find two projects from FryxGames on Gamefound: Wilderness and The Legacy of Mars. The former is a terrific game, and I truly expect the latter to be, too. However, the Fryx folk seem to be rather poor at communication: there are many complaints within Wilderness comments about the lack of information for months at a time, but a February update did say that this was partly due to working on Legacy of Mars at the same time… Back, meet rod of Fryx’s own making. Even less information is forthcoming about Legacy of Mars, much to the frustration of potential backers, one of whom commented: ‘Zu früh angekündigt’ (Announced too early). I guess I’ll just have to keep waiting for news.
Next comes a trio of games which I felt deserved a special mention: Canals of Windcrest, Scarab Sands and The Old Ones of El Dorado. It seems that because these didn’t reach or massively pass their funding threshold within 24 hours, the creators shut the project down early, to regroup and relaunch later on. In some cases, the game itself was tweaked in the meantime, but the main changes were to the campaign, to make the game more attractive—a few positives were the inclusion of or improvement to the rulebook second time around and more or better videos, but there’s also emphasis on promoting the projects (such as so-called social goals, where rewards will be unlocked at certain numbers of followers on places other than the crowdfunding platform) and adjusting the funding threshold to make exceeding it more likely. All three projects are back, and they are indeed better this time round, but it’s a shame that creators feel it necessary to game the system in this way to be (seen to be) successful.
Finally
I’ve covered a lot of crowdfunded projects in the past few months, and this article provided updates on just a fraction of them. I hope to highlight some more in future articles, too—maybe by then, the game I’m waiting for will have arrived!
I do like keeping an eye on what’s coming—Kickstarter and Gamefound seem to be where the majority of boardgame innovation appears nowadays. True, a lot is garbage (why so many STL files, especially of the scantily clad, exaggeratedly curvaceous variety?), but the ones I write about are those that really caught my eye (though not necessary for the best reasons), and there is some terrific stuff out there.
However, I don’t tend to back many projects myself—as I’ve explained elsewhere, buying via crowdfunding isn’t going to save money and is never totally risk free, as demonstrated by some of the campaigns covered in this article. I try not to go overboard as regards filling my shelves with games (there’s only so much playing time available!), limiting the number of projects I’ll consider backing. I’m also very cautious and will almost always prefer to wait for retail if that’s an option, but I do appreciate the people more willing to take a bet on these new games, and I especially laud retailers who are willing to bring them to their stores.
About the author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
