Board games 2021 — a r(kne)ecap

I’ve been away from this blog for a while, to the extent I almost forgot it existed!

Nonetheless I’m back, and we all have Covid-19 to thank. Despite being vaccinated, and boosted, I’ve been down with the terror of 2020 for the past week, and I’m finally coming to my senses and able to function. And having isolated myself at home without company, I’ve been down a data rabbit hole for the past few days, digging up whatever I can on how the board gaming industry fared in 2021, a true year of wonders, human wise, in the post Covid-19 era.

Before I start, perhaps a preamble to those who don’t know me. I went down the board gaming rabbit hole in 2018, and the love has only grown since. Before that I was strictly a Catan player, a game I now loathe with all my being. So when the shroud was lifted off my eyes to the wonderful and seemingly infinite world of modern board gaming, I couldn’t wait to explore every inch and crevice.

Crowdfunding Recap

Recently everyone and their mother have been launching games on Kickstarter and Gamefound, and it is getting very difficult to parse the bad from the average, the average from the good, and the good from the great. But that’s a story for another time.

Crowdfunded board games (Kickstarter +Gamefound) raised between $151m to $155m in 2021. That’s based on my manual analysis of 322 campaigns, where I believe I’ve captured most, if not all, of those that raised over $50,000. I added this $4m range to account for any that slipped through the cracks and in case the sub-$50k campaigns add up to that much.

Despite the seemingly staggering number, funding did take a kneecap, whereby the 2021 number was way below the $234m raised in 2020 (I have not personally verified the number), a drop of ~35%. The number makes sense though, whereby 2020 gave us the highest funded board game ever in Frosthaven, which raised a hair below $13m, and a board gaming table, yes not a typo, raised just about $9m, no campaigns in 2021 came close. My theory for this drop has to do with the global ocean freight crisis catching up with board gaming publishers. It seems that running a campaign and raising money has become the least of their worries, with when to press the “manufacture” button, and finding container space later, becoming the bane of their existence. This has led many to take it slow, some even canceling projects, with some examples being Bloodstone and Thunder Road: Vendetta despite raising a relatively decent amount of money upon launch. The latter is back now and is doing extremely well, while I expect the former is set for a return sometime in 2022. Some successfully funded campaigns are actually sitting on the money, in a wait and see mode, petrified of the freight situation.

Back to numbers, and for Kickstarter, here are the top funded board games of 2021:

• The Witcher: Old World, with $7.8m, brought to us from Go on Board, a Polish publisher that who previously brought us Titans and Valhalla, which raised relatively modest amounts, sub-$200k, in prior years. I took a look at the game and it didn’t really click with me, and I would say the Netflix series has something to do with the boost this IP’s Kickstarter got, good on them!
• The most funded expansion, and second most funded board gaming Kickstarter project, was The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls Requiem, which pulled in $6.7m.
• CMON pulled in a cool $12.1m, spread across 4 projects: Marvel United: X-Men with $6m, Zombicide: Undead or Alive with $3.3m, Masters of the Universe: Clash for Eternia the Board Game with $2m, and The Animation Collection with $743k.
• Everdell: Newleaf, Mistwood, and The Complete Collection from Starling Games, made an incredible $4.8m.
• Steamforged Games had two strong showings, with Monster Hunter World: The Board Game with $4.7m, and Resident Evil: The Board Game with $1.9m.
• Mythic Games weren’t too shabby, pulling in $3.4m from 3 projects: 6: The Board Game with $1.5m, Monsterpocalypse Board Game with $1.3m, and Super Fantasy Brawl: Round 2! with $583k.

In a nutshell, Kickstarter is still the place to be, having gobbled up 86% of the 2021 total. However Gamefound grabbing an 14% of board game funding $’s isn’t too bad, and that’s with 15 projects only, and I expect that will increase to 20% in 2022, not least because of backlash against Kickstarter’s announcement that it’s moving to the blockchain.

However, the 15 Gamefound projects raised on average $1.4m each, while the 307 Kickstarter projects raised on average $426k each. Naturally the Gamefound projects were publishers migrating from Kickstarter, as I don’t think any are first time publishers on there. However, this may make smaller creators hesitant to go on Gamefound, as the platform may be suffering from a bias towards bigger miniature-heavy games. The biggest Gamefound campaigns were:

• Awaken Realms (sister company of Gamefound) raised a pretty good $6.8m, across ISS Vanguard with $4.9m, and Lords of Ragnarok with $1.9m.
• Chip Theory Games’ Too Many Bones: Unbreakable, a standalone expansion of the franchise, raising $3.4m, another of their campaigns (on Kickstarter), Hoplomachus: Victorum, raised $944k.
• Two games from Portal Games, Robinson Crusoe - Collector’s Edition with $2.3m, and Eleven: Football Manager Board Game with $460k.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — The Boardgame from Modipius Entertainment with $1.7m.
• Chronicles Of Drunagor: Age Of Darkness Apocalypse from Creative Games Studio LLC with $1.6m.

It is worth noting that all numbers above numbers exclude funds raised post campaign in the pledge managers, or pre-orders on the publishers’ websites, though I do expect those numbers to bump up the total by 20% to 30%. Publishers reading this can confirm or correct this.

Sense of Scale

Now to the naked eye, those seem like incredible numbers, until you start to examine the wider industry numbers. While I’m not able to pinpoint a number, it seems the global board gaming industry’s size is anywhere from $6bn to $11bn, I say that because different market research firms either clump puzzles or other toys with board gaming numbers, but in any case that range is useful for us to see that Crowdfunding is but a drop in the ocean.

That is also not to say that all board gaming publishers go the Kickstarter route, notably:

• Behemoth Hasbro, which generated $1.8bn in gaming revenue in 2020, the company of Magic: The Gathering, Monopoly, and Dungeons & Dragons fame.
• The more comparable industry giant Asmodee, with revenues of over $1bn in 2021 with an excellent 22% adjusted EBITDA (Source: minute 47:14).
• Ravesnburger, a leader in the puzzle space as well, generated around ~$600m in 2019.
• CMON, which listed its shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2016, is required by the regulator to publish its financials, with its H1 2021 financials showing revenues of $15m, compared to full year 2020 with $25m.
• Stonemaier Games, with revenues of ~$18m in 2020.
• Steve Jackson Games, who publishes Munchkin, with revenues of $4m in 2020.

Then there’s a couple of other board gaming companies such as CGE, Capstone Games, GMT, Cranio Creations, and Rio Grande Games, among others, who either don’t use Kickstarter and/or don’t publish any financials. If any publishers want to get in touch and share numbers with me, I’ll be happy to discuss incorporating them while maintaining anonymity.

News from around the Industry (2021)

No surprise here that Asmodee news dominated, as acquirer, and aquiree. And one 2022 pieces of news that popped up just as I was publishing this article:

1. February 2022: Ravensburger invests $4.5m in Gamefound. No further details were disclosed beyond the $22m in funding raised via Gamefound, my calculation of their 2021 funds raised is $20.6m, so I’m guessing they included 2022 campaigns as well. I’m curious to know how much stake did Ravenburger get, I’m guessing something around 15%.
2. December 2021: Embracer acquires Asmodee for $3.1bn. There’s tons of details on the deal in this 2 hours video. One slide gave a nice overview of the company’s past, present, and future:

3. December 2021: Asmodee acqiures Miniature Market.

4. December 2021: Asmodee makes a strategic investment in Exploding Kittens.

5. December 2021: Greater than Games becomes part of Flat River Group.

6. November 2021: TMG shuts down, liquidates stock via CoolStuffInc.

7. March 2021: Asmodee acquires Plan B Games.

8. February 2021: Asmodee acquires Board Game Arena.

A few cool things to highlight from 2021

There are a few cool campaigns that I also want to highlight. We often get caught up in the hype of the multi-million dollar campaigns, so wanted to give a shoutout to a few:

1. The publisher Button Shy, who launched 5 campaigns in 2021, and raised $606k, not bad for a publisher whose games (which are mostly great) consist of 18 cards in a wallet.
2. Voyages by Postmark Games, which raised an amazing £53k for a print and play (pnp) roll and write game. The pledge set each backer back £4. They were fully ready at the start of the Kickstarter, with the game completed, lovely art, and as promised shared the files with backers a week or two upon campaign closing. They now also have a growing Discord community creating fan-made maps for the game.
3. I stumbled upon a creator who makes pnp roll and writes. For $3, I backed one of his campaigns. I loved the person’s passion, and the ethos behind his campaigns, which he has launched 11 of:

My name is Derik and I LOVE sharing! More directly, I want to share great games with great people at a great price — which is why the company is named “Lagniappe Games”. A lagniappe (pronounced lan-yap) is a gift or bonus. As the name implies, I want people to feel like they got a present — more than they expected — every time they open my games :D.

4. I was also personally involved in working on the promotion of a couple of campaigns via the awesome Board Game Revolution Community team. I learned a lot and it was a blast.

On a more personal note, I also created a logo for my Instagram account, MoShelfControl, which was an exciting thing for me. I plan to be more active in 2022:

2022 look ahead

I expect a lot of the 2021 issues to carry over into 2022, namely, the global ocean freight issues.

I think we’ll see some consolidation, with larger publishers acquiring small ones, or integrating up/down the supply chain.

For gaming predictions, I expect Ark Nova to crack the top 20 on BGG (152 at time of writing this) once it hits the US (happening as we speak, with Capstone starting to ship out direct orders, with the retail release set for 15 March).

This concludes my 2021 roundup, I’m thinking if there are interesting topics to write about, I could do more of those, otherwise, see you in the 2022 roundup!