Kickstarter Board Games — Think Before You Back a Project

Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash

“Kickstarter campaigns make ideas into reality. It’s where creators share new visions for creative work with the communities that will come together to fund them.”

— Kickstarter (taken from About page)

As some of you who follow me might know I love board games, and especially games with amazing components. It is the little kid in me. I am a sucker for quality over-the-top pieces that can immediately get people interested in a game.

Board games have come a long way from the days of Monopoly and Connect 4. Games being driven by highly creative and thoughtful designers, along with some amazing artists. This is especially true for games produced over the last 8–10 years. PARKS, Unmatched, Mexica, Tokaido, and Wingspan are excellent examples of games that are beautiful to see and fun to play.

Beautiful art and graphic design for Unmatched by Restoration Games and Mondo Games

This leads me to Kickstarter and the pattern of using over-the-top components to attract campaign supporters. Personally I have backed 16 projects in the last 7 years. Of those 16 board games that I supported only 2 of them remain in my collection today. The other 14 games were traded or sold soon after they arrived. So that translates to roughly 12% of the games I supported being keepers. That is awful. Perhaps I am just a very hard-to-please person…or perhaps this speaks to the amount of crap (very pretty crap) that is flooding Kickstarter.

Looking back at my experience with Kickstarter games I have found a few issues that are keeping me from backing future projects:

1. Price. Purchasing a game through Kickstarter will cost you more than if you wait and get the game from an online store after it has been distributed. This makes sense. Kickstarter is designed to help people fund projects that would not exist without it. I have zero problem with that and love to support lesser known designers. But Kickstarter has also become home to established publishers who use it to avoid paying retailers, allowing them to keep more of the profits. That is smart business and I don’t think it is wrong. But it can be frustrating that the game you back will be available at a cheaper price from online retailers.
2. Delivery time. Here is the equation that works for most Kickstarter delivery times: X + 6 months + Y = Delivery Time. In this equation the X variable is the advertised delivery time and Y is the inevitable email that will come 5 months after the campaign when the designers realize that manufacturing is hard.
3. Many of the games available have amazing components, and that is what initially hooks people. However, as beautiful as the games look, many of my biggest disappointments were poorly designed (looking at you Myth). They have amazing pieces but either the rules were too convoluted to understand (Myth’s problem) or they lacked play testing.
4. The exclusive stretch goals and add-on gimmick. I hate this gimmick. You find a game that looks interesting and might want to purchase it once it is available in stores. However, if you wait you can’t get these X number of shiny resin mini sculptures that are only available to backers. Now people start thinking these “extras” are “necessary”. I just hate the stretch goals.
5. I tend to like to read reviews of board games before I buy them (as I would for many other products). However, many of the “reviews” are paid previews produced by popular YouTube reviewers. Now most of these reviewers state up front that they were paid to give an overview of the game. Great, no problem with them making some extra money. However, it is hard to support a game that only offers a couple of “paid previews”. More recently some Kickstarters are not even giving prototypes out for paid previews. In my mind this might show a lack of confidence in their game design.
6. The last thing to consider is that when the wait is over and you finally get the game that you backed….you realize that you have purchased a monstrous game. I have always enjoyed the game Suburbia and I decided to back the Collector’s Edition. After all the enthusiasm, stretch goals and mini-expansions the game arrived and it was huge. There was no way I would be bringing that game to my local game group. I was thinking I would almost need a shelf devoted only to that game and man it was heavy. Needless to say I ended up trading away that game. The final production copy was just too unwieldy and all the various expansions too hard to sort. Perhaps simple is better.

This article came to mind because I have recently been pondering whether to support Marvel United by CMON. It is a campaign that checks almost every box above. Marvel United is pricey, going to ship in two different parts over the course of a year, has amazing minis & questionable gameplay, dozens of stretch goals/add-ons, and no reviews or previews from known reviewers. So I think that this is where I finally learn my lesson. I believe that this will be the last Kickstarter game that I support ….wait….what is that?…oh, shiny …. wow precious — my PRECIOUS!!! 😊