The Accidental Kickstarter, №1

My first Kickstarter, WanderSquares: The Underwood Tunnels, was a relative success. I raised $32,262 from 451 amazing backers, surpassing the campaign goal of $24,000 by 134%. I managed to design, produce, print and assemble 500 tabletop games in 5 or 6 months after the campaign closed. I’ve since shipped most of the rewards out to my backers, (I have a few international rewards left to send). Families and kids are playing the game and the reviews coming in have been pretty positive. But I did almost everything wrong.

I didn’t build a thriving community before I launched the campaign. In fact I didn’t even know where to build a community yet. I had never been to a major, or minor, gaming conference and didn’t arrange for well-known reviewers to playtest and post about my game. I didn’t safely pad my schedule for production delays, or have an international shipping strategy in place. I launched on an arbitrary date, instead of making sure I was completely ready. And the arbitrary date that I chose was Tuesday, October 20th, 2020, 11 days before Halloween, 14 days before one of the most divisive elections in American history, during a year of pandemic and political instability. Perfect timing! Despite my missteps, and thanks to the passion of a few hundred fans and the kindness of a great many strangers, we managed to succeed.

I wanted to share what I learned along the way: what went wrong, what went right and what I’ll do differently on my next Kickstarter campaign. I discovered fantastic resources, podcasts, blogs and communities that I’ll share with you. There are so many people and game publishers who know how to run an excellent kickstarter campaigns and I’ll share my growing lists of these. I can point you to the seasoned pros and successful publishers who have a deep understanding of how Kickstarter campaigns and their thriving communities work.

I’ll be looking at the Kickstarter experience purely through the lens of games and game design. I’ve designed lots of things throughout my career — brands, logos, packages, posters, apps and websites — but game design came first, before I even knew what design was. Game design is my recently rediscovered passion, and what I’m most excited to explore. In this series I’m going to be writing posts about:

• Kickstarter, game design and board game communities
• Game design and concept development
• Graphic design and game production
• What I’m learning about Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites
• Missteps, mistakes and what I’d do differently
• Useful resources for first time, accidental Kickstarters

I hope this will be helpful for people who are starting from scratch; about to stumble into their first Kickstarter without having everything lined up and in place. I’m like you, still figuring things out and learning everyday. And I’m still working on how I’ll make the next Kickstarter campaign better. This will be a work-in-progress and I hope you enjoy the adventure!