Crowdfunding Is Driving a Board Game Renaissance | Hacker News Reader

Crowdfunding Is Driving a Board Game Renaissance

fivethirtyeight.com

82 pointsEtienneK39 comments

The boardgames renaissance that I've seen grow ever the past 15 years has gone hand in hand with the increased fickleness of video games. I can't establish causation, but I'd wager that there's an appeal to a physical offline social game in contrast to the mandatory online, anonymity-fueled abrasive, potentially-unplayable-in-5-years digital games.

I like the idea that the boardgames I buy, barring physical abuse, will be playable by future generations in 20 years time. You can't "end-of-life" a physical product.

I definitely agree with this. I miss being able to sit down with my friends for some videogames and being able to kill bots. It recreated the experience of multiplayer games without making you a lonely basement creature. I'm thinking in particular about the TimeSplitters franchise.

I'd tie it more to the popularity of video games among adults(as I see adults, and younger people introduced to them by adults as the main driving force behind this board game resurgence), and the idea that there are always people looking to do things which are novel to them, and that things do not stay novel forever so there are people which shift to new or out of favor things which will be novel to them.

NBC I feel nailed it down with their tagline "If you haven't seen it, it's new to you"

The Board Game Renaissance had started before Kickstarter, but KS has been a multiplier, and has allowed board games to outlast the usual hobby boom-bust cycle. I guess it's still an ongoing question if board games will eventually 'crash' the way wargames, RPGs, and collectible card games did in the past or whether the market will cool gradually and continue to support a couple big players plus a collection of indies, similar to the current PC game market.

Yea, the analysis that Kickstarter is driving it is pretty poor, but if you think about why board games are booming, it's a dozens of small things multiplying.

GenCon has been growing attendance every year recently, BoardGameGeek has been around for many years, the Dice Tower has been going for years, TableTop is finishing season 3... There are lots of independent publishers, and crowdfunding models have worked their way into small publishers' business models...compare GMT Games' P500 model, for example.

Personally there's some disillusion with the state of D&D, and it's also true that board gaming is simply better now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. There are better games, different types of games, and people have more points of entry.

I think there's also a spot for board games as a social outlet that requires less commitment than D&D and is more accessible than videogaming; several years ago I used to get together with friends and bring videogame consoles, more recently it's board games (and they're super easy to play with new acquaintances too). I hate to say it but games like Cards against Humanity are, in a way, the Minecraft of board games; it starts with "party" games and before you know it you're playing BSG :)

The last time I went to a major game convention, board gaming was almost nonexistent. There were entire convention halls stuffed with people shuffling Magic: The Gathering cards, but if you wanted to play an old Avalon Hill war game you were SOL.

I'm not familiar with too many current board games, but the modern RPG boom is interesting because each popular game provides a highly distinct experience. It's not the D&D clones and poor designs of the 80s, or the shovelware of the d20 era.

The industry is microscopic compared to videogames, but it is growing, and I think the sheer quality of modern games will help to sustain that growth.

What do you mean by shovelware?

Shovelware refers to things that are (and implicitly shouldn't be) sold by quantity rather than quality. A shovel full of games for only $10!

Can't really agree with the thesis or the interpretation of the data here. First, as the top 10 chart in the article shows, the gaming money in Kickstarter is mainly in miniatures not in board or card games. The only exception on that list is a gimmick card game illustrated by a popular webcomic author that for whatever reason went viral. Second, a large proportion of the games that get funded are traditional publishers using Kickstarter as an alternate preorder and marketing system, usually with absolutely tiny goals. These are games that would have been published anyway. A third decent sized chunk are reprints for old games, which while nice to have are hardly a sign of a renaissance. What's left tends to not have much impact, or even be any good.

The number of major games that only or even mainly exist thanks to Kickstarter must be tiny. Yes, there's a lot of noise around crowdfunding in the board game space. But I don't think it's actually "driving a renaissance" in any meaningful way.

(The footnote talks of P500. It's much easier to argue that it has had a real impact over the 20(?) years it's existed. But it's really not crowdfunding in the way people think of it).

The only exception on that list is a gimmick card game illustrated by a popular webcomic author that for whatever reason went viral.

It went viral because said webcomic's creator is a professional SEO marketer.

The Oatmeal is basically the Buzzfeed of webcomics.

Personal opinion of course, but even if you don't like The Oatmeal, a comparison to Buzzfeed isn't really appropriate, they're very different animals. One's a comic written, drawn and published by a guy, the other is a couple of lists interspersed with gifs, then lazily rehashed weeks later.

Read some of the stuff he and others have written in the past about his process. Even the subject matter is selected based on virality more than anything. You really think it's coincidence that all his comics seem to be about whatever is an instant meme on reddit this week?

Nobody ever went broke on the internet by running cats and bacon into the ground.

Now I don't read the oatmeal so am not really qualified to comment on its content, but what you just described (content based on timely matters) seems like the very definition of the editorial cartoons I grew up reading. I imagine there are a large variety of non-contemporaneous comics one could also read on the web if it's not to one's liking.

And even the bacon phenomenon was marketing-driven: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-10-06/bacon-why-am...

Can you link to some of that stuff?

Actually, buzzfeed has some good long form content

I've noticed that, and been surprised every time. It's like finding a diamond at the bottom of a dive bar urinal.

It's not all that surprising once you know about their efforts:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/come-fly-with-us#.pqdmg3WRE

http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/page/1109-buzzfeed-news-c...

I'm going to have to disagree with your points:

> First, as the top 10 chart in the article shows, the gaming money in Kickstarter is mainly in miniatures not in board or card games.

That non-mini board games don't dominate gaming money on kickstarter is irrelevant to whether kickstarter is pushing the current market in board games. About board game dominance on kickstarter, though: it seems to me that kickstarter funds more card and board games than any other class of things.

> Second, a large proportion of the games that get funded are traditional publishers using Kickstarter as an alternate preorder and marketing system, usually with absolutely tiny goals.

Those traditional publishers seem to be publishing 2-3x as many games as they were publishing pre-kickstarter, and/or have moved to an entirely kickstarted model, basically becoming kickstarter companies (Queen, Eagle/Gryphon, etc.) It's not the preorders that are so important, but the free, instant crowdfunded credit.

> A third decent sized chunk are reprints for old games, which while nice to have are hardly a sign of a renaissance.

When many of the classics of gaming were only available from 20-year-old German 2000 game print runs for so long, this can seem like the definition of renaissance. Virtually all of the bgg.com top 100 are in print. 5 years ago, a lot of those games (the ones that existed) would have cost a small fortune. With every passing day my collection becomes less valuable, but more people fall in love with the board games I like.

> What's left tends to not have much impact, or even be any good.

Agreed, but within class that are buried amazing designers like Martin Wallace and Phil Eklund, who have used kickstarter to become largely independent of the big publishers.

> Agreed, but within class that are buried amazing designers like Martin Wallace and Phil Eklund, who have used kickstarter to become largely independent of the big publishers.

Martin Wallace has been self-publishing games for two decades through Warfrog/Treefrog, and that accounts for all of his most important designs. Things he did for other publishers tended to be either inferior and quickly forgotten, or straight reprints. He was also pre-selling straight to consumers (and getting pre-paid on) a substantial chunk of the games Treefrog published long before Kickstarter existed.

Phil Eklund has been self publishing his games for at least two decades through Sierra Madre Games. I can't think of a game he designed for another publisher. And I don't think he's run a kickstarter other than the High Frontier reprint, either. It's really hard to argue that the main problem for Eklund has been lack of independence, he's pretty much the defining example of auteurism in board games.

Sorry, don't think these examples work at all for making the case for the Kickstarter effect :-)

Also, even though I also think it is irrelevant distinction between miniatures and board games - I'd like to add that Zombicide is not a typical miniatures game. Also, the recent successful Ghostbusters game, which plays very similarly, is not a typical miniatures game. If you look how games like Warhammer are played vs. games like Zombicide, there is a clear distinction in complexity and duration of the game.

In any case, there are more than a few publishers outside of CMON doing well using KS as a vehicle for promotion and pre-orders. Eagle & Gryphon Games and Tasty Minstrel Games are my favorites to watch. A friend of mine actually had a game published by E&G through a Kickstarter, it would likely have never been finished without Kickstarter.

The renaissance is in the fact that we can have great games made by people who like to play great games - and not just rehashed stuff from Milton and Bradley. These are all definitely not games that would have been picked up by large publishers and sold at your local Target. With that said, many of them have been picked up by games stores, B&N, and others. Which I think is fantastic.

The distinction isn't irrelevant. Zombicide is a game whereas reaper bones is not a game at all there is no collection of a system of rules to apply using them. It is just miniatures that can be used in other games.

I would consider parts that can be used in board games part of the board games ecosystem and market though. Even people making those dice sets, dice rollers, and such are supporting the board game market. So the distinction is irrelevant.

In any case, even if you left those out, I see many pure board game kickstarters being successful. I would love to see a comparison of the board game kickstarters compared to all of the video game kickstarters.

"The number of major games that only or even mainly exist thanks to Kickstarter must be tiny."

Yes, the article is silly to spend much time talking about games which made millions. But the overall effect of crowdfunding making more small games available looks pretty real to me. I've backed a dozen or so table-top games and RPGs now. None of them made anywhere near a million dollars. Most of them raised 1x to 10x the amount they were asking for. I'd guess maybe half of them had a chance of being published without crowdfunding.

A website that recently rekindled my love of boardgames is http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/

I'm not affiliated in any way - I just really enjoyed it as an entity that is created out of a genuine passion for the medium mixed with a great "nuts & bolts" discussion of the mechanics of the games they review.

Enjoy!

Alternative reason: The iPhone and other smartphones. It brought games and playing back to the general, more mature audience, which got reminded of how much fun playing can be and then transformed their newly acquired need to play from the digital plane to the kitchen table.

Wanna try Hearthstone offline, play Dominion or Star Realms. Wanna farm some land, take a look at Settlers of Catan. Wanna Crush some Candy, try Set? Okay, the last one is probably a bad example.

It also helps that a lot of popular media licenses (TV/movies) get dressed in board game clothing (see http://cryptozoic.com/games ).

(avid gamer here) There is most certainly a "tabletop effect" but by and large it's not all that huge. Crowdfunding helps but that's also not the reason for the boom imo. In fact some of the smaller campaigns have struggled a fair bit (Incursion feels like they operated at a loss) and the large ones could be published by other means (Zombicide etc.)

First of all games are really good these days and second of all games really benefit from online media. There's youtube videos for pretty much all games, online reviews and boardgamegeek as a central hub. It's really easy to get a good feel for the quality of a game these days.

Why is it that most of those kickstarter games shown in the table are for miniatures? My understanding is that they are basically add ons for existing rpg ish games (I'm looking at Bones in particular) and not games on their own.

I can't really speak to the miniatures/RPG type games, but the folks in my eurogaming circle have pretty much sworn off buying kickstarter games. KS's video pitch tends to optimize for games with high visual appeal, or that are otherwise thematically awesome (funny, clever, dark, etc), but are lacking (or at least insufficiently tested) in actual gameplay fundamentals.

The one I got bitten by was Euphoria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v29GYH1sb2g

As above, gorgeous artwork, great theme— but it practically plays itself. The gameplay is a notch or two above parcheesi, but with fifteen minutes of rules explaining on the front end.

Three things, I think:

It's much easier to build hype with pretty renderings of miniatures rather than just with pictures of cards and dice.

I think folks are more willing to lay out $50 or $100 for a game with miniatures because it seems like you're getting more stuff. Even if the game sucks you get all these cool toys you can play with.

These games inevitably have higher revenue per user which gives them a much better chance of making the leaderboard. The cheapest reward level for Zombiecide: Season 3 was $90 and they raised about $237 per customer. Compare this to Tiny Epic Galaxies which had a similar number of backers and only raised only $33 per customer.

I think there are two factors, 1) cheaper production costs and 2) Using crowdfunding to not be forced to "bet the farm" on potential sales.

I've published two games and I wouldn't consider a third without crowdfunding.

For anyone interested in getting started with the hobby, I usually send this article to my friends and colleagues who express interest: http://www.tested.com/art/454213-modern-board-game-bestiary/

It's a bit old, but it gives a good introduction on the new type of games and also examples of good games in the various categories.

Board games really had a renaissance in my life once I discovered "German-style board games". Their rules always seem to be similar to what I find the most fun.

I always liked events like fig (festival of independent games) where you can sit down and play an indie game in various stages of development, usually taught by the creator. A increasing number over the past few years have been on Kickstarter.

http://bostonfig.com/tabletop-games-showcase/

I think the current boardgame boom is a reflection that gamers in general have increased in number. Mix in the fact that many of them were born out of the 90's console videogame era, have families and need a multiplayer experience that can be shared in the same room and it makes complete sense. I think this would be the case even if crowdfunding didn't exist.

Crowdfunding is a very funny way of spelling "Will Wheaton". I know the reason I'm funding these games is because he reminded me how much fun they can be.

That's not how you spell his name.

Parent is referring to the video series 'Tabletop' on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7atuZxmT954wz47aofSl...

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