TableTop Day Recap

On Saturday it was International TableTop Day (based on Geek and Sundry's show TableTop, hosted by Wil Wheaton), so I rolled on down to Santa Cruz to hang out with friends at Inklings Books and Things.  They held raffles for awesome loot, provided table space for various games, and helped a bunch of boardgamers hang out with friends and new acquaintances alike.

All the loot to be raffled...

I got lucky and won one of the first raffles, getting loot for Kaijudo, Spot It, Worra, The Resistance, and DnD!  An awesome way to get rolling.  I sat in on games of Zombicide (for three or four games) and Agricola and watched games of Evo and Roborally.  And all the while, Zombicide's Kickstarter was rolling through its second to last day and introducing awesome survivors based on Sean Connery, John Cleese, Tom Selleck, and Jack Nicholson as the 9 or 10 of us who were in on the Kickstarter kept one another updated.  Tons of fun.

In Zombicide, we play tested a scenario set up by my buddy Frost, in which we had to rescue trapped survivors from cars and escape the onrushing zombie horde.  We played the first couple rounds mostly with experienced Zombiciders.  Our first game out, we drew an Abomination on the second turn, which I tried to slow down (I was playing Nick, which gave me a little extra survivability).  Once the Abom was on the board, our downfall was inevitable.  We made it a little bit further in the second play through, getting what we needed to free the trapped survivors, but never quite reaching them.  We decided to take a break for a bit and come back to it later.

That meant it was time for Agricola!  I really enjoy Agricola when not playing with someone I know who seems to be able to optimize his actions without any effort and always wins.  Good guy, but man that's annoying!  Anyways, I got a great hand.  Lots of synergy between my occupations and minor improvements and I managed to steal first player right away and get rolling quickly.  We were introducing Frost to the game and he ended up with the Taster occupation which let him steal first player fairly effectively over and over!  It was a competitive game and I don't think anyone ever felt completely out of it, which made it even more fun than usual.

We had lunch, and spread out to other games.  I was feeling a bit of a headache coming on, so I spied on some games of Evo and watched my group reconvene to play RoboRally.  Both games looked pretty entertaining, though I think Evo is more my speed.  And it's got dinosaurs!  How can anyone say no to dinosaurs?

We finished the night out trying the Zombicide scenario again.  With some slight modifications and some luck, we got the first car open before an Abomination showed up and were able to hold on long enough to get the second car open.  We were mobbed at that point, but managed to kill enough zombies to clear a path and escape!  It was in doubt until the very last turn, which made the win extremely satisfying.  We also had three Zombicide newbies in the game and has been my experience, everyone who plays Zombicide gets hooked and declares they're going to buy the game.  That's a great sign.

All in all, International TableTop Day was great fun and I can't wait until next year when it all goes down again!

A few musings on Kickstarter

It's been a bit quiet around here, which is at least partially because of the fact that the day of Scions On A Plane has been literally the only day of gaming I've gotten to participate in the new year.  There are plans for International TableTop Day, though, so hopefully that'll get things going again.

In the meantime, I'm just going to jot down some of my musings on Kickstarter campaigns, based on what I've seen working and the campaigns I've chosen not to back.  I'll go over a few categories of what I look at in a Kickstarter and talk about what usually entices me and what doesn't.  Right up front I'll say that I often first inspect a campaign based on the product offered, but the product offered has yet to overcome my apathy if I'm seeing things that I dislike about the project.  I'll list the projects I've backed, but I'm going to leave out specific names of ones I've chosen not to back, since I don't want to directly harm their chances of getting other backers.

Price Point

One of the most important things I've seen about how I interact with campaigns on Kickstarter is that I need to feel like I am getting value for the money I'm pledging.  If the initial reward tier is too high, then I virtually never pledge, especially if I'm considering a project that I've got no prior experience with.  Low as the price point sounds, it seems like $10 is about where I need to feel like I'm getting some reward even if it isn't the full version of the product.  I backed Dresden Codak, where I get a PDF for $10; Artisan Dice, where $7 nets a die; Fate Core, giving a PDF at $10; and Werewolf 20th Anniversary, with a wallpaper at $10.  The outlier is Zombicide Season 2, where the first reward was at $50; in that instance I already owned Zombicide Season 1 and had friends who participated in the first Zombicide Kickstarter.  I pledged more than the minimum on them all, but I feel that the reasonable minimum was a contributing factor in my choice to pledge.

In the projects I've chosen to skip over, the lowest pledge at which I gained a reward was $14 dollars.  More typically, I've found rewards starting at $25, $40, or $50.  In a few rare cases I've looked at projects at where the initial reward was over $150!  Obviously some design projects need that high of an initial level, but I think it puts them at a distinct disadvantage from the start.  I've seen some of the projects where high pledge levels are important for getting actual products made get around the need a for a high "first" pledge by offering things like t-shirts and schematics for lesser pledge levels (and this is somewhat the Werewolf Kickstarter did).

Funding Goal

In a lot of ways, the funding goal is even more important than the price point to me.  In order from lowest to highest, the campaigns I've backed were Fate Core ($3000 goal), Artisan Dice ($9000), Zombicide Season 2 ($25000), Dresden Codak ($30000), and Werewolf 20th Anniversary ($85000).  These campaigns also all managed to hit their funding goals at a rapid pace.  Many of the Kickstarters I've chosen not to back have had goals upwards of $150000.  While there are certainly projects that do require that sort of funding, I've found that many Kickstarters which might not need such high goals (a single RPG game book, a figure carrying case, production of cooking sauces) aim for these lofty goals.

My sense in this case is that when the Kickstarter is designed to reach for "just enough" to fund a project they set these lower funding goals and when they're aiming for enough to produce the Kickstarter and then gain mass release outside the campaign, too.  While that's probably the better business decision on paper, I think it often does not actually pay off as those campaigns go unfunded where campaigns with lower goals have far more success and pull in the extra funding that would enable them to seek broader release.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the campaigns with higher funding goals are also those with higher initial pledge levels.

Stretch Goals

Stretch goals are vitally important.  They're not a requirement on Kickstarter, but they are a fairly common aspect of virtually every campaign on the site.  Most Kickstarter campaigns are long affairs, lasting over 30 days.  Stretch goals keep people considering a higher pledge level and serve as extra incentive to woo individuals who are undecided into pledging.  In looking back at the campaigns I've backed, Dresden Codak has 26 stretch goals, mostly announced fairly early on, but modified as the campaign continued.  Artisan Dice, still fairly early in the campaign with 35 days to go as I write this, has six stretch goals with more hinted to be revealed further down the line.  Zombicide Season 2 has 45 stretch goals currently at just 5 days to go, with a few optional bits that aren't quite stretch goals, but have been revealed similarly.  Fate Core had 35 stretch goals.  And Werewolf 20th Anniversary had 12 stretch goals, though they were bigger ticket items such as whole new books.

While most of the campaigns I haven't backed have had stretch goals, those goals were often, in my mind, unobtainable.  They were set out past the funding goal (which is the norm), but when the goal is so far out that it may be unobtainable, stretch goals fail to add extra incentive.  Similarly, I find that I'm most motivated when there are a few stretch goals laid out at the start and more are added as the campaign goes on.  That pattern taps into my curiosity and encourages me to share the Kickstarter and raise my pledge more than a list of stretch goals which is completely set down before the campaign even begins.  Obviously, I'm sure the best campaigns have their goals planned internally before the Kickstarter begins, but there's no need for full disclosure right away.

In looking back, a lot of the campaigns I've backed have shared quite a few attributes and given their success, it seems like those attributes are attractive to quite a few people.  The key outlier in my purchasing habits here seems to be the Werewolf 20th Anniversary book.  It had a higher funding goal, fewer stretch goals revealed less frequently, and didn't provide the actual produced item until a much higher pledge level.  I think that the key factor that got me to overlook those things that might normally turn me off was the fact that I was highly familiar with White Wolf/Onyx Path and the product that I'd be purchasing.  The same goes for Zombicide in some ways, as I knew that $50 was less than I'd pay for the full game once released and I already owned Season 1.

As a side note, I've left out one Kickstarter which I backed with the intent of helping a 9 year old girl go to camp to learn to make computer games.  I excluded it because I consider it a charitable donation more than a purchase and am not concerned with getting a final product back.  Normally, I'd do that sort of thing on Indiegogo, but it happened where it happened.

Another Day, Another Kickstarter

Not long after I raved about the Fate Core Kickstarter, I was enticed to jump in on another Kickstarter that's currently ongoing: Zombicide Season 2.

I own the first season of Zombicide, but missed the Kickstarter for it and thus the exclusives (if anyone reads this and wants to spring for them for me, I won't argue! Just saying...).  This time around I had been waiting and ready, having seen the warning on Guillotine Games' facebook page that the Kickstarter was coming.  Apparently, I wasn't the only one waiting, because Zombicide Season 2 shot out of the gate, blowing past stretch goals faster than they could be revealed.  As I write this, the campaign sits at just under $860k in around about a week.  Amazing.

I'm pretty excited for Season 2 and the extras are awesome.  In case you don't know, Zombicide is a cooperative zombie survival boardgame.  Players work together to meet objectives and escape the zombie horde.  In my experience, it is very important for players to work together; when one person goes off aline it often ends in their untimely demise ir the group being left without resources they desperately need.  Worse, as players grow stronger, the amount of zombies spawning increases; if one person quickly outpaces the others, the whole group will be quickly overwhelmed.  Dice are rolled on either melee or ranged attacks and when successful, zombies die.  Players can also search for more useful gear if they choose.  Personally, this is my favorite type of game.  While I love lots of directly competative games (Bang, Catan, Fluxx, Risk, Agricola and so on), I feel like I do best when working with a team.  I instictively try to support other players and enjoy collaborative problem solving.  At the moment, this basically makes Zombicide my favorite game.

Season 2 of Zombicide is (so far!) introducing two new settings, two new types of zombies, a new type of character, and a new form of support for players.  The settings are a prison (possibly a reference to The Walking Dead, which I love) and a mall (Dawn of the Dead, of course!).  The new barricade and security door mechanics for these settings look cool as heck.  The new types of zombies are toxic zombies, who do blood splatter damage when melee attacked, and berserker zombies, who have to be melee attacked to be killed.  No doubt having both types present in a single game will be devastating   The new type of character is the zombivor, an undead hero trying to help the survivors; I'm not so sure on the concept, but I have no doubt it could be tweaked to something I like or simply omitted and the game played under season 1 rules.  The new type if support is dogs!  Survivors can now have pet dogs to back them up and help them search or do damage. As a side bonus, zombie dogs are also being released!

So far the Kickstarter exclusive survivors, who are typically homages, are shaping up  to be pretty awesome.  The first is Brad, who looks a bit like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry.  Then there's Dakota, who bears a striking resemblance to Pamela Anderson in a prison jumpsuit.  Aunt Rose looks a bit like Betty White and Kirk has a certain resemblance to Steven Segal if you squint.  Emma Stone in her Zombieland incarnation is there, too.  But the current title holder for most awesome is Fred, who is quite clearly Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead!  Very, very cool as a follow up to last year's exclusives who were lookalikes for Samuel L Jackson, Uma Therman, Angelina Jolie, Chuck Norris, Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, Bruce Willis, Danny Trejo and Bruce Campbell as Ash from Evil Dead.  I can't wait to see who is next.  Also I desperately wish I had the not-Ash survivor Troy, because seriously, he's awesome.

All in all, I'm thoroughly caught up in the Zombicide Season 2 Kickstarter, and hopefully I've given you a bit of a picture of why you might want to be, too.