Top 5 2023 Gamefound Campaigns

5. Vampire: The Masquerade – Milan Uprising

I want to be more excited about this one and I am excited about a lot of it. The part that I’m less excited about is that it uses the Teburu system. Now that technology I think is interesting and I likely will get it, eventually. But it’s not out yet and my rule of thumb is don’t buy the first generation of a tech project. This is the second campaign for a game for it, and I’m excited to see them adding more games. But while the game, a cooperative 1-4 player game set in the World of Darkness setting, the technology, I want to see an iteration or two of it first.

4. DANTE: The Invasion of Hell

What puts this one on my radar is that it’s from the same company as Chronicles of Drunagor. A game that I want to play more of, but I think it’s a group campaign game. I want to know if DANTE: The Invasion of Hell works better solo? And it does have a solo mode, plus, I like their other game, so this is going to be really interesting. And my guess is that this is going to be another big game. Campaign games are a weakness of mine, so DANTE also hit on that, if it looks like a good game to play on Malts and Meeples it is going to make it even more tempting to play.

3. Thorgal: The Board Game

Based off of a video game that I don’t really know, this is a cooperative storybook adventure game, much like my #4. This one looks much smaller which I appreciate. And I’m curious to know more about it. It’s from Portal games. I don’t always gravitate towards everything Portal does, but I’m also interested to see what they are going to try next. And Thorgal, this one is interesting me. Again it’s that cooperative adventure game that can be played solo, and we know I like games like that.

2. Witchbound

I really didn’t know anything about Witchbound going in, and now it is towards the top of my list overall. I’m going to do a list like that at the end of this post for Top 5-7 games. But it’s a solo story driven game about becoming the first witch in over 100 years. That is exactly my sort of game. I like the theme of the game, I love the artwork that I’m seeing, and overall, I think I’d really enjoy it.

Plus it seems like a shorter play time which if it’s a bunch of little bites of game play over several sessions, that’s great and what I’m looking for often versus the two hours of some of the bigger campaign games that can be played solo.

1. Elder Scrolls

This one is pretty easy to pick because it’s based off of a system that I like, Too Many Bones, with a theme that I find interesting, and a company I really like. This is going to be a premium game with an IP so I expect a big price tag for it, but I’m going to likely back it, just to see if it’s for me. Chip Theory really doesn’t disappoint and they always have a strong fan base, so I’m excited for this game.

And I’m excited to see how they can bring as big a world as Elder Scrolls into a board game. It seems like it’ll be a campaign game, but one where you can mix and match different campaign elements together or go through different shorter stories, so not a massive campaign.

I find it interesting that with the five games from Gamefound all of them are cooperative games that have caught my eye. Really, it shouldn’t be a surprise, I love cooperative story driven games that can be played solo. All of these fall into that category, some of them are very big, and others less so, but at least I’m consistent.

Top 3 2023 Backerkit Campaigns

3. Leder Games Project

So like I said, it’s a bit thin on Backerkit. That means that we get from them. And one of them is this Leder Games project. It’s on the list because when Leder Games puts out a game, I am interested in it. Even if it isn’t going to be for me. I’m not that interested in trying Vast, but the game itself sounds interesting. And that means that I’m going to check out what this is when they announce it officially.

I think I’ve heard rumors, and I might be off on this, but an easier to get to the table Oath style game was in the works. But honestly, I might be making that up, there’s a lot of news and I’m just doing it off of memory. If it is, it’s maybe one that I’d pass on, but it could also catch my fancy if it’s easier to table.

2. Wild Gardens

One of the few out there that has any information on it. I’d probably have the Leder Games project above this one if I knew more about it. But Wild Gardens looks like a pretty game of resource collection and completing goals. I’m not sure what else is going on in it. But looking at the cover, it’s a pretty game, and the artwork throughout the game looks great as well. I hope that the game play matches the artwork and is a nice relaxing game to play.

1. Gloomhaven Minis and RPG

Easily my Top 1 over there. You know that I love Gloomhaven and I will say right now, I am not backing the minis. You can hold me to that, but I do not need the minis nor would I really  have use for a lot of them. It’d just make Gloomhaven and Frosthaven harder to play. But I want to know more about the RPG.

I haven’t looked into it too much yet. I know that it is built around card play, or can be, like you have in Gloomhaven. And I’m hoping that they give you tactical opportunities for combat and then a lot of theater of the mind and opportunities to role play as well. If it’s just mainly combat focused with a bit of role playing thrown on top, I’m less interested. But I’ll definitely be looking into this one more.

Top 5 2023 Kickstarter Campaigns

5. Crown of Ash

This is one that I keep on seeing advertisements for on Facebook and is one that definitely interests me. Crown of Ash is an area control and worker placement game. But it isn’t a game that is stuffed full of big minis or things like that, it looks like a more reasonably sized game. I’m not sure it’s one for me, but I want to learn more about it. The cover is striking and overall, if it’s a good area control game and the worker placement makes sense, it might be one that I want to play. Area control and in your face isn’t my normal style, but I am curious about it.

4. Rove

So there was a fan expansion that I want to get for Gloomhaven, The Crimson Scales. It’s something that was created, with the blessing of Isaac Childres to work with his system. And it sounds really cool. Rove is from that designer who is now branching out and making his own game. It’s a big box 1-4 player cooperative fantasy RPG in a box. I’m interested in that. No shock to anyone there.

And I want to know what someone who has done work related to Gloomhaven can come up with. Because I fully expect this isn’t going to be a dice chucking giant campaign like Sword & Sorcery, so how are the lessons learned from The Crimson Scales going to build into this new game?

3. Stonesaga

It helps to put this on the list having played it. And I believe the beta playtesting is going on right now, if people want to check it out. But this is a cooperative game where you are playing as cave dwellers who are advancing their society, building up, and well, dealing with giant monsters that are a threat to the board.

This is a legacy game, which is fun, and one that has story and campaign on it, but it reminds me more of the level of story of a My City or Charterstone. The story matters, and they integrate missions better and story challenges better, but it only matters so much. Plus the artwork on this one is just great and when OOMM Games puts something out I’m interested.

2. Marvel United Multiverse

Should this be number one? I don’t know. I don’t need more of the game. But Marvel United is such an easy game to get to the table that I definitely want more of the game. I love the IP with Marvel, it works well for the type of game it is. And it’s a good cooperative game that I can pull out and play with almost anyone. It isn’t too light for gamers because the game is fast. And it isn’t too heavy for non-gamers.

Plus it doesn’t matter if Groot is your favorite character, Wolverine, Iron Man, or whomever, you can sit down and play as your favorite Marvel character. And I think that’s great about it, this is just going to be even more. Like I said, I don ‘t need more, but it doesn’t make the game harder to table, which is great.

1. Rogue Angels

Again, this one hopefully will be coming back to Kickstarter or some crowdfunding platform in 2023. I put it here, I just got to play another scenario and I still love the game. The characters are so much fun, and while similar, different in what they can handle. We lost part of the scenario I played on Sunday but were able to be the overall mission. You fail forward into the story versus redoing a scenario over and over and over again.

And the game play, every time that I sit down and play it, I can pick it back up again, which is great. All of that while having a lot of story, being cooperative, you know I’m in. I think it’s one that would work well for Malts and Meeples as well. It’s a big campaign, but it isn’t a sprawling table hog like some big campaigns.

Top 5 Upcoming Crowdfunding Campaigns

Let’s face it, these are mainly going to be cooperative adventure driven games. But out of the 13 that I have, sorry Backerkit we couldn’t get to 5. Which ones are the ones that I am most interested in.

1. Rogue Angels
2. Elder Scrolls
3. Marvel United Multiverse
4. Stonesaga
5. Witchbound

What Crowdfunding Campaigns Are You Most Interested In?

Let me know which ones interest you the most? Are there any crossover, do you want to get all the minis for Gloomhaven, it would be awesome, or is that just too much? Are there any that I missed. I was trying to find everything that I could, but I won’t lie, it’s tricky.

And even some of them, like Crown of Ash is one that was supposed, I believe, to come out in 2022. Rogue Angels did, but then needed to relaunch. So it’ll be interesting to see what comes up and where everything lands. Checkout other creators, like BoardGameCo I think does a quarterly list of things, though might be doing a yearly list of Top 10 he’s most excited for across everything. So let me know what I missed that you think I might like.

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Why Is This Happening?

Firstly, because there is money in board games. Maybe not as much as some people speculate and hope. But for crowdfunding platforms, there is money in board games. Board games have made up almost $2 billion for Kickstarter. So if Kickstarter takes 10%, I believe, that’s $200 million just on board games. And $2 billion is out of $7 billion total for Kickstarter.

So you can see why Gamefound, IndieGoGo, and Backerkit would want to get in on things. Add in Kickstarters stagnancy it created opportunity. Kickstarter, while having a smooth interface, hasn’t updated their navigation or anything in several years. And with the advent of pledge managers, ways to collect shipping, do add-ons and allow people to find it later, Kickstarter just didn’t keep up.

Where Did Backerkit and Gamefound Come From?

Both Backerkit and Gamefound started out as pledge managers. With Backerkit, I’m not sure it was really their intention to ever start being a crowdfunding platform. For Gamefound, I do believe it was. But basically, they are already doing a lot of the heavy lifting needed.

They could process cards, they had ability to do add-ons, get people’s addresses. Work with the board game companies and the logistics and distribution companies that handle sending out crowdfunding games. So for them, it was a fairly simple shift to add in, now, some features that track money, that track stretch goals, and that add conversations, a piece they might have already had in progress.

Which is the Best Crowdfunding Site?

Right now, I do not think that there is clearly a best one. And Backerkit is just getting into the crowdfunding side of things. So we haven’t seen a pledge, but we can talk about what they do have in the limited pictures and pieces in place.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter does well at letting you see everything, fairly easily. Yes, for me to get exactly where I want to be – games sorted by newest – it takes a few clicks from the home page. I wish that their system allowed you to pick how you default looked at things, none of this “magic” I want newest. I dislike “magic” whenever it’s an option, and I’m talking about Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram doing that as well.

But I can easily bookmark the page that I want and I know that I’m just going to see active projects in order that they are coming out. It’s great for on Tuesday, I can see what the newest things are and if any big things have dropped.

Gamefound

On the page, though, Gamefound destroys Kickstarter. Kickstarter offers no navigation. And Gamefound lets you put in headers for sections and creates navigation to get to them. That means if I want to see game play, it can be all the way at the bottom and I can easily get to it.

Their development for pulling up pledge levels and seeing everything in them is a lot better as well. There are more single page features that they have without you needed to reload something. On Kickstarter it takes you to the pledge page where you can do add-ons. For Gamefound it is more like a shopping card and you can add everything from that one page.

On the flip side, though, I have yet to find a great link that I can save for projects. The big issue with it is that I want to filter to just active crowdfunding projects. I can get to active projects but that also has anything that is available to late pledge in the pledge manager. Sometimes I want to see what I can late pledge, but not all the time. Or make it really obvious which ones are active and which ones are late pledges.

Backerkit

Now, finally we have Backerkit, and like I said, I can’t tell you much about it. Mainly because there aren’t any active projects yet on it. But I will say that out of all of them, I think that currently Backerkit is the most dated. Now, that doesn’t mean that they might not have more features than Kickstarter, I fully expect them to. Their pledge manager piece has more features than Kickstarter does.

But speaking from a purely aesthetic point of view, the site is dated. It looks like it was created about 2010 and hasn’t been updated much since. Now the page that they used to announce their partnerships or first projects is nice. But the rest of the site, the notification for when things are going live, the emails you get when you sign up to get notified, all of those look bad.

Backerkit had an nice announcement. And I am guessing they are working on updating the aesthetic before things launch. But the pieces that they did show off still needed work. Like I said their upcoming projects page, the notifications page, the notifications email. So I hope it looks better because right now it is the worst of the three.

Will You Need to Use All Three?

Most likely yes. Kickstarter still has CMON and a few other big companies on it. Gamefound has Awaken Realms and Lucky Duck and a few others. And Backerkit already has upcoming projects from Cephalofair (Gloomhaven and Frosthaven’s company) and Restoration Games. If you want to keep abreast of crowdfunding, I think that you will need to keep an eye on all of them.

But with there being three now, I think this is an opportunity for people like myself as well as then others Tantrum House, BoardGameCo, Liege of Games, and more to be a resource for you. I think I’m going to start covering more crowdfunding on Malts and Meeples. In particular looking at projects. Why, because you shouldn’t need to look on all the sites. Not if all of us are putting out content to help with that. And it will make it less likely that you’ll miss the next Leder Games expansion for Root because it was on Backerkit and not Kickstarter.

Final Thoughts on Crowdfunding Platforms

As a consumer this is going to be good. It should force companies, all of them, to put out better and better products to entice creators to come to their platform. But I know that it is a bit of a struggle as well because as consumers we are used to just going to Kickstarter.

Overall, I think that Kickstarter has shown, to this point, that it won’t do the quality of life improvements that it should. Stuff like navigation for their pages. Instead they are focusing on the blockchain and more secure transactions but costly in other ways. And also means more likely to encourage fraud because of how that all works. Now, not fraud in someone getting access to your accounts but someone taking the money and leaving.

I hope that Gamefound and Backerkit don’t reach that point where they are become lax. I doubt that they will for a while, but it is certainly a concern that it could happen. And I think it behooves them to remember why this is happening to Kickstarter in the first place. But competition should be good, and hopefully good for the consumer and for the smaller companies that are having troubles now with Kickstarter.

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This is a game made by the same people as Vast: The Crystal Caverns, another asymmetrical game where each person is trying to complete their own objectives and score points in their own way. In Root, players take on one of the four different factions, there are also two more in an expansion, and battle for control of the forest. They do that by crafting items, building in locations, and moving about and fighting each other but each does it in their own unique way.

The Marquise de Cats already have most of the forest as they start on the board in every spot except one, and they are looking to use their superior creature count, at the start of the game, to control the forest, build more buildings, and really set-up their dominance in the forest. They do this primarily by adding building that allow them to craft items, build more buildings, and recruit more cats into the forest. However, if they lose too much ground, they might find their production a little bit low. The Marquise de Cats are probably the most straight forward of the different factions to play.

The Eyrie on the other hand are very regimented birds. They also start on the board, but only in a single location. The player picks a leader of the birds and that determines some of what they can do, because the birds are basically building out a decree, and the decree says that things must be done in a certain order in certain places, and if you ever can’t do the decree, the birds go into turmoil and your leader is overthrown and a new one comes onto the board. They are an interesting one to play, and while the game calls them low complexity, because of the fact that you’re locked into doing things in a certain order and at certain locations, you really want plan out what you’re adding to your decree, because you have to keep adding to it every turn, and if you aren’t careful and you go into turmoil, you could end up in a situation where you’re losing a number of points if the decree fails.

The Woodland Alliance is really focused on causing uprisings. They are sowing unrest on the board at the start of the game, and trying to get locations to revolt. If other players have enough creatures in locations, it can stop you from being able to sow unrest there. But once they start getting those on the board and they start causing revolts at locations, other players need to worry because they can spread fast, and they can definitely take advantage of the Eyrie and Marquise fighting against each other to seed unrest.

Finally, the vagabond is just going along through the forest, trying to find gear to improve their actions. They use their gear to be able to do more actions on their turns, and go on quests. The vagabond, like the Woodland Alliance, has a bit of a ramp to the character, because they need to have enough items to be able to complete quests, but once they can start completing the quests, their points will start growing quickly as the more quests that they do of the different colors, the more points they get.

I’ve personally only played the Eyrie, and they are a ton of fun to play. I kind of agree with the makers of the game that the Eyrie are a low complexity faction to play, but I wouldn’t say they are that easy. I had a large decree set-up that allowed me to recruit a lot of troops, move some, attack a little, and then build some of my roosts, so eventually I wouldn’t have been able to continue doing the decrees, but I made it through almost the whole game with a single leader. However, watching the Woodland Alliance and Vagabond being played, both of those seemed like a lot of fun as well. Even with the Marquise de Cats having a more straightforward playing style, you are often having to be the player who keeps everyone in check because of your starting board position and that definitely seems like it could be tricky.

In our game the Vagabond won because the Eyrie was growing so quickly, and the Cats hunkered down that they were playing against each other almost to the point of a stalemate. And the Vagabond was able to get their questing rolling and started getting a lot of points. Then the Eyrie had their decree broken by the cats, and there wasn’t anything that the Woodland Alliance was able to do to stop the vagabond. It made it interesting to see how you had to watch out for the different factions in different ways. The Woodland Alliance got hurt a fair amount by the fact the Cats and Eyrie grew so quickly, it kind of locked the Alliance out of a lot of areas, so they were lagging behind point wise, but the Alliance player still had fun playing them.

Now, clearly I had a lot of fun with the game and playing it, and everyone having different abilities and different ways that they play the game is very cool. That said, the game does have one fairly major drawback. It’s not a game that is fast to teach to new players. If everyone is new, you have to go through what each faction does and how they work as well as the basic actions of the game. So it can take quite a while, and there can be a number of questions about the game and how things work as well. It’s probably a game that is worth checking out reviews or “how to play” videos online ahead of time for all players so that you can get it up and running fast.

That said, the points are score quite quickly. That does mean that the actual game, for how long the game takes to teach, does move by at a good pace. Even the turns that players take are pretty quick. Add in to that some interesting strategy and while you aren’t involved in other peoples turns, you still have to pay attention to what they are doing, there isn’t that much mental downtime in the game. It helps keep the game quite engaging throughout, as long as you can make it through the rules.

Overall, it’s a fun game. I do think that this game will be a miss for some groups because of the complexity of teaching the game, though, if they can make it through that by watching a video to learn how to play or something along those lines if they aren’t good at just sitting and listening to rules, most groups will like this game. The artwork on the game is amazing, and the cards are goofy and cute so the game feels less heavy than it is on some ways.

Overall Grade: A
Gamer Grade: A
Casual Grade: C

The casual grade gets a big knock because of how long it takes to teach the rules, a casual gamer isn’t going to want to sit through rules that are that long. As a gamer, I barely wanted to sit through rules that were that long.

Have you had a chance to play Root? If so what did you think of it, and what is your favorite faction?

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