Your players enter the game excited and seem to be having a fantastic time. But, for some reason, after thirty minutes or so they begin to flag. By the time your hour long game is done, they're wiped out. They keep insisting that your game was fun, but it doesn't look like they're chomping at the bit to try it again. What happened? Why is your board game boring?
You don't know what you don't know. Before you launch your first Kickstarter board game, there are a lot of questions you might not even realize you need to ask. Kickstarter has become the de facto standard for independent board game funding, but that also means that the market is now saturated. How can you make your game stand out? What mistakes do you need to avoid?
Well, you may want to begin with the pricing.
What do players do when waiting for their turn? If you're testing your game on a group like mine, your players will end up chatting and socializing socializing. But if the turns begin to take too long, people will start getting impatient. Take even longer still, and the game will be put away -- never to be played again.
"This is a fantastic game," said our local game shop owner. "Everyone's loved it."
We picked up Magic Maze and set it up in a few minutes. The premise was simple: everyone controls the direction that pawns move and the movements they can take. Pawns must collect an item and then escape the maze. Oh, and it has to be done simultaneously, and in complete silence.
Kickstarter is becoming a difficult place for indie games -- both in terms of purchasing them and launching them. It's a weird, uneven market; many people are forsaking Kickstarter's model entirely, while others are using Kickstarter exclusively. Ultimately, Kickstarter's value isn't in its platform, but rather the marketing efforts of those behind a product. Too many consumers have been burned by mindlessly consuming games, and unless a game has a lot of hype it's not likely to breach interest.