2017 has been the year for my first foray in to Kickstarter campaigns, starting with the backing of Gloomhaven’s 2nd edition. Gloomhaven first appeared on my radar once the 1st edition was hitting reviewers and it quickly rose up through the rankings on Board Game Geek, where it now sits at number 3, and is probably going to be near the top of most people’s game of the year. I thought it looked fantastic and basically there was no way I was going to miss out on the 2nd edition seeing as copies of the first were selling for upwards of £300 on e-bay.
Backing this is a little different to a lot of projects on Kickstarter, mainly because it’s already a successful product; it was already funded and made in the 1st edition. It’s just that demand for the game became so high that a second campaign was run.
I backed it around April time and for the next few months I mostly left it in the back on my mind knowing that it was due to ship Q4 2017. There wasn’t really much point in me keeping tabs on every little bit of news as I’d just get excited way too early.
As the months ticked on updates came regularly, production started and things seemed to be moving along nicely.
Around the beginning of October, late September the big news came, the game was starting to ship all the way from China. Europe, or more specifically Germany was the destination for all the ships carrying over 40 thousand copies of the game – five ships in total. The delay between the first and last ship was pretty much a month. We were even given the names of the ships so that we could track them on their journey – a cruel and torturous thing if you ask me, watching those ships chug along.
My game was on one of these ships, but which one was anyone’s guess… (probably the last one…)
Excited
I’m a huge fan of Christmas; I love it, every year I start to feel the festive mood creeping in around September. I can’t help it. I don’t actually put up any decorations or anything crazy like that until December, but secretly, in my head, I’m singing Christmas Carols the day after my birthday… which is in August.
Imagine being that excited about Christmas every year, now imagine that you don’t know when Christmas is actually going to be. It could be today, when you get home from work, it could be in a months’ time… You just don’t know. That’s my situation with Gloomhaven right now. I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas except Father Christmas himself is flaky and doesn’t want to be tied down to specific date, “Ehhhh, I’m a bit busy I think , what if a better option comes up? I’d like to keep my options open, I’ll let you know” I hear him say, in my head…
Now imagine that Christmas might be a little bit broken. Your parents sit you down “Sorry son, we got you a really cool present, but we might have broken it on the way home because we accidentally got *drunk on **Eggnog and dropped your present. You’ll find out Christmas day though, fingers crossed.” That’s also a reality at the moment as a number of people who’ve already received their copies of the game start to report defects with the game, card board splitting, and damage to the components. It sucks knowing that when I do finally get the game there will still be the potential that parts of the game could be broken.
One unlucky guy got 5 of the same starting classes delivered in his box instead of 6 completely different ones as it should be.
Why am I telling you this, I don’t really know, I just know that I’m very excited about getting the game and I thought I’d share that excitement and my experience of backing my first project on Kickstarter.
Overall I think the whole experience has been a fun one, updates have been regular enough to keep people up to date, but not to the point where updates don’t really tell you anything new. It’s been fun getting excited with all the other people, discussing what we’re going to do when we get the game etc…
I also invested in a nice insert from The Broken Token, which essentially lets you store all the game components nicely, I spent one Sunday afternoon putting it all together, which took me about 4 hours, but it was a lot of fun, but didn’t help with the excitement levels.
I’m hoping that my game is now only a couple of weeks away at maximum, there are lots of copies already hitting the UK, so fingers crossed mine is making its way to me!
Have you guys ever backed anything on Kickstarter? How did it go for you?
-Will
*I’m not implying that anyone was drunk in the making of the game though, obviously…
** Do people still drink Eggnog? Is it even a thing anymore?
