Tag Archives: Indiegogo

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Kickstarter Roundup edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’d like to return to the subject of crowdfunding.

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First, let’s talk about Herbaceous. Ed and the Herbaceous team were hoping for $6500 to make the game a reality, and they absolutely crushed that goal!

The final total was a staggering $59,032! Congrats to everyone involved, and kudos to all the PuzzleNationers that contributed!

And in the spirit of such marvelous Kickstarter success, let’s take a look at four very different projects that might appeal to puzzle fans and game enthusiasts!

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I missed my chance to try out Originz: The Superpowered Card Game at the CT FIG event earlier this year — though you can try it out at the CT FIG mid-year event this weekend in Newington, CT! — but I definitely like what I’ve seen from their Kickstarter campaign.

In this deck-building game, you try to equip your villain or hero with the best mix of powers imaginable to keep your foes at bay! This accessible game is richly illustrated and detailed, a sure-fire hit with any fans of superheroics in your household.

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If you’re looking for a more traditional style of puzzling, there are only a few days left to get in on the ground floor of LightBox, a Rubik’s-style light-up puzzle box.

By rotating and rearranging the layers of plastic that form the cube, you will illuminate different layers and create different patterns of light! Whether you’re solving to create a particular pattern or to shut the LightBox off entirely, you’re sure to work your brain into knots with this curious puzzle box.

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And speaking of short deadlines, there are only a few days left to contribute to Word Domination, an intriguing mix of Scrabble-style spelling and a strategy card game.

The concept is devilishly simple: by spelling words, you acquire artifacts to help you in your criminal escapades. The mix of tactical spelling — sometimes, shorter words have more value than longer words — with the roguish qualities of an evildoer allow for all sorts of gameplay possibilities.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen these two puzzle-game formats combined like this before, and the result could be something great.

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Our fourth and final project today has the most potential, simply because of its design. It’s the PinBox 3000, and it’s a foundation for designing, decorating, and constructing your very own pinball game.

Merging DIY possibilities with a classic form of game play seems like a no-brainer, and I can’t believe we haven’t seen something like this on the market before. This is the perfect community builder, and I can foresee forums and Pinterest pages popping up all over, as fans and creators share their unique designs. What an awesome palette to work with!

Hopefully one or more of these projects piques your interest, my fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers! I wish all of these creators the best of luck in shepherding their brainchildren toward success!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

A Puzzly Success Story: The Codex Silenda

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In the past, I’ve covered plenty of puzzly Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns that I thought might interest my fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers.

Today, I’m not so much recommending a campaign — since it’s pretty much closed right now — but I do want to share the story of that campaign, because I think they’ve learned from the mistakes of other campaigns and they’re doing things right.

So let’s talk about the Codex Silenda project.

Codex Silenda: The Book of Puzzles is a series of mechanical puzzles, each of which unlocks the next “page” until you get to the final puzzle, which reveals a prize. It’s an awesome concept, and all of the photos of the 5-page Codex look gorgeous.

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Now, there are several noteworthy things about this particular Kickstarter campaign. The first is that the puzzle project funded in a day, and within two days, every tier that allowed you to receive a complete Codex was filled up. By day three, even the tier that stated you’d receive the Codex disassembled and you’ve have to put it together yourself was filled up.

So in 72 hours, if you wanted the Codex for yourself, you had to settle for the lower tier allowing you to receive a single page of the Codex of your choosing, or you had to set yourself for a long wait until the Kickstarter campaign had been fulfilled and the team had moved on to accepting orders once more.

That brings me to the second noteworthy thing about this campaign: their patience and forethought.

Many Kickstarter campaigns that turn out to be more successful than expected become victims of their success, accepting more and more backing from supporters, adding loads of stretch goals to fulfill, and basically getting caught up in the excitement of being a well-funded runaway success.

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[Image courtesy of expertrain.com.]

Unfortunately, those campaigns are often overwhelmed once they finally realize the monumental task ahead of them: producing the product for LOADS of supporters, becoming stressed by delays, missteps, and the ever-looming deadline they promised during the campaign. I’ve seen it time and time again, even with well-staffed, supremely organized campaigns. Things happen.

But the Codex team nipped that possibility in the bud early, declaring that they would NOT be adding additional tiers. Although this would mean losing out on more funding AND potentially disappointing interested customers, they wanted to fully commit to the supporters they already had and not overtax their team.

It’s an act of patience and restraint that will serve them well, even if it did leave latecomers to the campaign like me a little disheartened.

And that brings me to the third noteworthy aspect of this campaign: planning for the future.

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[Image courtesy of tibco.com.]

Now that they had secured funding and already turned their eyes toward production, they offered an olive branch to all the interested supporters who had found them after that amazing 72-hour launch to success. You see, one of the few stretch goals they had built into the campaign were 6th and 7th pages to add to the Codex, which would be exclusive to the Kickstarter campaign.

That means that the Codex produced for customers after the campaign would only be 5 pages, and latecomers would miss out. The team thought that was unfair, so they’ve offered a unique solution: an upgrade voucher.

By adding a bit more to your donation for one of the non-Codex tiers, you would receive a voucher proving you were a Kickstarter supporter. That way, when the Kickstarter campaign is complete, all those orders are filled, and the team begins accepting orders from customers, that voucher entitles you to a Codex with the Kickstarter-exclusive 6th and 7th pages.

Now that is smart marketing and customer service.

I look forward to seeing where the Codex Silenda team goes from here, and how the campaign proceeds once they move into formal production and eventually, product delivery. With forethought and planning like this, I think they’ll be a big success.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Kickstarter Roundup edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’d like to return to the subject of crowdfunding!

[Image courtesy of The Startup Garage.]

I’ve covered various campaigns for board games, card games, and puzzle projects across the Kickstarter and Indiegogo crowdfunding platforms over the years, and today I’d like to share a few more that could use your attention.

The first is the strategy game Sovrano.

Sovrano is a tactical game in the spirit of chess where you compete with your opponent to score points by capturing one or both of the towers in the center row of the board and/or by escorting your emperor to the throne at the center of the board. With only 11 game pieces apiece, this multi-tiered game is simple to learn but contains enough depth and nuance to keep players interested.

Although supporting Sovrano is a bit more expensive than the average game’s Kickstarter levels, it’s worth noting that each game is hand-made by the father-and-son team behind the game, and the craftsmanship looks gorgeous.

A bit more complex and cutthroat than Sovrano, Summit is a strategy game that’ll test your speed, cunning, and karma. It’s kind of like The Oregon Trail, but with other wagons racing you.

Summit combines path building (by laying triangular tiles on the mountain map), mechanics to help or hinder opponents (inspiring alliances and encouraging betrayals in equal measure), resource management, and an element of luck to create an intriguing racing game where players compete to climb AND descend a mountain before their opponents do.

On the simpler side of things, we have Hoard, a test-your-luck card game all about hedging your bet to sneak as much treasure as possible away from a sleeping dragon before it awakes.

With elements of Memory (remembering which treasure cards are hidden where), chain-solving (doing your best to combine where to move on the board with the cards in your hand and the treasures you’ve already nabbed) and risk management (do you try to wake the dragon now to secure your treasure, or do you hedge your bet and try to grab more before someone else wakes it?), Hoard is a quick-playing family-friendly experience that could be a great gateway game for more involved games later.

Our final game today, Knuckle Sammich, is far, far goofier than the other three, but it’s a project near and dear to my heart, because it’s a spinoff of one of my favorite quick-and-silly role-playing games, Kobolds Ate My Baby.

Now, for the uninitiated, a bit of backstory: kobolds are among the first creatures you usually encounter in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, because they’re easy for even the greenest of heroes to defeat. They’re basically cannon fodder. So it’s great fun to have a game centered around playing one of these easily crushed minions, stealing food for your king and being generally mischievous.

And now they’re launching a card game all about eating sandwiches before they run out…or before you become lunch yourself! It’s guaranteed to be glorious chaos.

These are four intriguing and very entertaining projects, all loaded with potential, and I hope you consider contributing to one or more of them. As someone who has become a regular donor to various Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, I am proud to have funded some marvelous new ideas and watched them take shape over the months that followed.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

Kickstarter Round-up!

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International TableTop Day is this Saturday, a day where we celebrate getting together with family and friends to play games! Board games, card games, role-playing games, puzzles…anything that involves gathering in person and having fun around a table fits the bill!

But we simply can’t wait until Saturday — plus the office is closed that day — so we’re hosting our PuzzleNation’s TableTop Day event in-house TODAY! And I figured what better day could there be for a round-up of puzzly crowdfunding campaigns marking some of the newest and most intriguing projects in the puzzle-game industry today!

I’ve covered various campaigns for board games, card games, and puzzle projects across the Kickstarter and Indiegogo crowdfunding platforms over the years, and today I’d like to share three more that could use your attention.

The first is the strategy game Tak.

Tak is a collaboration between game designer James Ernest, head honcho of Cheapass Games and Hip Pocket Games, and author Patrick Rothfuss, creator of the Kingkiller Chronicle series, to bring to life a game featured in Rothfuss’s novel The Wise Man’s Fear.

The premise sounds simple: build a road of pieces connecting opposite sides of the board. By using some pieces as parts of your road and others as walls to block your opponent, this mix of chess, Stratego, and Go is all about strategy. Plus, the game is adaptable, playable on square boards as small as 3×3 and as large as 8×8.

This is a new pub game that feels like a timeless classic, and it looks perfect for puzzlers of all ages.

Now let’s move from the pub to outer space with another Kickstarter campaign, Avoid the Void.

This is a different sort of strategy game, since it’s all about outlasting your opponents, not completing a task first. In Avoid the Void, whole sectors of space are being replaced with black holes, and everyone is scrambling to gather resources and elude these hungry death traps.

You’ve got an ever-changing gameboard, intriguing alien races (including one resembling a piece of cake), and all the reason in the world to deceive, outmaneuver, and betray your fellow players, just so you can stay in the universe a little while longer.

This is a game designed for replayability, allowing you to indulge in all of the diabolical selfishness of games like Monopoly, but without the huge time commitment. After all, the universe is collapsing and there’s no time to waste!

And speaking of replayability, the makers of this last Kickstarter campaign are known for puzzle games with high replay factor. Let’s talk about Pyramid Arcade from Looney Labs.

We normally talk about Looney Labs card games like Fluxx or Loonacy, but their original product line revolved around the Looney Pyramids system: various games you can play with their signature colored pyramids.

Now, they’re launching Pyramid Arcade, covering TWENTY-TWO different games and encompassing 90 pyramids of various colors. It’s their largest release ever, and with all the variants and mini-games they’ve created for these game pieces over the years, this promises to be a game set with endless possibilities.

Pattern-matching games, chess- and Tic-Tac-Toe-inspired games, bluffing games, strategy games, and even a tower-building game…Pyramid Arcade literally has something for everyone.

These are three intriguing and very worthy projects, and I hope you contribute to one or more of them. As someone who has become a regular donor to various Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, I am proud to have funded some marvelous new ideas and watched them take shape over the months that followed.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Schools and Spheres edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’d like to return to the subject of Kickstarter philanthropy!

[Image credit: for-preneur]

I’ve written about crowdfunding a lot in this blog, because over the last few years, platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have changed how many puzzles and games are created, funded, and brought to market.

There’s a virtual board game and card game renaissance stemming from these websites, and many puzzle constructors are bypassing traditional publishing formats and taking their puzzle suites and projects straight to the audience this way.

But there’s also the opportunity to give back to your community in meaningful ways.

I recently stumbled across the Kickstarter campaign for StrataSphere, a strategy puzzle game from Family Games America that really caught my eye.

Like a next-level version of Connect Four and KerPlunk, StrataSphere challenges you to place your sliding tabs in various slots around the cube, then use them to drop your spheres to the bottom layer first.

But what most intrigued me about the project wasn’t the puzzle itself, but one of the crowdfunding options being offered. Instead of just pledging for a copy of the game for yourself, you could pledge a little more money and donate a copy of the game in your name to a school of your choosing. Puzzle philanthropy.

I reached out to the team at FGA to find out more about the project, and had the opportunity to chat with Paulette Hall, communications director for FGA.

Where did the idea for StrataSphere come from?

The game was originally envisioned and developed by German designer Claudia Herz, who originally named it BallCube. Claudia remembers that after spending time sketching and offering the idea to other game publishers she finally made a handmade sample of acrylic glass and presented it at a trade-show not too far from her home.

The reaction and feedback was overwhelming. People wanted to know everything about the game and know where it can be purchased. This is what encouraged her to pursue the project. With a combination of inspiration from Claudia and outer-space, we renamed the game StrataSphere 2.0.

For people unfamiliar with FGA, what sort of puzzles and puzzle-games are your bread and butter? Is StrataSphere a traditional FGA-style puzzle, or is it a new direction for you?

FGA’s tag-line, Learning Through Laughter, has been been incorporated into all of our gift, game, and puzzle products since being established in 1987. StrataSphere 2.0 is not so much a puzzle but a strategy tabletop game that is a more contemporary modern addition to our line of products.

Our more popular items include eco-friendly wooden games and puzzles like Cathedral, Don’t Break The Bottle, and our wood and wire puzzles. While this strategy game is new to FGA, FGA is not new to strategy games.

The option for supporters to donate an additional copy to a school of their choosing is one I’ve never seen before, and I’m surprised more Kickstarter campaigns haven’t utilized it. Is this the first product that has incorporated this sort of program? Is this a long-term goal for FGA going forward?

FGA helped raise funds for actor Ted Danson’s American Oceans Campaign in the late ’80s and early ’90s with their environmental games and puzzles such as Endangered and Colorful Kingdom. A percentage of sales was also given to the ASPCA.

Donations of FGA products go out yearly to schools and organizations. A big part of FGA is our ability to give back, and we wanted to start 2016 with a campaign that will help us continue to do that. Our students are our future, and the state of our school systems has geared our focus of this campaign to get valuable learning material back into our schools and into their hands.

I think this is not only a really exciting puzzle game, but a worthwhile cause as well. You can check out all the details on the StrataSphere Kickstarter page. They’re more than halfway to their funding goal, and I sincerely hope they make it there and beyond.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

The Year Ahead

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Normally today I would be doing a Follow-Up Friday post, but since it’s the first day of 2016, instead of looking back, I thought I would look forward and talk a little bit about what’s to come in 2016!

On the PuzzleNation Blog side of things, I’ve got some great stuff planned for the new year.

For instance, game and puzzle reviews. Good lord, I have the fruits of so many Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns to show you, plus 2016 is promising to be a great year for both puzzles and games, so I have no doubt there are many surprises and terrific solving experiences awaiting the PuzzleNation audience next year.

I’m also bringing back our interview segment 5 Questions. In the past, we’ve had musicians, comedians, puzzle constructors, and even a game-show host appear for 5 Questions, and I’ve already lined up a few interviews that should really interest the readership.

Also, after the positive response to the interview we did with Fred when we announced the addition of a free daily puzzle to the Penny Dell Crosswords App, I’m hoping to interview the rest of the PuzzleNation Team in 2016 and give our fellow PuzzleNationers a glimpse behind the curtain!

On the app side, Fred and the PuzzleNation Team are keeping mum when it comes to new apps and features, but that’s simply because they know I’d immediately run to you guys with any news I heard. *laughs*

But our 2015 Deluxe Combo puzzle set AND the new Penny Dell Crosswords App for Android devices should tide you over until I can pry a few juicy secrets from Fred and the team.

And, of course, I’d love to hear from you! What sorts of posts would you like to see from PuzzleNation Blog in 2016? Let me know!

Thank you for all your support in 2015. On behalf of PuzzleNation, I can promise you that 2016 will be our best, most ambitious year yet!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!