The Kickstarter campaign for Swamped was, I’m delighted to write, very successful. Now, that sentence, and the post title, will raise questions for some readers. If you’re not among those readers, you can just skip down to the paragraph with the chart.
Questions arising from this post’s title and opening sentence may well include:
- What’s Kickstarter? Well, Kickstarter describes itself as “a new way to fund creative projects”.
- What’s Swamped? It’s a card game (and hence a creative project) funded using Kickstarter. The players are adventurers, traveling through the swamp in a shared boat, seeking to achieve certain goals. Some of these goals, such as avoiding the hungry croc, are shared. Other goals differ between adventurers, and are private.
- What does Tabletop mean here? It denotes a type of game that’s not a video game: this could mean a card game, like Swamped, or a board game, or…
- What do you mean when you describe the Kickstarter as “very successful”? Well, …
The chart shows that the Kickstarter for Swamped was successful, especially over its last few days. It:
- Raised well over twice its funding goal.
- Attracted more than 1,000 backers: each of these backers pledged money in order to receive a specific reward; most of them pledged $12 plus shipping for one copy of the game.
- Saw an upturn in funding over the last few days of the campaign. If you looked at the chart carefully, you might have noticed that the last 3 days of the campaign saw a pledge total of over $5,000, and of more than 25% of the total for the whole campaign.
This particular chart doesn’t show that the campaign also:
- Started strongly, raising $4,608 on its first day, and reaching its funding target in its first week. (Click on the chart above to see more data on the campaign, courtesy of Kicktraq.)
- Featured a map of stretch goals, just as the game itself features a map of the swamp. Some of the navigation decisions through the stretch goals map were decided by backer votes. This was very clever and thematic, and worked well once backers got used to it.
- Earned the attention and praise of Jamey Stegmaier, who may well know and share more about Kickstarting tabletop games than anyone.
Congratulations to: Dennis of Bellwether Games, the publisher, and the creator of the Kickstarter campaign; and to Ben Gerber, the designer of Swamped (that last link is to its BoardGameGeek entry).