Drowning in Gold: The Kickstarter Menace
Kind Fortress - Isaac Shalev
by Isaac Shalev
1y ago
Welcome back! We’re going to cover the impacts of Kickstarter on the 3-tier system in this post. You can go back and read about the 3-tier system, and the impacts of online game stores and mass-market stores on the industry in our previous posts. Scaling Up When Kickstarter launched in 2009 nobody realized how much of a force it would become in the boardgame industry. Boardgame projects started appearing on the platform in 2010, with Alien Frontiers and Eminent Domain, which raised nearly $15,000, and nearly $50,000, respectively. By the end of 2011, nearly $2 million had been raised on Kickst ..read more
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Drowning In Gold: The Mass Market Strikes Back
Kind Fortress - Isaac Shalev
by Isaac Shalev
1y ago
In previous installments we covered the basics of the 3-tier system, and how online game stores (OLGS) began to disrupt the traditional model. This time we’ll take a look at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart and Target, and how they’ve changed the industry. Amazon: Mass Market, or The Largest OLGS? In the early 2000s, Amazon wasn’t yet a player in the boardgame industry. But over the years, Amazon grew into more product categories, in part by opening the door to 3rd-party sellers. In essence, anyone could ship Amazon some inventory, create product pages, and when items would sell, Amazon han ..read more
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Drowning in Gold: The Rise of Online Game Stores
Kind Fortress - Isaac Shalev
by Isaac Shalev
1y ago
Welcome back. In our last post we covered the basics landscape of the three-tier system of retail distribution. This time, we’ll turn our attention to some of the early disruptions to this system. Online Game Stores (OLGS) In the early 2000s, brick-and-mortar (B&M) board game retailers everywhere started facing increasing competition from online stores. Various retailers started selling online. Some were large warehouse-style retail stores like CoolStuffInc (CSI) that began offering online ordering as a more convenient alternative to phone-order sales. Boardgame buying clubs emerged too ..read more
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Drowning in Gold: How Too Many Games Are Breaking The Three-Tier System
Kind Fortress - Isaac Shalev
by Isaac Shalev
1y ago
As we turn over from one year to the next, and perhaps from one decade to the next, depending one who you ask, I wanted to share reflections on the tabletop industry itself, and how that will impact consumers, designers, publishers, and everyone involved in making and playing board games. This is the first in a multipart series I’m calling Drowning in Gold. The last five years have completely transformed the tabletop industry. From Kickstarter and miniatures, to mass-market adoption of hobby games, to the continued penetration of games into popular culture, board games are enjoying a cultural ..read more
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Design Patterns: Perpendicular Constraints
Kind Fortress - Isaac Shalev
by Isaac Shalev
1y ago
There’s a useful term in project management called the Critical Path, which is defined as the least amount of time needed to complete some multi-step operation. A project manager tries to figure out how to sequence tasks in a way that is most efficient and wastes the least amount of time. Eurogames offer a similar challenge to players. In race-style games, players try to cross the finish line in the fewest number of actions, while in games with turn-based end conditions players try to squeeze the most points out a relatively fixed number of turns. Cooperative games incorporate the Critical Pat ..read more
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Playful Thoughts: The Hit List
Kind Fortress - Isaac Shalev
by Isaac Shalev
1y ago
Nick Bentley, Director of Online Marketing, North Star Games Nick Bentley is one of the brightest minds in gaming, and I’ve often turned to his blog, or approached him personally, for his insights into game design, product marketing, and the tabletop games industry. From his perch at North Star Games, Nick sees a lot, and understands more, about how to be successful in gaming. Immediately following Gen Con 2019, Bentley release a provocatively-titled post on his blog, Board game designers are bad at pitching games to publishers. I can help. In the post, Bentley makes two related points: first ..read more
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Playful Thoughts: Meaningful Decisions
Kind Fortress - Isaac Shalev
by Isaac Shalev
1y ago
In brainstorming ideas for the Design Patterns series, I sometimes come up with topics that don’t really fit there. This new series, Playful Thoughts will be the home for design topics that aren’t examples of a pattern in game design, but also for posts about the tabletop industry as a business, and for thoughts about games as art and culture. I hope you enjoy! Let’s dive in to today’s topic. If I had to point to one single idea that drove the Eurogames revolution and gave us modern gaming, it would be that games should force players to make meaningful decisions. The idea that player choices s ..read more
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Design Patterns: This Is Bigger Than All Of Us
Kind Fortress - Isaac Shalev
by Isaac Shalev
1y ago
In their terrific new book, Meeples Together, Christopher Allen and Shannon Appelcline discuss”challenge systems” in cooperative games. Though they don’t explicitly offer a concise definition of a challenge system, we might distill one out of their extensive coverage of the topic and say that a Challenge System is a mechanism or set of mechanisms that produce an escalating set of obstacles and threats that will cause players to lose the game if they are not overcome. Allen and Appelcline note, in passing, that though their focus is on cooperative games, challenge systems exist in competitive ..read more
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Design Pattern: Winning and Goals
Kind Fortress - Isaac Shalev
by Isaac Shalev
1y ago
As the Women’s World Cup rolls forward, I though we’d talk a bit about goaaaaaaals! Or just goals, as English-speaking commentators call them. Reiner Knizia once said “When playing a game the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.” At first impression, Knizia appears to be saying something about the idea of the magic circle: that the game can only exist so long as we agree on what winning is, even if winning has no meaning outside the game. We decide that the person who scores the most points wins, and that agreement creates the incentives that we all respond to ..read more
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Drowning in Gold: The Kickstarter Menace
Kind Fortress - Isaac Shalev
by Isaac Shalev
4y ago
Welcome back! We’re going to cover the impacts of Kickstarter on the 3-tier system in this post. You can go back and read about the 3-tier system, and the impacts of online game stores and mass-market stores on the industry in our previous posts. Scaling Up When Kickstarter launched in 2009 nobody realized how much of a force it would become in the boardgame industry. Boardgame projects started appearing on the platform in 2010, with Alien Frontiers and Eminent Domain, which raised nearly $15,000, and nearly $50,000, respectively. By the end of 2011, nearly $2 million had been raised on ..read more
Visit website

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