(bell dings) - Hello and welcome to the Tabletop Bellhop gaming podcast, episode 230, "Kicking the Table," the evolution of Kickstarter in tabletop gaming. Has Kickstarter jumped the shark, but everyone's forgotten to notice? Which is brought to you by our sponsor, Grand Gamers Guild. I'm Sean and here with me, the Tabletop Bellhop himself, Moe. - I am Moe Tousignant, the Tabletop Bellhop, your cardboard concierge, helping you make your game nights better. - Well, we're currently live on Twitch,
something we do every Wednesday night at 8 p.m. Eastern. You should stop by and see some of what goes into making the show and hang out with other fans in the lobby, our chat room. Yeah, they got a lot of that today. We were starting about 20 minutes in at this point, just to do why, why? Can anyone explain to me why Windows camera settings can't be saved between like reboots? It drives me bonkers. So tonight is actually a followup to last week's episode where we talked about the best games to
come from Kickstarter. Now, when I proposed that topic, Sean asked if we could take some time to talk about Kickstarter in general, like what we think of it as a platform, especially for tabletop gaming. And I figured doing that, along with sharing our favorite Kickstarter games, I was gonna be a bit too much. So I'd agreed to give him the floor this week. So that is what we'll be talking about later. After discussing Kickstarter, we're gonna be reviewing the robots expansion for MonsDRAWsity an
d another great game to come out of Kickstarter, The Artemis Project from our sponsor Grand Gamers Guild. We're gonna wrap up with a week in review that includes some birthday gaming and three games off my pile of shame. So first thoughts on three different games tonight. You'll find links to games we mentioned and more tonight through our show notes, which you can find at tabletopbellhop.com /episode230, that's 2 3 0. Links found there may be affiliate links and the games mentioned tonight may
have been provided by publishers for review purposes. - Let's start off with a trip to the suggestion box. - Welcome to this week's suggestion box. - So up first, we've got a nice long reply or comment on our Magical
Kitties Save the Day review that I think we're sharing because my biggest concern during that review was its suitability or lack of suitability as a game for brand new game masters. - Well, Marina MF 6 IG writes, "I bought this game and ran a session for my sister, her partner, and
my two nephews. It took the first hour and a half to read the rule book and create kitty characters. Lots of arguing about who should get the shape-shifting ability. The adults liked the randomizing element though. Now I didn't even realize there was a big example adventure to play through. I ignored it and jumped into a random mission I made up on the spot. I started with, "You find out that this kitten's human is too shy to make friends and that a strange fortune teller in an alley told you ab
out a magical item on the river island that could help the human. So you take off to check it out. Starting at the beach, what do you do?" - Oh, first off, oh, wait, sorry. - No, go ahead. They had a lot of fun. Now not everyone got to use their magical power and I wish I understood the scaling of the dice system better. There were lots of laughs and creative input. As bears were fought, mermaids got slapped and my youngest nephew yelled, "I'm bored." They didn't find what they were searching fo
r, but they are looking forward to me coming back with another session. This is my first time as a GM and in general, I still think it was a success. - Yeah, I got to say that sure sounds like a success to me. I'm impressed that Marino was able to get the game to the table and played in the same night. That is a hefty task. They did note that it did take an hour and a half before playing. There is not a small rule book in that game and the game expects you to actually do quite a bit of prep. So
full congratulations on improvising a start. And I am happy to hear the system did work for someone with no GM experience. Now maybe it's because I have lots of GM experience that I was overthinking it and maybe underestimating the draw of the theme, the power of cats trying to help their humans as a motivator to learn a new game system. So this is fantastic to hear. - Yeah, it certainly sounds like Marino managed to knock that one out of the park. And as far as players not reaching their goal,
don't worry, that's normal. Most players will do anything to avoid reaching the goal set out for them by their GM. - Next up, a review of one of my games that I brought back from Origins that I haven't actually played myself, which is something that sometimes happens when I bring games out to local public play events. - Well, David Hutchinson writes, "Sentinels of Earth Prime was pretty cool to play, though all of us said the text could be a point or two larger, as it is smaller than "Sentinels
of the Multi-verse," and it does not need to be. The art was really nice, though our group has played "Sentinals of the Multi-verse" about a hundred times now. We have yet to tire a bit, so it has awesome re-playability and is a great co-op game. The other guy we played with on Saturday had never played the original or this version and found the game very easy to learn. I know that was a demo copy and that you will be doing a review on it, but I'm sure you could pass on our thoughts to the game
company. If anyone needs a review of the game or it's parent, I'm sure we could come up with something. - Well, thanks for the short review, Dave. I'll be sure to pass that on to Chris at Green Ronin, and I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm still looking forward to trying this one. I know Sean is too, though I gotta say that the small text concern is going to be a bit of a problem for us as well. If Deanna's playing with us, I'll have to make sure she packs her magnifying glass when we do sit down to p
lay. - Well, that's it for tonight. Thanks to everyone who comments and shares and interacts with our stuff. (bell dings) A quick reminder that we'll not be recording on February 7th. - Yep, so we're gonna be here next Wednesday, but not the Wednesday after, and actually we may as well mention it now a month from then, we're also not gonna be here because we'll be on our way to Gamma Expo. (bell dings) - Now, mostly we're here to answer your gaming and game night tech questions. Tonight, though,
is my topic. As it came up in regards to last week's discussion on the best Kickstarter games. - Yeah, last week we shared some of what we thought were the best board games and role-playing games to come out of Kickstarter, which in my mind, just meant what are our favorite tabletop games that happened to be Kickstarter at some point in the process? I would show much other thought than that. That was pretty much it. No regard to whether they should have been Kickstarted, if they were groundbrea
king, if they did something new, if they helped or hindered the community. Just a purely subjective list of games that we like that happened to go through the Kickstarter process. - Now, when Mo first introduced last week's topic to me, I admit I was a little frustrated. As we indicated last week during the topic, the topic itself was very broad, since thousands of games every year are released on Kickstarter, and trying to identify which of them is the best is problematic and at best controvers
ial. And more importantly to me though, it once again brought up the whole problem with Kickstarter and how it's being used in practice versus what its purpose and initial goals were. - See, now, I don't know. This doesn't bother me that much. I don't care that much about where Kickstarter started. To me, it's much more interesting what's going on on the platform now. I'm more focused on the end user, like the consumer side of Kickstarter. Now, I'm not a game designer, so I'm not on that whole s
ide of things, but I am fascinated by what people are using Kickstarter for and possibly more interested in companies that didn't use it than have started, Stronghold Games being an example of that, or companies that solely used it and probably wouldn't exist without it, who have stopped, for example, Stonemaier Games. To me, it doesn't really matter what it was intended to be, all that matters to me is what it is now and what can it provide me. - Well, for me, Kickstarter is, or at least should
be, a modern crowdfunding platform and not a pre-order system. The origins of the whole modern crowdfunding concept come from the arts, where historically the upfront costs of things like going on tour, putting out an album or theatrical performances are astoundingly high and can't be fronted by poor performers, and new or smaller groups may not be able to find producers to back them for their cut of the profits. In our industry, someone working at home to develop a new game that they think mig
ht really be something might have to spend a load of money or might have already spent a load of money, possibly even dipping into their savings in order to prototype that game. Now, crowdfunding is an ideal solution for this person who may have no option for other funds and often may not even know how to pitch a major publishing company to sell it to them. - That's fair. I don't know. I just, I don't even know how much I buy the whole, the entire plane of Kickstarter is to help the little guy o
r to make things reality that wouldn't exist without it. And I can't find any information. I didn't dig too deep, but I tried to find out what Kickstarter's like original mission statement was. The only thing I could find publicly posted was in 2015 when they became a benefit corporation. And at that point, they released the mission statement saying, Kickstarter's mission is to help bring creative projects to life. We measure our success as a company by how well we achieve that mission, not by t
he size of our profits. So since 2015, at least, there's nothing there that really says, we're here for the little guys or we're here to make things reality that wouldn't be. We're just here to bring things to life. We're just here to help. And that could mean so many things. That could mean, yes, getting you funding to produce the thing, but it could also mean just help marketing it or just help getting the word out or advertising. That it could be a pre-order system just as legit to me as a wa
y to generate initial funds based on their mission statement themselves. And that's totally fair. I think a lot of what my annoyance comes from is their own rules about what can and can't be a Kickstarter and whether or not they follow them is a whole other thing. But, you know, we know for a fact that it's not supposed to be used. By their own rules as, you know, hey, I've got a bunch of product in my garage. I want to sell it. Here's here's a Kickstarter. Now we have I mean, while during the d
uring our brief stint at the Sunday brunches, we actually specifically came across a game that stated in their Kickstarter thing that they had all of the game sitting in the warehouse at their office and Kickstarter did nothing. I did bring it up to Kickstarter and they're like, no, no, they didn't break any rules. So their rules aren't even. I mean, as far as I know, the rule is still that you can't do that, but they didn't seem to care. So Kickstarter as a platform is kind of vague. But as a c
oncept is I think my whole concept of crowdfunding and Kickstarter or GoFundMe or indegogo or whatever there are, there's a lot of them. You know, a pre-order system isn't bringing projects to life. It's delivering perfectly healthy and breathing projects to consumers, which is what stores are for. See, I still I still think it is bringing them to life because a thousand games sitting in a warehouse, no one knows exists and no one is ordering aren't really alive. Like what do you call the undead
games? Well, yeah, I mean, games go to either to distributors to go to game stores. If you're sitting in if you're sitting in if they're sitting in a warehouse, you have to tell somebody someone, some some way to write them. And and one one website seems like the odd choice to do that. Especially like the one that works like the whole thing is as we as Roger points out in the chat, the cost to go on Kickstarter now is increasing. And I think that's because of companies like CMON and other compa
nies, which are I'm not going to say large companies. We've had this discussion many times. You know, these are not giant corporations. The employee, the entire employee count for CMON is 78. That's it. They have 78 employees. Yeah, I looked that one up myself. But they made six hundred thousand dollars in 2022 profit. Sure, that's right. Profit on a forty five million dollar revenue. Now, roughly 10 percent of their income from Kickstarter. So according to their financials, I pulled up their 20
22 financial records and they were they they report about 25 million dollars in Kickstarter revenue. OK. Of that, five percent is going to go to Kickstarter. Another roughly five percent is going to go to the manufacturer, whoever their credit card processors are. And so on and so on. So, I mean, they're not making tons of money. They only made six hundred thousand dollars on forty five million dollars income. But that's because they spent all of their money on other people doing their work. Rig
ht. Again, and a lot of that is going to be advertising and and marketing and fancy videos for their Kickstarter and all the graphics and art for their Kickstarter. Whereas if Roger, for instance, wants to throw his game up onto Kickstarter and doesn't have the money to put together professional videos, send out distribution copies to Tom and all of the big board game reviewers, get a copy into, you know, somebody's hands to do a video, a video, a video how to get a copy over to dyes for an inst
ructional thing. How are they going to compete? They are going to, you know, don't have the money for banner ads every five minutes on board game geek. You know, I get that, but how's that Kickstarter fault? Like, why where is that a failure of Kickstarter in any way? Because Roger, the company, the Kickstarter isn't the problem. The platform Kickstarter is a problem by allowing these giant companies to take fully formed concepts and push and put them out. And when and, you know, in this method
means that the people who initially started the whole concept of crowdfunding, the people who started the people who needed money because there was no other option. Right. Are pushed out of the way when companies who do have other options. Now, they aren't choosing to use them. They're choosing to outsource everything. But if they chose not to outsource everything and keep more, they could probably actually make more profit. They would also just have more hassles and have to employ more people,
et cetera, et cetera. But I mean, that's one thing companies can do is is bring more processes in house, keep more of the money that they are sending to distributors and do more of the and do more of the work themselves, including things like selling to wholesalers and retail and distribution distributors to get it into retail, which oftentimes isn't happening at all anymore. We're we're now seeing less games hit retail at all after Kickstarter. Yeah, that's right. In retail. But the other probl
em is distributors don't want them. They don't want the game unless it's already a success where Kickstarter proves that success ahead of time and then the distributor is willing to take it. But I think that's a different conversation we haven't quite gotten to yet. Although I would argue that proof of success is a very narrow, tight rope. But Diamond Distributing is going to be way more willing to take Roger's new game if it funded for six hundred thousand dollars on Kickstarter. Then if Roger
just sends an email and sends him a prototype and it right. You know, even if Roger called me a prototype by the time they're looking at distribution, but like gets old, the diamond like you can't just call diamond and go, yeah, I want to be distributed and they go, sure, no problem. We'll start sending your game to all these local game stores. No, but and I think the the former thing and this is I'm getting away from Kickstarter here has bro is probably a large part of the problem that we could
discuss has bow to Hasbro till all are one. Is you know, and the the consolidation of power under Hasbro, Asmodee and the narrow group of publishers out there that are limiting where Roger or someone else could bring their game to. And that's again a perfect reason why Kickstarter exists because you can't go there except Hasbro and Asmodee and and CMON are still using the platform that should be helping Roger avoid Asmodee and CMON and and competing directly against him. And Hasbro does not use
Kickstarter. They have their own. They have their own. They have their own. They made their own. But it's it's still it's still the same concept, really. Yeah, it is the same. They're competing with Kickstarter. Well, it's not the same concept because you're saying the basic concept. This is the right thing to like that wouldn't whereas Hasbro's isn't. Hasbro's is we're going to make luxury boutique items that people may or may not want. And if they want them, we'll make them, which is to me pa
rt of what Kickstarter is now, but definitely not that we're going to kick start the small project into existence. I don't know. Is HeroQuest really a boutique item? Yes. The fact that HeroScape failed a what, $500 board game if you went all in? I think it's a boutique item. It's it's something that appeals to people's nostalgia. It's not a mass market game. You're going to go pick up at the at Toys R Us. Well, by that argument, then most of CMON games are boutique items. They are. I suppose. No
, I agree. They are. And to be fair, I would rather see CMON. In particular, CMON is a frustrating one because of the sheer power they have in in the marketplace to to drive down other creators. I seem for their I don't know. I personally see it more as a why not both? Like the platform handles CMON, which still again, CMON isn't a giant. They're not huge. They're not putting anyone out of a sort of business by producing games. And the same way that Hasbro isn't hasn't ruined the entire board ga
me. Ask anyone who launches a board game on the day that CMON does, whether or not CMON's competitive. That's what they think. But I don't think it's true. I don't I don't think it's that limited a market. I think there are people in the market for CMON and people in the market for indie games, and I don't think one's stealing from the other. It's the it's the people who argue that Dungeons and Dragons shouldn't exist because it takes away from the little guys. I'm like, no, they're both allowed
to exist. I agree. But I think if I'm not just the dragons was crowdfunding on Kickstarter, we might have a different system. We might have we might have a different argument. And that's the problem, because I mean, we've seen and we know people who have said, oh, great, I launched the same day as CMON or somebody else or somebody else were canceling this kick start and we're going to try again. Yeah. And I've never seen that actually proven like it's all conjecture. It's all people I feel like
I'm competing with CMON. And I'm like, I don't think you are. I think that's more of a misconception than a reality. I don't know. Maybe that maybe the data is out there. Yeah, I mean, again, I don't have data in hand, but I know, you know, the the the common belief is and what people have seen is, you know, we we launched a one CMON launched on the same day as us. We weren't aware. We didn't get any sales day one. So we canceled it. But then we launched, we relaunched and we did get sales day
one. So, you know, again, it's it's anecdotal. But I think there is some some strength to it. Possibly. Now we were mentioning CMON a lot. And the one thing that I think is the elephant in the room as far as CMON is CMON started off one person turn who started the company as a hot or not for miniatures and launched their first game on Kickstarter. And that's where they got their started. They were the small guy. They were the company that didn't have all the material and all the stuff in place a
nd the production and anything. They needed the money to get that first game out there. They were that little guy. Absolutely. And I think that's that's fantastic. Now, I have questions whether or not another CMON could happen today. This runs into the same problem as the Facebook problem. Right. You know, Facebook was the little guy that the the upstart who took down some of the other social networks. But who's going to take down Facebook right now? Because Facebook has become too big to fail.
I'm not saying CMON is too big to fail, but they are certainly. I'm pretty sure there's a certain electric car company guy could buy it and completely scrap it. I don't know. I mean, for better or worse, X still hasn't failed. Yeah, that's true. And and the fact of the matter is, you know, the there are these large companies and CMON is not the only one. They're just the fun one to say. But, you know, there are Asmodee trickle down companies that are that are kickstartering as well, I believe. A
nd there are a number of other large companies using Kickstarter as their platform because Kickstarter has made itself the requirement for many people to go out there. So that drives up the cost of the Kickstarter of, you know, your marketing and who you're who's who's talking about it. And day one promotion by all the different influencers and board game geek advertising and getting people to pre sign up because they want all of that stuff. All of that you have to do whether you kickstart or no
t, though. That's just the modern board game industry and marketing games. That's because Essen, 3000 games every year are released. We double check that number for last year. 3000 new games you're competing with. It doesn't matter if you're on Kickstarter or not. You have to pay influencers and you have to buy banner ads and you have to do all that. Yeah, Kickstarter has nothing to do with that. Well, except you have to do that all on Kickstarter and give them five percent on top of all this ad
vertising and the things you're doing. Because I think that five percent is totally worth it in that case because you're still doing all that stuff anyway. And now you also get the hype from Kickstarter. Except what hype this Kickstarter actually doing. We've seen the actual platform itself has done very little. And there have been some questionable moves by some of their game people as to what they support in the past in the past. I can't speak to anything right now, but they have made some pre
tty questionable maneuvers in the past with former employees and things that, you know, put some doubt towards whether or not it's going. I know if I go to Kickstarter right now, I'm going to see one of a couple of games and it's probably by a major publisher. It's usually either by Cephalofair or by. Well, I was by Cephalofair there over on BackerKit now, but I you know, if Cephalofair had something, it was always at the top of my feed. I'll see something from Green Ronin, who while not a giant
publisher, are significantly larger than a lot of the people out there when we're coming up on Zine Month. And that's what I see. I also see a lot of junk on electronics, but that's just because of my habits. Well, that's what you Kickstarter Kickstarter purchasing. But I don't know. Maybe it's based on your profile. When I go there, I still see a mix. I see a mix of the big games and I see a mix of the fresh projects first created first, you know, the dream games, the the the the the the the t
rying to think of the term dream games, not the word I was looking for, but I think you know what I mean? Like the someone has a dream. They want to get their game out there. I still see a mix of both. And while, yes, the the big ones are flashier and tend to catch your attention. But the other ones are still there. I to me, it's still a CMON in particular, Asmodee, any of the big ones. To me, it's still the the rising ship lifts or rising tide lifts all boats. Like because the other thing I thi
nk that comes out of this is when you get those big CMON Kickstarters and someone checks it out and like, my God, this looks awesome here. We'll use an example of one that's currently live. This isn't on Kickstarter, but the Master Universe one is going on right now. This is that game found. But like someone is out there is a massive fan is going to buy that game. So Master Universe fan, they're going to get the game. They're going to get home. They're going to love it. And they're going to be l
ike, man, I wonder if there's other games like this. And then they're going to go to their local game store. They're going to go on Facebook or they're going to Google it or they're going to ask their friends and people are going to be like, hey, check out this other game. And to me, Kickstarter is just making board gaming and those type of games more accessible to the general public and raising public awareness about it. When you get a front page of whatever newspaper end up in the New York Tim
es, because it's the most money raised by a Kickstarter ever. And it happens to be a board game. You get people who had no clue, didn't care, never thought about board games since they played Monopoly as kids going, what's this Gloomhaven thing? What's this Frosthaven thing? What's going on with this MCDM RPG? I think well, I think there is going to be some of what you said. I think the larger part would be people who will go there and say, oh, what is this Gloomhaven? And perhaps they've got mo
ney to spare. Perhaps they buy Gloomhaven and they are not board gamers. And it's a disaster. And it either goes on to the resale market or it it sours them on modern board gaming. One of the things that I saw people talking about when I was doing a little bit of research into this and and trying to feel out people's thoughts on it is there are a whole lot of people who kickstart and have a pretty good idea that it's going to be garbage, but they know that if they get it and they can turn it aro
und and make a profit quickly flipping before the game has, you know, hit everyone's shelves and you know, they're they're just making it even worse. And so that's part of the issue with this whole, oh, it was a successful game. Now maybe someone will keep it in stores. Well, it wasn't necessarily a successful game. There's, you know, profit being made on there. There are there are scalpers out there in the board game world because in part because they are not using the retail chain. If the game
was going to hit retail, the the scalper market wouldn't be as potent. It's always going to be there. You can't you can't completely avoid scalpers. But if someone knows that in a month I can go to my FLGS and check out the game and buy it, why would I, you know, deal with the whole FOMO? I missed out. I better I better buy a copy for seven hundred dollars on eBay. Right. Yeah, I not a fan of scalping. It's that to me is more of a problem than people using Kickstarter as a pre-order system comp
letely. I'm that that's me. And the fact there's now companies out there that that's all they do that are that are founded on the premise. They're like, we're legitimate. We just back every Kickstarter so you can buy it later. I'm like, no, you're a scalper with a flippin' pretty web page. I'm not going to call out any particular companies. And I do not like that practice whatsoever. That, I think, it says more of a problem than it. But then the other thing you just brought up to also leads us t
o something we didn't even have as a bullet point to talk about tonight. And that is stretch goals, which is something the community created. That was not an initial part of crowdfunding. That was something someone came up with a great idea to make exclusives. And that's where you get the problem with scalpers and FOMO, because even if the game does go to retail, because my favorite Kickstarter is a game that wouldn't have existed that now exists that goes to retail that everyone can buy and you
can get at Toys R Us and Barnes and Noble. Right. That to me, those are the real successes. But then there's the stretch goals, the games that go to retail. But then you have the lesser version, the the why have it. But I don't have the cool version with the thing because I didn't back it on Kickstarter. Well, and again, that's you know, we've talked about this ad nauseam. You know, it's great if you put in a bunch of gold coins and cool miniatures that nobody actually needs. And the retail ver
sion just gets basic meeple and tokens. It's when they put in additional rules that you cannot get elsewhere or additional game aspects that you can't expand. Chins or yeah, extra campaigns, gigantic flipping miniatures that also count as boards. Now, one of the things is that like, I don't know, I almost feel like Kickstarter should have a rule against some of that. But I mean, to me, that's something that I think the market needs to just to deal with itself. I think I think the market should p
unish people who are doing that. You know, if they are going to put out Kickstarter, you know, exclusives that make the game actually less of a game versus less of a cool toy, then, you know, people should not back that Kickstarter. But I know that also won't. Yeah, well, it's easy to be fair. That's the only reason I would back a Kickstarter nowadays. I have completely backed off on backing Kickstarter's because so many of them that do hit retail are so much cheaper after the fact. Right. Like
part of what I do as a tabletop bellhop is I chase game deals. You wouldn't believe how many of these games that people are paying ridiculous prices for end up in in bargain basement prices. I'm not long after the Kickstarter's end and I get some hate from it going. I can't believe you shared this when the backers still and I'm like, hey, that's not me. I'm just trying to point out that I can get a cheap game here. But I see the frustration of the backers when some of these games come out way ch
eaper once they do hit retail. And then I'm like, well, what was the whole point of kick starting it in the first place, then, if that's all that was going to happen? Well, I think part of this is and Roger's talked a little bit about this. So Roger saying it's great when you can try out a game or read the rules or whatever before putting down your money on Kickstarter. And I agree. One of the big differences between something like pre-ordering a video game versus actually kick starting a board
game is in many cases, not all, but in many cases and increasingly more cases, you do get a feel for what the game is going to be. Hopefully you're seeing real product on in their pictures and not renderings. Hopefully you're seeing, you know, current rule books and tabletop simulator or what have you digital versions. Now, the problem, unfortunately, is you're not always going to get the newer version. Again, most of these games are coming out. So let's say 18 months after the Kickstarter is fi
nished between fulfillment, et cetera, et cetera. So if we say that, you know, these games still continue to evolve some at that point. And a lot of times you're not necessarily seeing you didn't play the same game on the Kickstarter. Yeah. And the game might very well suck. And it might actually, you know, someone paid $180 to get or $500 to go all in on Kickstarter. And the game, when they get it, has some really cool minis. Yeah. Yeah. I know it's three bucks. Where now here's where I do have
a problem with. I don't know if it's Kickstarter, Kickstarter users, Kickstarter communication is the people who literally do think of it as a pre-order system because despite the fact that's how people are using it, that's not what it is. Right. Like it's more of a you are investing in a game and you don't own it. It's both also the theory that you're investing in the game. And now you own a part of that game and have the right to, you know, yell at the producers and tell them they made their
game wrong compared with the. Well, I guarantee this should have been a good game. It's not I want to refund by making it feel like retail. It feels like Walmart where you buy something and bring it home. And if it sucks, you return it. Right. Because that's how people treat most mass market businesses. And I think people handling Kickstarter, that's that's where you get into the problem with considering it a pre-order system. Like I said, at the same time, considering it an investment and you'r
e an investor, you're not. Yeah, you're absolutely not. The term you're investing in Kickstarter, but you are not an investor. To be fair, I think it would actually be better if we had a new something where where companies like CMON and other and other companies, again, established companies and only large companies, but established companies that have an organization could go to for investment. You're not for pre-order, not for that. I need money. I need investment. You know, again, because I'm
sure a lot of the venture capitalists who are dealing in the tech market are going to touch the board game market. Don't understand the board game market. It's completely different. But there is a lot of money out there in the in the, you know, in this sort of investment in venture capital that could be going to board games. And I think a venture capital market for board games could take some of these heavy weights off of Kickstarter and allow some of the the smaller, smaller groups, smaller co
mpanies who aren't ready for investment in their company, but still have product to distribute to have a little more of a level playing field on the platform. Yeah, that's possible. There's been some attempts at this. There's one currently that keeps reaching out to us to talk to us and wants us to interview them. Like, there's been a couple of attempts at it. And I don't know, like Roger is saying in the chat, I think the margins are just too narrow. And like I've had people reach out to me and
utilize the the concierge part and consulting with me on board games who think they're about to make it big by investing in kickstarters to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, I'm telling them. And I'm like, no, it's just it's not that big. You're not going to get this. Like, well, we're going anyway and you can be part of it. And then within a month or like, yeah, we drop the board game sector of this thing. And because it's like board games are big to us, but in a global mark
et, it's nothing. Although you say that. But then we've got Asmodee, we've got Hasbro and we've got I forget whoever that other the other one, the other big players, three, the big three of the big Mattel being. Yeah. Well, they're not as much board game, but. But, you know, they've got the big players and they can make money. They do have the margins because they have brought in the they aren't. You know, everything isn't going outside. They have their own infrastructure. They are doing it inte
rnally. They're keeping the money for themselves. And that's the step that some of these other companies could make should make. And maybe it would mean they get eaten up by Hasbro ('till all are one.) Asmodee, you know, or Asmodee. But is that a bad. Embracer group. That's. Yes, Embracer Group. There we go. But they own Asmodee now. So that's I mean, Ravensburger, the the the Disney company, the Disney card game company. Yes. But, you know, there are, you know, I'm going to stop you because we'
re now getting into how could Kickstarter be better, which I don't think was the whole point of the topic. I think we want to talk about where Kickstarter was, what we think it should be, not propose alternatives at this point. Maybe that'll be another follow up episode is what could people do instead of Kickstarter, which would be better for the industry. But to me, that's a whole other topic. I'm playing moderator. So we had a bunch of points and we just went so off track that I don't know wha
t we've talked about and haven't talked about. So I'll let you pick it up with whatever next topic you want to talk about, because my show notes are kind of lost at this point. So I think at one point we see, you know, we we jumped away from it. We were talking about, in fact, the kids started a reason to be the only fish in the pond. There's Kickstarter, there's Backer kit, there's game found. There's Hasbro with their platform. You know, there are a number of these doing this. Kickstarter is t
he sort of the gorilla in the room. They're the biggest one because they got a head start on a lot of people. But there are a lot of other crowdfunding platforms as well that just don't do anything with board games or maybe have a couple of board games because people don't know any better. They get lost in their, you know, IndieGoGo or, you know, game. Well, IndieGoGo, I think, was it was a real competitor for a bit there, especially in the RPG industry. They angered a lot of people, though, bec
ause of their their alternate funding format. Yes. The you get the money regardless. So the GoFundMe kind of version of Kickstarter. Yeah. And I mean, you know, GoFundMe is still out there. You know, if people need to pay their medical bills in the States, GoFundMe is the place they're going to go. And I'm sure there were probably some card games and things that are sitting on GoFundMe as well. But each industry, you know, there there seems to be I was looking at a list of current crowdfunding p
latforms and it seems like every almost every industry has a platform of some sort that they do crowdfunding on. It just happens to be the Kickstarter is the one that everyone knows. It's the Kleenex of crowdfunding, essentially. It is. They got in on the ground for it. You know, eBay is the auction site. I remember when we were on eBay in 1994 and there were alternatives then. Right. It just it's the place people go. Now, I don't even think that I'm sure there are some underground ones and some
ones that are like legit auctions. But I don't think Kickstarter is going away. But I just found it fascinating. How many gamers were frustrated by Kickstarter for not quite providing what they wanted? Now, the problem I saw is every gamer wants something different out of it that splintered off into these other ones. And I'm totally blanking on the one that it's only RPGs because I'm not into RPGs that often. But like game found like their name is game found. It was specifically created for boa
rd games. And they managed to woo big names like Cephalofair, right? Like Frost Haven funded on that and broke records, but they weren't Kickstarter records. Well, they didn't know where they on Backerkit. I thought Backer. I thought they went to back. Are they back or kids? I think Cephalofair went to back. So it's interesting because again, all these, you know, Backerkit and game found both started off as fulfillment companies. So they were the next percentage that got pulled off the top. So,
you know, Kickstarter takes its 5 percent. And then the credit companies take their 5 percent. And now either your fulfillment company or your fulfillment group, whatever that is, they're taking their percent. And then your
manufacturers are taking their percent. And it adds up to a lot real quickly when you start adding up all these percentages. Again, you go back to CMON, 45 million dollar profit for 600 thousand dollars revenue because when you're 70, this is a takeaway. I think everyone shou
ld take away. People have to realize and when a Kickstarter makes three million dollars, that doesn't mean they made three million dollars profit. I see that so often. People put that company made three million dollars. I'm like, no, the company probably made 40,000 dollars. Like enough to pay one person a year's salary, sort of, you know, not the final price amount of a Kickstarter is not the awesome money that company just raked in, right? They have to make the game. They have to pay the peopl
e. They have to put the art in. They have to ship. They have to wear a hose. This, you know, again, something we have talked about in the past when the games make millions, when they're expecting 100,000 and they make a two million, that's usually a bad sign. Because that changes the scale of things. And as the scale changes, all the prices that they'd gone in expecting all that that entire budget that they'd had when they walked into the project and asked for 100,000 dollars, when they made two
million, those budgets are gone. They're all thrown out the window. Yeah. And we've seen a lot. Well, I got to say it's better now. And people have learned from a past experience or whatever. But we saw a lot of projects fail because of that, because of the scale. And over promising because they start making that money, they start offering more like, oh, we're at three million. We're going to throw in another book. We're going to hire another author. We're going to whatever. And that's what kil
ls them is the ones that do well are the ones that go, here's what we're offering. This is all we're offering. And holy crap, it made five million dollars. Not the ones are like, we want 100,000. Well, we're at 500,000. What else can we give you to get more people? Like they fall into this trap of just piling on more stuff that becomes impossible to deliver because again, all that money is supposed to be there to provide you the initial thing. Right. Like that's what people are actually paying f
or is the first thing you offer, not all these bonuses. Yeah, like the great thing, you know, we've seen some of our our friends in the RPG space have been like, look, if we make extra, we're going to pay everyone a little more. Yeah, I love that. That's fantastic. That's what we'd love to see. You know, we're actually going to make, you know, slightly better than market rate for our artists for a change. You know, they'll have they'll have dinner this month. Now there are we are talking about.
You're right. Red Meeple Ryan did bring up the the oopsie that Kickstarter had that they have kind of swept under the rug now. They did come out in support of NFTs and crypto-currency. And they came out long, urgent, strong. And in doing so, they actually enabled Backerkit and GameFound. Yeah, I think Backerkit and GameFound wouldn't have existed, wouldn't have made it if it wasn't for that. Well, I think GameFound might have, but GameFound's roll-out plan was massively accelerated. They had bee
n working on a Kickstarter concept. There was a lot of sort of behind the scenes things going on. And they saw the notes from Kickstarter about NFTs and they accelerated their project massively. And it had some it had some growing pains. I saw some people who were really not happy with the system. Yeah, the initial launches did not go as well as they hoped. And I mean, you and I, you and I on our Sunday show, you know, we would poke around at GameFound and try and figure out why is this the sort
? You know, it just wasn't a clean, smooth start because they had been forced to market and they made they made the most of it. You know, they they they weathered the rough seas and seem to have come out ahead of it ahead because of it. Yeah. And I think we'll continue to see various other attempts. In general, the one thing Kickstarter did that I have to give them credit for is just making crowdfunding acceptable. It's at the point now where almost there's a way to crowd fund anything. Right. L
ike it's the platform for reduce producing indie games, both digital and physical has their own itch funding. Now, a number of different companies have their own Kickstarter themed style crowdfunding slash pre-order systems to determine if they're making games. The the GMT Games P 500 system to me is a perfect example of a mashup of crowdfunding and pre-orders, because if you don't get enough pre-orders, the game isn't even made, whereas if they get enough orders, they make the game. But everyon
e who backed I'm going to use the term back gets a bonus. Right. Like which is a highly discounted price for the first print run. But then the game goes to market. Right. Like this is just part of their product life-cycle for every game they make. Now, like every game they produce, they go, well, we put it through P 500 first. And some games, everyone wants like in a day, they've got their 500 and it's 500 because if 500 people pre-order, they make the game. That's what's pre-order 500. But it's
got that crowdfunding aspect of giving you a discount and giving you a pre-order systems. And I'm like, that is awesome. Now, Ryan saying sometimes it takes years before they trigger. That does happen for some games, but others it's within a day. Right. Like you put out, I don't know, I off the top of my head. Thunder Road came out very quickly. It's a NASCAR based racing system. It's fantastic. Well, then they put out a Mad Max version. Apocalypse Road that took forever and kind of slipped ont
o the radar because by the time it actually came out, the people were hyped about it. We're like, oh, yeah, that's right. I backed that on P 500. Yeah, I think one interesting thing that I think could actually solve it. And I. Again, we're back to solving again. We are. But I mean, again, to Kickstarter is a good thing. I don't want Kickstarter to go away. I want Kickstarter to improve. But I think one of the routes to improvement on that platform is shrinking it a little bit. Not a lot. It does
n't have to. You know, we still want a lot of games. We just want some of the I just want some of the the giant players. Away. And one of the things I was noticing that surprised me when I was researching crowdfunding is Patreon is considers itself crowdfunding. Yeah. And to me, I think, you know, it would be simple to be able to back, you know, seem on as a patron for five dollars a month. And if they want a new game, you know, if they want to put out a new game, they could they could pre-order
crowdfunded through Patreon through that system. It's I mean, I have the opposite problem. Like you see a problem with big companies in Kickstarter. When I see big companies on Patreon, I'm like, what is this? Double dipping your fans? Like there's a bunch of big RPG and board game companies that have Patreon accounts, and that's where I get the feeling like, what are you doing? Patreons for the little guys. So I guess your feelings on Kickstarter, the feeling I have with those people were on P
atreon. Fair. And I don't know why I'm not trying to justify it. I didn't think about this till you brought it up. So I haven't like sat down and analyzed why I feel this way. But like I'm not going to call it specific companies. But I'm like, I'll be on their Facebook page and it's like back or our Patreon. I'm like, what the heck do you need a Patreon for? Just sell your damn games like and you're constantly in your Facebook group going back or Patreon back or Patreon. I'm like to me, it just
felt like double dipping your fans. You're like, your fans are already going to buy your games. Why are you begging them for more money? Well, and I think there is definitely a marketing aspect there, right? If you are on a company's Patreon, they have a direct connection with you that can help them reduce some of their marketing costs elsewhere. You know, if I find following Facebook, I join their Facebook group or I join their newsletter like there's other ways to do that. Whereas newsletters
are an excellent thing. Newsletters are fantastic. And I won't, you know, newsletters are put as like having your newsletter and putting it behind a paywall. But maybe newsletter, but only for five. But Facebook is not a good. Some people do that. Facebook because of the algorithm, you never know what people are going to see. So while yes, you do. I would I would put Patreon and newsletters in the same vein because they they are that direct to you marketing that pretty much isn't going to fail.
How's that different than Kickstarter? Because as soon as someone backs your Kickstarter, they didn't get this direct line through updates. Yeah, but you've got to back them. You've got you've got to back first. That's the thing you can back at a buck. How is that different than you get a Patreon? Well, the back at the back of the buck is a whole other problem with taking money from Kickstarter and giving it to crowd. You know, the game found and and and back or. Well, yeah, I'm not talking abou
t the back of the buck. The back at a dollar. And we'll sell you all these add ons. I don't even think we want to talk about add ons. I'm not touching. I'm just saying, like, like charging, like you're getting into life drawing to your customers. I mean, you get the same thing for Kickstarter, especially compared to Patreon. Well, I guess Patreon technically now allows free follows. But before that, you're still paying for that direct line. It's just you're doing it on Kickstarter. You're doing
it like to me, that's exactly the same. I'm sure I again, I get in that communication back and forth and that direct you feel part of something. You add to me, that's exact same because that is something Kickstarter does bring for people like when I first started on Kickstarter, that's the part I miss from it now. But it's more my own fault for not taking part is the camaraderie of it. So I've comments to start. I avoid them like the play. Yeah. And then and part of my hate for Kickstarter is in
fact marketing. I have, you know, I I backed a couple of comic books. Oh, the amount of spam you get afterwards. And, you know, five years later, I'm getting spam about other comic books and other releases and friends of friends of designers. And it's there are ways to shut it off. Every once in a while I find a click, but they definitely do not make it easy. Whereas again, newsletters really easy. You opt in or you opt out and legally they have to have an opt out right there in the in the bott
om of the email. So again, as a as a platform in that way, there are still some significant issues with Kickstarter's system. But what I liked about it when it was new is you felt like you were part of making something. So this is going way back to like Wasteland, who the video game Kickstarter Shadowrun. I remember Wasteland on their final day did a live stream and like I watched it. That was one of those backers that made them make it. And the whole place had a party and they're cracking champ
agne. And there was pizza. And I felt like I'm like, I helped make this happen, right? You don't really get that anywhere else except through crowdfunding. And like Kickstarter in particular seems to be really good for that. With the caveat of you also get a whole other side of having to deal with people in the comments. But back then, like no one was complaining. All the comments for those and some were late delayed and everything else were just like fans of the game excited to see new stuff co
ming and talking to each other. Oh, I can't wait to see if this is part of the game or this is in here. And and the lead developers in the chat going, we're thinking out in this. What do you get? Like there was a whole sense of being part of something. But I think that's something Kickstarter created that they did. But then we've moved past that and we've gone on to Ryan's calling it the spectacle board game spectacle where it's just it's this big. And again, I'm using the word corporate as a as
an organization, not as a big company. Again, these aren't giant companies, but they are being very corporate in their handling of things. And if if you are getting that experience, if you are, it is a very deliberate and focused experience to make you feel any specific way, not anything natural, like a bunch of people who just created a board game and are having fun and really, you know, pop in champagne because oh my God, I can't believe people actually liked our idea. That's that doesn't hap
pen. You get some of that on the RPG side of things. I don't know about small indie board games, because as you know, we've moved away from talking about and looking into small indie board games because reasons that that's a whole other episode and stuff we brought up before. But I think you still get that from some of the the the RPG kickstarters, but just from friends of ours. Well, I think RPGs are small potatoes compared to I mean, you know, we talk about general. We talk about we talk about
CMON. I don't think there's really any as small as CMON might be. I don't think there's any RPG companies on Kickstarter that are comparing maybe free league. I don't know. Free league Monte Cook games. Well, I don't think money cooks anywhere near CMON numbers. And now, well, they're not publicly traded for one. But, you know, it's it's it again, it's you're sort of stepping down whereas board games are because they are physical, because there is something you are getting in a big box, big box
es oftentimes. You know, there's there's more money being then. Then again, you get something like the right IP as proven by a certain airbender that. Well, yeah. Well, that's I looked up Invisible Sun, the last Invisible Sun. This is the reprint raised six hundred thousand more than six hundred thousand. But that's only six hundred thousand. That's pennies for for the big board game of things. Whereas, yeah, it's not getting in the million. Whereas airbender was ten million dollar. Yeah. But ag
ain, that's I don't know the size of them. I know they're not a big company, but it is a established company. We'll we'll call it they are. They are not a large. Yeah, it's so hard to talk about these companies, right? Like our sponsor, the sponsor of our show Grand Gamers Guild is two full time employees like two. Right. They're bigger than tabletop. El hop is three part time employees. Well, one full time to full time, one part time employee. But like there's three of us. Right. We're bigger t
han Grand Gamers Guild, theoretically. Yeah. It's so hard to talk about it that way. Any of these board game comes to me, talk about being big. Like none of them like, CMON's big Asmodee's big. But that's an investment company that owns all kinds of different little smaller subsidies and it's a mess. Right. Hasbro is is is the one big company I would think. Yeah. Anyway, we should we've talked about other different platforms. So I'll say the thing I was the big thing I find and is the Kickstarte
r does and game founds pretty good at where Indiegogo, I think, failed is is the hype engine, the marketing like more than anything these days. Kickstarter is a hype machine when used properly. Well, yes, some companies are using it as a pre-order system. Even the ones I know that are using as a pre-order system, that's incidental. Like they're only on there because you have to be on there or people don't notice you or people don't don't see it or don't take it seriously. You're the your chance
of being in the New York Times or on the front cover of a magazine or zero unless you happen to make it big on Kickstarter. I know you can't like count on that, but that's that's the goal. Right. You want to be that next big? You beat out Frosthaven, you beat out MCDM, you beat out Avatar. Like I know a number of people in the industry, like in insider groups who believe failure to crowd-fund, failure to crowd-fund on Kickstarter is just a bad business decision. Every game should go through Kick
starter because that's how you get noticed. You can have all the funding you want. You can have the game published ready to go ready for market. But you still like if you're ready, you've done everything. You pay for your art. You have your own videos and everything still going Kickstarter just to try to get that Kickstarter buzz to hit catch that lightning of the hotness, right? End up on the bottom of the page, end up on the front page, get the little Kickstarter. What is it? Sponsor, whatever
they say. The preferred program. I can't remember what they do. They put a little K on your project. Which means using the platform for advertising, pre previews, professional videos, getting things on board game, geek, all of that. And another big one is hitting the board game geek hotness. So it's that is just all part of marketing a successful game nowadays. Now, I'm not saying this is good or bad. I'm just saying this is coming from actual industry insiders who are like, you can't do anythi
ng else now. This is the way it's done. See, and I find that to be bullshit. I, you know, I know we're not explicit here and I'll probably end up bleeping that out during the show. But I think that sounds like a lot of people who are invested in Kickstarter and invested in consulting on Kickstarters and getting their content up on other people's Kickstarters because boop. didn't kickstart. Nope. boop. is one of the biggest games of 2023. It won awards. It was raved about for better or worse. We
loved it. We thought it was a good game. It didn't kickstart. Smirk and Dagger is not as moody, is not CMON is not what has is not Hasbro. Smirk and Dagger are far from a giant company. No, they're not. And boop. is a success. I don't know what he made, but they got all the advertising and influence that they needed without going through Kickstarter. So it's absolutely possible to do without Kickstarter. I think a lot of people also like to hang on Kickstarters and Kickstarter funders and Kickst
arter. There is a market that surrounds Kickstarters. And to be fair, we're we're sort of part of that. I mean, we get our content up on Kickstarter too. But it's you know, there is an investment some people have in having things go to Kickstarter. It benefits them as well as the companies doing it. And so some of those insiders on Facebook groups, I take with a huge grain of salt. But these are publishers I'm talking about. Not consultants, not marketers, not these are publishers. And they're p
robably publishers who haven't had anything go big outside of Kickstarter when and that's fair. I mean, if Kickstarter is how they have made their money and and how they have found success, great, more power to them. Right. I encourage that. But to say that you have to have Kickstarter is patently false. Um, so, you know, it's there. There is a lot of marketing and money and things you can that you can spend. If you market properly and you get things into the right people's hands. That marketing
all still happens without Kickstarter and without the 5% paying off of Kickstarter. And yeah, but you're not also not getting the crowdfunding to pay for that marketing without Kickstarter or some other crowdfunding. Very true. Because that's part of the catch 22, right? If you can afford to do all that marketing, you probably don't need Kickstarter, whereas if you can't afford to do that marketing, you use Kickstarter and it's part of the marketing as well as generating funding to pay for that
marketing. Again, though, I don't know. I don't see marketing from Kickstarter. I see marketing on Kickstarter. I see marketing from companies who have their products on Kickstarter. Right. But I'm saying it's not going to the marketing. But again, that's not coming from Kickstarter. Yes, but it's not coming from Kickstarter because you have to put a put the the the ads on board game geek to get people to go to your Kickstarter so that when the Kickstarter is over, you get money. You have to ha
ve money before the Kickstarter. Right. But you go into debt with that and you take it alone to get that money that you're going to pay back with the Kickstarter. I know as someone who is paid to market a Kickstarter that I wouldn't have got paid unless it was funded. And I wasn't paid until they were paid by Kickstarter. That's just that business. But that legit happened. I was part of it. Like I've done that. I've been in that position. I helped promote a Kickstarter. Yeah, that's you. But I'm
saying that's that's you're using Kickstarter to make the money. Like the crowdfunding isn't just production of the game or shipping. There's it's all the other stuff. It's paying the artists, paying the writers. It's well, yeah, that's all the other stuff. You're you are asking for something. If you are. So if you are asking for art from somebody that's going to go into a book. You can pay them when you're going to make the book because the book isn't made yet when the Kickstarter happens. But
advertising is something that happens before. And I'm sorry, I don't do advertising. There aren't too many companies to do advertising on spec. That's kind of ridiculous. So I'm saying it happens and it's not uncommon for Kickstarter. You know, that's that's all sorts of questionable. I would have I would have I would have suggested you not do that. I don't know. Anyway, that's that's not. I did it once and I'll never do it again, but I did it once. So, yeah, it's again, there's there's a whole
lot going on. There is no it's all gray. It's all gray area. There is no black and white. That's for sure. Yeah. And we are definitely not going to solve the kick starting situation today. No, no, not even close. But I think it was it was interesting and fun to have a discussion about it, because we do have very different opinions on it and and ideas about where it where it was, where it is and where it should be. I still if anyone can find me the initial like when Kickstarter launched, what wa
s their mission? What was their their stated goal? I want to know. I want to know if that's something that that they stated outright or if that's something creators wanted, expected. Just like, oh, this is what I think it should be used for. What was it actually designed to be used for? I would love to know that. All right. Well, let's see now. Another thing I just want to finish off with is personally, I think Kickstarter and crowdfunding and all of this Amazon online sales. It's just an entire
shift happening in the distribution model for board games, which I think is now partly driven by the transportation issues everyone faced during covid, because I have seen a distinct change since coming. But are we in I don't even know if we're even in a pandemic anymore officially, but since everything relaxed endemic and endemic last time I looked, it was still supposedly in Canada. We were in a pandemic. I don't know if that's still true. It seems endemic now, but whatever that it just and t
hat and the ease at which you can now shop online makes buying games direct from a publisher like skipping Kickstarter or just getting through Kickstarter. So much easier than it's ever been. Like I know we don't know a number of publishers who, as they're calling it a boutique model, which I guess that's better than bespoke. It's a model where they are selling direct to customers. And those customers include retail and friendly local game stores trying to remove the distributor, which I know is
terrible for distribution chain and the people who are in it, but kind of makes sense to me. And I don't know if this is going to ruin like like a lot of people that Kickstarter ruins retailer, it's putting our FLGS out of business. I don't think it's doing that. I just think it's shifting to a new model, which I don't know. Maybe it's better. Maybe it's worse. It's just times are changing. Yeah, it's interesting because part of the benefit of a distribution model is if I open up a store in. No
where, Ontario, I can reach out to the Canadian distribution market for board games. And in the past, I would have had access to the major, you know, any games that were published in Canada, more or less. Whereas now that is not even remotely the case. I know my FLGS in Hamilton had employees sitting there on Kickstarter because the only way they could get retail stuff was the distributor and sitting on Kickstarter, ordering and backing Kickstarter for retail versions. Which is horrible. I mean,
my God, that's just a really bad way to encourage people to sell your product is to make them do so much more work rather than again. Distribution distributors have their own problems. No one is saying that the existing or previous distribution model was great. There was all I'm sure there's, you know, everyone will have stories to tell about that. But the elimination of it means each of those game stores now needs to go to all of the different publishers to try and find games to buy and stock
and deal with a thousand different shipping costs and shipping rates from different places and, you know, all of the importing fees and this, that and the other thing. Each store now essentially needs a shipping and receiving department as well as a purchasing department for sourcing and finding games. And that's unfortunate because that is going to limit how many little game stores you can have. And that's also you're going to get the little guys lost in the mix, right? Because you're not going
to have the distributor who's like, hey, you're having a bunch of cool mini or not games. We're going to throw in these six other games by them. We think you'll enjoy because that was a thing, right? Like you're going to, you're going to sell your box. You sell by the box and you're like, you throw in a couple other games in there that may not have gotten ordered. And that's how the indie stuff gets mixed in with everything else. And no longer is the whole, we don't even quite know what we're g
etting, but the new games show up on Wednesday. That's kind of gone too. Now it's, it's, you're only going to order now. I understand too, because of the other end of the model is the stuff can sit on the sell forever model of retail is pretty much gone out the window, right? You need to turn over a lot more than you used to. And having something there that doesn't sell is taking up room for something that could. Absolutely. But at the same time, that's where we get into, you know, encouraging F
LGS is to do open play nights. And, you know, there are things this game store can do to move product as well as, you know, just having it sit there and that that's a whole, well, we've done, there are other episodes. We've got episodes on that. Go check those out. Um, so it's interesting. I guess, uh, you know, what we get to is, uh, what do you, the audience think, um, you know, are crowdfunding games, the way of the future for everything? Uh, maybe. Or is crowdfunding going to, you know, have
it today, be the next NFT and be NFT and be relegated to history. Uh, let us know what you think about it in the comments or join us on the tabletop bellhop discord at discord.tabletopbellhop.com. I'm sure Sean will talk to you at length about this topic. Um, you'd love to chat with you about the merits and flaws of Kickstarter, uh, back when it started, where it is now. And what do you think some good alternatives would be? And now a word from our sponsor, Grand Gamers Guild. So the game that
introduced us to Grand Gamers Guild is Gorinto. This is an abstract tile placement and drafting game that we honestly fell in love with. It features fantastic Upwords style plastic tiles, as well as very engaging and re-playable gameplay. We raved about this game a lot in the past and still continue to bring it up regularly, most recently on last week's episode about the best games to come from Kickstarter. It's also come up on some of our multiple best two player game lists and on our list of u
nderrated hidden gem games. So if somehow you haven't picked up Gorinto, if we haven't sold it to you, check out our review for one, but I got a deal for you. Now is the best time ever to pick it up. Mark has dropped the price of the deluxe edition by 10%. Approximately that's the version we have with the, the 3d round marker, the metal start player coin, and while most important to me at least is the Dragon Tiles expansion, which really does add something gold to the game. This is the time to p
ick it up as an added incentive. And thanks to our fans. If you order this week using our code bellhop, BELLHOP Marc will throw in the fifth player expansion for free. Like, come on. I got to say, thanks Marc for tossing us a bone here. I appreciate this one. I'm seriously, this is one of the best abstract games in my collection. And I dig abstract strategy games. That's, that's some of my favorite types of games. I'd like, you have no excuse now, right? Like, come on. We're giving you a free ex
pansion, 10% off the original price, 10% off with our discount code, go get Gorinto. Welcome to a quick review of the Robots expansion for the monster party game, MonsDRAWsity, an expansion that packed more punch than we expected. MonDRAWsity Robots comes from Eric Slauson, the same designer as the base game. It features artwork from a slew of different artists, all impressive. It was published in 2021 by Deep Water Games who are now known as Friendly Skeleton Games. This is technically the seco
nd expansion to MonDRAWsity. The first one is called Cute Creatures, which we also have, but haven't tried yet. Now this expansion contains 50 new monster cards to add to your monster collection. All of which feature robots, basically robotic looking creatures and things. It also provides you with a new player board, um, upping the overall player count of MonDRAWsity by one. Now, along with this, there is one other big bonus in the box. I had no clue we were getting when I picked up this game, a
totally new way to play MonDRAWsity. You can see Mo's joy at this discovery in our MonDRAWsity Robots unboxing video, which is up on YouTube right now. There, in addition to my surprise, you'll get to see the small box. This expansion comes in with its thin cardboard insert. Honestly, this seems like the kind of thing you're probably going to toss the box out. I won't, sorry, you're going to put it on a shelf somewhere and never recycle it. And it's going to sit there forever. Um, but you're ju
st going to add the cards to the base game box. The new player's board front matches the originals, but it does have the robots graphic on the back of it. Now it is worth noting you don't get an extra dry erase market to go with this. Now, as for the monster cards, the art is fantastic and features a wide variety of robots and different poses with a bonus of not having anything that was overly scary or creepy. If you don't know how to play MonDRAWsity already, go check out our review of the base
game before continuing, as we're about to get into what the robots expansion adds to the game. So the big thing this box is meant to do is give you more monsters to describe and draw, and it does that through 50 new cards with robotic themes. The next thing it does, it's already mentioned is up the player count. Then we get to the surprise. Yeah.
This is the new some assembly required variant rules that are included in robots, which features a more cooperative, though it's still competitive, mo
re cooperative way to play the game. Now, when playing with this variant, the witness gets a full 30 seconds to look at and memorize their card. They then set a 30 second timer and started when they are ready to start describing the monster they saw. So players, the artists start drawing what the witness describes just like normal until the timer runs out. Now that's only 30 seconds. Then they pass their board to the player on the left. A new 30 second timer is started and the witness starts des
cribing again. Players are now adding to the artwork that was passed to them from the last player. Lee continues like this in 30 second segments with each player being passed a different board and adding onto the work done by the other players until they get their board back. Note, if you play with only two players, you should swap boards twice. Next, all the drawings are revealed. The witness picks the one they think best matches the card they saw. Note, they're not allowed to look at the card
at this point. They then flip over the card so the entire group can see it and the artists vote on which one they think best matches the actual card. Now, unlike the regular game, artists are allowed to vote for their own board in this particular case, because they're not the only people that contributed to it. The witness gets a point if the majority of artists vote for the same drawing that they did. Each artist gets a point if they vote for the same drawing the witness picked. A full game has
each player being a witness twice, just like the base game. So here's the thing with this. These new rules, the some assembly required rules, in my opinion, are better than the rules in the base game. Well, I appreciate having another player board, even though it's number 10 and I don't have a number nine, which I guess comes in the cute creatures expansion. And while it's great to have 50 new monsters, like I love it. I want it new monsters. That's why I bought this. But the real prize to me i
n this is this new variant rule. I like the base game. I've played it a few times and I've had fun every time, but this version was immediately more fun. Using some assembly required to me does a great job of leveling the playing field. It makes the game semi-cooperative. It removes any imbalance between the players as far as drawing ability, both in your ability to capture small details or elements, but also drawing speed. It also removes bias from the voting system, which I know most people ca
n claim is not biased, but anytime you're voting for people, there's a tendency to play favorite. Well, at this point, every piece of artwork has been worked on by all players. So that part is removed. This overall makes the game more approachable and better for playing with groups of various ages, game experience, and artistic ability. As well, the intrigue of seeing and contributing to multiple drawings is more engaging, especially when those times when your board comes back to you and you don
't even recognize it as your own board because others have departed so greatly from your initial vision. Yeah, there's always a fantastic part of the game of getting your board back and just seeing what happened to what you started. Now, that said, there is a small potential issue with this game. After playing it multiple times, I did find one small problem with you have a player at the table who thinks they're better than everyone else. Like they, someone who's just so certain they know what th
e witness is describing that they try to fix every drawing they're given instead of just adding to. Because this can erase some of the other players work, which can be insulting. And it can also make it so all the drawings look similar at the end, which makes voting really hard when you're like, well, they all have the exact same thing on them. Well, in our plays, I noted some similarities, really the fact that you're passing it around and only have 30 seconds to work does limit how much damage
one player can do. Yeah, that's true. And this doesn't happen with every group. Like it just came up and I was like, Ooh, okay. I don't like people fixing other people's work because they think they're right. Especially when you get to the end and they weren't right. And now they all have the wrong, same wrong feature on every card. So what I do recommend, and this is something I've had to do when playing with certain players is say there's a no erasing rule where basically I'm saying that you c
an erase if you make a mistake, but just don't, when given a board, all you're allowed to do is add new additional details, not change what's already there. Now, the other thing though, is you also just want to encourage the artist or sorry, the witness to describe the creature in parts. You only have 30 seconds anyway, and that makes it so that each artist is going to focus on a different part of the creature. So you're going to like, you know, start off with the overall kind of shape and body,
and then maybe focus on the head in the next 30 seconds, next 30 seconds, focus on the limbs and then the next 30 seconds, focus on small details. So the more you play the game, the more you're likely to work in this manner anyway, I find describing specific aspects of the image completely, and then moving on to that next aspect is a benefit as it gives the artists more time to focus rather than trying to remember what you said first when you're already on the third detail. So the new rules are
good. As for the new monsters, I dig them. I like them. Um, one of my complaints about the base game is that some of the monsters in the original MonDRAWsity set are a little overly scary or creepy, and there are a lot of potentially phobia inducing insect and arachnid like creatures. So far, I haven't seen anything that I would describe at all, scary, creepy, bros or any of that in robots. This is a much more whimsical expansion with silly looking creatures rather than scary or creepy ones. Th
ough don't think they're easy. There is some detail to these drawings and perspective and obscuration of details that as one would hope makes it anything but obvious how to best describe things in the limited time allowed. Yeah.
And I totally agree. I would actually say the monsters in this set, and I don't know if it's like from learning experience, they, they, they better knew what to tell the artists to do, just seem more dynamic than the ones in the base game. Like there's a wider variety of
poses and there's a lot more like inaction shots, like the things are happening. The one disadvantage I did find with everything being robots is you start to see a lot of repetition in the drawings, um, especially bolts, rivets, and panels, excuse me, especially bolts, rivets and panels. It's not a bad thing, but just enough that you're like, okay, yeah, yep, more rivets yet. Oh, it's, it's another drawing I've got with rivets. Oh, I see the last player or one of the other players has added riv
ets. Um, I just, what it made me want to do is just mix it in with one of the other sets, uh, the base game so that now and then you're drawing rivets. Yeah, no, I think with any of the sets, you're bound to get some repetition as people come up with shortcuts to describe things, but yes, the rivets are possibly more problematic than most details in, uh, in the sets we've come across. Overall, I love Robots. It's fantastic. I love MonDRAWsity Robots. I picked this up to get 50 monster cards. My
youngest daughter should enjoy drawing cause she's into sci-fi robots. And I thought she loved these and they'd be a little less creepy and scary. But then I got bonuses like the ability to play with one more player. As long as I remember to grab an extra dry erase marker, what I need to do is put one in the base game box and won't be a problem, but most importantly, I got a whole new way to play my game that I actually found more fun than the original. All in all, sort of a must buy for fans of
this game. Yeah, I agree. If you enjoy MonDRAWsity at all, pick this expansion up. It's very reasonably priced. And if nothing else, you get 50 new cards to keep the game fresh. Um, the other stuff's going to depend. Like if you have a group of eight, you're probably not going to use that extra board very often. But I think everyone's going to dig these new variant rules. And of course, if the new rules don't work for you, you haven't lost anything and still gained 50 new cards. Now here's the
interesting one. And this is the one that like, I kind of hope people who played MonDRAWsity listen to this. Uh, cause if you own it and didn't love it, or if you know, you wrote to a public play event, you tried it and you're like, nah, I don't need this game. I encourage you to give the game another shot with the expansion and the some assembly required rules, or just try the base game with the some assembly required rules, I guess too. Cause if you, what you didn't like about the game was pla
yers who drew better seem to have an advantage or players who drew quicker, um, did better than anyone else cause they could get more details on the board or you didn't like the potential foibles of a voting system, the variant rules here, fix all of those problems in my opinion. Well, thank you for joining us for this review of MonDRAWsity Robots, an expansion that not only offers more content for a game we already dig, but also offers a whole new way to play that we found better than the origi
nal rules. So what's a game you enjoy that was made better by an optional set of rules? And these could come from an expansion like tonight's review, or it could be a variant included in the core rules, or maybe something you found on port game geek or a local gaming discord. I would love to hear it about, oh yeah, I would love to hear about it in the comments below. Did you dig this review? How about picking us up a coffee through ko-fi.com/tabletopbellhop. You can help keep us caffeinated and
motivated. Join us for a trip to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. As we review The Artemis Project from our sponsor Grand Gamers Guild, who we have to thank for handing over a review copy of this dice placement game that origins 2023. The Artemis Project was designed by Daryl Chow and Daniel Rocchi (might be Rocchi?) I'm not sure which I apologize and features artwork from Josh Cappel and Dominic Mayer was originally kickstarted back in 2019 and is available in three different versions. The retai
l version, the Pioneer edition and the Galileo edition version. We are looking at today is the Galileo edition. It includes 30 metal expedition tokens and everything in the pioneer edition. That includes spot coded box, recess player boards, miniatures for the embassy and snow cat and the alien relic and directives mini expansion, as well as everything in the retail edition. Now note that grand gamers guild themselves only has copies of the pioneer and Galileo versions left. And honestly, if you
're going to pick this game up and I'll get into why later, you want to at least go with the Pioneer Edition. Like the metal tokens and Galileo are nice. You don't need them, but you're going to want those other upgrades. Plus there's the added bonus that if you do buy direct from grand gamers guild, you can use our code bellhop, the BELLHOP to save 10% off. Now getting back to the game info, the Artemis project plays one to five players with the game time. I would say over two hours at the high
er player count getting quicker. The less players you have. While this game does have some meat on it with a board game geek weight rating of 2.83, we found it flows really well and people pick it up quickly with a group of experienced players. The playtime can be much shorter. So in the Artemis project, you're a team of stabilizers helping to build a colony on the ocean moon of Jupiter Europa. You start by harvesting materials and energy under the thick ice crust, building resource generation b
uildings under this icy crust. You'll recruit new colonists as well as train and upgrade the ones you have embark on dangerous expeditions on the moon surface and deal with unpredictable events halfway through the game. Though your focus is going to shift from resource generation to end game scoring as you start to build buildings on the surface. Now, all of this is handled through a unique dice placement and displacement system where what your opponents role is as important as what you rolled,
where player order can really matter and where roll low rolls can be just as useful as high ones. For a look at the components in the Galileo edition of the Artemis project, check out our unboxing video on YouTube. Now, remember, the only thing that you need to Galileo are the metal tokens I open up there. They're kind of near the end. Everything else I show off, you're going to get in the pioneer edition and everything's really top notch. Well, the dual layer player boards work. Well, the icono
graphy in this game is fantastic. The fact that the two main resources are not only different shape, but made up of different materials. You've got translucent plastic cubes versus wood cylinders. And that's fantastic for accessibility. Each of the different colonists types have unique colors and shapes, like lots of great premium updates that are in this game. Now, while some of the components are a bit over the top, like the big chunky embassy miniature and the somewhat silly shake ship drop s
hip for randomizing what colonists show up, it never goes quite too far. And if you really don't like the ship, there's always a drawstring bag that comes with it. Personally, I'm also not a big fan of shuffling tiles and would have preferred cards for the buildings, but that's really a neat thing. Now, before we get to an overview of play, I do want to call out the instructions, the rule book in the Artemis project for being very clear and well-organized with lots of examples. This is one of th
e better board game rule books I've ever read. I also want to note though, that the box does not come with any form of organization at all, other than some extra baggies. If you enjoy this one as much as we have, you might want to look into some form of third party boxes or making your own. Now onto that overview of play. No, this is going to be pretty fairly high level. Look at the gameplay just to give you an idea of the mechanics and their interactions to let you know if it sounds like the ki
nd of thing your group would enjoy. Please do not consider this a full rules teach. No, we're going to skip over quite a bit here. So everyone picks a color, takes a player board and the playing piece in that color, grab three minerals, three energy, one toolkit, one pioneer, and put those on your player board. Your score and relief markers go on the main board, which is then seeded with four of each of the other colonists types, which are engineers, Marines, and stewards. The rest of the coloni
sts are put in the bag or the shape chip. Building tiles, expedition cards, and event deck are shuffled. Six event cards are taken from the deck and the rest are put back in the box. Next, you go through board setup. This is done at the start of the game as well as at the start of each round. Expedition cards are drawn and displayed next to the board. The events and quarry are filled with energy and minerals based on the numbers of those cards. A number of buildings are drawn displayed on the ot
her side of the board. New colonists are dumped out of the shape ship or drawn from the bag and an encounter card is revealed. Now the encounter cards include a mix of beans and boons, good and bad things, which take effect during a specific phase of the game during the resolution section. You're going to use that chunky embassy marker, the event marker to remind you where that's going to happen. Now a random player is given the snow cat. That's the starting player token. They can then keep it a
nd go first or they can put one energy or one material on it and pass it to the next player. Yes, the nice mini is big enough to actually hold some resources. That player can take it in the resources or put another resource on it and pass to the next player and so on until someone decides to go first and gets all the resources stacked. Next, everyone rolls their dice and then take turns placing them on the board, starting from the player with the snow cat going clockwise. At this point, you don'
t resolve anything. You do that after everyone has placed all of their dice. Also, when placing dice, players can use toolboxes to roll their dice up or down one pip per toolbox. Now there are seven places you can place your dice. You can place at the base camp to take part in expeditions and the vents quarry to gain resources at the gantry to build buildings on the doorstep to recruit new colonists at the academy to promote an existing colonists or at the outfitter for victory points or more to
olkits. The dice placement rules vary depending on where you place at the base camp. Dice are stacked bottom to top and the colonists can be played along with your dice to modify yours or your opponent's dice or give you a special bonus if the expedition succeeds. Now at the vents, quarry and doorstep, lowered value dice bump higher dice to the right at the gantry. Once a die is placed, another die can only be placed there if it's higher than the dice already on the building and in the academy o
nly has room for two dice total and has to be played with a colonist. Any number of dice of any value can be placed in the outfitter. Now when placing at the outfitter, this is the one place where you get the reward right now, which potentially could give you toolkits that can be used later in this planning phase. Once all dice are placed, you resolve each section in order starting with the base camp. Each expedition card is resolved where they either succeed or fail depending on the total of th
e dice placed there. Players who contribute the most get a medal and get to pick one of the rewards on the card and the player who contributed second most gets the other reward in the medal. Any other players there suffer from exposure and go up on the relief track. Now both events and quarry resolved the same. Starting from the lowest number die and working upwards, resources equal to the value of the dice are given to the appropriate players. If the resources run out, any remaining dice get no
thing, but their players do get to go up on the relief track. The gantry works as an auction. Players have the option to build the building of their dice are on by paying a matching amount of mineral. The player with the highest die value gets that option first, then the next lowest die and so on. Now the doorsteps pretty close to the vents and quarries with players getting to hire new colonists at the cost of 200 each. The difference here is the die value determines how many columns you can hir
e. If it gets to your die and there are no colonists left, you get to go up on the relief track. Players at the Academy discard the colonists they sent there and take the appropriate replacement from the board if available. If they aren't available, they get nothing, nor do they go up on the relief track. Now while resolving these actions, remember the event card that was revealed at the start of the turn. That's going to resolve at one of the appropriate places on the board, one of the regions
and money of these events will modify what you get there, the costs you play or allow you to take actions more than once. There's a wide variety of different events. While you are taking these actions, you will also be managing your colonists. Whenever you can get new colonists, they can be placed into any of your existing buildings that have room for them. Any leftovers go into the shelter on your player board. Whenever you build a building, you can immediately move colonists from your shelter
into it, but you can't take colonists from another building. Now, after all seven regions of the board are resolved, you move to an upkeep phase. Players can swap one of their colonists and then activate each of their fully staffed buildings in any order they choose. Next, you have to pay one energy per colonists in the outpost and lose any colonists you can't afford. Then the board is reseeded, as we just described, including drawing a new event. First player, a new first player is determined,
starting with the player to the left of where I was the snowcat and doing the whole if you don't want to put resource on it and pass it around. At the end of six rounds, players calculate their score. While playing, points are awarded through some of the underwater buildings, many of the expeditions by putting low dice at the outpost and through some events. At the end of the game, players will earn additional points for leftover resources, each of their fully staffed above ground buildings, tot
al number of buildings, sets of colonists, the number of medals they have collected and their remaining briefcases. Player with the most point wins. While that covers everything mechanically at a high level, what it doesn't really get across is how the game plays at the table. Each round of the Artemis project is filled with difficult decisions. This is one of those games where there are lots of things you want to do and no way at all to do them all. The first three rounds of the game are all ab
out engine building, starting with making sure you have enough resources to actually start building some buildings and you're getting the colonists you need to fill those buildings so you can activate them. You also want to make sure, though, that you're taking part in at least a few expeditions, both due to the fact they have some really good rewards, but also you're going to lose points at the end of the game if you haven't collected a few medals. Not a single round goes by where you didn't wi
sh you had more dice and different values on the dice you do have. I would say that this struggle is actually rather thematic, reflecting the struggles of trying to survive on a hostile world. Now, interestingly, about halfway through the game, the focus of the game shifts. The resource generation, extra action buildings stop coming out. They may still be up for a couple of times if no one buys them, but the whole game starts to become about endgame scoring. Competition for buildings and colonis
ts becomes more fierce and people try to up their medal count. Things that seemed easy, like fully staffing buildings, becomes harder because you only swap one turn. Some players were also going to start amassing things, gathering lots of energy or materials or medals or briefcases for endgame scoring based on which buildings they purchase. Here your choices in the early game can either help you surge ahead or come back to bite you. There's a lot of randomness in this game and it will impact you
. So all your planning and careful choices may be ruined by the buildings you want not coming up or an event crushing your expectations. Yeah, it does feel like those events are extra punishing, but you know what? They affect all the players the same. So seems balanced in the end. The Artemis project to me features one of the best dice based work placement systems I've ever played with. And a big part of this is how the different reasons regions of the board have their own placement rules. Once
you start playing this game, you quickly realize how important it is to look around, to look at what other what dice the other players have available. You can't just play this one as multiplayer solitaire. You've got to watch for where you can be outbid or bumped and where you may be able to do the same to others. Do you place a six in the vents because you really need six energy? Well, if everyone else has a bunch of low dice, you're going to run the risk of exposure. Maybe you'd be better play
ing a four or you know what? Maybe use two threes to get those resources just to make sure you get in there on the ground floor. Can you get away with putting a one die on that building? If you get away with it, you only pay one material. But based on the colonists everyone else has, you might look around and go, oh, you know what? It needs scientists. It's not likely someone will get it. But you know what? Those two players have twos and that's pretty cheap for them if they want to kind of snip
e you there. Have one die in an expedition. You sit and let the round go around and around the table and is someone going to join you? Are we going to complete this? Maybe you're better to put a second die there and make sure it gets done. Those are all the kind of decisions you're going to have to make. You're on a planet with scarcity, fighting for resources and survival. This isn't a happy, friendly co-op. You won't win without acting selfishly and focusing on your needs. Even if you choose n
ot to act maliciously, this, of course, may mean the game isn't for all groups. Yeah, with all the bumping and outbidding, the Artemis project can be very cut through and quite nasty. And that's going to turn off some players. Unlike many worker placement games, there is a ton of player interaction here. Pretty much every die placed is going to affect not only you, but at least one of your other opponents, if not all of them. And it's not uncommon that your well-laid plans are cut off by someone
else's play, sometimes intentionally, but often unintentionally. There's really only one place on the entire board that doesn't impact other players. And that's usually a last resort if everything else has failed. Now, one thing I do like is while there are seven different places you can place your die and the initial teach of this game, there's a lot to download. But each individual region resolves in a way that's easy to learn and they resolve quickly. Plus, there's that thematic tie-in. We'v
e already brought it up in this review, but we've mentioned in a number of our recent reviews, the games that are tied close to their theme are easier to remember and easier to teach. Here, expeditions represent taking a risk to get a reward, just like exploring a moon's surface would. Whoever gets in the mines and vents first gets resources and those trying to take too much might miss out. Right after mining those materials, you're probably going to be spending them on buildings. It's literally
the next step in the game. How much you have to pay for a building is going to be based on market demand. If you really want a building, go for it, bid high for it, make sure you get it, or try to take a chance bidding low, hoping no one undercuts you, or I guess overcuts you. Getting the doorstep early means you're going to get your pick of the crowd of the new colonists coming off of the Shakespeare ship. The mechanic just makes sense when looked at through the lens of the theme of building a
space column. The only mechanic I would say that doesn't feel as thematic compared to the rest of the game is the exposure. The amount of benefit you get from losing out, while certainly a valid game mechanic, doesn't feel as much like a valid thematic one. Of course, if you didn't see some benefit here, the game would be downright cruel. Yeah, true. Yeah, I think this was a mechanical edition. I explained thematically that when you're affected by exposure that you get relief from Earth. I don'
t know if that's supposed to be them feeling bad for you or I don't know, someone launched a GoFundMe after your people had a bad experience and got left out in the snow. I don't know what it actually ties into. Crowdfunding space projects. There we go. Exactly. Tie it into the rest of this episode. Now, the other thing with this game, and we've kind of already mentioned this in a way, is that this is a game that rewards repeated plays. Knowing what expedition cards there are, what buildings cou
ld come up, and what events could come up in the deck are going to give experienced players an advantage. And they're going to help players who know the game with overall strategic planning. When playing at the full player count, you're going to see every expedition card, every single one comes up into play. And due to the fact there are two copies of every building, with the highest player count, there's a really good chance you're going to see at least one copy of each building, if not all of
them. Now, this is, of course, different at level where player counts where you don't know for sure what will come up. So the lower the player count, actually the more randomness in the game. As well, knowing the value of resources and their importance at various points in the game, as well as experience with the many various endgame scoring options and which are likely to be most important, you're likely going to play the game very differently, the more you know about the game. And new players
can actually throw a wrench into things by skewing expectations of how you might think other players ought to behave, which can also impact your strategy. Yeah, very true. So overall, the Artemis project is a very solid dice driven worker placement engine builder that I personally really enjoy. Like just dice driven worker placement engine builder gets me excited. Those are some of my favorite types of games. I love engine building games. I like engine worker placement games. Dice driven. I just
handled really well in this game. Artemis project me does enough new things and differently from other games that it sticks out in my growing collection of engine builders. I've got a lot of them. This one still stands out as unique, different and fun in its own way. Now, one of the highlights for me, though, that really makes this step up a level is the amount of punch it packs and only six rounds and under two hours of play time you get a group of experienced players. We're talking an hour an
d a half play time. Every time I finished a game, Artemis project, I felt like I've accomplished something. I built an engine. Look at look at what I built, right? Look at my colony. It's just that limited options, the limited resources really gives you a feeling of accomplishments when you finish. There's just something rewarding about the play experience here. I think this game for me is right on the edge of being too harshly competitive, but it saves itself because of that reasonably quick pl
aying time. If this game had another couple of rounds, I think it would likely be too much take that and hate drafting for me. But in its existing state, it manages to sort of sit right in that comfort zone. Yeah.
Where for me, this game is a perfect fit. Like it's also my euro loving wife takes this game as well. But I do know it's not going to be for everyone. The biggest thing to watch for there is that take that screw your opponent nature of the game. Resources are limited. You are going to
be competing for them. Plus there are a couple buildings that are directly confrontational. They target the other players in a rather mean way. No, if you do want to remove a bit of the in your face conflict, take those buildings out. But even without them, you're still going to get cut off. You're going to get bumped. You're going to get outbid. You're going to make a plan with another player to out someone out of somewhere that this game can get nasty. If you're dead set against take that and
highly competitive games where players can impact your play, this might not be for you. But if a little of that works for you, I would say this is worth a try because of the type gameplay and reasonable game length. Now, you can pick up a copy of the Artemis Project Direct from Grand Gamers Guild at grandgamersguild.com. Be sure to save 10% off by using our coupon code bellhop. That's B E L L H O P. Now we did mention at the start of this review, there are three different versions of the game. A
nd while I think the retail version is a good option, especially if it means supporting your friendly local game store, I think the pioneer edition is the sweet spot here. It's only $10 more than the retail price, the MSRP on the retail. And you get some great component improvements as well as a mini expansion, which is pretty neat. Well, the metal badges included in the Gallileo edition are nice, like really nice. Like there's some of the most fun to hold board game components I've had. They do
n't actually add anything to the game. They're just a nice to have to me. Well, that's it for our look at the Artemis Project, a very solid dice driven worker placement game about colonizing Europa. There are now quite a few dice driven worker placement games out there. What's your favorite? Are you still playing Alien Frontiers? Did Stonemaier win you over with Euphoria, build a better dystopia? Or have you discovered something else? We'd love to hear about it in the comments. Or you can join u
s on the Tabletop Bellhop Discord at Discord at TabletopBellhop.com and tell us all about it. And now in the Bellhops Tabletop, we look back at the games we played since the last episode. So we're at the start of January level of game plays, which is awesome. I love it when we have multiple games to talk about in this segment. More importantly, I love it when I play lots of games during a week. Now, I know my birthday party paid a part in this, but we did have a couple of other game nights as we
ll. So this actually starts with the day after we recorded on Thursday. I was working on a review of Catch the Moon, the the latter stacking game. And I was like, oh, I don't have nearly enough pictures of this game. But more importantly, I need a picture. I want a picture of the co-op ladder stacked above the box, the scoring system. I wanted to kind of show I really want to show how tall the box actually is compared to what I was building. And I sat down and at first I was kind of playing with
and I'm like, you know what? Why don't I play solo? So I did. I played a solo round. And yeah, there was no way I was getting to the top of the box. So I played that and didn't score so well. I got zero. So then I'm like, forget it. I'm just going to build this. This won't be hard. I think I was at it for half an hour before I could get a stable structure that stood. I it was bad. Now I was cheating. I was I was using both hands and trying to lock things in. And it would look all great. Then it
would just fall down. Yeah, well, I'm sure there's a level of familiarity with the pieces that helps. It's just not an easy game despite being very approachable and easy to pick up rules. It looks like it should be a fun, not simple game, but, you know, easily playable game and nope. Yeah, no, no, see, this is it. So Deanna is calling out in the chat. I said the kid talked about playing with her friends and never knocking it down. But I asked one if she got taller in the box. She said, no, it w
ent wide. And that's what was happening. I would get it up and I would kind of and then and then it just like at the end, I could have basically stacked ladders like just on top of each other, maybe to get there. Well, I did end up getting a picture. And one of the things I noticed was when we were playing, what you want are a couple of twos like two two ladder on the dice so that you can connect things and build a stable base in order to go up. Yeah, we kept rolling ones. And when you get the o
ne, you there's nothing you can't stabilize anything. So not very easily. No. No. Well, plus when you're playing competitively, it's totally different, too. Like you you you. There's two ways to play. You can try to build a stable structure. You can try to build something that's going to fall apart as soon as the next player touches it. And that's one of those learning experience. Once you played a couple of times, you start. There are times where each is appropriate. Yeah. But yeah, cooperative
. And like the whole thing in the back of the rulebook actually has some tricks for supposedly building like better structures. And like I opened that and tried and I'm like, I don't know. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't I don't have the manual decks for it. Anyway, next up was day out. One of my kids had a day. And when we have something like that, we try to do something special with them, especially now that they're at different schools. So like they have different days. So it's lik
e, oh, today's just one kid, right? So we took her out to 22 coffee house kind of Sean's way. Actually, I'll pass Sean's way. Enjoyed some treats. Oh, my God, you got to try the cookies. I finally tried the cookies. They don't look like cookies. I don't know what they are. They're carts. They call them cookies. Fantastic. Actually had lunch there as well. Pretty good sandwich. But we tried out rec raiders for the first time. This one's from kid table board games. Went really well. Genevieve actu
ally loved it. Like she's like, I really like that one. Dad, I love that game. Though we planned it out. Right. So we had to pick up her sister and we had other things do that day. We're like, we have an hour and a half to do this. And the play time says 45 minutes on the box. And for whatever like kids, family weight game, 45 minutes seem very reasonable. The man was that way up. We did not finish the game. I don't even think we were close. Like I think it would have taken a good 15, 20 minutes
to actually wrap it up. Now, no, we had to punch the game and there are a lot of tokens and I had to teach it. But I didn't know the timing on that. Like I just expect kids tables working with kids games to be more accurate to that. Now, maybe the problem is we're not kids and we're thinking too much and much strategy. Anyway, I'll get into more details about how this one plays in an overview of play. This is one of the new to me games. I got played this last week. Interesting. Just checked thr
ough through the comments really quickly. And someone in January of 2024 from Canada, who isn't you said, plays about an hour and a half, not 45 minutes. Yeah. So it's not just me then. So, yeah, I know you had high hope for it. And I must say the unboxing of it impressed me. So I'm certainly more interested in seeing what kids table board games has to offer. Now that we've had this first one from them. Oh, and Fossilis, if they hadn't sold out at origins, I might have paid for that one. I might
not have even the Yes this was a review copy. And I know I'm terrible at calling that out in this particular segment of of the podcast. When we do the review, I will fully disclose, but I often forget when we're just talking about the games casually. So, yeah, we took this home as a review copy. But like after playing Fossilis, which oh my God, it looks so toyetic and silly, but it was so cool. Talk about tying in the theme. Like you were literally unburying things and using tweezers to blow li
ttle bones. Super impressed by the production quality of kids table. Next we get to the actual birthday party that was on Saturday. Started off just because I was sitting at the kitchen table and the first couple people came in and we had a total of four of us. We sat down and played two rounds of four player Crokinole. This was my first time playing Crokinole with four players. And I like it. I liked it a lot for players. It's like playing you could write your team with the player opposite you.
You follow all the standard rules of the game. But of course, there's the whole trying to help yourself out and set up your partner and all that. And I thought that was really cool. My friend Mike is, I want to call him a shark, but I guess it's not a shark. Just he grew up playing Crokinole with his dad. So he had an advantage over us with multiple years experience playing the game versus, this is I think my sixth game ever. Jeff and Sheila who were there. Jeff was fascinated by he's like, I h
ave been wanting to try this game for so long. And I think you really liked it. He's like, I don't usually like dexterity, but this is cool. So I don't know. Like Mike's team won every time. I think was definitely better than us. But definitely still digging my new Crokinole board. All right. Well, while Mo was flicking pucks, I went down to watch a play of Jane Austen, the board game get started. So obsession is a Victorian area household management party, throwing reputation, building romance
game. Okay. It's a meaty one, but it's also the number 70 board game on board game geek right now. And the number 20 thematic game. So it's doing things right. It is a hefty teach though, as there's a lot of upfront information to download. I want to look into that. That's on my list to play at some point props to Roger Dodger games, Roger for bringing the game out to the event and teaching it. Cause I let me go do other stuff and teach people. Not that I was trying to avoid them, but it lets us
have two players or two or three tables going at once, which is awesome. This is one that's on my list to try. I know it's one of Roger's favorite games. Now when us finished upstairs and we finished playing Crokinole, we joined everyone downstairs obsession was still going. Probably still in the pretty early game at this point. So I decided to set up a game on my own and we set up Artemis project, the game we just finished talking about set up a five player game. There were the four of us were
playing Crokinole, Jeff, Sheila, Mike, and I. And I grabbed Sean, who was at the time just watching them play obsession. And we played in and honestly, it went great. Like I don't think that game could have went better. Went over really well. Everyone picked it up quickly. Which honestly is a tribute to the game that something that meaty that they're not inexperienced gamers, but they're not people who come out to every board game event I host and play games every weekend, right? They're defini
tely a group of more casual game players that picked it up quickly. Got the whole nice bumping how to play, watch what the others are doing. Started off friendly. It was the most friendly game of Artemis project during the first season. But then after that, it just got nasty. Yeah, it's again, props to Grand Gamers Guild. We're coming up with some fantastic iconography on this game that just makes it understandable. You look at things and you go, Oh, okay. I know what that means. You're not look
ing up every card or every location in the rulebook regularly. The game can be really swingy, but it's just not that hard. Again, there is a real potential. Take that in the games. You have to be able to roll with what happens and know that all your carefully laid plans may be completely ruined. Now, at this point, some people were heading home. We've already met this point. Some fantastic Windsor pizza. Windsor pizza was on point in my opinion that night. That was some of the best Windsor pizza
from Windsor pizza. I've had in a long time on the group kind of mixed it up a bit. One table ended up playing a game of Grand Carnival. Which is a circus themed poly-omino game. While that was going on, I hosted a game of Starship captains, which I am still digging a lot. This is one that the more I play it, the more I enjoy. Now I particularly picked this game because we were playing with Stacy and Brenda. And I knew they were both Trekkies or I don't know how far into Trekkies, but well, Sta
cy, I know at least owns a full Starfleet uniform. So, and I know my mother-in-law is big into Trek or having grown up with it. So they both, I admit they looked a bit like Deere and the headlights when I was kind of describing the game. But once we started playing, they picked it up quickly. Game flowed really well. And like me, I know your thoughts on this game have improved with every play. Indeed.
This game was much smoother or perhaps my mood was better. But really, I think just knowing a b
it more about the game made all the difference. I'm also thinking that four player rather than three player is a benefit too. I think the, I haven't checked board game geek, but I think having extra players makes a difference as well and smooths out some of the imbalance and bumps that I felt in that first game. Yep. Yeah.
Because I honestly, I felt the same. My second play of the game was so much better than the first game. Now I enjoyed my first game more than you enjoyed your first game, but
I don't know. And I still don't know what my expectation of this game is when I brought it home. Again, thanks, CG for the review copy. I didn't know what to expect. Like I knew it was a Starship game and I thought it was all about time management and that, but I expected a lot more play with the queue system. Well, it's part of the game and an important part of the game. It does come into play. It's not, it doesn't rotate as much as I thought. And I don't know. I don't know what I expected and
it wasn't it, but then once I played and knew what to expect, then I found I really enjoyed it. Now that I'm like, I know what I'm getting into. I know I got to try to heal all my damage. I know I got to deal with pirates. I know I'm going to want to promote like that. Now that I know what to do, it just honestly has gotten better every time I played it. I just did a quick check. It's actually listed as best at three. So, you know, take that for what it is. It still feels like it's not a CGE gam
e, though. That's the one thing that stands out to me. It is. It doesn't feel like CGE. It's not a bad game, but it's just feels so out of line with what I expect to get from CGE. So at this point, we wrapped that up. It was getting pretty late. Sean had gone home. Actually, most of the group had gone home. It was just four of us left and we squeezed in one more game. And that was rec creators at four players before we wrapped up for the night. Now, I didn't describe it earlier because I knew I
was going to come back to it. So what this game is about is diving for sunken treasure and presenting your findings to the local museum. Well, you know, keeping a few choice pieces for yourself. Now, gameplay involves a die drop table, something you don't see often. Drafting dice to place divers out on the board where you place your diver will get you to draw different treasure tokens. But the neat part is any time you place or go for a dive, the divers adjacent to where you place also get to go
down. So a big part of this game is trying to line it up so that you're getting multiples or even when you're only getting one thing, you got to watch for helping your opponents more than you're helping yourself. And I've always enjoyed games like that lanterns. I also love for that aspect that you're helping yourself, but don't try to help everyone else too much. Now, you're going to collect these treasures to turn in sets based on cards that are in play. And you're going to keep some more fri
end game scoring. That's pretty much the gist of it with a little kind of mini game of also collecting seashells that have in game bonuses and ways to mitigate the dice. But they can also be used to buy fish tanks, which is a whole set collection part of scoring. And it's just kind of neat thematic. And it just looks fantastic. While there's a lot going on, that does seem to sort of be what this company is after with, you know, kids to work games and their family weight. Yeah, that's exactly wha
t they're trying to do, right? Like because the basic mechanics here are pretty simple and a kid could play this. But this is very much not just a game for kids. And for anyone who knows who I'm talking to when I when I name drop here. Well, it's one a.m. And I'm playing with Brenda, Deanna, me and Charles. And all of us are like, that was a good game. Let's play again. Like you're getting some of the heaviest board game fans in the city who are playing a kid's table board game fan and really di
gging it. Yeah.
So they got their start by finding kids games too boring for adults and adult games too hard for kids. And they really wanted to dial in that family game difficulty level. And it sounds like they've they've hit it. Yeah, I'm extremely impressed by this. And I do say I do like they changed their name, right? They were kids table board games. Now it's KTBG because they were having it so that the the hobby gamers weren't buying their games because they thought they were just for kid
s. And I'm like, no, this is a sweet spot. Like this one's coming out to our barbershop bar event on Saturday. Like I think this is a great welcoming, good for all experience levels game. Final game of Saturday. Yes, I probably should have called it a night after everyone went home. But once we got home, I convinced Anna to sit down to a game of the Star Wars deck building game from fantasy flight. This is the next game off my pilot shame. We played over a couple of beers when we got home and I
have been hearing good things about this one for a while. And so far it lives up to all of the hype I've heard. I've heard this game is basically what if Star Realms was Star Wars themed with a few tweaks that make sense thematically for Star Wars, including the fact that cards are either empire rebel or neutral and you can only buy cards of your own faction and the neutral cards. The goal instead of just depleting someone's honor is to destroy three of the enemy's bases, which is more interesti
ng than directly attacking each other. And one of the coolest parts in this game that I really enjoyed is that your played cards, instead of attacking a base can instead directly attack cards in the market from the other faction, both removing them as an option to be purchased, but also giving you a reward for doing so. And then of course, there's a whole tug of war force system which ties in. Now I know you're not a big Star Wars fan that I am. Like I know you know the series and enjoy it. And
I will say this is there's no deep lore knowledge required to play this game. You may be like, what's an Inquisitor? But that's about it. You're going to recognize most of the stuff. It does bread the whole rebels to the end of Jedi, I would say, time period. But you don't need to know all that. But because of how much you like deck builders and how much familiar are with Star Realms? Like basically I sat down with the inside at Star Realms. These are the bases. They work like bases. These are t
his. And here's the new stuff. I think you're going to dig this. That certainly sounds solid. And it's not like I dislike Star Wars. I just never dove deep into the lore as some people have. So no, that definitely sounds like an enjoyable one. Then finally, we have the last game off the pile of shame. And this is an afternoon gaming at Brenda's where we played through three full rounds of Lem. And this is not like a 15 minute game. This is not a party game. Actually, one of the surprises of this
game because this is one that is targeted to families and kids is how long it is. It is not a quick game. We played at various player accounts. So that was nice for knocking off the review checklist. We tried it with three players with the kids and I just three of us. Then we played at five with all of us with Deanna, Brenda, kids and me. And then Deanna had some other work to do and was kind of out. So then we played with four. And we did try out what's called the UFO variant. There are multip
le kind of small expansion like modules in this game. We tried out one of those. And the fact my kids wanted to play three times in a row on the same night technically wasn't a row. It was two before dinner and once after dinner was a good indication of how well this went over with our family. Yeah, it's interesting. And I'm going to hate myself on closed captioning for this episode. But but Liam Lem is getting a good vibe. I mean, Rebel Studio does does great work. It's he has only a couple of
times failed. And I'm looking forward to giving it a try. And nothing else. It looks fantastic. Now for an overview, since the first time I'm talking about the game on the show, I always like to give a brief overview. It's basically a push your luck dice game where it's pretty easy to figure out your odds at each step because yes, it's a somewhat mathy Knizia game. So honestly, you can totally skip that and just toss dice without figuring out the odds, which is where the the appeal to kids are g
oes in each turn one players, the captain of the ship, and they're going to pick one of their eight cats to be the captain. Then every other player is going to contribute a cat and you're off. You roll the dice and you move up the track on the board based on this interesting d6 diminishing dice pool. As you go, you're going to start to get the moons and planets and at each stop, everyone gets a chance to disembark their cats that are on the ship. So if any point the dice fail and you can't move
further, the ship crashes, but everyone gets their cats back because, you know, nine lives and all that. Now to make things more interesting, each of the players eight cats has a special ability. So for example, one gives bonus points for landing on certain spots, like two times points if they're on a planet. Another is going to take a die away and it kind of nasty take that way where if I disembark, well, the captain's going to have less dice to keep going. And then there's parachute cats that
even if the ship crashes, they can still land where they stopped that. Yeah, this is this is definitely an interesting one between the the fun idea of hats, the disturbingly difficult name of Mlem and and the fact that it is just a Knizia game in and of itself just sort of places this in a really strange but potentially valuable place in the market. Yeah, I agree. And one of the things I did like is this weird feeling. OK, so I don't even know how to describe it because you've got a cooperative
feel, right? You've got this. Let's all work together to see how far we can go. And we're going to make this flight work. And one of the one of the kind of unofficial goals of the game is to get to deep space. That's off the end of the map. If you can send a cat into deep space, it's worth the most points in the game. And even when you're not like your cats already landed, you're kind of rooting for everyone to get there. But then there's the whole screw you. I don't want your play to get there.
I already came off and I'm using my nasty cat that's going to take dice away from you because I got what I needed. Screw you guys. And like both of that's part of the game. And it's kind of both happening at once. And it's really neat that way. And then there's the rule that you can only use each your cats once. So you're ending up with a diminishing pool of resources and abilities as the game goes on. And then lots of interesting decision points. Yes, it's random. It's pretty dang random. But
they realize that. The base game is to play it with your kids, play it here in pretzels, play it when you don't care game. But if you're playing with gamers, throw in those optional expansions. We tried the UFO one, which I strongly encourage any group of gamers to add in as quickly as possible. I'm not going to get into what all the expansions do and everything, but just seriously, if you played this, like maybe play once without it. But if you're playing with gamers, toss that UFO and right aw
ay just to give you some of the dice roll mitigation and special abilities that come with it. And there's other expansions which look like they also, again, make it more of a more decision points, more player agencies. So I'm looking forward to checking those out too. And just for reference, the board game weight on this board game, geek weight on this one is one point five seven. But we're not talking, you know, super heavy weight. There's there's a lot of rolling dice and pushing cats around.
Yes. Yep. Now, as for what's next, I am co-hosting a barbershop bar game night this Saturday. That's on the 27th of December or December back in time. We're back in 2023. It's a year ago. No, on Saturday, January the 27th. We are planning to go to Brenda's on Sunday. Now, Brenda specifically asked me to bring them because she really wants to try out the I don't know what the expansions are called. I know the UFO one was pretty hard. There's one where you put special abilities on the map at diffe
rent numbers. So it gives you a reason to try to aim for those numbers to get things. She really wants to try that one out. She wants to see if that makes it better. My other plan is to grab monstrosity cute creatures because the kids have been begging me to play it. Though I'm still disappointed there was not a set of variant rules in that version. There should have been. I shouldn't know. I should have reopened them in order. I should have one with cute creatures first and I wouldn't have been
disappointed. But by being blown away by robots, as we talked about earlier today, I was so disappointed I didn't get an equally cool variant way to play in cute creatures. Well, before we start locking things down, let's take a moment to thank a selection of our tabletop bellhop Patreon patrons. Their support helps keep this show going. Sean P Kelly. Thanks, Sean. Derek Hisson. Thank you, Mr. Hisson. Thank you to the misdirected Mark podcast. Donna, sad you won't be here for the beginning of t
he show every week, but nice that you got nice work going on instead. Can't neglect the education of the people. Thank you, Pax. Evil John. Thank you, John. Well, that was the double bell. That means our ship's coming to an end. It's time to lock the lobby doors. Even if we're not here live, you can always find us at tabletopbellhop.com. All over the web, as tabletop Bellhop. One word. And on your podcatcher of choice as the Tabletop Bellhop gaming podcast. Now, I know most of our show tonight w
as about our personal opinions on Kickstarter and a couple of games, but there's still a good chance you learned something new tonight, right? Or we convince you to try out a game you may have overlooked or you're going to give monstrosity another chance. If we helped you at all tonight, we would appreciate it if you tipped your Bellhop at patreon.com/tabletopbellhop. Well, that's all for us tonight. Another way you can show your support is by giving us a thumbs up like leave a comment or better
yet, tell your friends and fellow gamers about our show for the Tabletop Bellhop gaming podcast. I'm Sean. And I'm Moe. Thank you. And game on.
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