As a designer, I think it can be easy to design an expansion as you already have all the pieces — and with a successful game, an expansion is as guaranteed as anything can be to see some sales. The obvious path was to start work on a new expansion and get it ready to crowdfund alongside the March 2020 retail release of The Isle of Cats. After all, this is when the game would have the most hype and the biggest chance of success. I then asked myself a simple question...
In 2009 Kickstarter launched, it wasn’t the first crowdfunding platform but it did a lot of things right and has grown into something incredible. For board gaming at least, Kickstarter has perhaps had more of an impact than anything else over the past 10 years.
I recently returned from UKGE, the largest board game convention in the UK and I wanted to share a few of the ideas I had for the booth. The goal was to grow my community while bonding with existing community members, sales would just be a bonus.
There are many ways to grow a community and in this guide I’ve tried to cover a range of ideas without diving too deeply into any one thing specifically. In future articles I’ll dive deeper into specific ideas but I’d like to wrap things up with a few final thoughts.
Up until now this guide has focussed on easily actionable things that you can start doing today to grow a community. For part 4. I want to focus on longterm activities that will improve your passive followers over time and is what I believe to be the most powerful form of marketing.
Our website is now set up and our social channels are in place, it is time to put on some shoes and look into how we can grow a community in person.
Today we move beyond the basic elements required for growing a community and dive into social media. It may be one of the biggest tools we have but it must be handled properly, otherwise it will end up doing as much harm as good.
In this guide I'll be sharing over 20 recommendations for how to grow a community and talking in detail about the way I built my audience in the build up to my first Kickstarter.
One of the lesser-known parts of running a Kickstarter is just how many people cancel their pledges or decrease from one reward tier to another during the campaign. When you login to see how things are doing, it’s not uncommon to see the dreaded red labels.
Conventions can be expensive and with some games taking 1 – 2 hours to play, plus additional time to teach, it’s important to find a way to allow people to experience the game in the shortest time possible. I typically aim for 30 minutes from the moment someone sits at the table to the moment they leave.
