A Crash Course in Board Game Marketing & Promotion

Posted on Brandon Rollins30 CommentsPosted in Start to Finish

Self-publishing a board game is a long, drawn-out process. Some of this goes back to the process of creating your game, getting it manufactured, and raising funds. Yet if there were a single thing that self-publishers regularly fail at, it’s marketing.

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Marketing covers a wide array of activities that convince people to care about and eventually buy your game. Yet that definition doesn’t do it justice. Marketing is best understood as an ongoing process that breathes itself into everything you do as a self-publishing board game developer. As an example, look at this generic project timeline I made a while back. That gray bar at the bottom of the chart that stretches from the beginning to the end is labeled Marketing.

Marketing is something I put tons of time and thought into. I’ve graduated with my MBA and I’m a published researcher in the subject of online viral marketing. Even still, there is so much to learn that even with that background, it took years of effort to get a handle on the entire discipline. It’s only after starting and successfully running a marketing agency and having two successful Kickstarter campaigns that I feel like I understand it well enough to write about it.

For that reason, this is going to be a long post. I’ve broken it into 12 distinct sections for the sake of readability.

  1. Targeting
  2. Attention, Interest, Desire, And Action
  3. Product
  4. Your Niche
  5. Price
  6. Process & Logistics
  7. Core Concepts of Promotion
  8. Outreach
  9. Reviews
  10. Distribution
  11. Kickstarter
  12. Advertising
Targeting
Game of Darts

There is no perfect product. There is no perfect audience. When it comes to marketing, there is no way to make something that is objectively the best in all situations. Because value is so subjective, what you need to focus on is making the perfect product for a very specific audience.

This concept is called product-market fit. If you want to see what happens when you don’t have it, check out this autopsy I did for a failed Kickstarter campaign I attempted in 2018. A close analysis of that campaign will teach you as much as any guide on how to do things right.

In board gaming, there are lots of little communities. Remember, the board game community is not a monolithic singular entity, but rather a whole bunch of different mini-communities with interests that roughly line up. For example, I’ll never get people to play Twilight Struggle with me at a party, but Codenames…now we’re talking. All the considerations that go into making a game –  length, weight, price, art style, gameplay, packaging, and so on – needs to be tailored for a very specific audience. Alternatively, you can make whatever you want and just find the perfect audience later. Both approaches work and have different pros and cons.

The goal of marketing, especially when you’re small and just getting started, is not to broadcast your message. Until you have a big media presence, you can’t really use “the hype machine” to your advantage. You just don’t have the power to do that. You can, however, target a very particular audience – this is the best use of your limited resources and it’s much more effective. Don’t broadcast. Narrowcast instead.

Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action

I’ve mentioned the AIDA model before in How to Get Big on Twitter as a Board Game Dev. Much of what I said there bears repeating.

AIDA Model

AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. When you’re a marketer, the first thing you need to do is get people to know you exist – attention. Then you have to make people care about your game – interest. If they start to want your game, that’s a good sign – desire. Next, they get on your website or Amazon with intention to buy – action. Marketing is a slow dance. You have to very slowly build your reputation.

Marketing is not just about garnering attention and targeting a specific audience. It’s about convincing people to buy your game and to talk about. This is a multi-step process and you need to understand that. You cannot simply shout about your game into the void of Twitter and pray for the best. You need to create a “sales funnel.”

Here is an example of a sales funnel:

  • With the board game Tasty Humans, we used Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to generate leads. We also generated leads with paid advertising, reviews, and a Rahdo review. This is how we attracted attention.
  • We were very careful about how we worded each ad and social media post. We usually said something to the effect of “Become a monster. Eat villagers. A puzzle-solving, tile placement board game for 1-4 players.” This pitch piqued Interest.
  • The Kickstarter campaign page was full of detail, which showed off pretty pictures of the game and really sold it. This stoked Desire.
  • Kickstarter campaigns act as a clear call to Action because time is so limited. This causes people to back while they still have a chance!

There are a million ways to do this and I can’t tell you the best. In fact, I’m still tweaking, learning, and growing all the time on this because I’ve not yet perfected my sales funnel.

Product

If you look on Board Game Geek, you’ll find that there are so many types of games out there. It’ll make your head spin. You want to know exactly what sort of game you’re making so that you can select the ideal target market and tweak around them. If you can’t describe your game, you’re in deep marketing trouble.

I suggest you look on Board Game Geek to find similar games to yours. There will always be similar games. Know how to make comparisons of your game to other games. Tasty Humans, for example, was like Azul, Sagrada, and Tetris.

Know how to describe mechanics that are in your game and see who it appeals to. Some people dislike “take that” mechanics because they’re too mean-spirited, such as the well-regarded reviewer, Rahdo. It’s no use selling a game with “take that” mechanics to him, then, is it? Likewise, some people really, really love “take that” mechanics and they’re the ones I sell War Co. to.

Know exactly who you’re trying to appeal to. This determines your target audience. Your target audience will differ with each game.

Your Niche

The intersection of your product and your target makes your niche. This is a special place in the market that you occupy better than anyone else (ideally). Your niche in the board game industry is your competitive advantage. You want to own a niche. You want to scratch a particular itch for a particular person better than anyone else.

When you have the perfect product for a specific target, that’s how you get a niche. When you have a working sales funnel that your target audience responds to, that’s how you turn a niche into cash.

Price

Price is very important. I used to claim that it wasn’t, but Kickstarter has changed a lot of the last several years. Namely, backers have become more price-sensitive because of the sheer variety of available board games. This same effect can be found on other online retailers as well as in local gaming stores.

The degree to which customers make decisions based solely on price is called “price sensitivity.” So this naturally brings you to the question of “how exactly do you know what to charge?” There is no easy answer, but here is a method I have found useful:

  • Go to Kickstarter, Amazon, and local gaming stores.
  • Look for games that are similar to the one you are making. They need to be similar and art style, amount of components, and general “feel.”
  • Write down what each one costs – both the base price and shipping.
  • Pay attention to their sales figures. Copy the successful games’ pricing strategies.
  • Make sure you can afford to price competitively, or, reduce the amount of materials you need to produce the game.

This method, slightly modified, works for nearly any industry. In fact, if this sounds really complicated, I can help you with this through my marketing agency.

Process & Logistics

Marketing is more than simply product, niche, pricing, and setting up a marketing system. It’s also about the subjective experiences that people have while they’re dealing with you. It’s also about what people think about when they hear about your game, when they hear about your website, and when they hear your name. This can all be classed under the bailiwick of “customer experience.”

How do you control customer experience? Some people think it’s about branding – your website, logo, and all that stuff. That’s all important, but let’s talk about four specific processes which affect how people experience your brand:

  1. The sales process. Everything about how you approach people affects your brand. From the language you use, the venues you reach out to people through, and the entire process by which you persuade people to buy your product falls under the sales process.
  2. The buying or pre-order process. The website or offline sales channels you use to facilitate buying or pre-ordering affect how people see you. You want purchasing to be as seamless as possible so you appear professional.
  3. The fulfillment process. You need to fulfill games as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. You want people to think of you as someone who keeps their promises.
  4. The returns process. If people decide they don’t like your game, you need to have a seamless return process. People who return your games but have a good experience returning the game will have a more positive view of your brand. They might choose to buy from you later.

While processes and logistics may seem just like means to an end, it’s important that people feel like they’re being treated well at every step of the process. This is an important part of marketing because these processes will determine your reputation.

Core Concepts of Promotion

Wikipedia says that “[p]romotion covers the methods of communication that a marketer uses to provide information about its product.” In short, promotion is how you spread the word about your business. When you’re a first-time business owner, or especially a first-time game dev, mastery of promotion is absolutely critical to your success. That’s why half this guide is dedicated to promotion and promotion alone.

Promotion is a big tent that covers a lot of different concepts which I cover in more detail below. The first is outreach – how you find first-time customers (also known as “lead generation”). One very specific type of outreach that is critical in the board game industry is the review process. Then you have distribution, which tends to overlap with promotion in some critical ways. Kickstarter itself, which many people falsely see as the means of succeeding in the board game industry in and of itself, is a form of promotion. Finally, there is also advertising – a very effective and nuanced form of promotion that tends to scare people off because it costs money.

Outreach

Outreach is how you find people to care about your game. It is how you find your target and tell them about your product so that you can carve out your niche. Some people call this “lead generation.”

There are a number of great ways you can run an effective outreach campaign. You can use social media, go to conventions, do an email newsletter, start a chat room, create a Facebook group, and even advertise. While there are some methods that are more effective than others, you want to choose a form of outreach that you like and really stick to it. Just try one or two forms of outreach at first and work your way up if you find that you have enough time to do more.

If your ambitions are grand and you want to raise tens of thousands of dollars, you will likely need a promotional mix. I won’t get into all that here, but here’s a good course I’ve found online on the matter.

Social Media

Social media includes Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and other popular websites where people tend to hang out. This is what people immediately jump to when they think of outreach. However, mastering social media is a challenge all of its own and that requires nuanced thinking which I spell out in Setting Up Social Media as a Board Game Dev: A Primer Course. This is the most approachable way to find and reach out to your target audience, but it’s also a fantastic way to get ignored in the unending shuffle of these constantly noisy networks.

Cons

You can also meet a lot of people very quickly by going to board game cons. By meeting people face-to-face and getting contact information such as phone numbers and email addresses, you can get reach out to lots of people in a short amount of time. Cons, however, are intimidating, cost a lot of money, and take a lot of time. That said, I know beginners who have great experiences with them. Don’t write off cons!

Email

Email newsletters are a great way to reach out to people, too. You have to ask for a lot of email addresses and put out a regular, high-quality newsletter with a service like Mailchimp. It’s tricky to do both of these things, but email is by far one of the greatest ways to contact people online. Given a choice between a mailing list of 100 and a Twitter following of 1000, I would take the mailing list every single time – no contest. I have personally had great results with my newsletter (which you should totally sign up for).

I cannot begin to list all the different forms of outreach. This aspect of business rewards creativity and hard work. As long as you can reach out to a highly targeted group of people and keep in touch with them on a systematic basis, you’re well on your way to succeeding with outreach.

Reviews

Reviews warrant their own section as a very specific form of outreach. They are such a critical credibility-builder for new game devs. Good reviews convince people to buy your game. The occasional bad review still gets your name out there for others to discover you later, plus it makes you look more authentic.

Use Reddit, Board Game Geek, and social media to identify reviewers who fall within your target market. You’ll want to send games to them when it comes time for the review stage of your game’s development. If the reviewer is a professional with an engaged audience and you select based on them falling within your target market, you have a good chance of getting a good review that is seen by people who were already predisposed to like your game’s style from the get-go.

Distribution

Distribution involves ways that your game is seen outside of just your website or company Amazon account. It is sometimes helpful to have third-party retailers or subscription boxes sell your game on your behalf. When you’re starting out, the exposure alone can be extremely useful to you. Good distribution gets your game seen by more people.

Want to know a secret? This is actually something I’ve bungled on War Co. in the past, so I don’t want to purport to be an expert on this. I encourage you to ask questions about the ideal way to distribute your game and do better than I did my first time.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter is the last step in a long marketing dance for a lot of game developers. Your Kickstarter campaign is generally only the Action part of AIDA. Getting people to pay Attention, growing their Interest, and cultivating Desire – those are all up to you. Kickstarter is nothing more than a struck match on a pile of tinder that you assembled yourself.

That said, about 30-40% of backers tend to find you through the search, meaning Kickstarter is a good form of outreach. A lot of people who don’t care at all about social media are trawling Kickstarter in search of the newest new. Still, the degree to which Kickstarter contributes dollars-wise tends to pin itself to how much of an entourage you bring on your own.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that $1 rewards are one of the best things you can have on Kickstarter. Yes, it makes your backer count go up, which is itself a good thing. More importantly, though, once the campaign is done, you can ask everyone to fill out a survey – meaning you can ask for email addresses if you have a newsletter. Kickstarter is not just a way of convincing people to give you money, it can also be a way to capture and hold attention for future games.

Advertising

Advertising is the last thing I wanted to cover. People tend to get spooked by advertising because they hate the idea of giving up their hard-earned cash for something abstract. Plus, it’s super easy to get burned by advertising and you see a lot of smart people talking bad about advertising because they failed to understand more critical, basic marketing lessons. Still, the potential time savings might just be worth a few hundred bucks in Facebook ads. You’d be a fool to dismiss advertising entirely.

Facebook and Board Game Geek tend to be pretty good places to advertise board games. I’d stick to Facebook when you’re new, though, because Board Game Geek has a really high minimum expense. Facebook doesn’t require you to spend much at all and it also comes with robust analytics that let you make the most of your ad.

When you make an ad, you need to act like a scientist, creating ads and seeing how people react to them. You subtly tweak them until you get better and better responses. But where do you begin? Start with something that your target audience will respond to. Start with the tightest, smallest possible audience.

Once you have a tight target and a good basic idea of what to say to grab attention, you need one last thing. You need to make sure your ad goes to a page that leads to high conversions. The word “conversion” here means “a person who does what you want them to do” in marketing jargon. Do you want them to follow you on Twitter, buy your game, back your campaign, or sign up for your newsletter? Think hard about what you want people to do once you start an ad.

Final Thoughts

Marketing board games can be very tricky. This article was designed to give you a broad overview of all the different things that go into marketing. My hope is that by spelling it all out, you’ll be more equipped to pitch your game to people who care. Use this guide to ask more questions, run more tests, and get your wheels turning.

If you have any questions or comments, I encourage you to comment below 🙂




You Can Never Really Be Your Own Boss (And That’s a Good Thing)

Posted on Brandon Rollins1 CommentPosted in Uncategorized

“It must be great to be your own boss!” Over the last few months, as the Pangea Marketing Agency has taken off faster than I expected, I’ve heard this sentence more than I ever expected. Don’t get me wrong – it’s incredibly flattering and I respond with polite confirmations. You know the sort: “yes, it’s pretty great, I’m very fortunate!” And, yes, indeed, I really am very fortunate.

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What goes unseen is that I’m juggling a full-time day job, the marketing agency, and board game projects like Tasty Humans. I’ve had a wide variety of work experiences and I have to tell you something I’ve found out.

You can never really be your own boss.

Obviously, putting a sentence like that in bold, you know I’m not about to give you a Tony Robbins style speech. No, I’m here to shatter myths like my name’s Adam Savage. I’m here to set expectations sensibly so you can live a life of relative comfort while you strive to become your best self. It’s true, I’m a big fan of self-starting and hard work, but I’m not a fan of false prosperity gospel.

So let’s put to bed this “be your own boss” cliche that I hear all the time online and offline.

Even Corporate CEOs Have Bosses

Let’s say you’re a yuppie in the 1980s. You smoke in your office and wear suspenders and stripes. At the age of 27, after working 90 hours a week for years on end in a high finance firm, you earn a VP title. You’re on track to become the CEO of JP Chase Fargo.

Cut to 2007 where you’re testing the strings on your golden parachute. Yeah, you made it to the CEO position, but you never became your own boss. No, indeed, the Board of Directors tells you what to do all the time.

You consider angling for the Chairman of the Board position, but she seems miserable. She’s reporting to all the shareholders and doesn’t really have many viable strategic options either. She’s at their mercy.

You’ve kicked around the idea of buying a 51% stake in the company, but even then, you’d still be subject to the whims of the market. Everybody’s a part of the market, so this abstract thing that would rule your life and limit your actions has no face. You can’t call anyone out or bargain with it.

All this is to say that no matter how high up you get in a traditional company, you’re always reporting to somebody or something. This isn’t a bad thing, and I’ll explain this later.

Want to Be Your Own Boss? Don’t Become an Entrepreneur!

“Be your own boss doesn’t mean becoming the CEO of JP Chase Fargo, Brandon.” Okay, and I get that. As a member of the millennial generation that wants to become entrepreneurs because of the misdeeds of the CEOs of JP Chase Fargo, I can relate. However, I can tell you from firsthand experience that entrepreneurs are not their own bosses either.

Entrepreneurs report to their clients. If they don’t have clients, they report to their customers. If they never deal with their customers directly, they report to market demand. Their viable money-making options are limited by the iron law of product-market fit.

Even if you found a way around the inexorable law of product-market fit, you’d still have some bosses. Among my many bosses includes the Tennessee Department of Revenue, and for that matter, the Internal Revenue Service. I have to play nice by the rules of my local city as well as Hamilton County, Tennessee. Even in my own business, I report to bureaucrats at various different levels of the government. And Tennessee, true to Southern tradition, plays it pretty fast and loose on laws and regulations.

Again, this is not a bad thing. It’s simply something you must accept.

Even World Leaders Have a Boss

“Okay smart guy, but what if I become the government?” Sure, let’s run with this idea. Even politicians cannot act with impunity. They have to win over a coalition of voters. Donald Trump may be the President of the United States, but he also has a boss. Multiple, in fact. Their names are Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

Even if you’re a dictator, like Kim Jong Un, you have a boss, too. You see, being dictator comes with a lot of perks, so you have to have people protect you or else you will be overthrown. In this sense, Kim Jong Un’s bosses are any generals or other key government personnel who prevent a coup. This is not just my personal belief. This is, in fact, a studied and published fact in political science. Here’s a reputable, if insouciant, pop-sci book that does a good job of explaining it.

You Can Never Escape Accountability…But That’s Actually a Good Thing

The key takeaway here is that you can never escape accountability. All human begins are connected. We are in the world together for better or for worse. For that reason, it’s really important to build connections and try to help people.

Look, I know working for someone is hard. Sometimes you don’t know what they want. Sometimes they are unreasonable. Other times, they are outright mean. Bad bosses outnumber good bosses by a ratio of like 10:1. Indeed, it’s my hope that I’m not among the 10 for my interns and contractors.

In most situations, though, you can find a way to finesse it. You can find a way to live and work well. A few exceptions, of course, are when communication breaks down to an irreparable level and gross indecency of the type that I’d prefer not to spell out.

You Don’t Want to Be Your Own Boss…You Actually Want Purpose, Self-Expression, and the Ability to Control Your Work

It’s no secret that most people hate their jobs. Again, this is not a Brandonism – about a third of people would call themselves “engaged at work” according to Gallup. So what actually makes a difference? According to Harvard Business Review, it comes down to three basic qualities: purpose, self-expression, and experimentation.

When people want to “be their own boss,” it’s a cry that they feel out of control. They don’t feel like their work matters, our their voice matters, or that they have any say. Seriously, if you have a desire to be your own boss, keep asking “why” until you get to the root of the desire. It will probably be some variation of these three things.

People need to feel like their life has a purpose. To constantly repress your true desires is to suffer. The ability to experiment at work, to my ears, sounds like freedom from micromanagement and the ability to choose your own path.

Not every job will offer you the ability to pursue these three things. Not everyone will have the privilege to chase one that does either. If you’re stuck in a job you hate, I’m here to say that running away may or may not actually fix your problems. You have to do the hard work of introspection!

And let me say just one more thing. There is dignity in any work you do, including the act of looking for work. You don’t have to be your own boss to live well. You don’t have to have a flashy job to make a difference.

Final Thoughts

We are all connected. Everyone’s actions affect other people. We live in a world where no one can truly be their own boss. This is a good thing – it means we have to play nice with one another!

When you say to yourself “I want to be my own boss,” I want you to challenge that statement. Ask “why?” Keep asking until you get to the emotional root of your desires. It when you reach the roots that you can see what you really want. This gives you the freedom to chase what you truly desire 🙂




Tasty Humans: How Our Board Game Raised $20,536 on Kickstarter

Posted on Brandon Rollins1 CommentPosted in Behind the Scenes

After a year of development, Tasty Humans raised $20,536 on Kickstarter. It’s a puzzle-solving, tile placement board game for 1-4 players where you play as a fantasy monster who’s hungry for villagers. We could not be happier with how the campaign turned out, and the game is available for pre-order now!

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This stands in stark contrast to the last Kickstarter campaign I ran, which was Highways & Byways in March 2018. After canceling that campaign at around 30% of the goal, I wrote a long in-depth post about what exactly went wrong. Indeed, with Tasty Humans, both the game development and the marketing processes were radically different than they used to be, and this ultimately paid off.

This was a small, tight, humble, simple project. Having seen ups and downs, I was determined to see just how far we could go with $2,500. I never intended to take this game project on, but ultimately, it worked out really well. Now I would like to share what I’ve learned with you 🙂

Tasty Humans Had Good Product-Market Fit

Everybody values different things in life. No two people are the same, and neither are their interests. For that reason, when you’re creating products, you have to do so with your audience in mind. This is true no matter what industry you work in. When your product feels tailor-made for audience, we call that product-market fit.

The Early Design

Tasty Humans had strong product-market fit potential from the get-go. An extremely talented new designer, Ryan Langewisch, won a 48-hour board game design contest. The GameSmiths judged all these anonymous submissions. His submission – then called Fantasy Feast – stood out head and shoulders above the competition, scoring fully two points higher on a ten-point scale than any of the other nineteen participants.

My friend, Tyson Mertlich, member of the GameSmiths told me, “you have to try this game.” Sure enough, I did, and it was really, really uncommonly good. It was then that I agreed to produce the game provided we spent only $2,500 to produce it and we split the costs 50/50.

Mid-Development

It’s not enough to simply make a good game, though. To sell in this awfully noisy, competitive board gaming environment, you have to have mechanics and art that people really enjoy. On the note of mechanics, we were really lucky. The mechanics that were chosen for the initial game – tile placement, variable player powers, and so on – all screened well with an audience. Additionally, the material costs to create this game were surprisingly low, so we didn’t have to make any major cuts. The cuts that we did make (two-sided monster boards, 330 gsm cards, etc.) ended up being added back as stretch goals when they became financially viable.

Tyson found a wonderful Russian artist named Petr Semenikhin. He made the caricature art that really refined the look of Tasty Humans. As soon as we received his art, we started running Facebook “page like” ads to see how well the art would be received. We very quickly had empirical data that suggested that a certain subset of board gamers loved the art. (Relevance Score of 8, 9, 10 and really low cost per action.)

Late Development

After the game was fully completed, everything we did, from the price point to the page set up was based on successful campaigns. I’ve been running a marketing agency for the last several months that has actually, through a bizarre twist of fate, superseded Pangea Games in revenue. As part of running that company, I’ve become very good at market research.

I looked at probably 30 or 40 different successful campaigns of a similar price point with a similar “feel.” Once I collated all the data, we reverse-engineered a high-quality Kickstarter page with the right prices. We even hired this fantastic voice actor from Fiverr for the video!

When all was said and done, the conversion rate was a staggering 5.5% per unique user on the campaign page. That means that for every 1,000 computers that accessed our campaign page, 55 became backers and did not cancel their pledges. According to CrowdCrux, the typical Kickstarter conversion rate is 1.5 – 5%.

We Had a Fantastic Team Dynamic

I cannot emphasize how important liking your team is. We were very communicative and always willing to help one another out. Ryan and Tyson were very organized and timely, handling their respective work with ease and excellence. Even Petr, who I know spoke with directly, was creating art at a breakneck pace. In fact, he turned around brand new stretch goal art before our funds even had a chance to clear, giving us a little buffer room if something goes sideways with manufacturing or freight shipping.

Good Supply Chain Management Reduced Costs

Over the last few months, I’ve provided a lot of consulting work for Fulfillrite, who met me through this blog. For that reason, I’ve become extremely familiar with order fulfillment, which is their specialty, but also related industries like freight shipping and customs. On top of that, I’ve been working back and forth with printers to create specs for a long time.

This is all to say that we optimized for product cost in the long run. The problem with making a game for $2,500 is that you don’t benefit from the economies of scale like the bigger companies do. That means you have to make games for the lowest possible cost or else your price will, by necessity, be too high for anybody to buy.

We Didn’t Spend Much on Marketing, But Our ROI was High

We added another $2,500 in marketing costs, bringing the total to about $5,000. At the very beginning, we did not intend to do this, but with the marketing agency doing so well and with Tasty Humans showing such potential, it would have been foolish to squander the opportunity by being cheap.

We ordered a few more review copies than we needed, which added a few hundred. We had Rahdo do a video, which was the best $500 I’ve ever spent! Then after that, we waited until two days before the game launched and then ran a bunch of Facebook ads.

Why wait until two days before? The two day time period gave us adequate time for Facebook to approve the ads and for us to test them. It also meant we wouldn’t spend much money before the game was, you know, buyable. Once we knew the ad worked, we really juiced it up with a few hundred for the first two days of the campaign. We then ultimately spent a total of about $1,600 on Facebook ads over the life of the campaign.

One of my regrets with this campaign is that we never turned on conversion tracking for Facebook ads. We’ll never know for sure how much the ads brought in. I stopped and started the ads for a couple of days. From that, I imputed that we earned $6-7 per every ad dollar, which I feel pretty good about.

Another one of my regrets with this campaign is that we were so risk-averse. We had such a high conversion rate on the page, so few review copies, and relatively little money spent on ads. If we had invested more early on, it’s very possible that we could have made $50,000 or more on this campaign.

Tasty Humans Was the Least Stressful Campaign I’ve Ever Run

I don’t have too many regrets, though. In fact, this is the least stressful Kickstarter campaign I’ve ever run. Having seen dramatic highs and dramatic lows in the board game business, this was a relative breeze.

Our team is fantastic, which made launch day less stressful. With relatively little money on the line and the agency being a viable way to generate revenue, the specter of failure no longer had the same ability to frighten.

Do We Have Any Regrets?

I can’t speak for the other guys, but I have to say I don’t really have regrets that matter on this project. I’ve tried to nitpick and autopsy this game like War Co. or Highways & Byways, but the simple truth is that this accomplished every objective we wanted it to and more.

What objectives were those? Well, I wanted redemption after a failed campaign and I wanted to launch a low-risk project. Ryan wanted to see his design come to life. Tyson wanted to establish himself as a capable board game developer. On all fronts, we succeded.

My one regret is that we didn’t spend more on the marketing campaign. We would have bought a couple more review copies, spent some more on ads, and maybe attended another convention or two.

Now What?

With Tasty Humans funded, all that’s left is manufacturing and fulfillment. As logistically tricky as these can be, both are familiar territory for Pangea Games.

At this point, we’re considering new game ideas. For me personally, I’m still working on building the marketing agency. The agency will need to settle into more of a routine before I become actively involved in new games. That said, we’re kicking around the idea of doing another 48-hour design contest in late September. You never know… 🙂