Crowdfunding

Operation Barbarossa: A Roll and Write Game

A Solo PNP Wargame of the 1941 German Invasion of the Soviet Union, done by Martin Melbardis, designer of Campaign: Fall Blau and soon to come Campaign: Bagration!

Dictator for Life

Card game? 2+ Players? Beautiful art, and my heart goes out to this guy and his passion for the end of the Roman Empire. Plus I love the roadtrip to game stores video.

Prepare for 2025 releases! Our next game will be Lonely Cairn, the failed attempt at finding the Northwest Passage.

Arabian Struggle Kickstarter had to be cancelled.

I've got an internal rule for our Kickstarter campaigns: Final sales number = 1st day sales x 2. Doesn't work for every campaign, but has been a really helpful predictor for our campaigns.

So by the end of day one it looked like we were going to hit about $4k for the campaign. The goal was $3k, so shouldn't be a problem, correct?

Unfortunately, I put in the KS that the game would be coming with a mounted board. Blue Panther does not make mounted boards (at least not anytime soon at least), so the plan was going to be to produce the game through traditional printing, but that required a minimum of 500 games. What I was really expecting to get on the KS was about $10-20k, which would have covered a good chunk of the printing costs. But clearly I wasn't going to hit that mark. Additionally, with such a low start with with the KS, there would be a lot of copies of the game sitting around, with a lot of storage fees. So I pulled the plug.

What I should have done...

1) Create a stretch goal to allow mounted boards IF we hit certain funding levels.

2) Created a funding goal that reflected what I needed to launch.

The games are now published and have shipped!

While we had a rocky start, the games are printed and flowing to customers!

We are now selling games published by Central Michigan University (Fire up Chips!) and the Strategist's Den.

For CMU we are selling:

Rising Waters- Coop game about helping people prepare for some awful flooding in the the Mississippi Delta in 1927

500 Year Old Vampire- Coop journaling game about what interesting history intersects a group of vampires. OK, maybe not 100% historical...

Hydrologic Cycle- Fast 2 player game about the water cycle

Monumental Crisis- Party game about an occupied French village facing a terrible decision

For Strategist's Den we are selling:

Forward Defense '85- Solo game as a company commander (really a company team commander) dealing with the Soviet horde flooding across the border in WWIII. OK, alternative history...

Our con schedule for 2025 looks like this:

28-30 MAR Circlecon, in DC (fingers crossed)

1-4 MAY Buckeye Game Fest, in Columbus

17-21 JUN Origins, in Columbus (with the Armchair Dragoons)

26 JUL- 3 AUG World Boardgaming Championships

Less busy than last year, and we aren't actually selling, just running demos. Trying to get to different cons though, so we are attending WBC to run some demos there.

Now mostly focused on Bluesky for social media

I started mostly on Twitter, but that became increasingly less focused on boardgame content and more on other items, then Twitter changed the agreement so that anything posted will be used to train their AI, and that was kind of the last straw. So now mostly on Bluesky, although I try to post now and again on Facebook and Instagram.