When you think of Kickstarter, you might think primarily of electronics and gadgets, which are two of the most popular product types on the site. But this year’s biggest Kickstarter project is rather more old school: a board game.
The Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon Kickstarter raised a massive $6.2 million from over 40,000 backers, and the final game should be delivered in August 2019. The concept is a complex adventure game clearly aimed at hardcore board gamers, with a 100,000 word book of story scripts and hundreds of markers, tokens, cards, and several different boards provided. The story has fifteen chapters, each of which can take up to four hours to complete, so there should be plenty of content to keep players happy.
The world of the game is based around a dark version of Arthurian legends, and the gameplay allows solo or co-operative play for one to four players. The makers describe the game as featuring “adventure, survival and exploration mechanics perfectly paired with character development and exciting combat and diplomatic systems.”
The developers of Tainted Grail, Awaken Realms, have previously created other games like the Edge miniature universe, the Awakening project, the This War of Mine board game, and are currently delivering the first wave of a project called Nemesis. Their proven track record of delivered Kickstarter projects has likely contributed to backers being willing to plunk down serious money for the new game, which has funding levels starting from £15 ($19) for a digital copy of the game and running all the way up to £826 or more (around $1050) for six sets of the complete game and all of the stretch goals and extras.
The digital version of the game is planned to be available for PC on the Steam store, and an early access code for the digital version will be included with all orders of the physical game.
The biggest Kickstarter project of 2017 was the ZeTime smartwatch, which raised over $5 million on the platform. Unlike some Kickstarter projects, the ZeTime watch did get produced and distributed and it did work as advertised, although its reviews were rather lukewarm. Let’s hope that Tainted Grail is better received, and that the thousands of backers get a game that they love.
