Victory Point Strategy and “All or Nothing” Tabletop Games Marketing
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Crowdfunding is a popular strategy for all sorts of board game, TTRPG, and tabletop game designers out there.
And no wonder: there are countless success stories, tons raising over six figures and several raising millions of dollars!
So one question I get a lot is: “How can we you make the kickstarter successful?”
Which is a reasonable question for any board game copywriter and tabletop games marketer…
Its… like… what I DO.
But what is NOT reasonable is “oh, and I’m hoping to launch the kickstarter in about 6 months”.
Why is that not reasonable?
Because usually they haven’t started any marketing yet.
Zero…
Zilch…
Nada…
And sure, better late than never, but you have to think of it like victory points in a complicated board game…
Recently I played Terra Mystica again, and played as the “Darklings” faction.
Their whole strategy revolves around getting “priests” rather than “workers”. Wanna terraform anything? Great. But forget the shovels; your priest will just pray super hard and make the desert become streams of living water.
image is not property of Riley James Copy
The problem is: workers are cheap and priests are expensive.
So if you want to get anything done in the later rounds, you have to start building your temple/sanctuary ASAP, rather than wasting your time on trading houses.
And since, by the later rounds, I would be getting at least 3 priests every Income Phase, I figured my strategy would be best to focus specifically on the elemental cults.
Because if I could get #1 in ALL of the elemental cults, then that would be 32 victory points I could add at the end! Woo!
But there were two problems to my strategy:
I wouldn’t have either the most structures (but my opponents wouldn’t have cults, so this balanced out).
I had no strategy for getting victory points throughout the game…
As you might have guessed, it was the second problem that KILLED ME.
By round 6, my opponent (dwarves) was 25 points ahead of me and it was too late for me to do anything about it.
No surprise, despite totally killing it at the elemental cults and getting around 66 victory points. I got third out of four players… not so great.
For a lot of victory point based board games, you need to two strategies:
You need to earn victory points THROUGHOUT the game to win.
You can’t just bank on a big win at the end…
You have to find some way to have the victory points trickle in each round,
And then combine that with a big “end of game bonus”
Well, with marketing it is the same way:
To get results, you need to have a long term marketing strategy too.
To succeed in launching a board game, you can’t just rely on a “big launch”…
You need to be doing marketing leading up and supporting the big launch.
You need to have your priorities CLEAR… your goals OUTLINED… your website PERFECT… your customer base IDENTIFIED… your social media channels UP AND RUNNING… your social proof OVERWHELMING.
So that when you launch, you have easy ways to ENGAGE and increase ENGAGEMENT.
In conclusion, when people want to launch a crowdfunding campaign and yet they have:
No branding
No USP
No understanding of their target audience
No email marketing
No social media presence
No benefits or features
No landing page
No influencer support
No reviews
Well, the proverbial crowdfunding mountain goes from a rigorous 10 mile hike with 3000 ft elevation gain…
To a technical climb with ice picks and oxygen tanks up Mt. Denali.
(Sorry for constantly jumping to random illustrations… that is the former pastor in me!)
You might still reach your crowdfunding minimum…
But you will almost certainly not “place 1st” like you hoped.
