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Final Frontier Games have been building an impressive catalogue of games funded through Kickstarter. With Robin Hood due to deliver anytime now and a new expansion for Rise to Nobility on the way, we fired some questions their way....
A quick look at your game history and it seems that you have nailed Kickstarter! What have been the biggest lessons along the way?
Thanks! Well it’s hard to say there is one big lesson to be learned here. Running a Kickstarter is a very complex operation, and can be very demanding, even though it doesn’t seem that way at first glance. From my experience, the biggest and most important three cogs that drive the whole machinery are good marketing, an attractive Kickstarter page and constant interaction with your backers. If “greased” properly these three cogs can take your product far along the way.
What have been the advantages of the Kickstarter platform for you?
The biggest advantages that Kickstarter can offer is its following, which is measured in millions, and the significant minimisation of the risk factor in terms of starting investment. It’s absolutely the best (and for me the only) choice for starting publishers to get their games and their name out there.
But, because Kickstarter works so well, naturally this is a fact that thousands of other creators are aware of, so it’s not easy to stand out from the crowd and from the hundreds of other board game campaigns that are present in any given moment. So uniqueness is a thing that every creator should strive for.
How do you see crowd funding board games evolving?
Over the past years Kickstarter has slowly evolved towards a pre-order platform rather than an idea funding one. All products exposed there are already 95% finished and are just looking for finances that can kick-start their production. The competition in the board game category is fearsome and the quality of the board games there is on the highest level, sometimes even surpassing some well established publishing houses.
There is very little tolerance for mistakes, so creators must be very careful when shaping their products, and how they will present them in their campaigns. Still, I consider this to be a good thing for the board game industry, as competition can only lead to greater products.
Robin Hood and the Merry Men was your biggest success and your first game with design input from outside the company, is this something you will be doing more of in the future?
Definitely, I mean we enjoy designing games, and we’ll probably continue to, but in order to achieve having a big publishing catalogue with all kinds of board game genres, we simply must stay open for other designers and developers as well. This is the natural course a publishing company should evolve. We have already signed with some pretty interesting names in the board game industry and we are working on four different projects with them as we speak.
We know you have an expansion coming for Rise to Nobility - can you give us some more details on that?
“Rise to Nobility: Beyond” is a big box expansion that can be added to the base game to enrich the player's experience by broadening the playing area, introducing a new twist to the reputation mechanic in the game, and offering a wider spectre of choices. It adds new ways of scoring and engine building through a tableau building mechanism.
We are launching this campaign on October 3, and I invite all our fans to join us in this journey.
Any more sneak peaks for the future?
As I mentioned above we are working on multiple projects in the moment, all coming hopefully in the next year. Two of those board games will be set in the world of the Five Realms, one being a dice placement game set in a wizard school and the other one is an asymmetric board game where each player owns a different business and plays a different mechanism like worker placement, tile laying, card drafting, dice placement etc.
We also have a Western game and a small Roll and Write game coming up, but we’ll talk about that more as time passes.
