Nach der Gen Con ist auf den drei großen Plattformen wenig los: Die Spieleschmiede hat in den vergangenen sieben Tagen kein neues Brettspiel gestartet, und die einzige neue Gamefound-Kampagne der Woche, eine Sonderedition von Mykerinos, erreicht keine der Auswahlschwellen dieser Ausgabe. Diese Wochenschau konzentriert sich daher auf vier Kickstarter-Kampagnen: zwei frisch gestartete Titel und zwei Klassiker-Neuauflagen, die in den kommenden Tagen enden. Alle Zahlen sind Momentaufnahmen vom 24. August 2026.

Spirit Train: ein Geisterzug für die letzte Reise

Spirit Train: The Final Journey von SweaterBear Games ist seit dem 18. August auf Kickstarter live und läuft noch bis zum 15. September. Am 24. August 2026 stehen 262.726 US-Dollar zu Buche, bei einem Ziel von 10.000 US-Dollar sind das 2.627 Prozent, getragen von 1.733 Unterstützenden. Die drei Pledge-Stufen werben mit 30, 20 und 32 Prozent Rabatt gegenüber dem späteren Ladenpreis. Versand, Steuern und Zoll rechnet die Kampagne nach eigenen Angaben separat nach Kampagnenende ab.

Designt haben das Spiel Casey Mattes und Zoey Mattes. Als Fährleute zwischen den Welten bauen 2 bis 4 Spielende in 60 bis 90 Minuten ihren Zug aus wechselnden Waggons, sammeln Geister ein und begleiten sie in ihr Jenseits. Mechanisch mischt Spirit Train Worker Placement mit einer Aktionsreihenfolge, die von der Stimmung der Geister abhängt. Einen Solo- und Koop-Modus bietet erst die oberste Pledge-Stufe mit der Zusatzkampagne „The Lost Soul“, laut Kampagnenbeschreibung acht Kapitel im Solo- oder Koop-Modus.

The Monolith: blutiges Opfer für einen außerirdischen Fels

Auch The Monolith von Plaid Hat Games ist seit dem 18. August live, mit Laufzeit bis zum 17. September. Am 24. August 2026 sind 110.998 US-Dollar zusammengekommen, bei einem Ziel von 50.000 US-Dollar sind das 222 Prozent und 1.221 Unterstützende. Plaid Hat Games hatte eine erste Kampagne zum Spiel bereits im Juni gestartet und sie trotz erfolgreicher Finanzierung nach drei Tagen abgebrochen. Firmenchef Colby Dauch nannte im August gegenüber der Fachpresse den Grund: Die Zusagen seien bereits am zweiten Kampagnentag vollständig zum Stillstand gekommen, weshalb Plaid Hat Games den Neustart erst nach eingehender Analyse der Fehler plante.

Design stammt von Phil Gross. 3 bis 4 Spielende führen als Schamanen Krieger gegen rivalisierende Kulte, sammeln Herzen und opfern sie am Ende jeder Runde dem titelgebenden Monolithen, der daraufhin die Kampfaktionen der Partie bestimmt. Eine Partie dauert laut Verlag rund 120 Minuten. Das Grundspiel hat keinen Solo-Modus, gegen Aufpreis bringt ein Bot-Pack-Zukauf Unterstützung für 1 bis 2 Spielende.

Zu Versandkosten und Einfuhrabgaben für Unterstützende außerhalb der USA macht die Kampagne, anders als Spirit Train, keine Angabe. Die Reward-Texte nennen für alle Stufen nur einen weltweiten Versand ohne weitere Details.

Twilight City und Kalmár: Queen Games holt zwei Pierrot-Spiele zurück

Nur noch bis zum 27. August läuft die Kickstarter-Kampagne von Queen Games zu Twilight City und Kalmár: Merchants in Buda, zwei Spielen des ungarischen Designers Pierrot (Tamás Z. Marosi). Am 24. August 2026 stehen 9.026 Euro bei einem Ziel von 2.000 Euro, das sind 451 Prozent bei 59 Unterstützenden. Die Deluxe-Stufen nennen Ladenpreise von 79,99 Euro für Kalmár und 89,99 Euro für Twilight City, das Bundle beider Spiele kostet gegenüber einem Richtpreis von rund 180 Euro je nach Stufe 15 oder 25 Prozent weniger. Alle Deluxe-Stufen schließen laut Kampagne die deutsche und die EU-Mehrwertsteuer ein, die Bundle-Stufen liefern zusätzlich versandkostenfrei nach Deutschland und in die EU.

Twilight City schickt 1 bis 4 Spielende als Partisanen gegen ein diktatorisches Gouverneursregime in einer smoggeschwängerten Stadt, mit Tableau-Aufbau und rund 120 Minuten Spielzeit, und bringt einen eigenen Solo-Modus mit. Kalmár versetzt 2 bis 4 Spielende für 90 bis 150 Minuten als konkurrierende Kaufmannssöhne ins Buda des 15. Jahrhunderts, mit Warenhandel, Investitionen und einem eigenen Modus für zwei Personen, aber ohne klassischen Solo-Modus. Beide Spiele erschienen ursprünglich bei Private Moon Studios. Queen Games mit Sitz in Troisdorf bringt jetzt Deluxe-Neuauflagen beider Titel heraus.

Mexica, Bridges of Shangri-La, Gheos und Reel Rivals: vier Klassiker in letzter Minute

Der britische Verlag Play For Keeps beendet seine Sammelkampagne zu vier Euro-Klassikern bereits am 26. August. Am 24. August 2026 stehen 56.824 britische Pfund bei einem Ziel von 12.250 Pfund, das sind 464 Prozent, unterstützt von 814 Personen. Die Mexica-Stufe wirbt mit rund 7 Pfund Ersparnis gegenüber dem Ladenpreis, das Bundle aller vier Spiele mit rund 46 Pfund. Zu Mehrwertsteuer oder Zoll für Unterstützende in der EU äußert sich die Kampagne, anders als Queen Games bei Twilight City und Kalmár, nicht.

Das Zugpferd der Kampagne ist Mexica von Michael Kiesling und Wolfgang Kramer, der dritte Teil ihrer Masken-Trilogie aus dem Jahr 2002. 2 bis 4 Spielende ziehen in rund 90 Minuten Kanäle und Brücken durch Tenochtitlan und gründen Bezirke für Mehrheitspunkte, ein Solo-Modus fehlt. Dazu kommen die Neuauflagen von Bridges of Shangri-La, Gheos und Reel Rivals als weitere Titel im selben Bundle.

Diese Ausgabe teilt sich in der Mitte: Spirit Train und The Monolith sind komplett neue Spiele, Twilight City/Kalmár und das Mexica-Bundle bringen dagegen Bestehendes in neuer Auflage zurück. Wer an Twilight City, Kalmár oder den vier Play-For-Keeps-Titeln interessiert ist, hat nur noch wenige Tage Zeit. Die kommende Woche dürfte nach der Sommerpause wieder mehr Neustarts bringen.

Plaid Hat Games launched its Kickstarter for The Monolith in June with a trio of successful crowdfunding campaigns under its belt – only to pull the project three days after launch when pledges unexpectedly ground to a halt, despite quickly beating its $20,000 goal. Less than two months later the revamped campaign is back, and has already pulled in almost four-times the amount the cancelled campaign managed in the same amount of time. In this first-person piece for BoardGameWire, Plaid Hat founder and CEO Colby Dauch explains why The Monolith exposed flaws the publisher’s previous campaigns had masked, what he believes it got wrong, and why the changes made for the relaunch appear to be working.

Plaid Hat Games is relatively new to crowdfunding and we’ve experience our first major setback in that arena. We launched our fourth ever crowdfunding campaign back in June, this time for a new game called The Monolith.

By the second day of the campaign the pledges had fully stalled out. It was self-evident that we had made mistakes, so we pulled the campaign with the intention to relaunch it after analyzing what had gone wrong, and doing what we could to address it.

As I write this article, I don’t know if our hunches will turn out to be correct. This article is scheduled to be posted as we relaunch the campaign, so I suppose we are all going to find out together! I’m more than a little nervous. Allow me to provide some background essential in understanding how we’ve come to make the choices we’ve made.

We’ve been around since 2009 and watched from the sidelines as crowdfunding took hold and grew into a large part of the board game industry.

For many years we swore off crowdfunding. Internally we were critical of it for a number of reasons. My biggest reservation was that it felt dishonest to me that an established company would tell its customers “we need your help to make this product”, when they had already proven previously that they were capable of putting together the funding necessary to launch a new product onto the market, without requiring the customer to buy said product a year or more in advance of its release.

However, things have changed over the years in more ways than one and honestly, it has been a bad business decision to hold out on the crowdfunding model for as long as I have.

When we did finally enter the crowdfunding space a couple of years ago I told myself, and others, that there was clearly no longer an expectation that the companies going to crowdfunding needed to be there. I believed it to be understood that it was more akin to a pre-order system and that the consumer knows that. I even said as much in the article I was interviewed for on this very site, posted on June 30th, about us pulling the Monolith from Kickstarter. It’s not true. I had only convinced myself that it was.

I’m in the midst of reflecting on every decision I’ve made that led to a failed campaign, and what that failure means for my company, the people I employ and my family, if I’m not able to correct course. The reality is that we moved to crowdfunding because the things that made us successful in the past aren’t working anymore and we were growing desperate for a solution.

Getting attention on a board game release announcement isn’t free anymore. It’s not news. At best it’s a bullet point on a long list of new release announcements for the week. The traditional method we’ve long employed of selling to distributors who sell to retailers who sell to players, sadly seems to be falling apart for us, and I suspect for most publishers.

So we found ourselves trying to incorporate crowdfunding into our business model while simultaneously telling ourselves we could do it different – better. Our approach:

• We will severely limit the use of exclusives. We don’t want people feeling like they HAVE to buy the product now or they will be missing out.
  
• We aren’t seeking to punish the people who have long supported their local board game shop by purchasing our products through them.
  
• Most of all we don’t want to manipulate our customers by preying on their fear of missing out.
  
• We will reduce the long wait between the time you back a game and the time you get that game by being fully ready to go to production at the time of the Kickstarter.

There were flaws in this approach. Flaws that I believe were masked in our first three campaigns because they all had something else big going for them.

Wandering Galaxy was the latest installment in a series of games we had released that had gotten a lot of attention for their amazing storytelling and voice acting (in a companion app).

Ashes Ascendency was a reinvigoration for a game that has ten years worth of glowing reviews to put in front of people and a dedicated fanbase.

Super Auto Pets Card Battle was based on an amazing and charming digital game, and we were able to rely on the attention of fans from that.

The Monolith had no predecessor.

This is why I believe our attempts to do things ‘different from the others’ has come back to bite us:

We wanted to limit FOMO.

A crowdfunding campaign must be compelling beyond the presentation of the game itself. You are asking the customer to pay for a game long before they can expect to have it in their hands. We need to give them a compelling reason to do that.

In the Super Auto Pets Card Battle campaign, the most popular pledge was by far the ALL-IN pledge, because it was the most compelling. You got all of the sets, all of the add-ons and in a storage box that would organize it all and only be available during the campaign.

I took away the wrong lesson. What I decided was that what those results were telling me was just that people want all the stuff, so with The Monolith let’s just make the core product all of the stuff.

We wanted to reduce the wait time on the game.

This is the one where I really messed up with The Monolith. As I established, the reality is that we needed to make changes to how we were doing things and I allowed myself to miss out on a key advantage to crowdfunding: measuring demand.

In an effort to shorten the window on how quickly we could deliver on a campaign, and further spurred on by a yearning to have a line at our booth for a new game release at GenCon or Essen (that feeling is the highest of highs), I started having plastic molds for the game well before the campaign so that they wouldn’t delay production – and remember this game was going to have all the upgrades packed in, so it was a lot of plastics and a lot of mold costs.

Further compounding the issue was that the mold costs were so high, to get the cost per unit down, I felt like I needed to be prepared to produce 10,000 copies. And like the molds, I got that production started before the campaign even started.

It was the exact kind of risk we had always needed to take when producing a game, but crowdfunding should have given me a chance to mitigate that risk, and in doing so really been a fulfillment of the core concept of crowdfunding to begin with: Asking the player to help be a part of bringing the game to the market.

So here is what we are doing differently with the relaunch of The Monolith campaign to try to address what went wrong with the initial campaign:

• Creating a 1-2 player mini-expansion.
  
• Lowering the retail price of the game and offering a larger discount on that already lower price for backers.
  
• Creating a 6th shaman character add-on.
  
• Creating glass blood tokens add-on.
  
• Creating a metal first player and surge tokens add-on.
  
• Creating an All-In tier with all of the add-ons included at a lower price than purchasing them separately.
  
• Different marketing partner and strategy.

Finally, here are my take aways for how we will do campaigns differently in the future:

• When possible, create a version of the game that focuses on lower price and a version that focuses on maximum bling.
  
• Be more willing to compete with the price point that we and everyone else knows online retailers are going to put on our games.
  
• Give the campaign a chance to communicate what the demand is. We will still be production ready, but I won’t be putting the cart directly in front of the horse again.
  
• Better leverage the community-based systems that already exist to support crowdfunding.

Follow Up

As I write THIS bit, the campaign has relaunched about 24 hours ago and is doing much better this time!  By a large margin, backers are opting for the pledge level that includes all the add-ons. So I believe this supports the theory that the add-ons were essential for a successful campaign. 

It is hard to quantify exactly how much each of our changes contributed to the better result, but overall, the adjustments seem to be working.  I’m so grateful to everyone who has backed.

The Kickstarter for The Monolith, which is designed by Phil Gross, is set to run until September 17.

The post “Our attempts to do things ‘different from the others’ came back to bite us”: Plaid Hat’s Colby Dauch on The Monolith’s Kickstarter failure and rapid turnaround first appeared on .

Brumble Quest is a peculiar inclusion in Plaid Hat’s catalog. Unlike their other touchstones, whether expandable duelers like Ashes and Summoner Wars or comedy adventures in the vein of Forgotten Waters, it’s a diminutive thing with minimal components, a ten-minute playtime, and — oh yeah — it only sells in sync with big conventions. Fortunately, that means during conventions, not at them; online ordering is still a possibility for those of us unable or unwilling to make the annual pilgrimage to Indianapolis.

For such an odd duck, though, it’s… kinda great? Designed by J. Arthur Ellis, Brumble Quest is a prisoner’s dilemma game for pretty much any number of players. Minimum three. But as many as fifty out of the box. With a projector and laser pointers, theoretically it could go even higher.

It’s all location location location.

Down at its roots, Brumble Quest is familiar enough. Every round seeds three new locations onto the table. At the count of “One, Two, Three, Brumble” — I know, it’s cheesy — everyone points at the location they intend to visit. Depending on the outcome, players then take home some quantity of loot and/or suffer an injury.

There are two things that set it apart. First, the production. Rather than gussying itself up with a whole to-do, Brumble Quest is as minimal as they come. In lieu of tokens for loot and wounds, each player receives a peel-off hero from a pad, then folds its corners to track their current wealth and health. The rules are compressed onto a single card, front and back, and takes so little time to internalize that it’s closer to hopping into a childhood classic than learning something new. As for the locations, there are only fourteen. That’s a slender deck indeed, all but guaranteeing you’ll see repeats within a session.

But the second point is that the locations are nicely diversified, even if there aren’t many to play with, and really it’s the way they combine and conflict and, even at times, pre-solve their own conundrums, that make the game so special.

I’ll give an example. Let’s say the current trio is the Lonesome Peak, the Shadow Wastes, and the Cursed Prison. That first location provides four gems, but you’ll take damage if you visit it unless it’s the least visited destination. The Shadow Wastes are even more tempting: five gems, and you avoid damage if everyone is pointing there but one player. But then there’s the Cursed Prison, a locale very unlike the others. It subtracts a gem, but everyone at the table will suffer a wound unless at least one adventurer goes there.

No time to think. One. Two. Three. Brumble. (Ugh.)

Measuring health and loot is done by folding a paper tracker. Cheaper than tokens!

The beauty of these social conundrums lies in their clarity. The stakes are always perfectly clear, barring an unfortunate misunderstanding. But this clarity is sharply contrasted with the slow departure of objectives at the table, not to mention the sheer uncertainty of human behavior.

For instance, how does the previous scenario alter if you’re the player with the least remaining health? How about the most? What if your score is meager so you’re trying to drive everyone else into an early grave? Sure, all things being equal, everyone should do the optimal thing, right? But get together a half-dozen players and it becomes clear pretty quickly that “the optimal thing” may be a matter of interpretation.

And, sure, sometimes the game coughs up a problem that really does feel solved. More than once, I’ve looked down at a trio and thought, wow, why would anybody ever go to that one spot? But, again, people are unpredictable. Almost as often as Brumble Quest seems to proffer a solved dilemma, someone at the table has appeared hell-bent to un-solve it.

The result is a pleasantly crisp little thing. There are no character abilities, no sudden reversals. Some locations might bump your health up a notch, but that’s a rare outlier. For the most part, it’s you, your friends, and pockets that grow heavier while your blood supply gets lighter. That’s it. Honestly, anything else would clutter the experience.

These fellas had better’ve washed.

Barring the addition of extra junk, this is nigh-perfect in its restraint. Maybe Plaid Hat won’t be able to help themselves. Last I checked, the second edition of Summoner Wars was up to thirty factions. (Yes, I have all of them.) (Yes, they are amazing.) (No, I probably won’t have time to write about them.)

Then again, maybe not. As I understand it, Brumble Quest may soon have peers, other teensy-tiny boxes that provide their own miniature siblings. For this game in particular, I’m hard-pressed to imagine it getting any better. This is a true pocket game, slender enough it could have been compressed into one of those plastic Button Shy wallets. I expect it’ll make for a good candidate at our family dinner this weekend.

A complimentary copy of Brumble Quest was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)