Plaid Hat Games has cancelled its successfully-funded Kickstarter for upcoming title The Monolith three days after launch, saying it failed to give prospective backers enough reasons to pledge rather than wait for retail.

The Monolith quickly beat its $20,000 funding goal after launching on June 25, but Plaid Hat CEO Colby Dauch told BoardGameWire pledges had “completely stagnated” by the second day of the campaign.

That led the publisher to scrap the crowdfund for the Phil Gross-designed game on day three, having collected $27,400 from 290 backers.

Dauch said Plaid Hat plans to relaunch the crowdfund shortly after Gen Con with additional content and more pledge tiers, while keeping the game’s existing delivery timeline intact – with manufacturing having already begun on the title.

That manufacturing process has included Plaid Hat spending $35,000 on plastic moulds alone, given the large amount of plastic components in the game – including the namesake monolith, a large plastic tower which sits at the centre of the board.

Dauch told BoardGameWire the company estimates it would have to sell 10,000 copies of the game in order to spread the mould cost widely enough that the retail price could be kept down, adding that the long lead times on making plastic moulds was a big motivator in starting manufacturing prior to the campaign – as well as a desire to launch the game at a convention this year.

Plaid Hat said in an update to Kickstarter backers, “While we hit our funding goal at a decent rate, almost as soon as we did, the pledges stopped. Another 24 hours passed, and the needle didn’t move.

“Of course, we had questions since we’ve run several campaigns now and this experience is completely new to us.

“What we found was that our visually striking campaign was drawing in lots of people, but they weren’t pledging.

“While there wasn’t a ton of feedback, one thing we heard on several occasions was, ‘Why pledge now? Why not just wait for retail?'”

“For everyone here who’s backed, you already know the answer to that question, but we must acknowledge the simple truth that along the way, we could have done better.”

The company added in a follow-up post on BlueSky, “We could have limped over the finish line, but it would have been such a disservice to a game worthy of so much more.”

Dauch told BoardGameWire that all of Plaid Hat’s prior Kickstarters had followed the common practice of setting a low goal amount which can be quickly celebrated as having been beaten, providing momentum for the campaign.

But after seeing The Monolith quickly fund before effectively flatlining, Dauch said reaching a funding target was no longer enough to demonstrate sufficient market demand.

The company has said it will revisit that practice in the wake of cancelling The Monolith, instead likely setting the target as costs plus a certain margin that would need to be crossed to indicate there is enough overall enthusiasm from backers.

Dauch told BoardGameWire, “I think it is just public knowledge that there are certain rules you have to follow to make a Kickstarter work.

“We’ve tried to challenge some of the rules – for example, as a company we try not to lean too hard on FOMO to get people to pledge.

“But we’ve accepted other rules for success as standard practice in a crowdfunding campaign. One of those rules is that you really want to set a low goal that you can blow past early.”

Asked whether the game potentially suffered due to its $90 price point – not necessarily that it was too high, but that it fell between the extremes of ‘very affordable’ and ‘massive, multi-hundred dollar multibox crowdfund’ – Dauch told BoardGameWire:

“I think there is evidence that people want a variety of price points they can buy into, and we are exploring options to make that happen. I think that is more to blame than being in some middle ground.”

Plaid Hat has been making successful board games since 2009, when Dauch created the company to sell his highly-regarded card-based fantasy battler Summoner Wars.

The publisher scored another hit with animal-themed co-op adventure game Mice and Mystics in 2012, and followed that two years later with the hugely successful Dead of Winter, which scooped a string of awards – and big sales numbers – for its thematic mix of zombie survival, traitor mechanics and story-driven gameplay.

Plaid Hat was bought by Asmodee in 2015, but became a rarity five years later as one of just two studios which have gone on to become independent from the publishing and distribution giant.

The publisher only began running crowdfunding campaigns two years ago, having become free of a “first refusal” distribution deal with its former owner that had made experimenting with something like a Kickstarter campaign functionally impossible.

Dauch told BoardGameWire Plaid Hat had long delayed embracing Kickstarter because it was uncomfortable with some of the accepted conventions of crowdfunding, including the pressure to create artificial urgency.

He said, “The reality is that we held off on doing crowdfunding campaigns for a long time as a company because parts of them do feel artificial and we weren’t looking to deceive anyone.

“These large companies on Kickstarter don’t NEED the campaign funds in order to fund a project. It’s self-evident from the fact that a campaign must have a certain amount of polish and progress to even be taken seriously, which already represents a sizeable investment made to get a game to that state.

“Our decision to enter the crowdfunding arena was based on the belief that we were missing out on a portion of the market that enjoys getting their games through crowdfunding campaigns, not because we could no longer fun projects on our own.

“We felt that crowdfunding has been such a mainstay for so long, that most people who participate in them are aware that this is how many established companies use Kickstarter – as a sort of pre-order campaign.”

The post Plaid Hat pulls funded The Monolith Kickstarter after pledges ‘stagnated’ on day two, plans post-Gen Con relaunch first appeared on .

By Kaysee and Max

Disclosure: finished the campaign

Earthborne Rangers was one of the games that had been on our radar for quite a while. Many campaign games are also legacy games, which are often not replayable and happen to have many components that aren’t compostable. The components of EBR are compostable, but it’s also a replayable campaign game. For some time we’d wanted to play GMless RPGs with just the two of us; we tried, but it was difficult and we felt we needed more guidance. It seemed that EBR could scratch that itch, giving us some structure without being so restrictive that we couldn’t create our own narrative. Additionally, the art style is beautiful and captures the ecopunk vibe that we like (and we both love green). So we were very excited when we were able to get our hands on it.

Earthborne Rangers is a deck-building/construction game that relies on cards for the world building. Most of the game consists of cards. While there is a map that shows the location, there’s no board to place your character, and having minis isn’t necessary. It is quite similar to a tabletop RPG. But unlike many TTRPGs, players don’t have to rely on the GM to decide whether an action is permissible. The rules are all set up in the game. While TTRPGs offer more flexibility in terms of what a player can do, in EBR, players get to choose the personality and the aspects or the stats of their character and don’t have to rely on dice to randomly generate the stats.

The prologue got us hooked very quickly. During the prologue each player first chooses a number of personality cards, followed by cards representing their ranger’s background and specialty. One of us chose a Forager-Shaper and the other chose an Artisan-Artificer. While we weren’t able to update them regularly during the game, you can check our character sheets here and here. The resulting ranger deck slowly changes over the course of the campaign, as there are opportunities to engage in some further deck building.

The prologue also walks players through the setup process that repeats at the beginning of each day/session. First, players set up their individual areas and draw a starting hand of six cards. This is followed by shuffling the challenge deck, the function of which we’ll explain later. Next come the location, weather and mission cards. We really like these cards as they really help with the immersion (we’d recommend checking out the soundtrack if you want your game session to be more immersive). These are determined by the current state of the campaign, which is noted down on a campaign tracker. If you’re curious, check out our campaign tracker, but be warned: it contains plenty of spoilers.

Then comes the potentially most consequential part, building the path deck, which contains the flora and fauna, the beings, the people, and some structures/ruins. This will include cards based on the path that was used to arrive at the current location, specific or general cards based on that location and sometimes additional cards related to a mission or the weather. What we like about the path deck is that it makes the world come alive and it gives more variety to the game as who/whatever you encounter when you draw a path card is random even though its construction is determined by the factors mentioned earlier. Finally, there are arrival setup instructions on the back of the location card, which shape the initial conditions the rangers find themselves in.

After setup, rangers take turns until everyone has decided to rest for the round. On their turn, each ranger can either play a card from their hand, perform a test or decide to rest. The test or the card that a ranger can perform or play is dependent on the available energy, the type and the amount of which is determined by the aspect, in their energy pool and the path card that they want to interact with. In the first few sessions we were trying to use all the energy in the energy pool effectively, but it gets tricky as the campaign and the days progress; we asked ourselves (and each other) whether we should use them all before we rest or just rest even if there are some left in the pool. We really like this mechanism since while at the beginning it seems that being efficient with your resources means using most of them before resting, eventually we would have to consider whether not using them all and drawing a ranger card during the refresh stage (the stage after resting) might be the better option. But this also means having to draw another path card, which could bring more risks and might have to be dealt with.

When a ranger performs a test, they have to draw a challenge card, which contains a challenge icon (mountain, crest, or sun). Some path cards, weather cards, mission cards, and location cards contain challenge effects, which are triggered if the challenge card drawn has the corresponding challenge icon. The challenge card also determines if the effort used is deducted, added, or stays the same. We feel that the challenge cards are the ones that create the tension as you don’t know whether it’s going to trigger some negative or postive effects. Depending on the location, weather, path card and the mission cards in play, drawing a challenge card may speed up fatigue. Fatigue is when a ranger sets aside a card facedown from the ranger deck without using it. If the ranger is forced to fatigue a card but they don’t have any cards left in the ranger deck, they need to end the day. We haven’t played all the specialties and backgrounds yet, but we think that Shapers have a huge advantage when it comes to decreasing randomness and mitigating fatigue since they have more options not to perform tests during their turn; they could, instead, play a card, which doesn’t require drawing a challenge card to clear or help clear a path.

Clearing a path card is one of the most important things to do in the game because it unlocks and helps progress some missions. But a ranger doesn’t have to clear every path card in play. How to clear a path card depends on the type of path card and the conditions written on the card to clear it. If the card is a being, a flora, or a fauna, it can either be cleared by harm or progress. We would always try our best to clear using progress if it’s a being. We were talking about the choice of using the term “harm” and what it means in the game. This is the part of the narrative that we wanted to be very much our own. We sometimes just define “harm” as disturbance. Sometimes we say that the fruits were harvested and the plants were disturbed, which what harm means in the context of flora. Sometimes when a companion causes a harm to the prey, it just means that they “shooed” it. We interpret the term depending on which context it was done. The narrative and the system are not too restrictive so that there is some space for us to add our own spin on things.

The results of our choices also didn’t feel punishing mechanically and let us freely choose based on what we think is the right thing to do. Without going into too much detail, there was a mission where we needed some prey. One of the preys happened to be not a living prey. When we read the entry after clearing the mission, we were so relieved that we got it. When we finally cleared the mission, the reward wasn’t something we found valuable, but we enjoyed curating the narrative based on which preys we got. We’re being vague here, but you’ll know once you’ve chosen and completed that mission. What we also find very interesting and really love is that clearing a being with harm may seem to require less resources than clearing it with progress, but every ranger has some Spirit (the aspect that provides energy needed to clear with progress) and is capable of compassion, but not every ranger has the means (cards) to cause harm.

Our Final Thoughts:
Earthborne Rangers is the type of game that we were looking for when we were looking for a more structured GMless RPG. It’s not a TTRPG, but it is also not a typical card game. There were times during the campaign where we hoped to not encounter Quisi (one of the characters of the Valley who is endearingly fatiguing) anymore, but we still enjoyed the journey a lot. The art style, the interaction between the mechanics and the theme, the balance between randomness and choice, and most especially having the space to create a world that is uniquely our own, are the things that make EBR one of the best games we’ve played together.

Kaysee’s rating: 4.5/5
Max’s rating: 4.0/5

Combined rating: 4.5/5

Reference:
Earthborne Rangers[Rulebook].(2023). Earthborne Games.

Title: Earthborne Rangers (2023)
Game Design: Andrew Fischer, Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt, Andrew Navaro, Adam Sadler, Brady Sadler
Illustration: Joe Banner (II), Evan Simonet
Publisher: Earthborne Games

Photos by Kaysee

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