Today is also the day that UPS will deliver a board game to me that I backed in crowdfunding. I just don't know which one. Surprise! Basically making a crowdfunded board game is an exercise in coordinating a bunch of different sub-contractors, with the last in line being the shipping company. The end customer usually doesn't know which backed project uses which shipping company, and the shipping notification doesn't always specify the content of the parcel. So now I got a shipping notification that I'll receive a parcel of 6.5 kg (so I am pretty sure it is a board game), coming from Awaken Realms in Poland. But as Awaken Realms is the owner of Gamefound, and Gamefound is both its own crowdfunding platform, and is being used as pledge manager by games on Kickstarter, I still don't know which game this will be. My best guess is Dragon Eclipse, a game I backed in September 2023, and which was promised for September 2024.

One reason that I am less enthusiastic about backing crowdfunded board games is that the delays sometimes mean that by the time the game arrives, I'm not all that interested anymore. For example I love campaign games, but the last two campaign games I finished each took about 1 year to complete. So I realized that I bought more of this type of game than I can reasonably hope to play through, even with me currently having two different groups to play with. Well, two reliable groups; I have a third group running to play another campaign game, but we only played once, and now have problems finding another date.

Tomorrow I'll visit a board game fair in Dortmund. It is an order of magnitude smaller than the Spiel fair in Essen in October every year, but that is probably both an advantage and a disadvantage. Essen last October felt too crowded to actually try a game out. I think I'll have better opportunities to try out games at the smaller event. And it would be nice to try out a game, and then immediately be able to buy it. I still see the advantages of crowdfunding board games, especially if I want the deluxified edition, or games that are too niche to have retail appeal. But I'll probably pick up a game or two tomorrow, which is a whole lot less complicated and involves less surprises than crowdfunding.