Tycoon Games bought for example the IP of Blood Rage from CMON. Blood Rage is a 2015 game which ranks currently on place 60 in popularity of all board games on BoardGameGeek. So Tycoon Games quickly produced a reskinned "new" version and started a new crowdfunding campaign for it. It didn't go well. CMON had huge experience and skill in launching crowdfunding campaigns, some people even said that their crowdfunding campaigns were better than the games they made. Tycoon Games pretty obviously was lacking that experience. The video for Blood Rage Valhalla was widely ridiculed for being a low-cost production. The crowdfunding campaign contained some weird elements, like a $1 payment that would reserve you a special miniature, for which you would then have to pay another $15 via a different payment system. And in an unfortunate design decision, the designers now imagined Valhalla to be some sort of manor, which makes the game board look remarkably like Clue. Colonel Mustard with the pipe in the library is attacking a group of bloodthirsty vikings!

As I write this, Blood Rage Valhalla has a dismal 4.4 out of 10 rating on BGG due to some people expressing their disappointment with advance review bombing. On YouTube several board game channels decided to express their own disappointment, rather than getting paid to promote the game. The only good news is that Blood Rage Valhalla already made $660,000 in pledges from 2,389 backers on name recognition alone. Not quite as much as the 9,825 backers of the original game, but those back then spent a lot less per backer, and collected only $905,682.

I don't know how much Tycoon Games paid for the Blood Rage IP. But to me it seems their crowdfunding campaign for the successor was rushed. I am not sure that is a good business decision. Board games, especially the crowdfunded variety, are a small market. You can't just produce junk with a popular IP like in the mobile game market and rely on nobody remembering. People who have a bad experience with one crowdfunded game from a company tend to remember and stay away from that company, I certainly already have a handful of companies I wouldn't back anymore. What good is it to buy a board game IP if you can't make a better game out of it, and aren't as good at crowdfunding campaigns?

I am currently keeping an eye on the upcoming crowdfunding campaign for Brass: Pittsburgh. Brass: Birmingham is the top 1 game on BGG, and a favorite of mine. Brass: Pittsburgh is done by the same company and developers as Brass: Birmingham. And still I am not sure whether I want to buy it. While Brass: Birmingham is widely considered an improvement over the original Brass, it isn't obvious that every new version of a game is better than the predecessor. Sometimes new game elements are added, just to justify the new game, but they make the game more cumbersome and less elegant. If the new game stays too close to the original, then why buy a new version? If the new game is too different, then maybe it loses what made the original attractive in the first play. Reimplementing a beloved and well-known board game is no easy task. And unlike computer games, you can't just take advantage of better graphics cards and CPU to generate automatic interest in the reimplementation.