Campaign Review: Hunt for Blackbeard

What did work and what did not work in the latest Kickstarter campaign

Our Kickstarter campaign for Hunt for Blackbeard wrapped up last month and I wanted to review the numbers from the campaign and identify what did work and what did not work from a marketing perspective. While the campaign was certainly a success - we had almost 800 backers and raised $62,597 - it fell a little short of my own prediction of ~1000 backers and $75,000. Posted below, you can see the results of all of the Fort Circle Kickstarter campaigns to date. The last four columns are the amount raised and number of backers from the last three days of the campaign.

Results for all Fort Circle Kickstarter campaigns to date

Kickstarter provides some campaign data during the campaign that for some reason you can no longer access once the campaign ends, so I grabbed the below data with about thirty minutes left to the campaign - so it missing a handful of backers. The breakdown of backer types is fascinating to me. Three-quarters of our backers are either “power” or “core” backers while there were only eighteen folks backing their first Kickstarter campaign.

Hunt for Blackbeard backers by Backer Type

The country breakdown is not that surprising - about two-thirds of our backers are from the United States. Although there are more individual backers from Great Britain there are more actual games being backed by folks from Germany thanks to the four groups who backed for six copies to save on shipping. I was a little surprised that Spain only came in at the number twelve spot for number of backers, as our previous games have been quite popular in Spain.

Hunt for Blackbeard backers by Country

I was also a little surprised that we had more new backers (436) than returning backers (350). The “return” rate being higher for previous backers of The Shores of Tripoli and The Halls of Montezuma doesn’t surprise me even though Montezuma hasn’t been delivered yet. My guess is that First Monday in October will do much better with previous backers of Votes for Women, but we’ll see later this year.

Hunt for Blackbeard Returning Backers - 1

Hunt for Blackbeard Returning Backers - 2

Hunt for Blackbeard New Backers

So, what worked in the campaign and what did not?

VOLKO RUHNKE - worked

Volko was an outstanding advocate for Hunt for Blackbeard. He did a number of interviews, both print and live, and was very accessible via social media for people who had questions. Volko is obviously an amazingly talented designer, but he is also a force for good in our hobby and that was certainly an asset during the campaign.

GMT GAMES - worked

Volko originally designed Hunt for Blackbeard for GMT Games but the game languished on GMT’s P500 board. Everyone agreed that the game would have a better home with us, and so Fort Circle became the publisher for Hunt for Blackbeard. GMT very kindly included info and links to the campaign twice - once in May just prior to the launch of the campaign and once in June while the campaign was live - in their monthly newsletter. The first email generated about 300 followers prior to the campaign’s launch. The second email generated 32 backers and $2360 from the direct link from the newsletter. If you include the followers that converted, the direct backers, and people who saw GMT’s email and later looked for the campaign, GMT was likely responsible for 100 backers and $8000. By the way, Volko’s game Coastwatchers is currently live on GMT’s P500 system - you should take a look!

YOUTUBE VIDEOS - worked

The Heavy Cardboard teach-and-play of Hunt for Blackbeard was fantastic. It was the single best piece of media that communicated how amazing the game is. Of course, the Volko interviews with Zilla Blitz and Ardwulf were helpful as well. The campaign video had 1368 views on Kickstarter (48.76% completed) and an additional 390 on our YouTube channel. Once Hunt for Blackbeard is published, we will follow the model with The Shores of Tripoli and send out a significant number of review copies.

CAMPAIGN TIMING - undetermined

I thought I made a major mistake by having the campaign end on Sunday at 6:30pm EST. Why? Because Kickstarter sends out an email to all followers 48 hours before the end of the campaign - which meant that email went out on Friday evening. I was sure the last three days of the campaign would be a disappointment because of this error. Instead, the campaign performed slightly better in the last three days than The Shores of Tripoli or The Halls of Montezuma. I still think this timing was a mistake - for the foreseeable future we will always end campaigns on a Wednesday or a Thursday.

ORIGINS - undetermined

I am not fond of large conventions, but I have a soft spot in my heart for Origins. This year at Origins we had two demo tables - one table was used by Tory Brown for Votes for Women and David Thompson for Night Witches and I used the other table to demo The Shores of Tripoli, The Halls of Montezuma, Shakespeare’s First Folio, and Hunt for Blackbeard. There wasn’t a huge uptick in backers for Hunt for Blackbeard while I was at Origins, but I probably should have been more aggressive in demoing Hunt for Blackbeard. I did get to chat with a number of friends of the firm and that alone probably made the trip worth it in the long run even if there were not immediate short term benefits to the Hunt for Blackbeard campaign.

FULFILLMENT DELAYS - did not work

We have two Kickstarter campaigns that have not delivered yet - The Halls of Montezuma and the second printing of Votes for Women. We still had a decent rate of returning backers from The Halls of Montezuma because those folks tend to be familiar with our games and our focus on quality of play and components - although I am sure there would have been even more backers had The Halls of Montezuma already delivered. Far worse was the delay in shipping for Votes for Women. We had originally expected delivery around April-May timeframe, but because of the closure of our home port of Baltimore and the delay in getting a new shipping plan in place means that Votes for Women will not be delivered until the July-August timeframe. Most of those backers are new to Fort Circle and is definitely a reason why only 5% of the second printing folks backed Hunt for Blackbeard.

BOARDGAMEGEEK (BGG) - did not work

For the Votes for Women second printing, we saw 112 backers for $9330 come boardgamegeek.com while Hunt for Blackbeard only saw 7 backers for $735. Why the difference? BGG ran Tory Brown’s designer diary for Votes for Women on the front page of BGG, but declined to do so for Volko’s design diary for Hunt for Blackbeard. BGG also covered on their front page the Facebook kerfuffle where ads for Votes for Women were banned. Not surprisingly this drove quite a bit of traffic to the Votes for Women campaign.

BGG also did not display the Hunt for Blackbeard campaign on their “Crowdfunding Countdown” for an odd technical reason. I asked them to correct this issue which they did - the day after the campaign ended.

We did not run BGG ads for the Hunt for Blackbeard campaign. In the past, we ran BGG ads for the campaigns for The Shores of Tripoli and the first printing of Votes for Women and the results were lackluster. We are going to make a major push on BGG ads for the upcoming First Monday in October and use that to determine if BGG ads make sense for future campaigns.

LOCAL MEDIA - did not work

Prior to the campaign, I reached out to all of the newspapers on the North Carolina coast and I heard back from about half of them - and those half all said they would be interested in doing a story on Hunt for Blackbeard when it is released but did not find a Kickstarter launch newsworthy enough.

There were plenty of partnership opportunities with museums and pirate-interest groups and tourism bureaus that were not explored during the campaign. Of course, similar to local media, I think these efforts will bear more fruit once the game is released. It certainly did not help that I was down for the final week of the campaign with a nasty case of Covid.

NO SOLO MODE - did not work

Hunt for Blackbeard is a masterful game where the players need to integrate operational and strategic intelligence to determine their opponent’s intentions. The system that Volko has designed really is brilliant - but it does not work as a solitaire game. I am fine with that and happy to publish it as a two-player game, but there is a significant segment of the hobby that won’t buy or back a game unless it has a solo mode. And while we are very thankful for GMT’s marketing support for Hunt for Blackbeard, I am sure that with Volko’s Coastwatchers on the P500 list - and Coastwatchers having a solo mode - that some customers had to pick one or the other to back.

CONCLUSION

The campaign for Hunt for Blackbeard was a moderate success. I think our campaign approaches are starting to diverge - for our conflict focused games (The Shores of Tripoli, The Halls of Montezuma, Hunt for Blackbeard), we will continue to run low-key campaigns that have a goal of pre-selling 800-1000 copies for print runs in the 3600-4800 range. For our more mainstream games (Votes for Women, First Monday in October, Guano! Guano!! Guano!!!), I think there is more opportunity to reach a wider market but also more risk that we might spend a lot of marketing dollars to miss that market.