Reassessing Kickstarter

In a 23 October 2026 post on his "Negotium Ludorum" Substack, Fort Circle Games owner Kevin Bertram details the benefits he's seen from using the crowdfunding site Kickstarter — a unique sales channel, cash flow, forecasting, a sense of urgency — but explains why he'll be using it less often in the future. [Disclosure: Fort Circle has purchased advertising on Board Game Beat, but has not yet run ads.]

In addition to the common complaint that Kickstarter is essentially a pre-order platform for many publishers, Bertram writes:

The second change is that Kickstarter has lost some of its luster. Some of that was first-time publishers who got in over their heads and could not deliver... [L]arger failures like Mythic and CMON have made Kickstarter at times look more like a Ponzi scheme than a legit crowdfunding platform.

Of course, the mess from the IEEPA tariffs certainly exacerbated issues for publishers — including us. We had three outstanding Kickstarters when the tariffs hit: The Halls of Montezuma (2023 KS), Hunt for Blackbeard (2024 KS) and First Monday in October (2024/2025 KS). We exhausted all options for printing alternatives to China — Brazil, Vietnam, Poland, the Netherlands — but nothing worked. Ultimately, we had to wait until the Supreme Court ruled the IEPPA tariffs unconstitutional in February 2026 before restarting production...

Of course, we were not the only company to rush back into production — hence there was a pretty significant backlog at our factory. While we expected all three outstanding Kickstarters to deliver in 2026, The Halls of Montezuma will not deliver until early 2027... I understand it is quite frustrating for our backers. On most campaigns we have two or three people request refunds for various reasons; for The Halls of Montezuma it is almost two dozen refunds. There are five 1-star reviews on BoardGameGeek for The Halls of Montezuma with stellar comments like, "Game does not exist. Fort Circle Games cannot be trusted. Will never purchase a game from them again." Ouch.

Those crowdfunding backers in a unique sales channel with a sense of urgency who provided cash flow can transform from a benefit to a liability, their complaints being concentrated in that channel and spilling over into every subsequent campaign a publisher runs.

Thus, for some releases Fort Circle will now forgo crowdfunding, for other releases it will crowdfund only subsequent printings, and for still other releases it will use Kickstarter as it has previously, "but only once the game is 100% ready to print at the factory", writes Bertram. "In all scenarios, there will be no delay between the Kickstarter campaign ending and hitting the print button at the factory. In other words, Kickstarter will now be a pre-order machine for us as well."

In a subsequent email to me, Bertram added, "[I]t takes a minimum of four months from 'hitting print' to delivery in the U.S. I don't want to have multiple KS campaigns outstanding, so mixing and matching which printings to go on Kickstarter makes sense."

Curious to check out other pre-orders being crowdfunded — or perhaps even projects that would not be released if not supported by backers? Here's a non-comprehensive list of crowdfunding projects I've run across in the past few days:

▪️ Line By Line is a collaborative poetry-writing game by Tilak Vyas and Central Michigan University Press that prompts players with words, images, and devices. (Backerkit)

▪️ A Feast for Odin's Uwe Rosenberg and Feuerland Spiele have been joined by designer Gernot Köpke for The Danes, a larger version of Feast for gamers who enjoy opening boxes. (Gamefound)

▪️ On the opposite end of the game size scale, Button Shy has a quartet of new titles — The Cursed Cat, Reawaken, Forest Rivals, and Crime Sprawl — along with three reprints in a new boxed format suitable for retail display. (Kickstarter)

▪️ HOOKed Games debuted in 2025 with Good & Evil, and its sophomore release will be Exorcismo, a card and dice game in which player exorcists must defeat a demon. (Kickstarter)

▪️ Publisher Dice Throne has another four characters ready to enter the Dice Throne game series from Gavan Brown, Nate Chatellier, John Heidrich, and Manny Trembley, with Phantom Runner, Hunter, Snyper, and Punch-A-Tron 3000 being packaged together as Dice Throne: Nexus. (Kickstarter)

▪️ David Thor Fjalarsson and MOOD Publishing are adapting the factory-building video game Satisfactory into a tabletop experience titled...Satisfactory: The Board Game, which is due out in 2028. (Gamefound)

▪️ Skybirds is a World War I aerial combat, ladder-climbing game by Andy Schwarz and Envelopes of Cash LLC in which players receive tokens as they exit a round for bonus actions in future rounds. (Backerkit)

▪️ Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert's 2015 game Elysium has already been remade in 2026 by publisher Space Cowboys as First Giants, and now Lucky Duck Games has sprung a preview of Elysium: Pantheon Edition. Folks on that campaign are already asking whether LDG will provide an upgrade pack for those who own the original game, which is a ridiculous request. (Gamefound)

▪️ And on a different crowdfunding site Lucky Duck Games will run a project for Blade Runner 2099: The Board Game, which is my cue that another Blade Runner sequel is in the works. (Kickstarter)

▪️ Catalyst Game Labs is previewing My Hero Academia: Miniatures Game. (Backerkit)

▪️ Lunar Oak Studio is previewing Shifting Rooms: Ghosties, a jigsaw puzzle/game crossover that features forty riddles in the form of mini-puzzles. (Gamefound)

▪️ Killing with Kindness is a 2-4 player game from Manny Vega, Scott Rogers, and Burnt Island Games (Backerkit) for which I will quote the publisher's description in full as it deserves to be seen:

You have just been hired as one of the new managers of the Candlewick Inn, a historic landmark in the Evergreen Forest famous for its menu of delicious pastries and sweet treats. However, your tasks will include more than mere hospitality. You see, whoever built this inn, did so over a rift where cosmic horrors can move freely into our world. The only thing keeping these terrifying creatures at bay is a nightly meal of fuzzy forest denizens stuffed with their favourite sweet treats. This is the dark side of the job they don't tell you about in innkeeping college. Can you sate the horrors' unconscionable hunger each night, while running a restaurant inn by day, all while somehow keeping your guests none the wiser?