That’s the biggest trouble with KS in general. From pledge to fulfilment can take ages. That’s one of the reason why I stay away from big KS investments that have a delivery date beyond 6 – 12 months… StarCitizen anybody?

Kickstarters frequently deliver late and delays of 12-18 months are not unheard of, so much so that I manage my expectations by always adding a year on to expected delivery dates.

Also I think it’s always the type of KS that makes a difference. If you back something like Fugou terrain it’ll be useful next year and the year after that. But games, with a hype associated, simply fall flat when they are delivered and the hype train has moved on waaaaay ahead…

I am totally unconvinced by the hype argument to be honest. I backed the original Conan game by Monolith and that was well over a year late, in fact it was beset by delays almost straight away as they had some issues getting Kickstarter to transfer the funds to them. Conan had absolutely loads of hype and I think it might have been the first (certainly one of the first) boards games to pass the $1m mark. When it eventually arrived I didn’t suddenly just shrug my shoulders and and put it to one side because the delays had killed my excitement. Why? because it was still Conan!  In fact I was more excited about it because it was late, it was Conan The Barbarian for christ’s sake!

I think people need to ask themselves why they are  excited about a kickstarter.  is it because it is something you really, really love or is it because you feel like you should be excited because everyone else is?  I guess if you don’t feel excited by it when it’s delivered late, you probably don’t love that thing as much as you think you do.  But I don’t really think that’s the fault of the people making the game. They can be responsible for it being late, but in most cases, not for recipients not being excited to finally take delivery of the product.

Initially I backed the last JoA KS as I liked the idea of being able to playout the large battles of the HYW and sieges with what seemed to be a fun and lightish ruleset that I could get others in the family interested in. I was not interested in the fantasy side.

By the time of the pledge manager opening the total cost of being able to do what I wanted to do – which was modest in the grand scheme – was around €400 plus another €100 shipping and I’d have to find somewhere to store 1.5m of boxes eventually. And a two year wait without having the chance even try out the system in advance. For me at that point it wasn’t worth it anymore.

I think another thing with kickstarters is the false idea of a “bargain”. At the end of the day, once you’ve got all the additional pledge items (it’s rare to see just one box, particularly with any “boardgame with minis” projects) you could have spent £400-£500 in a frenzy of FOMO spending.

Half the time you could get just as many miniatures (if not a better quality), for an established rule system (rather than pledging blindly on rules that are “TBC” at the time of the kickstarter).

There’s few KS schemes that perk my interest these days (I’ve become REALLY picky), and if there’s no FULL “Lets Play Videos” on Youtube it will not get a look in.

Resist the FOMO, don’t be a sheep, buy games that you will play repeatedly (rather than just the one run through which some KS schemes are designed to do), and finally really, really look at the rules and not at all the nice renders 🙂

@cdn41 it’s not as much of  a gamble as you might think.  I have backed, to date, 81 kickstarters (I won’t disclose the total amount) and that’s just the ones that are on my account.  I quite often go halves on a pledge with my brother (my primary gaming buddy) and for the price of two pledges we can get a single pledge with add ons.  So I am invested in several more kickstarters above the 81 I have backed myself.  To date, only 3 out of the 81 have failed representing a total of £140 over the course of 8 years (first kickstarter backed in 2013).  That £140 is more than offset by the savings made by backing things on kickstarter.  The worst that usually happens is that projects don’t deliver on the dates they originally estimate but if you go into it expecting that they won’t actually hit their deadlines it ceases to be an issue.

@limburger of the 81 projects I have backed there’s only one that I regret backing (route 666: devil’s run) and even then I actually found a good home for it so it didn’t go to waste.  When people say they have lost interest in a game by the time they get it, that probably means they weren’t interested in the game, they were excited by the idea of a game ( a bit like when people think they’re in love but they’re actually in love with the idea of being in love).  It’s like, OK, so this game I backed 3 years ago has just turned up; 3 years ago I wanted to play it but now I don’t. Why?  What’s changed in 3 years?  The only thing that’s changed is that there is no longer anyone telling you that you want to play it