Cats

Last year I backed the IndieGoGo campaign to fund season 3 of Table Top, an awesome web series hosted by Wil Wheaton wherein he plays board games. Every episode features a different game, and three different guest with which he plays. I’ve been watching the first two seasons and it has given me many new games to put on my wish list.

I’ve really grown to love Kickstarter and likewise crowd funding websites the last two years. They are an excellent way to support people that do not get mainstream publishing or funding while getting some loot in return 🙂

Crowd funding has the artist or producer present their idea and plans, set a monetary goal to be raised in one or two months and list a number of rewards people can pick. People then pledge an amount of money, and select a reward, or perk, they want. At the end of the campaign, if it’s funded, credit cards get charged, the thing gets made and people get their rewards. It functions more or less like a pre-order system.

There is an element of risk, though. There is no safeguard in place if the project creator does not come through with what they promised. If they don’t it will ruin their reputation and such, but you’ll still be out of money.

Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are fairly similar, with the difference being that IndieGoGo offers flexible funding and Kickstarter doesn’t. So with Kickstarter, if at the end of the period the goal isn’t reached, the campaign fails. No money exchanges hands, and the thing doesn’t get made.

On IndieGoGo, with flexible funding, the campaign gets all the money pledged to it during its runtime. This makes IndieGoGo ideal for charities and for campaigns that either feel secure in their plan, or already have back-up money.

So far, I’ve backed a dozen campaigns on Kickstarter, and the TableTop one on IndieGoGo. They were for music (Amanda Palmer album), books (The Charmed Realm art book, Short Fantasy Story), comics (WormWorld Saga general support, and first English edition, Borthaniel, What’s Normal Anyway), movies (Veronica Mars, Afronauts, Blood Kiss, LFG comic animated short), and other random things (Wooden Tarot).

I’ve ended up with books, comics, t-shirts, stickers, postcards, CDs and other fun stuff. It’s always so much fun to receive packages out of the blue 🙂

The only tricky thing is usually balancing the additional shipping. As a lot of campaigns are based in the US, shipping over here tends to be steep. I always have to carefully wage whether I find it worth it. This is why I generally skip board game campaigns, even though I’ve seen so many gorgeous ones, as the shipping cost for getting the game here, is often almost as much as the game itself. Like it would be $40 to get one copy of the game, but also $30 shipping, that’s not worth it.

I am also careful in selecting projects to minimise risk of the creator failing to deliver. So far, only one of my backed projects seems to be heading for failure (Blood Kiss, no updates in months and they’re still not shooting…), the others all delivered, and mostly on time.

For Table Top, I pitched in on the $100 level which offered as perks DVDs of season 1 and 2, a t-shirt, a special set of Cards Against Humanity cards, a button, a sticker and set of TableTop Dice.

Yesterday, the perks got here, and they are fantastic! Captain agrees.