What do you do if you can’t find a board game you like?
Or, rather, what do you do if you can’t find a board game your girlfriend likes? She didn’t grow up at the local game shops like you did, in this hypothetical. She was playing Scattergories and Uno while you were diving into a class of tabletop games that appeal to the real hobbyists.
Ask Toledoan Brian Shoemaker. He’s got a handle on this one.
“I started making games just for her, and I and our friends to play,” he said, referring to his then-girlfriend and now-wife, Cara, who describes a preference for fast-paced card games, ideally with a cute animal theme. “And then slowly, that transferred into making actual games.”
And then that turned into Glass Shoe Games, the name under which they design their own line of tabletop games. It’s a part-time gig that’s kept them full-time busy for three years or so, they said, most recently in crowd-funding investment into a fast-faced, animal-themed card game that’s right up Cara Shoemaker’s alley: Party Bandimals.
The hobby game industry is booming right now, last year continuing a decade-long pattern of growth that topped $1.5 billion in 2017. That’s according to ICv2, an online trade magazine that defines hobby games as those produced specifically for a “gamer” market.They’re the sort of non-classic titles you’re more likely to find at a specialty game shop than you are at Wal-Mart: More News@11 or Dinosaur Island, less Monopoly or Yahtzee.
Brian and Cara Shoemaker are one of several local game development teams in northwest Ohio who account for a piece of that market. With an established fund-raising and marketing channel on Kickstarter — a site that facilitates fund-raising for any kind of project, but that’s especially popular among hobby gamers — they described an industry that’s accessible for a small-scale designer to enter, if not necessarily one where it’s easy for them to succeed.
“The barrier to entry is pretty low,” Ian Moss, of Montpelier, said. He’s published games under his own name and with Jonathan Gilmour as Infectious Play. “Anyone can have an idea about a game, and if they put in the time and they’re passionate about it, that shows. If they take it to Kickstarter, that removes a lot of the personal risk of producing the game.”
“If you are determined, you can make it happen,” said Jacob Parr, one half of the Toledo-based Sparr Games. “However, it is not necessarily easy as far as effort is concerned.”
Standing out in raising funds
Kickstarter is an established starting point for thousands of designers like Mr. Moss and Mr. Parr, who use it to set up campaigns that describe their games and lay out incentives for would-be backers: If they pledge a set amount to support the campaign, they might be rewarded with a first-run edition of the game or exclusive add-ons.
Consider Cards Against Humanity, for example. The “party game for horrible people” took off on Kickstarter beginning in 2010, in a campaign that ultimately raised more than $15,000. Early backers of the card game that’s since gone mainstream were playing it well before it hit the shelves of Target or Wal-Mart, in addition to throwing down exclusive “expansion pack” cards.
Kickstarter saw tabletop game developers take more than 3,695 projects to the site in 2018, a record-breaking number that ensured the tabletop games category remained its biggest, according to numbers provided by a spokesman.
That’s the biggest category both in terms of campaigns and in pledges: Backers pledged more than $172 million to tabletop game campaigns in 2018, accounting for just more than 28 percent of all the funds pledged to any campaign on the site that year.
It’s a continuation of nearly a decade of explosive growth, according to statistics.
That growth comes with its own benefits and challenges, according to local board game developers, who both appreciate that they have the eyes of the hobby gaming community when they take a project to Kickstarter, but who also struggle to stand out among so many campaigns. In a response to the latter, and in a shift they’ve seen from just a few years ago, they said that any game they take to the site these days has to essentially be fully developed.
That often means investing in a professional-grade presentation, including photos and videos that walk a prospective backer through exactly how the game works and what it will look like.
“Kickstarter is very key, but it’s becoming more and more and more demanding,” said Uwe Eickert of Fremont’s Academy Games, one of the bigger players in the tabletop gaming industry in this region. Academy Games is anticipating eight new titles this year and specializes in educational board games, including Freedom: The Underground Railroad, which drew nationwide attention for the way it handled a sensitive subject matter in 2013.
Mr. Eickert, who launched the company in his retirement in 2008, remembers when a good idea alone could go far on Kickstarter. But he echoed others in describing a higher bar for a viable campaign these days. Academy Games is in a position to use it more as a marketing tool, a way to reach a demographic that is already browsing the site for new and interesting games.
“We do every third game on Kickstarter, because they’re a pain in the butt,” Mr. Eickert said. “It takes so much time and effort. If we just did Kickstarters, we would get a lot fewer games out.”
Working out the kinks
Toledo’s Brian and Cara Shoemaker spend most of their evenings in the world of board games. In addition to Party Bandimals, in which players strive to build the best band based on a set of cards illustrated with instrument-toting animals, Mr. Shoemaker has six games in the works — a pretty modest number, he said, compared to the full-time game developers he knows.
And Ms. Shoemaker is also on YouTube and Facebook as Cara the Blonde Unicorn, where she posts game previews and reviews, interviews with developers and other content related to the industry.
They also head to a local game shop once a week to play-test, a step they and others said is key when developing a tabletop game. It’s important to work out the kinks before they take a game to a publisher or to Kickstarter — or, often, figure out what the kinks even are.
Consider Master Thief, for example, a locally designed card game that asks each player to put themselves in the mindset of a thief sneaking into an art museum. Sparr Games’ Mr. Parr estimates they went through 25 versions of the game before they took it to Kickstarter in 2015. And they still had a few tweaks to do before they released it the following year.
Master Thief and other games the pair self-published are available at Handmade Toledo.
Mr. Parr and Jake Spencer, his business partner who lives in Louisville, Ky., enlisted a tight-knit alumni network of the Toledo School for the Arts to help them work out the kinks. They’re both graduates. In rounds and rounds and rounds of games, they were on the hunt for unintended loopholes that a player could exploit and then “decimate the entire game.”
“Then we have to go back to the drawing board,” Mr. Parr said.
Mr. Moss play-tests with other game developers, including the Shoemakers, on Thursdays. They agreed they find it helpful to work on their games with fellow designers, who know how the process works and who tend to know what kind of critiques are most helpful.
“A lot of times you’re trying to answer a specific question,” Mr. Moss said. “You can pause the play-test and the play-testers will give you feedback or ask what type of feedback you’re looking for. Then you write everything down, make changes and do it all again.”
It can be a long process. If you trace the Shoemaker’s Party Bandimals through three years of pretty extensive revisions, for example, you’ll find it’s really one of their first ideas for a game.
But with some crowd-funded investment in the bank — their just-finished campaign on Kickstarter netted more than $1,400 — they’re one step closer to game night.
First Published November 23, 2019, 2:00 p.m.
