The FTC Finally Cracks Down on Never-Completed Kickstarters

It sounded fun enough: “The Doom That Came to Atlantic City,” its creators said, would be a “lighthearted Lovecraftian game of urban destruction, for two to four players.” Sort of like Monopoly, but with more destruction. The game’s inventors said they needed $35,000 to get the project off the ground, so they turned to crowdfunding—and, naturally, to Kickstarter. Online backers pledged a total of $122,874 in exchange for advance copies of the game, T-shirts, pewter figurines, and special crediting in the game’s eventual rule book.

But by 2013, a year after the project had been fully funded, the game’s makers—Portland-based The Forking Path, Co., run by Erik Chevalier—announced that their project had collapsed, and “The Doom That Came to Atlantic City” would never see the light of day.