Local resident Wesley Woodbury has wrapped up a Kickstarter campaign to secure funding for his board game Legends of Novus (LON).
He did so in roughly half the time of other Kickstarter campaigns.
LON is a tabletop fantasy adventure board game for one to five players aged 13 or older. The games last 60-90 minutes.
“It’s a tabletop fantasy adventure board game and I know many people, when they think of board games, they think of Monopoly, Life or those traditional games," he told the Albertan.
“The hobby has really changed quite a bit over the last 10 years and there’s all kinds of immersive, exciting fantasy games out there.
“The most common one out there is Dungeons and Dragons as a role-playing game. But I wanted to find a way to squeeze the experience of Dungeons and Dragons into a single-play board game,” Woodbury said.
Woodbury works in town as a store manager at Walmart and has a family of his own, so the time he has to work on the project is limited. He's usually working on it from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. He began work on it in February 2018.
The Kickstarter campaign that Woodbury launched for LON was notably shorter than most, having a 17-day run as opposed to the typical 30-45 days.
This is actually the second all-or-nothing campaign he’s done for the project this year, the first being in February to March, but it failed to reach its goal at that time.
“If you don’t reach your funding goal, nobody pays any money and you’re back at Square 1,” Woodbury said. “So what I decided to do for the relaunch is to keep the days shorter because the longer your campaign that means the more of a lull in the middle.”
Woodbury’s strategy proved successful and the project had reached its funding goal of $36,973 which is over $10,000 more than his initial $20,195 goal. More than 600 donors contributed to it.
The campaign passed the initial goal a week into the campaign.
The extra funding that has been received will allow Woodbury to implement his stretch goals of the campaign. They include etched travel dice and an exclusive character for those who donated.
The money from the main goal will be used to pay the Italian artists he’s been working with to complete the artwork for the game and to manufacture it through a Chinese company that has worked on other previously successful Kickstarter board game campaigns.
The target audience that the game is aiming to hit is men and women from 18 to 40 years of age. Woodbury says that it would serve as a good entry point into this kind of board game.
“This game would be what I call a gateway game to fantasy gaming,” Woodbury said. “A gateway game is kind of like a game that anybody could pick and read the rules and figure out in a few turns how to play.”
