Dan Goes Inside Dragon Dodge

Today, Dan discusses the current Kickstarter campaign by Hidden Creek Games: Dragon Dodge. He talks with these first time creators about the challenges they faced, components, art and reviews. 

Dragon Dodge Campaign Vitals

• Launch date: February 15, 2017
• End date: March 19, 2017
• Goal: $8,000
• Cost for a copy of the game: $20
• Designed by: Jeff Fitzgerald and Maggie Stewart
• Published by: Hidden Creek Games, LLC
• Campaign Link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1870586178/dragon-dodge
  

Why don’t you start us off by giving us a brief overview of Dragon Dodge. ^

Dragon Dodge is a light strategy game for 2-4 players, ages 8 and up, and plays in about 20 minutes. It has very simple rules that can easily be picked up by kids and new gamers, but it also has enough depth of strategy to appeal to more serious gamers.

You play a team of wizards in a tile arena with two dragons. On your turn, you draw cards from two different decks that allow you to cast a variety of spells on the dragons, the wizards and the tiles. Your goal is to move the dragons around and tag the other team’s wizards. Your spells can also change the arena itself and the board shrinks as the dragons move around, making every game different.

So this is your first campaign, how did you prepare for this amazing journey? ^

I started by reading all of Jamey Stegmaier’s blog and book. That gave me a pretty good sense of the big picture of running a Kickstarter campaign. Then I also started looking at other publishers that started out small and have a target audience similar to ours. We have closely followed you, Dan, and others like Eduardo Baraf and Mike Wokasch. I’ve found it very valuable to take a close look at how creators present themselves in their first campaign and how this evolves as they become more established in the community, we’ve found lots of ideas and advice this way that have really resonated with us.

We are also members of Playtest Northwest, which is a local community of designers and playtesters. Through this group we’ve interacted with several experienced designers and Kickstarter creators and have learned a lot from them.

In the end, we tried to take into consideration a wealth of information and advice from many different sources, while still staying true to what we want to represent with our game, our campaign, and our company.

What was the best piece of advice you received about your campaign before launching? ^

One of the first things I read in Jamey Stegmaier’s blog was “You don’t need to launch today” and I’ve kept that in mind ever since. We had initially set a goal for ourselves to launch last September, so it could coincide with PAX West, which we attended. Luckily, thanks to Jamey’s advice, we knew in the back of our minds that we wouldn’t launch before we were truly ready. When it became evident that September was not realistic, we decided to just keep working on the project until we were ready to set a new launch date based on our progress rather than external factors. This made the process less stressful and more enjoyable.

Jamey definitely is a pillar in this community, I think he has had an influence on most, if not all of us newer creators! If you could pick one thing you could say you definitely did right in preparation for this campaign, what would it be? ^

I would say sending the review copies out with plenty of time, some as early as 3 months before the launch date. Since this is our first game, we weren’t quite sure how it would be received. Also, being newcomers, we wanted to give reviewers ample time to fit us into their schedule. I’m glad we did this for a couple of reasons:
We were able to get our game reviewed by some of our favorite reviewers out there, which is pretty cool on a personal level.

When the first reviews started coming in, a common theme was that the tile and card art was not good enough. Luckily, we still had plenty of time to work with Terrana Cliff, who also did the box art, to upgrade the cards and tiles without having to delay our planned launch date.

How are your advertising or spreading the word about this game? ^

On the day we launched, we started by sending personalized emails to a lot of our friends and family encouraging them to check out our page. We also have a mailing list of people that had played Dragon Dodge at various conventions over the past year, so we sent them a message as well.
Going forward past day 1 we’ll be doing demos and small playtest events at local game stores. We’re also going to be at the Terminal City Tabletop Convention in Vancouver, because Dragon Dodge is one of the finalists for their Golden Arbutus Award.
Finally, we’re reaching out to board game content creators to set up interviews and coverage of our campaign.

I noticed in your components list that you went straight for the gold and are including custom meeples. Did you ever consider starting smaller with generic meeples or pawns to reduce your goal and then offering the custom meeples as a stretch goal? ^

We’re really excited about the custom meeples! During playtesting, a recurring comment was that it would be neat to have little wizard and dragon meeples. So, we checked with our manufacturer and found that we could add the custom meeples and still keep the base pledge level at $20 where we wanted it.

We did consider adding this as a stretch goal, but we feel like the custom meeples really add something special to the game and we want every backer to get that. Hopefully they also help get some people interested in the campaign early on, rather than waiting to back until we hit some stretch goals.

Speaking of stretch goals, you are only showing one and leaving us on edge to find out the next until after funding. Can you tell us a little more about the stretch goals you have planned? ^

Yes, we want to make the component quality as good as possible. We have plans for upgraded card stock and linen finish for the cards, thicker tiles, and thicker box with spot UV.

I just wrote a blog post about why I think people should include a PnP in their campaign, so I am very happy to see you have done that. I am curious though, you are offering the full color PnP for free; did you consider offering a B&W version for free and including the full color version as a low cost reward tier? ^

It’s funny that you mentioned this, because we were undecided regarding the whole PnP issue until we read that article, then we knew we needed to include one.

One thing you mentioned in the article is that many people tend to download the PnP to see what the game looks like. Well, it looks much nicer in color, so we figured why not give it to them. Maybe we could’ve gotten a few bucks by charging for it, but we also wanted to keep the reward levels simple with both the base game and the expansion showing up near the top.

So you are a member of the Indie Game Alliance, can you tell us how they have helped you in preparation for the campaign? ^

I think the main thing so far has been “hanging out” in the IGA facebook group just reading all the questions and comments that people post there. There are a lot of questions that I wouldn’t even think to ask, but then I see them on the forum and I learn a lot by following the comments.
I also posted the preview link for the Kickstarter there and was able to get some feedback. There are a lot of groups on facebook where you can do that, but I like the IGA one because it feels more private and focused toward smaller indies.

Lastly, say that I am not sure if your game is really a good fit for me, what final words do you have to convince me that I should back this game immediately? ^

No game is going to be liked by everyone of course, but we really believe that Dragon Dodge has something that can appeal to every type of gamer. You can teach it to your kids or your non-gamer friends in no time and just play a low-pressure, quick game with them. Or you can get competitive with your partner or your buddies and try out different strategies. For just $20, it’s a versatile game with good replay value.

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A huge thank you to Maggie of Hidden Creek games for answering questions for me about their campaign. If you like dipping, ducking, diving and dodging dragons, be sure to head over to their campaign and check it out! They are currently 25% funded with 30 days to go!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1870586178/dragon-dodge