Lanterns

We have just released the expansion Lanterns: The Emperor’s Gifts. The inspiration for its theme came from looking at traditional Chinese gardens.

Watching someone miss a rule in livestreamed game of Lanterns gave me insight into how rulebooks are used as references.

We finished mailing rewards to backer of Lanterns: The Harvest Festival last month using Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment and Asendia.

Working with Amazon the fulfillment company and Amazon the retailer at the same time was mostly great, but it did cause one big hiccup.

As a Kickstarter creator, one thing you cannot plan for perfectly in advance is where your future backers live. But if you are shipping a physical product, the amount of money you need to raise (your actual funding goal!) depends on it. The total pledges on a Kickstarter campaign can be very misleading, and I pay much more attention to the total backer count on my projects than on the total pledges on my projects. Let me explain why.

An interesting dynamic of many Kickstarter campaigns is that they have a huge influx of backers at the end. (We did for Relic Expedition.) Plenty of projects struggle through a long slow campaign, unsure if they will reach their goal, and then the final days can lift the project to exceed its goal by another 50%. (The recent successful funding of the Grow Kickstarter campaign is a perfect example.) Why does this happen? Can it be avoided?

Today is the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, an inspiration for the game’s “harvest festival.” I posted the PnP and a press release to BGG.