On Funding

Our Kickstarter for Hipsters: The Card Game has been live for 10 days at the time of this posting. We’ve raised $2,025 dollars of our $9,500 goal. We have 53 backers – 53 people made up of friends, family, and total strangers – who want to see our game get made and own a copy of the final product. At 21 percent of our full funding goal, we’ve definitely made some considerable stride – but we have a long way, a very long way, to go.

From what I understand, Kickstarter campaigns go something like this: You see a surge of funding in the beginning of your campaign, a plateau in the middle, and a big push at its end, when that invaluable 48 hour remind notice kicks in for folks that are interested, but haven’t backed just yet. At three days and counting of hovering right around $2,000, I’d say we’re pretty thoroughly entrenched in the plateau stretch of our campaign.

Matthew and myself getting ready for a Hipsters playtest event.

So, what now?

Historically, I’ve always been pretty uneasy asking other people for things. I didn’t grow up poor per se, but my mom was single and putting herself through college until I was in high school, and so I grew up feeling like asking for anything was not only in bad taste, but shameful to a certain degree. As a result, the moments in my life where I’ve needed to ask for help have stung considerably.

But so here I am, running a Kickstarter for Hipsters and finding that in order to make this game happen, I’m going to need to do just that. Ask people for help.

The caveat here is that I’m not soliciting donations for the sake of keeping myself afloat, covering my rent, etc. – we’re trying to make a quality game with quality materials, and we’re looking for people that believe in our game and want to own and play it. And so far, we’ve met a lot of people outside of our backers who like the game, who believe in its character and design. But still, there’s that gap between belief and action, the translation of removing your wallet from your pocket, entering your information, and then clicking submit. A lot of people might want our game (our 2-player Youtube video has racked up a few hundred views, and we’ve got a good thing going on Facebook, too), but going through the work of making that donation on Kickstarter is a few steps beyond wanting it.

So here it is, the pitch. If you believe in my game – if you think it looks fun, cool, or interesting (even if only in terms of the text and illustrations) – please take a few minutes and back us on Kickstarter. There’s a cliché about every dollar counting, but it’s certainly true in this case. The more people donate and the more frequently they do so, the better chance we have of being surfaced higher up on the Kickstarter website, and the better chance we have of being featured as a staff pick. Both of those things can boost a Kickstarter campaign tremendously.

The Mini Van Card

Beyond donating, I can’t stress enough how important telling your friends and acquaintances is to us. Posts on Facebook & Twitter are priceless. Seeding our page us on discovery sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg and Reddit even more so. Hell, just describing it to someone in person and telling them to look it up is huge for us. Want to actually play the game with some friends who are on the fence? Hit me up – I will send you a copy of our game to do so with.

Okay, pitch over. It feels weird to make it, but I believe in this game enough to endure the awkward and uncomfortable feelings that come with, well, asking for money.

If our game doesn’t get funded, it won’t be the end of the world. It’ll be a huge bummer, and it’ll hurt, but life will go on. And we’ll probably go on to make other games (there are talks of a time travel board game and something currently titled, “Giant Dead Author Killer Robots”) regardless of whether or not this project gets funded. But if we do make this game, those future projects will come sooner, they’ll come with more oomph and excitement, and hopefully, they’ll have folks who are already excited to play them.

And hey, let’s not forget about why we’re here right this moment – back us, and you’ll have a kick ass Hipsters Game to play with your friends and family to boot. Thank you for reading, and for your support.

Hipsters: The Card Game

I wanted to take some time today to talk about a project I've been working on for the past few months with my good friend and colleague Matthew Gravelyn. It's not a piece of fiction or an essay or a script - it's a game; Hipsters: The Card Game, to be specific. 

What is Hipsters? It's a 2-4 player game in which players race to build a hipster character for cred (points). You can win by making a raw vegan academic hipster who carries old chicken drumsticks and a cheap six-pack of Schitz beer in canvas bags. Or you can win with an cappuccino-sipping grungeling who's finishing up his master's thesis in between bouts of panhandling for drug money or gnawing on candy necklaces. Or maybe your particular style is looking down your nose at mainstream lackeys with unsophisticated music preferences and pouring buckets fake blood on fur-wearers while secretly hiding the smooth jazz collection stored beneath the driver's seat of your minivan.

You get the idea.

At its heart I think Hipsters is actually playing with some big questions. There's a kind of uncanny intangibility  as to what a hipster really is, and this game takes that somewhat uncomfortable conversation and runs with it at full speed. In a way, it's a game about defining that which has no real definition. It's a game about forming an incongruous identity and rejoicing in the resulting ironies.

It's also supposed to be fun, quick, and humorous, if you're not into the whole identity crisis convo. 

Mr. Gravelyn and myself are all but done finalizing the 59 cards that will constitute the Hipsters deck - we've just got to settle on some final items for our four hipster archetypes (Academic, Activist, Elitist, and Grungeling). The rules are all but completed too, though we plan on cementing those at our upcoming play test event at The Raygun Lounge (courtesy of Gamma Ray Games) in Seattle on October 7th. If you live in Seattle, we'd love to see you there.

For more info on development (and eventually availability) for Hipsters: The Card Game, please check out our Facebook and Twitter pages.

Oh, and if this made you chuckle, grimace, or otherwise change your facial expression, please do us a favor and share this page with a friend (I would insert a smiley here, but I'm far too hip to do so).