How to Choose Realistic Stretch Goals for Your Board Game Kickstarter – Stonemaier Games

How to Choose Realistic Stretch Goals for Your Board Game Kickstarter

This guest post by Fulfillrite’s Brandon Rollins really hits home for me, as I almost accidentally sunk Stonemaier Games during our first Kickstarter by adding a metal coins stretch goal that we fortunately didn’t reach. Thanks, Brandon!

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Stretch goals are a wonderful way of keeping a Kickstarter campaign exciting after it funds. However, knowing which stretch goals to choose is a formidable task. Choose wisely and you’ll please your backers by making a better board game. Choose unwisely and you might end up paying big, unexpected bills and delaying fulfillment.

In this post, we’ll talk about how you can choose realistic stretch goals so you can avoid unexpected bills and slow shipping.

The Danger of Stretch Goals

Of course, because of my use of the word “Realistic” in the headline, you knew there would be a catch. It’s a doozy, too. Turns out, stretch goals are really hard to do right.

Choosing stretch is a delicate balancing act. There are three objectives which you have to meet when you pick them:

  1. You have to satisfy your backers by making the game a genuinely better product.
  2. Additional manufacturing and shipping costs need to be kept to a manageable level.
  3. You have to still fulfill the campaign on time.

If you raise hundreds of thousands of dollars when you were expecting $20,000, it’s tempting to make up stretch goals on the spot. Yet this is a pretty reliable way to derail a campaign.

Adding miniatures, for example, dramatically changes manufacturing requirements, throws off the timetable, and makes your game physically heavier. Even seemingly innocuous choices like custom plastic meeples can leave you footing the bill for custom plastic injection mold costs.

Keeping Additional Costs Low

Broadly speaking, there are three reasons why stretch goals could drive your campaign fulfillment costs up.

First, if you add more parts or even simply upgrade parts to your game, your manufacturing costs will rise. Oftentimes, this is by a negligible amount that is offset by printing more games to ship to more backers. This can still get you in a lot of trouble if you’re not careful, though.

To avoid manufacturing costs that exceed what you’re capable of paying for, make sure you contact your printer before your campaign and ask them for quotes on your stretch goals. That way, you won’t run into any nasty surprises after promising something to your backers that is way too expensive to provide.

Contacting your printer ahead of time also helps you avoid another major source of additional costs: rework. If you add new parts to your game, you will want to order a sample before making a big print run. Unfortunately, sampling costs can be very high for offset printers – often several hundred dollars!

Now once you recover from the sticker shock, you must understand: this isn’t a matter of mere greed on the printer’s part. It is genuinely difficult to set up equipment and prepare files to make a board game. The difference in labor required to make 1 game and to make 1,000 games is less than you might think. So if you have to order multiple samples to have your game turn out the way you want, you’ll be left with a big bill.

Lastly, extra parts, and even upgraded parts can make your game bigger and heavier. To a gamer, there’s no meaningful difference between a 1 lb, 15 oz game (880 g) and a 2 lbs, 1 oz game (935 g). To a postal carrier like UPS, FedEx, DHL, or the USPS, there’s a big difference in postage costs!*

The same principle applies to box sizes, too. One box might fit in a cheap small flat rate USPS box. Another box only half an inch thicker might not, suddenly increasing the cost to ship by $2-3 per backer.

To work around that, you can do one of two things:

  1. Make sure stretch goals won’t force your package to cross any expensive thresholds for postage costs. (2 lbs vs. 1 lb 15 oz., 1 kg vs 995 g, etc.)
  2. Withhold certain stretch goals until the extra backers mean you’re paying roughly the same per unit overall to fulfill the game. (For example, hold off on an extra deck of cards until you can print 2,000 units instead of 1,500.)

* The cost of bulk freight shipping will also go up as you ship heavier/bigger games, but it’s often not nearly as dramatic as the postage rate hikes.

Fulfilling Your Campaign On-Time

Let’s say you’ve done all the price research and you’ve found stretch goals that strike the right balance between cost and backer desire. You still have another big hurdle to contend with: time itself.

Kickstarters are already notorious for being late. The vast majority of Kickstarters, after all, ship late. Stretch goals can exacerbate the problem, making campaigns victims of their own success.

Stretch goals introduce delays for a number of different reasons, one of which we’ve already touched on: rework. If you don’t plan ahead for stretch goals, you run the risk of having to run through the sampling process again. This can add weeks, if not months, to your delivery timetable.

Miscommunication in general is a big risk. Think about it. First, you’re under a time crunch because you have a wallet full of other people’s money and obligations to meet. Second, you’ve changed the specs of the product based on the amount of money you raised.

Time constraints and changing manufacturing requirements aren’t exactly a great pairing. Again, this is why planning stretch goals ahead is crucial!

There’s also the matter of the manufacturing process itself. Some parts take longer to make than others. For example, custom plastic pieces require making a mold. This might increase the amount of time needed to manufacture your game. The same principle applies to minis, custom wooden parts, and other common board game accoutrements.

Finally, you might run into issues with customs that you might not have anticipated. Whenever you change the parts in your game, you need to double-check to make sure you’re still following child safety laws and other important rules. Your manufacturer should be able to help you out with this, including the new UKCA mark for Europe.

Final Thoughts

Choosing the right stretch goals can help your Kickstarter campaign remain exciting well after it funds. To choose the right stretch goals, you want to find game improvements you can make that your backers want, that won’t cost too much, and won’t complicate manufacturing.

Though meeting these criteria can be tough, you’re still left with a lot of options. Thoughtfully choosing your stretch goals in advance will allow you to ship a better game on-time and within your budget.

Brandon Rollins (Brandon the Game Dev) has written this blog post on behalf of Fulfillrite. Fulfillrite is a fulfillment company that has helped hundreds of Kickstarter creators, including board game creators, ship rewards to their backers.

Also read: The Current State of Stretch Goals (2019)

9 Comments on “How to Choose Realistic Stretch Goals for Your Board Game Kickstarter

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  1. […] How to Choose Realistic Stretch Goals for Your Board Game Kickstarter […]

  2. Hi Jamey,

    As per our chat about getting feedback for our Kickstarter project on your post (https://stonemaiergames.com/create-something-meaningful-to-you-in-2022/), we are ready to hear and take tough-love feedback on our Kickstarter project preview page https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/travelus/travelus?ref=2nqyia&token=5c0d480f :)

    I found this post and hope it’s ok to comment here (please let me know otherwise). As we will be using the best possible quality for the games, our sketch goals aim to reduce shipping costs for our backers.

    We understand it’s impossible to know ahead how effective/meaningful the results will be but do you foresee any potential downsides with this approach? Of course, we appreciate any other suggestions/comments you may have on other aspects as well. Thank you, Jamey.

    1. Thanks so much for sharing! Given that you’re adding shipping costs after the project is over, I think this is a very clever version of stretch goals. I don’t know if it’s super *exciting* for backers, but it’s clever.

      If I were you, I would pare back the project a bit and offer a mix of stretch goals that include a few shipping bonuses (maybe 2 or 3 total–decreasing the shipping cost by $3 is more exciting than $1) along with stretch goals that add games (so, maybe start by offering 5 or 6 games instead of 8) and player count (start with 2-5 players and expand up to 8 and down to 1).

      1. Jamey, we really appreciate your feedback and will implement your suggestion on fewer shipping bonuses that reflect larger reductions.

        It’s interesting to hear your thoughts on using the number of games as sketch goals because we’ve had the same discussions way back. We knew of those options but have decided that the 8-game-in-1-box is the way to demonstrate the sustainability principle in its design and also it’s more important to us to give our backers the best of everything at the beginning. There is a high chance that you are right so we hope for your blessings and for backers who appreciate our efforts :)

  3. From a consumer standpoint, I also worry about hastily created stretch goals from a gameplay perspective. I cannot imagine how much play testing goes into the initial design. But a random stretch goal that is thrown in to create more content may be imbalanced, broken, or underwhelming when the game hits the table. I am not ever likely to produce a board game Kickstarter, but I loved reading the great perspective of this article.

  4. Great read! Thank you and Brandon Rollins for this. I think cards make great stretch goals in general. Also, if the game is designed having some component hooks, maybe try and keep some for stretch goals later on. Things like mini campaign scenarios (like the one from PP) or new clever ways (mechanisms) which do not require a lot (or none) of new components to be made, only paper and\or cards, tiles, etc…can serve as great stretch goals!

    1. Hi George, thank you for reading and I’m glad that this article has helped!

      Mini-campaign scenarios and the like, in my opinion, make for good stretch goals. I think this is because game creators often create and test more than they can afford to manufacture. Stretch goals, in that sense, help creators achieve more of their original vision, which backers usually respond well too!

  5. Any thoughts on adding cards that actually make a change to the game play, almost like a mini-expansion?

    I’m considering this for a stretch goal, and I think it meets your criteria — adding 20 cards to a 160 card game; these 20 add a completely new action capability (rather than just more of the same content) so I think they genuinely make the game a better product.

    If that does feel like a significant improvement, the impact to manufacturing and form factor isn’t much. A few more cards won’t change the manufacturing cost, and the box was already designed with a bit of room to spare.

    1. Based on what you’ve said here, this sounds like a great stretch goal, if not something to include in the game from day 1.

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