Villages of Valeria Kickstarter

Re-reading my last post about Villages of Valeria aka Deckville, I see that I promised to post here when the Kickstarter campaign started. I completely forgot to do that!

The campaign ended just a couple of days ago, and I'm delighted to report that it was a huge success. We needed just $8,000 to fund the project, and wound up with over $200,000! We will be shipping over 7,000 copies to backers, before the game even hits the store shelves. Here are the final results:

We never expected the campaign to be this successful. We had to scurry in mid-campaign to find new stretch goals to offer. Each new goal seemed to be achieved almost the instant we put it up. By the halfway mark, we couldn't offer anything more because the game box was full and within a flea's weight of being too heavy to ship for the pledge amounts we were asking.

Daily Magic Games is nothing if not resourceful. A new pledge level was announced that would get its backers a "Deluxe Box", with room for still more content. The necessarily higher price compensated for the increased shipping price, and of course all backers were notified and allowed to upgrade their pledge to the Deluxe Box if they wished to do so. And then more goals were set, allowing us to put even more content into that bigger box.

In the end, backers got their choice of the standard or Deluxe box, each with lots of extra Building and Adventurer cards from stretch goals. There are three new 12-card expansions (one was a Kickstarter exclusive), and two new mechanisms (Events and Monuments) were added to the game as part of the expansions. Cards were upgraded to top-quality stock, coins were upgraded from cardboard to printed wood. And all backers will be able to download a high-quality digital art book, containing artist Mihajlo Dimitrievski's wonderful artwork without the game's text and iconography blocking the view. (I'm excited about that one myself; the art in this game is fabulous.)

As I write this, we are putting the finishing touches on the artwork and the rules. The goal now is to deliver the product to backers in September 2016, and to retailers a few weeks after that.

I have to give a tremendous shout-out to Daily Magic Games. DMG did a simply amazing job: helping improve the basic design, adding theme, engaging a wonderful artist, promoting the game to reviewers, working the social media, and using their previous successful Valeria: Card Kingdoms campaign as a springboard for the Villages of Valeria campaign.

And I also have to give my profuse thanks to my enthusiastic playtesters. A lot of people kindly tried out this untried game when it was still incomplete, but I am particularly grateful to two groups. One is Helen's and my old gaming group down in San Jose: we miss you guys! The other is our new gaming group up here in Oregon: the gang at Off the Charts Games, and its amazingly welcoming owners Lynn and Ron Brown. Off the Charts is a great place; you should definitely stop in if you're in the area.

What a ride this has been!

Villages of Valeria

Sometimes you get good news, but it's not the right time to make noise about it. And then when it is time, you're busy and you don't get around to it. That happened to me this year with this bit of news: I sold a card game design, which we hope will be published in (probably) 2017!

Deckville...
That design was called Deckville: City of Cards, and you can read about my early design work on it here. In March 2015, I went to the excellent GameStorm convention in nearby Vancouver, and showed off three of my designs in their Game Lab area, which is dedicated to as-yet-unpublished games. There were few publishers in attendance that year, but I got lucky: Deckville was noticed by Daily Magic Games. They were looking for card games to publish, and thought that Deckville was a good candidate. I gave them a copy to take home and try out, and soon after we had a deal.

Since then, I've been working with Isaias Vallejo, an experienced designer and founder of Daily Magic Games, to get the game ready for publication. We've made a lot of changes to my original design in order to make the game more suitable for their target audience: they want games that are easy to learn and quick to play. I was a little reluctant at first, thinking that they wanted non-strategic games with little to think about, but happily I was wrong about that. We've worked over the design until its play time is significantly shortened, but it still offers plenty to think about in under an hour of play. It's been a pleasure working with Isaias on this project; it's definitely been a joint effort, and we will both be listed as designers when the game is published.

...is now Villages of Valeria
We also gave the game a new theme (which I admit it desperately needed!) and a new name. It is now Villages of Valeria, with a fantasy theme to match their first-published card game. That game, Valeria: Card Kingdoms, will be available in stores in early 2016. It's a fun, light-weight game featuring wonderful artwork by Mihajlo Dimitrievski, who is also doing the art for Villages of Valeria. Here's a sample, the artwork for the "Witch's Hut" card:

Kickstarter and Print-and-Play
We hope to launch a Kickstarter campaign for Villages of Valeria in early 2016. I'll post here when the Kickstarter is up. In the meantime, a print-and-play version of the game is available now on BoardGameGeek: click here if you're interested, try the game, and send us your feedback!

Related Games
Another of Daily Magic's games is now in the last days of its Kickstarter campaign. Check out Mana Surge on Kickstarter!

Isaias Vallejo is also the designer of the board game Sunrise City, which is a nicely designed game that's a lot of fun. I recommend it.