Image Credit: FACEBOOK/Starlight Board Game

A Kelowna board game company has exceeded its expectations by raising more than $920,000 during its latest Kickstarter campaign to launch a new space adventure board game.

“We weren’t actually expecting it to take off… we were projecting a lot less than that,” said Jonathan Thwaites, OOMM Games creative director.

“Once things did start taking off, we heard that a lot of people were already looking for that style of game for a while now, so that’s how a lot of people we’ve been talking with think.”

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The new board game Starlight is a campaign-style adventure game, similar to Dungeons & Dragons, with miniatures, which is a popular type of game on Kickstarter, he said, adding they also spent a large amount of time marketing the game.

“It’s focus is on combat… but in addition to that, we wanted to add other elements where you could actually get out of your ship and explore,” he said.

While they did get more than 7,000 backers, more people were visiting the Kickstarter page than actually donating to it, he said.  “If we had launched at a regular time, not during COVID, we could have potentially raised 30 per cent more than we did.”

Even though the goal on Kickstarter was listed at $50,000 it’s nowhere near the actual production costs of the game, but Thwaites believes the funds will cover the expenses.

As a newer and smaller company, Kickstarter is a good way to market OOMM Games, as the industry “can be hard to break into,” he said.

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OOMM Games have released four other board games.

“We primarily market to North America right now but we do have some sales overseas,” Thwaites said. “We design them ourselves and we’re all in Kelowna here, that’s where our entire team is.”

The game is expected to be released in August 2021. To learn more about Starlight visit its Kickstarter page.

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