Hi friends,
I figured many of you might appreciate a brief update on Flag Dash, the capture the flag board game I published earlier this year. Some of you were kind to back the game on Kickstarter, I am very thankful for all who helped make the game possible!
God truly has blessed our efforts and done abundantly more than we could hope or ask for. We were selling though our stock steadily from Sep-Oct after the retail release, on a trajectory to sell out of our initial 1,000 units by end of year, and were considering a reprint of another 1,000 units for early next year.
Although Flag Dash had received a very favorable review from Tom Vasel (the biggest name in board game reviews) and was featured on a top 10 most anticipated games of Gen Con by a large media contributor (Gen Con is the largest board game convention in US), we had under 5k lifetime views of our game page on BoardGameGeek (largest board game site). It seemed that our best course for future success was to try to get into the mainstream gaming market, rather than just focusing on the hobby market. Flag Dash has mainstream appeal with gamer game quality and replayability. We had one main option to try to get into toy stores via a distributor but there was no guarantee of anything.
Then God showed up in a big way. The weekend before Thanksgiving, we demoed all weekend at a very important board game convention in Dallas (BGG Con). Initially I planned to go about our previous marketing strategy of asking demoers to enter our raffle via posting a picture on social media (we did this at Gen Con for about 30 posts). But God put it on my heart to make use of a voting system at the show called the GeekBuzz. I wasn't sure if it made sense at first though, because we would be steering customers favorable to us towards engagement by which we couldn't follow up with them later for the potential benefit of getting more exposure. It's sweet that God gave me peace about it, though, as we vaulted to the top of the GeekBuzz (in front of many big name, popular games) and attracted lots of attention at the show.
We ended up selling out of our print run, finishing #1 on the GeekBuzz, having over 25k new users view our BGG page in the following 2 weeks, and being featured prominently near the top of "The Hotness" on BGG. We had multiple distribution opportunities and localization of the game into other languages.
The biggest outcome though was Ultra PRO approached us to license Flag Dash at the very end of the show, right when we were starting to pack up. Talk about God's perfect timing! Needless to say, we are extremely excited about where God takes Flag Dash in the future. It's all in His hands and we give Him all the glory. They will push forward quickly with a reprint. Here is the
press release.
Now to design the first expansion for Flag Dash and decide whether to launch our next game on our own (with increased name recognition now) or look to license it to Ultra PRO.
Blessings,
Kirk
