We made a board game about vampires
Let me introduce you to "Thirst"
Hey everyone,
Sometime over the last four years since we setup the Design Thinking Games mailing list, you subscribed for updates — and we may never have actually sent one.
If you have totally spaced, we make a podcast interviewing game designers. And after season one we thought we’d take a crack at it ourselves and we made THIRST.
If you can bear with me, I want to show it off and ask that you follow us for free on Kickstarter. We are trying to reach 646 followers before we feel comfortable launching. I’ll explain the thinking at the bottom.
Let me tell you about Thirst
Thirst is a two-to-four player, competitive, vampire-vs-vampire, city dominion game. It can be played in 30-60 minutes.
Human made
Thirst is made by and for humans, illustrated by Aidan Detwiler (aidandetwiler.art).
Three years in the making
This is our passion project. We have been working on Thirst for three years. We've taken it to PAX Unplugged, Origins, CharCon, and Unpub Prime, playtesting with hundreds of players.
Forget the person you were🧛♀️
Become the powerful, timeless, bloodthirsty vampire you were born to be. In Thirst, command the undead and wield evil dark magic, but you awaken in a modern age of human invention and society.
Evil ichor courses through your veins keeping you undead, and since you only know peace when you kill, you MUST FEED, you must drink blood, and there isn’t enough in this city to go around.
Why 646?
After interviewing so many game designers who have both had failed and successful Kickstarters, we generally came away with a number: 40%. Of Kickstarter prelaunch followers, people we spoke to generally saw that 40% will support the project once it has launched.
Thirst — for a first game — is more dense than we would recommend to other first-time game designers. That is, there’s a lot of stuff in the box. The more there is in the box, the more expensive it is to manufacture.
Woops. Rookie mistake.
To make Thirst affordable ($30), we have to manufacture 1500 copies in this first run. Whoa. That is a huge up-front cost that we can’t afford out-of-pocket - hence an ambitious Kickstarter goal.
But back to that 40%: if 258 people buy Thirst through Kickstarter, we will be able to fund the subsequent 1242 copies. When you look around and see that most Kickstarters from first-time indie creators have less than 100 backers, that makes us nervous. So, we will feel ready at 646 followers.
This is where you come in.
Following for free on Kickstarter not only sets you up to be notified the second Thirst launches, but it acts as social proof. If you show interest, it might interest others who are on the fence.
If you can: take five minutes and follow us on Kickstarter. You will need a Kickstarter account, but you won’t have to pay or commit to anything.
Your help will make it possible for us to bring Thirst into the real world.