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Lovecraftesque second edition is crowdfunding on Backerkit. Pledge Now!
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LOVECRAFTESQUE SECOND EDITION IS LIVE ON BACKERKIT CROWDFUNDING!

October 10, 2023October 17, 2023 Josh Fox Leave a comment

Lovecraftesque just went live on Backerkit crowdfunding. You can back it here,
or if you’d like to know more, read on!

Lovecraftesque is a storytelling card game of creeping cosmic horror, emulating
the tone and pace of eldritch horror stories. The game will guide you to create
the story of a lone individual who stumbles upon clues to a terrible evil. It
creates slow-building, brooding horror that the main character at first
dismisses, until all too suddenly it becomes impossible to deny. The ending will
certainly be bleak, and the main character is likely to meet their doom.

Brand new cards help streamline gameplay and inspire your group

Lovecraftesque is an emergent mystery game, which crafts a story out of clues
that you take turns to create. The game includes hundreds of creative prompts to
help you generate your story and guide the main character towards a
confrontation with cosmic evil. You take turns to drip weird events into the
story, building up your mystery one clue at a time.  Each player creates a
secret theory about the horror and the truth about the horror emerges from those
theories. By the end you’ll reach a chilling climax that none of you could have
predicted at the start.

Lovecraftesque is easy to learn and teach, simple and intuitive to play, with
hundreds of prompts to fire your imagination. It can be played with 1-5 players
in around 2 hours.

Lovecraftesque is created by Josh Fox and Becky Annison of Black Armada Games,
the award-winning publishers who brought you Wreck This Deck, Last Fleet,
Flotsam: Adrift Amongst The Stars and Bite Marks.

We created the first edition of Lovecraftesque back in 2015. It was our first
game design project and we were delighted with its success. It’s received
critical acclaim, won awards and gained thousands of fans around the world. But
we were new to publishing then, and the costs and risks meant we were unable to
realise our full vision for the game. In this new edition we’ve created the game
we always wanted to.

The second edition is fully card-driven. It gives your group more support for
their creativity through prompt cards that help you get your story set up and
populate it with interesting clues, characters and locations. The story will
seem to write itself.

There are also brand new card-based scenarios to get your story off to a flying
start. Check out the scenarios list to see the incredible range of fresh
exciting settings for eldritch horror, written by a diverse slate of talent from
across the industry. Like the rest of the game, these are written on cards,
meaning you can easily mix and match to make up your own weird tales.

With the new card-driven approach the game is even easier to learn, teach and
play. The rules and structure of the game are written into the cards and your
progress is tracked on the board, so you always know what you’re meant to be
doing. As always we include teaching text to make it easy for you to learn and
teach the game at the table, and tools to avoid the stereotypes of Lovecraft’s
own work.

We are also commissioning new art by Vincent Sammy and Paul Tomes to make the
game look cooler than ever before.

Lovecraftesque second edition will be available as a boxed set with the rules
and all the cards you need, and as a virtual tabletop for online play.

Lovecraftesque is crowdfunding from 10 October to 9 November 2023. Pledge now
and become one of the first to back the project!


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OCTOBER GAME: CYRANO IN LOVE

October 13, 2023October 13, 2023 Leave a comment
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LOVECRAFTESQUE SECOND EDITION HAS BRAND NEW SCENARIOS!

October 9, 2023October 9, 2023 Josh Fox Leave a comment

We are just 24 hours off the launch of our crowdfunding campaign for
Lovecraftesque second edition. If you are excited for the new edition you should
follow the campaign now so you can back as soon as the campaign goes live!

As part of the new edition, we have commissioned a ton of new writers to create
brand new scenarios for the game, as well as writing a bunch ourselves and
updating a few of the scenarios from the first edition. They really are
incredibly diverse – not just the writers themselves, but the fresh and exciting
settings that they have brought to eldritch horror. I don’t think you’ll find a
more unique and original set of cosmic horror scenarios anywhere (though the
first edition of Lovecraftesque gives it a run for its money!)

The new scenarios come on cards, just like the rest of the game’s creative
prompts, and provide pre-generated characters, locations and clues that you can
use to create a story with a distinct flavour. These aren’t pre-plotted
adventures, but rich ingredients that you deploy at the table to create your own
eldritch mystery. Whenever you use them, they’re mixed in with some standard
cards from the core game. As a result, every play through is different, and
every scenario is infinitely replayable.

More than that, you can recombine the cards in the scenarios with each other and
with those in the core deck to create scenarios of your own. With about 240
cards across the scenarios, it is an awesome bank of cosmic horror ideas and
prompts.

Here is the full list of scenarios.

 * A Place In The Country by Lynne Hardy. The Norton Hotel Consortium plans to
   turn Rowan Hall into a luxury hotel and spa. But what mysteries lurk within
   the dilapidated hall and gardens? And why is its current owner so desperate
   to sell? 
 * A Witch’s Love by Michele Gelli. Caterina Sforza (1460~1509), ruler of Imola
   and Countess of Forlì, political leader and alchemist, was a tough cookie.
   She held hostage the Vatican’s conclave and she’s said to be a witch who had
   a well to dispose of bodies of “discarded” lovers. Can Caterina’s presence
   cross space and time? Can her love change the destiny of a team of
   archaeologists that are investigating her old castle?
 * Atlantis Swallowed by Becky Annison. Thousands of years ago and the sea
   levels are lapping at the heels of Atlantis. With greater technological
   prowess than anything a modern civilization has seen, they are confident they
   can hold back the waters. But a deeper rot has seeped in through the cracks.
 * Blow Ye Winds by Sasha Sienna and Jonathan Sims. In 1831, the British port of
   Peterhead processed the butchered blubber of over a thousand whales a year,
   hunted and killed off the coast of Greenland. Dr Andrew Campbell has left his
   landlocked life behind to serve as surgeon on the whaling vessel Sanguine,
   but his first voyage will not be an easy one as a strangeness begins to
   affect the ship.
 * Echoes of Vulcan by Darla Burrow. It is strange days in Pompeii. Phantoms
   walk the streets, doors open to tunnels where once they opened to courtyards,
   and birds fall dead from the sky. Something awful is coming, but what is it
   and how does it connect to the mysterious Cult of Mithras?
 * Ex Nihilo by Joshua Fox. A spaceship is sent to explore the last frontier of
   science by entering the black hole V616 Monocerotis “Mon”. The journey into
   the singularity is even more terrifying than expected.
 * Mr Giggles Comes To Dinner by Misha Bushyager. Your kid won’t shut up about
   their ‘imaginary friend’s’ exploits. So far, so normal, until you start
   experiencing them too.
 * Nothingness has a thousand endings by Bryan Thao Worra. In this scenario, the
   witness takes a step into the 1990s Southeast Asian refugee community in a
   working class neighborhood in the US to resolve a mysterious debt of
   uncertain consequences.
 * On Ilkla Moor Bah’tat by Becky Annison. Ilkley Moor is a dark and foreboding
   place for a young world war II evacuee miles from the city she called home.
   What lurks in the soothing waters of the suspicious Hydro Hotel and are the
   locals friendly or ready to offer her up on a plate?
 * The Chicxulub Horrors by Santiago Villa. In the coast of Yucatán where an
   ancient meteorite has created a gargantuan underground crater that is now a
   web of tunnels, a man disappears. During the art boom of the 1930’s in
   Mexico, painter and muralist Hervé Pelletier has gone missing and his wife,
   Amaranta Vera, has arrived at Chicxulub Puerto, a town nestled over the
   crater’s dead center, to look for him.
 * The Hidden Cabinet by Helen Gould. A scenario about whispered rumours,
   duplicitous politicians, and what really happens in the corridors of power.
   What will you find behind these closed doors?
 * The Sea Hungers by Thomas Manuel. It’s Bombay in 1728. As the East India
   Company recovers from a ferocious defeat at the hands of legendary pirate
   admiral Kanhoji Angre, a naive, young marine discovers a sinister plot
   involving sacrifice and spirals of blood.  
 * We serve and protect by Kenneth Hite. A long hot summer of protests rocks the
   streets of Chicago in the 1970s, and you rock with them. Until the cops pen
   you in, snatch you up, and take you to the precinct house, where worse things
   than rubber hoses wait in the basement. The Chicago Police Department serves
   and protects… but what inhuman entity do the cops who have you serve? What
   dark secrets do they protect?
 * Wolfshead by Joshua Fox. Sherwood, Nottinghamshire, in the 13th century. A
   hapless cutpurse robs the wrong person and finds themselves in possession of
   a strange item. Now they have the Baron’s men hunting for them – but that may
   not be the worst thing that stalks the night.
 * The Copycat Canal Murders by Becky Annison. Ritual murders spanning a century
   are investigated again in the age of DNA profiling and AI. Will the truth of
   the horrifying secrets on the foggy banks of the canal finally be revealed?
 * The Outer Gods by Nick Bate. The year is 23XX. Humanity has colonised the
   Solar System aboard reality-rending liveships, warding themselves against
   unearthly things hiding in the dark through ritual and prayer. Monette is one
   such liveship, a salvager investigating the sudden reappearance of a lost
   generation ship. What will they find aboard the deadship Yog-Sothoth?
 * The Siren’s Caw by W.H. Arthur. Every summer, visitors from London and beyond
   are drawn to the seaside resort of Brighton. Are they called here by the
   eldritch forces from beneath the waves, or is there something even more
   sinister from across time and space?
 * Through The Waters, Darkly by Josh Fox. A research and exploration base has
   been set up at the bottom of the deepest place on Earth: the Mariana Trench.
   The small team of scientists are isolated in the cold depths as they explore
   the last frontier of our planet. Isolated, yes: but not alone.

Lovecraftesque second edition launches on Backerkit crowdfunding tomorrow –
Tuesday 10 October, at 11am ET / 4pm BST. Follow the campaign and be one of the
first to back the new edition.


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LOVECRAFTESQUE 2E HAS HIDDEN UV ART!

October 3, 2023October 3, 2023 Josh Fox 1 Comment

We’re ONE WEEK away from the launch of the Lovecraftesque 2e crowdfunding
campaign and, to celebrate, I want to share with you a very exciting part of
Lovecraftesque 2e which is *hidden UV art*. The new edition will come with a UV
torch, and when you shine it on the box, board and rulebook you’ll see extra
detail that was invisible before.

A mock-up of what the UV cover will look like

We first saw this approach in the Italian edition of Lovecraftesque 1e by
Narrattiva, and we’re stealing it wholesale. Every illustration will contain
hidden details and the text itself will be splattered with sigils, blood stains
and tentacles. Check out the Italian edition cover below – you’ll be seeing
something very similar on the new edition’s rulebook.

The Italian edition of Lovecraftesque 1e

The art for this game is going to be SO GOOD. You’ve seen the awesome cover by
our lead illustrator Vincent Sammy, who also illustrated Bite Marks. There’s
more where that came from. Check out this gorgeously creepy illustration for the
game’s board, also by Vincent Sammy. (This too will have UV on it but you’ll
have to wait to see what that looks like!)

The board for Lovecraftesque 2e.

And we also have Paul Tomes creating interior illustrations for the book. We’ve
long admired Paul’s style and we’re really excited to have him on board. Take a
look at this terrific piece showing horror about to unfold in a mine. Again,
there will be UV on this one, but you’ll have to wait to see that.

One of Paul Tomes’ illustrations for Lovecraftesque 2e

As always, commissioning art for games is my favourite bit about being a small
press publisher. It’s always delightful to see our weird ideas turned into
something gorgeous, and to support artists while doing it.

The campaign for Lovecraftesque 2e goes live in one week, on 10 October – sign
up to be notified when it launches!


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LOVECRAFTESQUE 2E: WHAT’S NEW

September 26, 2023September 26, 2023 Josh Fox Leave a comment

We are just TWO WEEKS from our crowdfunding of Lovecraftesque second edition
(you can sign up to be notified when the campaign launches here). There are a
ton of exciting things to share about the new game and I’ll be announcing them
day by day.

But let’s start really basic: what is new in the game’s core design?

It’s still a GMless storytelling game where you share control of one main
character, and also share the job of creating the clues that drive the mystery.
It’s still about slow-building mystery culminating in worldview-shattering
horror and a bleak ending for the main character.

But the game now comes with a plethora of prompts to help you create the
characters, locations and clues.

You get a dedicated deck of Location Cards with prompts to generate the places
where the horror unfolds, and a deck of Character Cards with prompts to create
NPCs your main character might encounter. The two of these together help you
rapidly generate the setting for your game; perhaps you’ll be presented with a
Holy Place, a Remote Location and a Natural Feature and immediately think to
yourself “that sounds like a monastery in the mountains”. Once you’ve decided
your basic setting, the cards enable you to create a bunch of ready-to-go story
elements that you can grab and quickly turn into a scene.

Then there’s the Mystery Deck, which is the engine that drives the unfolding
mystery. The Mystery Deck contains Clue Cards with a theme for a Clue. Themes
like technology, strange writings, weird construction, and rites & customs. With
each card, you can straight away imagine the sorts of eldritch weirdness you
might create. But to make it even easier, the cards contain a handful of prompts
that you can quickly flesh out to turn into a Clue.

The Mystery Deck also contains Special Cards, just like the ones in the first
edition of the game, that allow you to break the rules. These shake up the story
so that just occasionally the main character will get killed midway through the
story, and pick up a new character; or, even more surprising, they might
actually defeat the horror at the end.

The game also comes with scenarios, just like the first edition, written by a
diverse international slate of authors and covering fresh and varied venues for
cosmic horror. What’s new is, the scenarios are written on cards. This makes it
simple to set up the characters and locations where everyone can see them, and
dish out the clues to the group. Further, you can recombine the scenario cards
with cards from other scenarios and those from the main deck to create your own
scenarios, and for infinite replayability.

The scenarios aren’t stretch goals: we’re funding them as part of our main goal.
There will be a set included in the main game, and more available as expansion
packs. We’ll be announcing details in the coming days.

Alongside those you have the Story Track and Story Cards, which guide you
through the game. They serve a similar role to the teaching guide in 1e, walking
you through each part of the game so you always know what to do next. This is a
bit like the way games like For The Queen present each new step of the game on
cards, making it simple to follow the structure of the game.

We haven’t got rid of the teaching guide, by the way – we know this was a
favourite feature of the first edition. What we have done though is integrate it
into the rulebook so that the whole text is now presented as a read-out-loud
guide.

Finally you have Rule Cards which describe the key rules of the game – things
like the creeping horror rule which limit how extreme the clues can be. These
serve as a handy reference but also help to highlight when the rules change
mid-game – it’s very satisfying to discard the rules that have been limiting the
horror and know that the leash is off!

All this makes for a hugely improved experience: better creative support,
slicker, easier to learn rules, and a more accessible game. I’ve successfully
taught and played a full session of Lovecraftesque in 90 minutes and the group
was BUZZING with how much fun they had and how easy it was to pick up.

I’ll be back with more over the next two weeks. In the mean time, if you haven’t
already, you should get yourself signed up to be notified when the project
launches. Don’t miss it!


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SEPTEMBER GAME: WHIPPY WARS

September 13, 2023September 13, 2023 Leave a comment
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OUR EXPERIENCE WITH BACKERKIT ADVERTISING

August 22, 2023August 22, 2023 Leave a comment

We’ve been running TTRPG crowdfunding campaigns for almost a decade and we like
to think we’re quite good at it. We’ve been gradually and organically growing
our audience, but it gets harder and harder to connect with people as the TTRPG
world fractures into zillions of little communities. We had dipped our toe in
the water of advertising previously, but never had much success with it and
viewed it as a waste of money. Enter Backerkit advertising – a service that
proved very effective for us. In this article I’ll break down the experience and
the outcomes we saw.

The TL;DR here is that we got a lot more money, both before and after taking out
the cost of the ads. Wreck This Deck looks likely to have been unusually
successful for a TTRPG zine even without the ads, but there’s clear evidence
that the ads increased that.

I’m not affiliated with Backerkit, I’m not getting anything from them for doing
it, I’m just sharing this because I think it might be helpful for fellow
creators.

Backerkit’s advertising pitch is, they buy advertising on your behalf (mostly
Facebook/Instagram ads) and improve the targeting using their presumably very
impressive storehouse of data from all the millions of crowdfunding campaigns
they’ve been involved with. You tell them a target return you want on your ads,
and they then increase or decrease spend depending on how well they’re meeting
that target. They charge you a commission on any resulting pledges. You don’t
pay for anything until the campaign closes and you’ve received your pledge
money.

By the way, this is in-campaign advertising. Backerkit (and others, probably) do
pre-campaign advertising to build up followers on your launch page. We haven’t
tried that, and it isn’t covered here.

We weren’t sure if this service was likely to work for us, but – spoiler alert –
it absolutely did. We saw at least a 50% increase in our backers compared to our
most optimistic expectations, and there’s very clear evidence to show that this
was generated by the ads, as I’ll explain below.

Before going any further, let’s talk about the ick factor. If you’re like me,
you probably don’t like the idea of advertising. It’s horrible, intrusive stuff
that feels sort of spammy and slightly dirty. You just want to be left alone to
enjoy the internet without this stuff, and you don’t want to be a part of it.
You maybe feel like your product should be so good that it doesn’t need
advertising.  There was a definite emotional barrier we had to push through to
get started with this. But the truth is, well-targeted adverts for a quality
product are a way of finding people who want something and helping them to find
out about it. They’re gonna see some ads anyway, so it might as well be for a
cool new game. Provided the things you promise in your pitch are accurate, and
your game is good, you’re not hurting anyone by using it.

What we did

We were pretty wary of pouring a ton of money into something for no return. The
Backerkit model – tell us a target return on your ad and we’ll spend like crazy
as long as you’re meeting it – was kind of terrifying to us. We set up
advertising early on in our campaign, saw some fairly middling results, and told
them to switch the ads off.

Later on in the campaign, for no reason I can articulate, we decided to give
them another go. We switched them on again, at a low level of spend, and saw an
immediate increase in pledges. Bumping the spend up a bit, we saw even better
results.

Throughout the periods where we were advertising, we set a target return on
advertising spend (ROAS) of 3 – meaning the aim is for each £1 spent on adverts
to yield £3 or more of pledges. This is the amount we’d worked out, after costs,
should ensure we made extra money rather than a loss. Although the ROAS jumped
around a lot over the course of the campaign, the final ROAS was 3.04.

The results

The graph below tracks our pledges each day of the campaign for Wreck This Deck.

The blue bit of the chart is pledges that Backerkit identify as not being ad
driven. Orange is pledges that Backerkit identify as being ad driven. The tiny
almost-invisible grey bit is pledges Backerkit identify as being driven by their
newsletter.

You might ask: why should we trust Backerkit’s assessment of whether a pledge
was ad-driven? They get a commission on the ad-driven pledges so it’s in their
interests to round those up isn’t it? That is indeed an anxiety that we had. But
in a way, the fact that we had a gap in the middle where we weren’t using ads
was incredibly helpful, in that it clearly demonstrated that the ads were
working. You can easily see the point that we turned the ads back on in the
graph below, even without the big red arrows, and you could probably guess how
much revenue was ad-driven even without the colour-coding.



The first few days of a crowdfunding campaign always see lots of pledges as
existing fans and highly enthusiastic backers jump in. After day 3 or so, things
naturally quieten down, and you see a trickle of pledges from folk who have only
just heard about the campaign. During this mid-campaign period – days 4-20 on
the graph – we saw about £200 of new pledges per day. Once we turned the
advertising on this leapt up by a factor of 4, even excluding the last few days
when, again, you always see a big increase in pledges.

Interestingly even the organic pledges increased by about 75% during the period
we were advertising. Presumably some people were seeing the ads and then
pledging on a different device or similar, hiding them from Backerkit’s tracking
algorithm.

It’s a lot harder to feel confident about the impact of the ads during the last
few days, because you’d expect a big spike anyway. Look at any successful
crowdfunding campaign, there’s always a rush of pledges at the end. But it is
possible to estimate the effect of advertising here. I looked at our previous
campaigns and a few carefully-chosen third-party campaigns that I deemed to be
similar to Wreck This Deck. The difference is fairly obvious.



Table showing the percentage share of revenue taken in the last 3 days of
various crowdfunding campaigns. The figure ranges from 16-29%, except for Wreck
This Deck where 66% of revenue came in the last 3 days.



We also asked our backers in the post-campaign survey whether they’d seen ads.
Obviously the data here is subject to the caveat that people might not remember
correctly, or might have thought something was an ad when it wasn’t, and so
forth. With that said:

 * 35.2% said they didn’t see any ads
 * 13.2% said they saw an ad after they’d already backed
 * 5.7% said they saw an ad after they’d already heard about the campaign
 * 9.5% said they saw an ad but probably would have heard about the campaign
   anyway
 * 32.9% said they came to the campaign because they’d seen an ad

Backerkit’s marketing stats claim that 57% of our pledges came from advertising.
That matches reasonably well to the 61% above who said they’d seen an ad, though
just under half of these had already heard of the campaign or think they would
have done so anyway.

Did it pay off?

The above analysis seems to pretty clearly indicate that we raised a large
amount of revenue from advertising. But of course, that’s before costs.

Based on Backerkit’s own analysis, the fees we paid them for the advertising –
covering the cost of the ads themselves and Backerkit’s commission – added up to
39.8% of what the pledges that they identified as being ad-generated. So we got
to keep 60.2% of what we raised.

Once you take out our own costs, that number comes down, but because we’d
already paid off a lot of our costs (art etc) from organic pledges alone, it
still leaves a decent % of money left over for paying ourselves for the work on
the project.

The possible fly in the ointment here is what I term “wasted ad spend”. This is
essentially my attempt to work out how many ad-driven pledges would have
happened anyway, and are therefore wasted money. This is really really hard to
know.

The survey data above suggest that only about half of our advertising driven
pledges were people who hadn’t already pledged, hadn’t yet heard of the campaign
and wouldn’t have likely done so anyway. If all that is counted as “wasted ad
spend” then we came in very close to break-even – probably making a small amount
of extra money, but just possibly making a small loss once all costs have been
counted.

However, if you’d heard about the campaign before but not backed, maybe the ad
was what tipped the balance, reminding you about this cool game and getting you
to pledge. Only those who already backed can be considered definitely as “wasted
ad spend”. If you only count these as waste, that’s only a 21.5% rate of wasted
ad spend. That might seem over-optimistic, but if you compare what we made in
the late stages of the campaign with what we would have expected, based on
comparison with other campaigns, you’d guess that only about 19% of the
ad-driven pledges were “wasted ad spend”. At any rate, at a 21.5% rate of wasted
spend, the ads would have driven a healthy amount of extra money – meaning we
would have kept about 23.5% of the ad-driven revenue after costs.

So we can’t ever really know how effective the ads were taking into account
wasted spend. Indeed, there are other unknowns: could it be that the ad-driven
folks would eventually have bought the game after the campaign closed? Might we
be robbing our future selves? Conversely, might ad-driven backers have reshared
the campaign a generated more organic sales from people who would never have
heard of it otherwise? It’s all pretty hard to estimate.

What we do know is that this was our most successful campaign, in terms of
number of backers, ever. Even though it was a small zine project, it was the
most revenue we’ve ever raised from a crowdfunding campaign. And even if we
can’t quite prove it, the overall trend in the data suggests that the
advertising was well worth it for us.

A small further addendum to the above is that obviously a % of our ad-driven
backers will come back and support future projects. We can’t know what this is
worth to us, but in the scenario where we actually had very high wasted ad
spend, and made a small loss overall, this would be the silver lining to the
cloud.

What about you?

Before closing out, I want to pile in some caveats to the above.

First off, this was just one example. Wreck This Deck appears to already have
been fairly unusual as zine projects go, with nearly 600 backers before the ads
kicked in. It had low overheads, and indeed once you’ve got 600 backers the
extra cost of delivering additional copies of the game is very low. This makes
it easier for ads to be cost-effective. This might not be a representative
example.

Second, we’re a relatively mature gaming company. We’re still absolutely tiny in
the scheme of things, but we knew we could afford to take some risks with a
relatively small project and if we made a loss then it wouldn’t destroy us. It’s
wonderful that Backerkit don’t charge you until after the campaign, but they do
charge you, and the bill can be quite high. You have to decide your own appetite
for risk.

Third, your costs are an absolutely vital part of the calculation here. Not just
the cost of the ads, but the cost of providing your product to all those extra
people, including shipping and all the other horrible costs that notoriously
turn out to be higher than you expected. We made a spreadsheet to add all these
costs up, and work out how high a % return on advertising spend we’d need to
turn a profit. We looked at nightmare scenarios where that % turned out to be
too low, and how much that would cost us. I strongly recommend you do that too,
if you’re thinking about using ads.

Fourth, advertising can be a bit anxiety-inducing. You get real-time data about
advertising spend, including how effective it’s been today, and sometimes the
numbers can be quite alarming. Returns on spend zigzag around. If you’re in the
UK like us, it’s doubly alarming as you can’t communicate with West Cost
US-based Backerkit until they get to work in your late afternoon. This goes back
to your risk appetite – are you comfortable watching your money being spent, and
sometimes feeling unsure if it’s worth it?

Obviously I wouldn’t think to tell anyone “go and spend a pile of money on ads”
– that has to be your decision, based on your particular circumstances. All I
can say is: it worked well for us, and we will likely be doing more of it.


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AUGUST GAME – GHOST HUNT LIVE!

August 15, 2023October 13, 2023 Leave a comment

Ghost Hunt was our August release. It has now been taken down but it will be
released soon on our Itch store.

Hey folks!

August’s game is Ghost Hunt Live! – a hack of Lovecraftesque where you play TV
ghosthunters.

You are a fearless and seasoned team of TV ghosthunters. A blend of
investigators, psychics, parapsychologists, camera crew, sceptics, a cool
presenter and maybe even the occasional exorcist. This is a haunted location and
it doesn’t know what is about to hit it!

Ghost Hunt Live! is a game about a TV show hunting for ghosts and finding the
stories of the people they once were. You will play one main character, The
Psychic, and rotate this and other roles around the play group until the full
story of the haunting is revealed.

It’s a super fun game and we hope you enjoy it.

While we’re on the subject (kind of) of Lovecraftesque, you might be interested
to know that we are not far off launching the crowdfunding campaign for the
second edition of the game. The new edition takes everything that was good about
the first and improves it, providing a slicker, more inspiring and even more
accessible experience. You can sign up to be notified when the campaign launches
here:

https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/7d5c14b9-1a73-4aa3-bd55-ad7c3afc43fe/landing?ref=patreon

Cheers

Josh and Becky


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LOVECRAFTESQUE SECOND EDITION IS COMING!

August 9, 2023August 9, 2023 Josh Fox Leave a comment

Check out the preview page and sign up for updates

We’re launching a new edition of Lovecraftesque, the classic storytelling game
of creeping cosmic horror. Lovecraftesque creates chilling eldritch mysteries
that keep the whole table in suspense right until the end: the story emerges
over a single session as if by magic without any prep, planning or discussion.
The first edition was critically acclaimed, won the Gioco Dell’Anno (Game Of The
Year) award, was a finalist in the IGDN indie groundbreakers, and influenced a
generation of mystery games like Brindlewood Bay, Apocalypse Keys and Bleak
Spirit. We’re crowdfunding a new second edition boxed set, building on the
lessons from the first to make an even slicker, more inspiring, easier-to-learn
experience, with brand new art and a plethora of exciting new scenarios for the
game. The campaign launches in October.

If you like the sound of that you can find out more and sign up for
updates here.


CUTE FAMILIARS AND SPOOKY MANSIONS!

Familiar Friends is a cozy journaling game about the lives of witches’
familiars, and the silly adventures they get up to. It’s solo-first but it also
works as a light GMless game for a gang of familiars. It’s a lot of fun! You can
get it now by supporting the Black Armada Patreon – and of course it will be
available on our itch store in a few months.

Ghost Hunt Live! is a game about TV ghost hunters staking out spooky mansions
and uncovering the lives of the ghosts they find there. It’s a Lovecraftesque
hack where your TV psychic will gradually discover the truth about a haunted
place, ably aided by the crew of your TV show. GHL is on its way to the Black
Armada Patreon imminently.

It’s a good time to join the Patreon – for a mere $5 you can get our previous
release Polis, plus Familiar Friends and Ghost Hunt Live! when it releases. Not
bad!


WRECK THIS DECK IS AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER

Wreck This Deck, the dark urban fantasy journaling game of demon summoning and
deck crafting, is at the printers and shipping in the next few weeks. If you
missed the crowdfunding campaign, you can pre-order it here.


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JULY GAME: FAMILIAR FRIENDS

July 12, 2023September 13, 2023 Leave a comment

Familiar friends was July’s Patreon release. It has now been taken down, but
will soon be available on the Black Armada itch store.

This month’s game seemed to leap into my head fully-formed. It’s a cozy
journaling game about the lives of witches’ familiars, and the silly adventures
they get up to. It’s solo-first but it also works as a light GMless game for a
gang of familiars.

I had a lot of fun playtesting it and I hope you enjoy playing it too!

Josh


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