Tabletop Gaming

Tabletop Gaming is the UK’s only monthly magazine dedicated to all types of gaming on your tabletop. From board games, card games, roleplaying games and miniatures we have you covered every month in 100 pages.

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Tabletop Gaming

Welcome

FROM AN IDEA TO A GRAND FESTIVAL • There‘s perhaps no better place to start talking about Crowdfunding, than with the creator some of the highest funded games in our industry. Isaac Childres of Cephalofair Games fills us in on going from small Kickstarter project, to giant BackerKit Festival.

KICKSTARTER FOR BEGINNERS • Kickstarter is a crowdfunding website that allows creators product to put their ideas in front of a massive audience and generate funding through what are essentially pre-orders. This has allowed many independent creators to get their games off the ground and out into the world, including yours truly. With six successful RPG Kickstarter projects under my belt at time of writing, Tabletop Gaming has asked me to write about what it’s like running a Kickstarter, and how to run one.

THE SEASON OF THE ZINE • Anna Blackwell takes us through the very event that launched their RPG writing career – but what is Zine Quest, and is it any different to Zine Month?

5 ZINE MONTH PROJECTS • With February marking the start of Zine Month and Zine Quest, creators have started sharing their projects, and we’re taking a look at five ahead of time. For full details, be sure to track them down on their relevant crowdfunding site, and mark the calendar to get involved

HEADED TO KICKSTARTER • Kickstarter has long been synonymous with crowdfunding, especially when it comes to board games. Despite recent years and numerous other platforms, it remains the biggest source of tabletop games, and indeed, tabletop games provide a big chunk of the Kickstarter income. It wouldn’t be a crowdfunding issue without talking to them, so we caught up with the Head of Games at Kickstarter, Jon Ritter-Roderick

THE CROWDFUNDING LANDSCAPE • You may have gone to back a shiny new game, and found that instead of Kickstarter, it’s on a new unfamiliar platform. Sound familiar? As the opportunities to fund elsewhere arise, it’s often easier to follow the game to where it lives, but whether you’ve backed thousands of games or none at all, we’ve taken a look at all the places you might end up, with some pros and cons for each of them

FORGING A NEW PATH • What if you created a trading card game that didn’t just leave you to build your own decks, but could use an algorithm to make billions of different, usable decks, that meant no one knew what you’d get within each pack – but you could play with every single one? Brilliant, you’d probably think. Except when the algorithm had some hiccoughs… Ross Gilbert discusses its return to crowdfunding, and what it means for the game.

WHAT’S IN A GAME? • THE SCIENCE OF CROWDFUNDING

WHEN CROWDFUNDING GOES WRONG

KEEPING SAFE • Things to look for in a Crowdfunding project to avoid an expensive disappointment…

BEHIND THE SCENES: panda MAKING BOARD GAMES • Panda Games Manufacturing is one of the biggest names in our hobby for manufacturing, likely being responsible for a good chunk of games on your shelf. Whilst we don’t always take a moment to question the path our games have been on before they reach us, we wanted to find out more about this surprisingly under-discussed area of gaming

FROM PLEDGE TO YOUR DOOR • If you’ve ever wondered how your game got from the factory that made it to your doorstep, it’ll almost always have been the quiet role of a fulfilment company. We sat down with Nigel Matthews, CEO of GamesQuest, about how the company came about, and the passion that comes with it.

10 OF THE BEST CROWDFUNDED GAMES FOR 2024 • As we...