❖ Version History ❖

1st of July – 17th of November 2022
Well, it would be an understatement to say anything less than: We have finally made it.

Are you ready for some behind the scenes action?

At the time that I am writing this, it is now 2023. Between my last post to the design journal entry and right now, we have officially completed process of our Kickstarter campaign and publication of Calendra. But what happened exactly? How did we end up getting to this place, and what were the overall results of the Kickstarter experience for us? Calendra’s origin until this post has been about the formation of the game from the game design side of things, but now we are into the status of product manufacturing and distribution, and that has come with a very different story.

To begin this part of the tale, it is important to recall exactly what the plan was here. For us at Librarium Games, it was critical to make absolutely certain that this first kickstarter we were going to host was to be perfect without exception. This means: Relentless Planning & Organization, No Delays, No Errors, and A Beautiful, Functional Product.

To streamline the success of this objective, our first goal was something crazy: we planned on beginning the manufacturing our product before the actual launch of the Kickstarter. This means that we had to financially, artistically, and strategically plan on the creation of the game during a timeline that both began before the crowd funding, but also concluded at nearly the same time (so as to avoid breaking the code of conduct regarding how to allocate kickstarter donated funds, but subvert the wait time on manufacturing delays). To make this magic happen from behind the scenes, it was necessary to begin the manufacturing conversation at least six months in advance of our launch date… so, all the way back in March of 2022 we were already planning on exact dates for specific events to take place through September, October, November, and December, on over 15 parts of this process.

To help avoid confusion about all of that, I decided to wait on publishing this post until the entire Kickstarter production was complete. This helps avoid making it seem like things were happening out of order as they were happening, and it also helps us share the full scope of this story from its end, rather than during a time when some details were still uncertain. Luckily, now that we are through that, we can share all sorts of awesome photography that took place during this time! To begin, lets take a look at the production photos from the manufacturing facility in Hong Kong:

These photographs were delivered to me in late August 2022, only about a month before our launch day! They were the final pictures to be taken by the manufacturing facility before pushing print on our 2,000 unit production! I wanted to share these photos so badly at the time, but this was still before we were done having reviews come into the picture, so it was critical to keep this timeline under wraps.

Another major piece of the process that was taking place actively in the background of our campaign timeline was the making and distributing of digital advertising. There were several kinds of adds that we had publicly posted to our social media, but there were also a few digital ads that we paid to have up on other sites, most notably sites like Board Game Geek. These adds were designed to be visually engaging for the layout of their special webpage based ad slots, which could not also be shown on our social platforms, because the sizing wouldn’t make sense. Here are a few examples of these special sized ads:

It was an especially difficult task to realize & follow through with making this art. It was unfortunately a very last minute decision, and we paid for that in lack of perfect quality… but with all things considered, these ads came out a lot nicer than I had expected with the mere week that I had as a timeline to produce them before the official launch day. Much more importantly, these ads were wildly effective. They were seen by an average of 45,000 people per day (just on the BGG website, which offered some of the better analytics) during the two weeks of our campaign timeline, and of those, there were several customer conversations that we owe a significant slice of our success to.

As another big piece of the puzzle, there was the overwhelming madness of preparing to fulfill on our campaign rewards. For this slice of the production, we had no choice but to be very present on social media: we needed to post content updates about new art, new designs, product movement (from our facility in China, and three others in the US), and of course, we needed to be as vocal as we could about our ability to get everything prepped for postage on a timeline that we promised not to mess up. Though this too was an overwhelmingly difficult task to follow through on correctly the first time (because so many variables were based on guesswork and uncertain production shipping timelines), we were successful in our goal.

For one fateful & crazy day during this madness, Ben and I frantically converted my whole house into a shipping center & then proceeded to return it back to normal all within a 12 hour timeline. Here are some of the highlight photos from that day:

In the end, it was an absolute flurry of non-stop busy working days. To me, the first day of September till Thanksgiving in 2022 was an absolute blur. Though we were not quite as successful as The Great Chase project with our first product launch as a company, I think that we did just about as good as we possibly could. Here are some juicy stats to consider:

Calendra Manufacturing Costs:
$15,766 From start to end

Kickstarter Campaign Funding:
$7,619 (Before Tax)

Customer Count:
92 Total Backers!

Shipping / Taxation:
$1,621

When shown like this, it honestly doesn’t even look that great!
But.
The goal of this project was something I consider an absolute success none-the-less.

We have never produced anything like this on our own before. It took a lot of guts, it took a lot of planning, and though we did not technically break even on our first attempt at sales, we did very well to plan this with an insight into the future of our existence as a company. We now possess a real product! Something that we can continue on with into the world of business, something that we can sell to try an establish ourselves better, and something that every single one of us can be proud of.

Because of how we planned all of this, and the fact that we had some residual revenue to work with, we were capable of beginning the next step in the process: Distribution and Event Planning! Be sure to tune back in soon to see how that process will begins for us in the end of 2022, and where we plan to take this into the new year of 2023! And as always, thank you for tuning into another post of the Librarium Games Design Journal! See you again soon my friends!