I’m not opposed to crowdfunding tabletop games in principle. Even bigger companies might need some guaranteed cash up front before ordering a huge print run of their product. In that respect, it’s basically a preorder.

However, there’s a lot of habits surrounding kickstarters that I could really do without. Arbitrary funding goals and contrived stretch goals (“we can make a game if we get funded at 40k, but now that we have 2m we can give you the game as intended all these extra bits!”), preying on FOMO, overpromising and underdelivering, launching half baked and undeveloped ideas as a kickstarter, etc. All of that just screams to me that their main goal is taking my money, instead of creating an awesome game and being solvent while doing so.

I don’t really do crowdfunding games anymore. Instead I wait until it hits retail, pick up a second hand copy if it doesn’t, or just don’t buy it. There are exceptions to this of companies I trust to deliver, but they’re few and far between.

That said, I kind of like what Cephalofair is doing with their current Gloomhaven campaign on Backerkit. It’s basically a preorder for a bunch of new products that’ll go in production soon, clear information, no extra FOMO bullshit, lots of content creation and events around the new products, and a really good deal compared to MRSP (and historically, their crowdfunding campaigns have been by far the cheapest way to get their products).