THUNDER BAY -- Conor McGoey started with an idea and a rough sketch on the back of a President’s Choice pizza a little more than a year ago.
Now the 33-year-old Thunder Bay man is just $65,000 away from seeing that idea become a ready-for-market, professionally manufactured tabletop board game.
Summit is the game, and Inside Up Games is the company McGoey created to help launch it via Kickstarter. Summit is a survival race where one to six players try to move their game piece up and back down a mountain without dying.
With only minor adjustments to the game board and rules, Summit can turn from a co-operative experience to a competitive one. A co-operative game features rules that make it more difficult for players to survive, while a competitive game has its own unique challenges in the form of other players trying to sabotage one another.
“So you can be as nice or as evil as you need to be,” McGoey said.
The original idea for Summit came to McGoey while he laid in bed restlessly on the Christmas Eve of 2014. He jotted down notes into his iPhone, but a busy work schedule forced those notes to collect dust.
Later McGoey became ill and was forced off the job site for a period of time. He used that time, his iPhone notes, a pizza box and a sharpie to create the first working version of Summit.
“The mechanics worked, but it was pretty ugly,” McGoey said, recalling the playtesting of that first version.
After some adjustments, and graphical help from Jordan Danielsson of Lost Art., McGoey now has a working prototype that has been undergoing aggressive game testing for the last six months.
“The game works, the mechanics work, I’ve been getting a lot of positive reviews from some real gamers … who have really tried to break the game, which is the important part.”
The real test comes on June 1 when McGoey officially launches his Kickstarter campaign, where he hopes to find the roughly $65,000 he needs.
“That will give me the first print run of the game,” he said. “That’s 1,500 units manufactured at full professional production quality.”
He’ll have 35 days to collect that money once the campaign begins and cannot be a penny short.
Turning to crowdfunding to find investors for a tabletop game isn’t unheard of. Cards Against Humanity is among the most well-known examples of successful Kickstarter campaigns in gaming, and its $15,000 investment in 2011 makes it one of the more modest examples of success.
Exploding Kittens found itself with an astonishing 219,000 backers pledging $8.8 million despite its original $10,000 goal. While Exploding Kittens is currently the greatest Kickstarter achievement in tabletop gaming, there are another dozen examples or more of independent game makers drawing in millions of dollars.
There are also countless examples of failed Kickstarter campaigns, but the fact that so many game makers have found success through crowdfunding that the avenue gives McGoey hope.
“The window is definitely open for this,” McGoey said.
“(Tabletop gaming) is the fastest growing industry for people our age who grew up playing games, kind of got into video games, and are now getting back to family life and spending time with people face to face.”
Kodie Long was among nearly 10 people who participated in a game testing event at the Red Lion Smokehouse last week. He played with a small group testing the co-operative version of the game.
“But some of the players weren’t very cooperative and let me die,” Long said jokingly. “It was pretty exciting, and you could see that there was a lot of strategy to it.”
To learn more about Summit and its soon-to-be-launched Kickstarter campaign, visit Inside Up games online here.
