I backed three separate deluxe-edition Kickstarter board games in the same twelve month stretch a couple years back, all of them the kind of ambitious, component-heavy dungeon crawlers I genuinely love reviewing, and by the time the third one arrived I realized I hadn’t opened the shrink wrap on the first two, six and eight months after they’d shown up at my door respectively. I want to be honest about what that says, because I think it’s a more common pattern than people admit, and I only really reckoned with it because all three boxes ended up stacked in the same corner of my apartment, physically impossible to ignore.
The pattern, once I actually looked at it, was pretty simple and a little humbling. I back these projects during the campaign, months before delivery, riding on genuine excitement about the concept, the stretch goals, the previews. Then delivery happens, often a year or two later, life has moved on in some small way, and the box arrives into a version of me that’s excited in the abstract but doesn’t actually have a free Saturday queued up for a four-hour learning session with a rulebook the size of a phone book. So it goes on the shelf. And then another one arrives, and the same thing happens, and the backlog grows in a way that started to feel less like a hobby and more like a low-grade source of guilt every time I walked past that corner of the room.
What finally made me stop and actually think about it wasn’t running out of shelf space, though that was a real practical problem too. It was noticing that I’d started to feel a small flicker of dread rather than excitement whenever a shipping update email showed up, which is exactly backwards from what a hobby is supposed to feel like. I was buying the anticipation, essentially, the campaign itself, the previews and stretch goal reveals, and treating the actual arriving game as almost an afterthought, a debt I now owed my own past enthusiasm.
I said no to a fourth campaign last spring, a genuinely well-designed-looking game from a studio I like, and it was harder than I expected, mostly because saying no felt like admitting the previous three purchases hadn’t been fully rational, which, in fairness, they hadn’t been. But I’ve since opened both of the older boxes, played through a good chunk of one campaign, and enjoyed it enormously, which only confirmed that the problem was never the games themselves. It was buying faster than I could actually make room to enjoy what I’d already bought.
I don’t think this makes me done with Kickstarter entirely, and I’m not writing this as some tidy cautionary tale with a clean moral. I just wanted to write down what it actually feels like to notice a gap that big between what you’re buying and what you’re using, because I suspect a decent number of people reading this have a similar corner of their own apartment, and maybe it helps to know someone else has one too.