February 3, 2017: Munchkin Shakespeare: Why Kickstarter?

One of the most obvious questions to ask about our Munchkin Shakespeare Kickstarter announcement is: Why Kickstarter? It's a fair question. The announcement touched on some of our reasons and I'm going to elaborate on them here.

The most important reason is that this set started as a crowdsourced project. On the 2015 JoCo Cruise, Steve and I held a "Help us write a Munchkin expansion!" seminar. Very quickly, the group decided they wanted to see Shakespeare-themed Munchkin cards, and we spent the remainder of the hour writing down suggestions as fast as they came in. By the end of the hour, we had enough good suggestions that Steve and I realized we could probably make this a playable game rather than just an expansion.

Back in Austin, talking over the idea of expanding the game, we realized we didn't know how big a game we wanted to make. The "Lite" style of Munchkin game, such as Munchkin Christmas Lite, was being developed, and that's how we built Shakespeare . . . but we had more than enough ideas to make a full 168-card set. But could we sell it? "It would be nice," I said, "if we had a way to gauge interest from possible customers and build the game around that."

"Actually," Steve replied, "we do . . ."

And that's how the crowdsourced Munchkin Shakespeare expansion turned into a crowdfunded Munchkin Shakespeare game project.

Fans who are interested in this game – and in making it bigger and better! – should follow us on Kickstarter, and sign up for our newsletter so you get alerted to the launch of the Munchkin Shakespeare Kickstarter on Tuesday. Of course, we aren't forgetting our retailer partners; we have a way for them to explore the possibility of preorders, including some content exclusive to this Kickstarter, without committing a lot of cash up front.

We hope y'all are as excited as we are to get this underway! "The play's the thing to loot the Treasure of the king . . ."

-- Andrew Hackard