A few months ago on Primecast, we dropped the first hints about our forthcoming Iron Kingdoms Adventure Board Game, Widower’s Wood.

For months now, we’ve been working on not just the game itself but on approaches that will let us do some new, truly exciting things with it. Now it’s my pleasure to announce Widower’s Wood is not just going to be joining our line of board games but will also be Privateer Press’ first foray into the world of tabletop games on Kickstarter, beginning February 16!

Before I discuss why we’re turning to Kickstarter, I want to talk a bit about the game itself. Widower’s Wood is the latest in the expandable Iron Kingdoms Adventure Board Game series and is designed by William “Oz” Schoonover. Widower’s Wood is a cooperative, tile-based adventure game for up to four players and will contain dozens of high-quality miniatures created by our award-winning sculptors here at Privateer Press HQ. Gameplay takes place on a richly designed board with tiles that change from scenario to scenario, all accompanied by hundreds of tokens and cards for tracking the players’ progress. We’ve worked carefully to make the board and tiles thematic, lush, and engaging. Widower’s Wood is completely compatible with our existing board game, The Undercity, making for a tremendous amount of re-playability.

So, why Kickstarter? We’ve been producing great games for over fifteen years now, and jumping into the crowd-funding arena was not something we decided lightly. While Privateer is well known as a publisher and manufacturer of miniatures games, our board games—which we are just as passionate about—haven’t reached as wide an audience as we believe would appreciate them. So, after much consideration and discussion, we concluded that Kickstarter presents the opportunity for us to raise awareness of our board games and to hopefully get them into more hands than we have been able to through traditional marketing. Plus, it gives us a chance to give our gamers what they want: tons of extra miniatures, extra scenarios, extra tiles, extra everything!

By being able to accurately gauge our audience’s interest in a project, we can pack our board games with everything they want without the risk associated with publishing through traditional methods. It also lets us explore things like the Premium Collector’s Edition box for Widower’s Wood. These kinds of items are difficult to adequately determine market demand for in advance, but with Kickstarter, we can order exactly what we need to fulfill everyone’s wishes. While we have no intentions or plans to use Kickstarter for our miniatures wargames, our drive to create new games and load them with extra content is something we can’t contain, and we’re excited for the opportunity to use Kickstarter as a platform to bring this project to life.

The Widower’s Wood campaign will launch on Kickstarter on February 16, 2016, when backers will be able to choose from a variety of ways to support the project. We have some awesome rewards and stretch goals that we’ll talk about in the coming weeks.

We expect Widower’s Wood to be delivered to backers in early 2017. Stay tuned to Privateer Insiders, Facebook, and Twitter posts, and widowerswood.com as we get ready to launch our first board game Kickstarter. Thanks in advance for your support!