Covid-19 is making way for a tabletop game renaissance

At the end of March, Isaac Childres was leaning into the new stay-at-home order in his home state of Indiana. But he was also getting ready to launch one of the biggest projects of his career: On March 31, Childres’ one-person company, Cephalofair Games, launched a Kickstarter campaign for a tabletop game called Frosthaven. Within three hours, Childres had crowdfunded $3 million—600% of the $500,000 he initially sought.

But thousands of backers continued to pony up (including me). By the end of the campaign a month later, Frosthaven had become the most-funded board game and the third-most-funded project on Kickstarter ever, bringing in a whopping $12.9 million from over 83,000 backers (Cephalofair Games is donating some of those proceeds to the World Health Organization).