Thank You!
over 2 years ago
– Thu, Sep 16, 2021 at 01:23:38 AM
First of all, Don, Adrian and I want to extend our gratitude to each of your for supporting Backyard Chickens. There is something very wonderful about working hard to put a game together you love and having other see the value is what you do. Thanks!
Production Has Started!
Daniel signed off on the pre-production copy and production has started for Backyard Chickens. Again, the quality of the box and components were very good. Below is the plastic box insert for the game. We like sleeving our games so we made sure there was room for sleeved cards in the box as upgraded bits.
Pledge Manager
We are using Backerkit for our pledge manager and are in the process of setting it all up. Once Kickstarter releases your information to Backerkit we will send the pledge manager to each of you. Emails should go out in a week or two.
The pledge manager will have the following add-ons:
Additional Copies of Backyard Chickens (No increased shipping for up to 4 copies)
Rise of the Gnomes with expansions
Octoberfest
Pre-Production Approval Copy
over 2 years ago
– Sat, Sep 11, 2021 at 03:23:58 AM
We got our pre-production approval copy of Backyard Chickens from LongPack games. The quality of the box and components are really good. We thought you would like to see some pictures.
Backyard chicken has hatched!!
Box Top. We really love this image.
The back of the box.
Box side. It needed to be thick to hold all those cards!
The chicken deck. The production cards really pop.
The supply deck. That's a LOT of cards.
Starting supply cards.
The event deck. We are so glad we decided to just include this stretch goal from the start. The event deck really adds a lot of variety and strategy to the game.
Dan wants to hang this up on his wall. He loves chickens.
The rule book.
The rule book back and player reference. It's big and easy to read. Perfect for Dan and Gary's old eyes!
The two-sided player boards.
Plenty of tokens. We never had a game that used more than 75% of them. Better safe than sorry.
We are doing a live stream on Sunday, September 12th at 9:15 Pacific time. Dan will speak with Don, Adrian, and Jason about the design for backyard chickens. Post your questions in the response to this update and date will make sure your question is covered. Check out the link!
Designer Diary
over 2 years ago
– Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 05:01:01 AM
Hello all! Thank you so much for your support. We have a week left and hope to get a big push at the end. While you wait, Don and Adrian were kind enough to share their designer diary for Backyard Chickens. Enjoy!
Designer Diary
Hi all, Don here! For this update, we thought you might like to see some of the evolution of Backyard Chickens. Adrian and I have been working on the game since late 2018 when one of our own chickens came walking up to the back door and I said to Adrian, “We should make a game called Backyard Chickens.”
All the best games start with the title, right?
Adrian and I were having a lot of fun tinkering with game design at the time. We wandered into our first protospiel room at a Northern California convention called Dundracon in February of 2016 and quickly fell in love with playtesting and became friends with a lot of San Francisco Bay Area designers. We started working on our own designs because you can only hear, “Hey, what did you bring?” so many times before you feel compelled to offer something up. I made a couple of very bad movie-making themed games and Adrian is still contemplating a game set in a magic school (no, not that one), but Backyard Chickens was the first game we sat down to create together from the start.
We knew right away that we wanted to make a deck builder. We love deck builders and the mechanism has really worked well for this game.
If you’ve watched the preview videos for the game, you’ll have noticed that everyone likes the mood mechanic in the game. Happy chickens lay more eggs. Sad chickens lay fewer. With eggs as the currency in the game, this is a big deal. That mechanism has been the core of the game from the start. It was Adrian’s inspiration and it’s possibly the only thing that hasn’t changed in the nearly three years since. You can see it on one of the first prototype cards here on the left. This is also a great example of how not to present information on a card. Our first public playtests at Dundracon in 2019 showed us that. We had people reading words and doing math. The card on the right shows how we fixed that.
That is Adrian’s art on the chicken cards, by the way. I still love those early chicken drawings. Here are some more.
One early element of the game that no longer exists are the Threat cards. We had cards in the supply market that players could purchase and put into another player’s discard. When that card was later drawn, it would have a negative effect. These didn’t last long. “Take that” cards just aren’t fun in a pleasant little game like this and nobody would buy them. We tried them out because predators and other situations are a real concern when raising chickens, but absolutely no one would buy them. We did manage to get some of these threats into the Event deck and they work much better that way.
A lot of the design and development of this game involved trying out new Supply cards, adjusting cost and point values, and lots of playtesting in between. I won’t bore you with all of that detail, but there are a couple of standout moments in the development of this game.
The first one is silly. The chickens didn’t have names for the longest time and every playtest felt like it was missing something. There was always a vague plan to add names, but it felt like a last-minute polish step once the gameplay was solid. Then one day I was bored and just brainstormed a list of names and added them to the chicken cards. The very next playtest showed what a big difference this made in the game. A playtester turned over a new chicken at the beginning of a round and said, “This is Doris and she is HUNGRY!” We have not had a game of Backyard Chickens since where players didn’t talk about their chickens by name and it really affects the enjoyment of the game.
The other big change was even more significant in moving the game forward. We had already signed the game with August Games at that point, but were struggling with the pacing. Players were enjoying the game, but there was just too much downtime and it could take more than an hour to finish a game. In one our last in-person playtests in early 2020, a good friend and Bay Area designer named Mark Schynert pointed at phases 1, 2, and 4 of the game and said, “Why don’t you just make all this simultaneous?” It was such a simple change and it dramatically improved the tone and pacing of the game. The next playtest was just over 30 minutes long with four players. With that change, player count did not have a big effect on game time and the game felt fast and efficient.
2020 was largely about fine-tuning and developing the game. Adrian gets a lot of credit for the balance in the cost of the various supply cards and the point value of the chickens. He set a lot of those numbers by instinct and observation. When Dan George at August Games put together a big model to test the game’s balance, we only made a couple of minor adjustments. Next came Dan’s work to turn our rough prototype cards into a more finished presentation and, of course, Mac’s amazing art. We’ve been able to continue playtesting remotely with Tabletopia and Dan and his wife tested the game countless times at two players.
The player boards were a nice addition that Dan made to the game. We always had some sort of player board in our prototypes (you can see an early one here), but Dan really pulled all of the information together into a nice, neat version that works really well. We are big believers in useful player aids and the way Dan incorporated the round phases and the available actions into the player boards is really great.
I have to say how grateful we are to all of the folks who playtested this game during its development and to the Bay Area design community that has always been so welcoming and supportive. Adrian and I have made some very good friends in that community.
So, what did I miss? What would you like to know about the development of this game?
Celebrating Our Content Creators!
over 2 years ago
– Wed, Sep 01, 2021 at 09:31:33 PM
HI all, Don here! For this update, I’d like to acknowledge some of the folks that helped get us where we are. Hopefully, you’ve all had a chance to watch the great preview videos that our wonderful content creators have put out. One of the best parts of getting ready to launch this Kickstarter was watching these videos as they rolled in. Each channel took a different approach to talking about the game and they are all awesome. We love all of these channels and wanted to take a moment to talk about them and hopefully create some new fans!
Will (AKA “The Hungry Gamer”) is a good friend of the project and the first content creator we reached out to. We love his casual style and thoughtful “likes” and “quibbles” about games. Check out his channel for previews, reviews, and comments on general gaming topics.
Amy (the “thinker”) and Maggie (the “themer”) blasted onto the board game YouTube scene last year with engaging videos on board game mechanics and themes and, ideally, how the two combine together beautifully. Check out their fortnightly “Back Chat” and “Small Talk” series for great discussions of what’s exciting in crowdfunding and what smaller games they find interesting.
Jazz has another great up-and-coming channel with thoughtful reviews and general gaming discussion. We especially appreciate his recent video discussing diversity and inclusion in gaming. He really nailed some critical steps for creating an inclusive community. Check out his channel.
We love you, family! Mik and Starla are just delightful. I have been following them since they jumped onto the board game scene a while back. I've now introduced Dan to their channel and he loves them. Tune into their weekly episodes with board game reviews, news, and thoughtful commentary.
Stephanie has great taste in games and her channel has such a lovely relaxed vibe to it. She provides great game play overviews and reviews. Her recent addition of a “Thoughts” video as follow up to each preview video is great.
Matthew is a very talented and busy person! He is part of the team that is killing it over at Watch It Played and also part of the amazing ensembles of the podcasts “This Game is Broken” and “Death By Monsters.” On top of that, he creates amazing previews and reviews on the “This Game is Broken” YouTube channel and you can find him streaming on Twitch. Check him out in all these places!
Spencer’s channel is fun! We really appreciate his positive spirit and his focus on making sure we have fun when we play and discuss our games. Dan is particularly a fan of the dad jokes. We recommend you go check him out!
Thank you to Sarah Shah for doing the cover video for this project as well as helping us spread the word. Many of you are almost certainly already familiar with Sarah’s channel, where she masterfully covers an entire game in one minute. If you’ve had a chance to watch her video for Backyard Chickens, you’ve seen how well she can pack an entire game into a minute. Check out Board Games in a Minute on all the social channels.
Board Game Snobs
A very special thank you to the Board Game Snobs podcast. I am a big fan of this podcast. I think they’d be the first to admit that it’s not the most structured board game podcast out there. I joke that it’s 90% banter and 10% board games, but I come for the banter. Gaby and Jerry are hilarious and that would be enough, but they are also extremely thoughtful when they occasionally get into a topic like neurodiversity or depression and how they relate to board games. They guys reached out to me and had me on the podcast to talk about Backyard Chickens. I had a blast talking to them and am very grateful to them for doing that.
So which of these channels do you follow? Which are brand new to you? Who else do you tune into for board game content?
We are #1!
ThinkerThemer gave us the top spot as their favorite game of the week. Check it their video!
The Results are in!
over 2 years ago
– Mon, Aug 30, 2021 at 07:17:13 PM
Watch this video to find out which chicken was your favorite!
Live Play Through
We would like to do a live stream play through of Backyard Chickens with some backers next weekend on Tabletopia. Reply to this post if you are interested in playing. We would love to have you.
