by Thomas Franken

The process of transforming an idea into reality is wonderful and scary at the same time. It’s a dream that’s always on the verge of turning into a nightmare — and sometimes it does. When I embarked on the journey of publishing my own game, I expected to leave my comfort zone and reach the limits of my knowledge, competence, and endurance — a challenge I was eager to take on.

It’s now been four years since I ran my first Kickstarter campaign, and I would like to share some of my experiences in the hope that my mistakes might help for others who are about to start their own project.

1. Working Solo: A Long-Expected Party

My entire life I’ve always worked in teams. I usually worked in video game start-ups and enjoyed wearing many hats, working with specialists for all areas. Along with the obvious benefits of team work, you also develop many blind spots for topics outside of your responsibility, and you have to accept decisions other people make, even if you don’t like them.

I had reached a point in my life when I had spent too long working on products that I was not fully committed to and following the lead of others. I wanted to work on something without any compromises or blind spots. I wanted to understand my own capabilities and put my knowledge, skills, and decision-making abilities to the test.

On the other hand, going all-in to pursue a board game idea is a bold move if you have a family to support. My wife and I were expecting our third child soon — hardly the ideal time to quit a steady job and commit to a financially questionable idea for a board game. With that in mind, I started Forests of Pangaia purely as a passion project, not a business, while keeping my part-time job and making every hour count.

It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, full of adrenaline and passion. I learned a myriad of things about product design, production, marketing, global logistics, and finance, but most importantly, I learned about myself: my hidden strengths, my weaknesses, my limits.

Throughout, I had an amazing network of supportive friends who helped me. However, on darker days, I suffered greatly from shouldering everything alone; at times, the weight of problems overwhelmed me. I also needed to cut back hard on anything that was not mission critical, which meant that a lot of business opportunities were left untapped.

Towards the end, I almost collapsed under the weight, and unfortunately what started off as a great project started to crumble, and I had a rough time pushing it over the finishing line. In hindsight, I could have avoided a lot of stress if I’d had one other person I could rely on.

After much work, the final game

2. Design & Feedback: Fog on the Barrow-downs

Designing Forests of Pangaia was a creative process of countless iterations, build-ups, and break-downs — always in search of mechanisms that would carry the forest theme and organic feeling I wanted to create. I battle-tested the mechanisms across countless variations with many different groups, observing how the game dynamics would change depending on the people playing. The game design phase was a game by itself, continuously expanding and reducing, backpedaling out of dead ends and circling around the sweet spots.

While intense testing is a crucial phase in the evolutionary process of game design, it can also be discouraging, depending on the feedback you receive. A game is not just a set of rules, but also a piece of art; showing your work makes you vulnerable, and harsh comments can cut deep. Sometimes I overexposed myself to testers and found that I needed a long time to motivate myself again to keep going. I learned that it’s important to respect my own boundaries and surround myself with the right balance of people. Supportive voices can inspire your creativity, while measured doses of critical feedback will sharpen the design.

3. Community & Transparency: A Warm Welcome

I’m a shy person and usually don’t engage in discussions on forums or social media. During the campaign preparations, I realized more and more that engaging with the community is (obviously) an integral part of crowdfunding. However, I was so stressed about that thought that I even reached out to agencies to take over that part for me. Luckily in the end I decided to do it myself, and in hindsight, it was one of the best decisions I made.

Working with the community is hands down the most stimulating part of a crowdfunding project, and it should be close to your heart. It’s a bidirectional channel of communication that should never be diluted or buffered by someone who isn’t one of the creators. Working with the community can also set you apart from the big companies that use Kickstarter just as a marketing instrument, without truly embracing the opinions of their backers.

However, one of my early nightmares was the thought of Kickstarter’s public comment page turning against me. That page is notoriously hard to moderate, and a negative voice can easily set the tone and culture, influencing others. If you are not the loudest person, someone else will be. I decided to treat the page like my house and be the host. I made sure people saw “I’m here”, and I worked hard on building a culture where everyone felt heard, respected, and valued.

Once the campaign is over and you start production, many things happen behind the scenes that are non-deterministic and can’t be planned for. I found it crucial to keep the backers in the loop — not on an event basis but on a regular basis. Just like a TV series, releasing campaign updates frequently and in a regular rhythm helps to build reliability and trust. Even when going through a rough patch, the community can be loyal and supportive, if you communicate up-front rather than waiting until people ask questions.

Finally, I communicated good progress with the same transparency as setbacks and problems. While this approach admittedly took courage, it was surprising to me how the community carried their support when I shared my failures. I learned that if you have built a foundation of trust, showing your vulnerability can grow an incredible amount of empathy. This was unexpected for me and something that I was always and still am truly thankful for.

The journey of designing and launching Forests of Pangaia tested me more than I imagined. Although I prepared diligently, analyzed campaigns, and got valuable advice from other creators, theory brings you only so far and eventually you need to jump. Launching my first campaign felt like learning how to swim by reading a book — then trying to cross a river without drowning.

In the next part, I’ll dive into what happened once production began: the battles over wood, paint, and manufacturing, and why choosing the right partner can make or break a first-time creator.

Hard Lessons in Production

The key component of Forests of Pangaia are turned wooden trees with stacking treetops that need to be added and removed easily during play — trees designed to be tactile, natural, and beautiful. From the beginning, I knew production would be one of the biggest challenges. What I didn’t know was just how many compromises, errors, and frustrations it would involve.

1. Choosing a Manufacturer: Many Meetings

As part of my research, I reached out to local suppliers like Ludo Fact in Germany, but my game didn’t fall into their usual category, especially with the autumn color palette requiring custom Pantone colors, and their high prices were a big hurdle for a first-time project. My requirement for a fully FSC-certified product disqualified many others.

Eventually, my shortlist gravitated around well-known manufacturers in China: Panda, Longpack, Eastar, and Whatz (among others).

Panda came with lots of good references and an excellent German account manager, but their manufacturing quote was unfortunately too high for my projected selling point and my already tight margin.

Longpack and Whatz gave me the most price-effective quotes, but I wasn’t sure they were able to handle quality wooden components — and somehow I was afraid of going for a low quote since their price point gave me the impression that they underestimated the complexity of the product.

Eastar‘s quote was high, but a bit lower than Panda and they claimed to have won many awards for the best production quality. Communication was good, and also their reference games looked great.

I went with Eastar. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bad decision in many ways.

As a first-time creator, you rely heavily on your manufacturer’s expertise. Flawless communication with your manufacturer and the expertise of your account manager is crucial. If you are a professional, battle-tested creator, communication might be less important because you know what to look out for and can preemptively avoid many mistakes. But even though I tried to be super diligent and professional, I made tons of beginner mistakes. For your first project, choose a partner that can also be a good teacher.

I have not worked with Panda yet, but my hunch is that many painful (and expensive) errors could have been avoided by going with a more experienced and established partner that speaks your native language. The higher production price pays out many times, with better quality, fewer mistakes, and higher player satisfaction.

2. The Wooden Trees: The Passage of the Marshes

The original prototypes came from a local carpenter in Berlin, and later I had a mini-series made in the German “Erzgebirge”, a region famous for turned wooden miniatures. I stained them manually to enrich the wooden texture and keep the natural surface of the wood alive. I used beech wood because it’s quite commonly used for game components and has a dense and heavy touch, as well as a nice texture.

But scaling this up with Eastar was another story.

Colors: Wood is not just a material but carries its own beauty. Naturally I prefer glaze and stain over paint that fully covers the surface and hides the natural, rich texture. It was very difficult to explain this to Eastar since it’s not a standard way to handle game components. After many discussions and samples sent, they finally found a paint that was semi-transparent.

Seeds and Meeples: As with the trees, I wanted the meeples matching the same color, but laser-cutting wood results in dark burn marks. Usually those can be bleached, but 1cm beech wood requires a strong laser, leaving burn marks that can’t be removed. The only practical solution was classic overpainting. Unfortunately Eastar wasn’t able to offer me alternative options, like CNC instead of laser. That gives you a good compromise if burn marks are a concern.

Treetop Precision: Finally, the stacking of the treetops was an important part of the game play experience. I needed a high precision to guarantee the stability of the stack since my rules allowed stacking of up to six treetops. As you can imagine, early samples were a disaster: too tight, too loose, trees bent and toppled after just two or three levels. Eastar needed many rounds of feedback and adjustments to reach a quality that was acceptable.

Eventually I understood the source of the issue: Eastar has no in-house wooden manufacturing, so it was relying on an external supplier. That’s why communication was slow and error prone, and even basic in-house knowledge was missing. On top of that, Eastar wasn’t managing the wooden supplier tightly and had a terrible in-house quality assurance (QA) process, leading to many badly produced components, missing trees, and wrong quantities of tokens.

3. Quality Assurance: The Window on the West

Luckily, something happened that saved me from shipping a total disaster.

During the campaign, a Chinese publisher offered to buy a localized edition of one thousand Chinese units. Gameland is not only a publisher, but also a manufacturer that covers the full circle of design, production, marketing, and sales. To keep things simple, I asked them to purchase the Chinese edition from Eastar, even though they usually produced their games themselves. Gameland accepted and offered to act as an on-site QA for me to inspect the final product of Eastar before shipping.

That decision saved me. Gameland found countless issues and their QA caught broken tokens, sticky paint, misprints, and wrong quantities. After three full rounds of testing, Gameland’s QA finally greenlit their sample batch — but many issues were revealed only at a later stage and required much customer support from my side. Both Gameland and I were massively disappointed by the quality that Eastar delivered.

Even so, I want to be fair: My project manager at Eastar cared, showed goodwill, and tried hard. The failures weren’t out of bad intent, but from sloppy QA and unreliable suppliers. Nevertheless, they failed to deliver a quality product at scale.

Addendum

Even though I didn’t plan to do add-ons, based on heavy community requests I ended up offering a wooden insert that was produced by LaserOx in Hungary. Working with them was a breath of fresh air: professional, detail-oriented, and reliable — easily the best partner I worked with during the entire campaign. My hat goes to Peter at this point, the head and heart at LaserOx.

With production finally complete, I thought the hardest part was over. The games were boxed and ready for pick-up, and I could almost breathe again. What could go wrong?

I had no idea what was waiting on the horizon. Fulfillment, during a global pandemic, turned out to be a nightmare of its own.

Fulfillment during a Pandemic

It was July 2022, all my games were produced, boxed, and ready for pick-up. I had over nine thousand units in four languages, with Deluxe and Standard editions, and almost eight thousand backers, spread across 65 countries.

Meanwhile, the Covid pandemic still had the world in its firm grip. Sea freight prices had already increased manyfold, harbors were clogged. Russia was trying to claim parts of Ukraine, and the Euro course was about to go into free fall. The last phase of the project was about to begin.

What could go wrong?

1. Choosing a Fulfilment Partner: One Ring to Rule Them All

The “classic” set-up would have been to work with a series of regional partners, for example: Quartermaster (U.S.), VFI (Asia), ShipQuest (UK), HappyShop (EU), Aetherworks (Australia).

Logistics were surely never my strength nor passion. Already strained from the production problems, I was afraid that the co-ordination and management of so many partners, local warehouses, and shipping logistics were too much for me as a solo creator. I found other logistic companies that claimed to ship everything from one single warehouse — a charming idea that appealed to me, seemingly reducing the variables and allowing a single partner to solve the coordination of global logistics.

I started talking to two Hong Kong-based companies: Floship and EasyShip. Both had competent client outreach, making a solid impression on our first calls and promising to handle everything: warehousing, picking, packing, and global shipping.

What sounded elegant on paper turned into a nightmare — as soon as we were faced with reality.

2. Inbound Shipment: Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire

All of my games were headed to the central Floship warehouse in Hong Kong when Gameland received their games as well. Gameland conducted a final inspection of their games, and the results were shocking, with missing components in approximately 6% of boxes. I escalated the issue, after which Eastar recalled the main shipment to China in order to adjust the quantities of components. The customs process for re-importing the goods from Hong Kong to China took a long time, resulting in another month being lost.

3. Account Manager: Riddles in the Dark

As always, most problems stem from bad communication. After a promising sales pitch, Floship’s shiny facade started to crumble. Floship’s order management tool had technical problems, and their internal communication was sloppy. My assigned account manager was inexperienced, uninformed, and unaware of board game-specific shipping requirements. More and more they lost all my trust, and I had to become my own expert, trying to compensate for their lack of expertise.

4. Regional Fulfillment: The Slow March of the Ents

We started fulfillment with the U.S. as that was my largest region. However, I only then realized that Floship would stall fulfillment of orders from Europe and other parts of the world. When I requested it process my entire order, I hit a wall: Floship processed regions sequentially, one by one. They would start processing other regions only once one region had been fully fulfilled. This was very slow and the first major downside of single warehouse fulfillment. While my community waited patiently, Floship charged thousands of dollars per month for stock that was just sitting there. I was stuck and burning cash.

5. Seafreight Container: The Great River

Floship presented the benefit of centralized fulfillment, explaining that importing a series of individual orders is cheaper than importing one large volume of goods in terms of tax and duties. However, by the time we started booking container space, freight prices had already increased significantly due to the Covid pandemic. Shipping individually packaged games for an entire region took approximately twice the space compared to sending all the games in their master cartons without individual packaging. Overall, the additional container space cost much more and the argument didn’t hold up.

6. Pledge Management: The Gathering Storm

I launched my pledge manager early to allow backers to complete their pledge, share their address, and pay for shipping. Eager to move forward quickly and get this out of the way, I didn’t expect it to take another year before I could actually start fulfillment. During that time, Russia invaded Ukraine and inflation spiked across Europe. By the time we started shipping, prices had increased significantly and the amount I had charged in the pledge manager no longer reflected reality.

On top of that, due to the long waiting time, a lot of address changes had piled up that needed to be communicated to Floship, which was another source of mistakes. Many people also forgot to update their information, which led to failed deliveries, expensive returns, or even disposals.

7. Exchange Rates: The Black Gate Opens

I’m usually not affected by currency exchange rates, but I should have paid more attention. All my campaign funds were in euros, while the majority of expenses were based on U.S. dollars. I was taken by surprise by the fluctuation between the two currencies, especially when in November 2022 the production and fulfillment payments fell due at a historic low point for the euro. Suddenly, my funds were worth much less, which hit my already thin margins hard.

8. Last-Mile Shipping: A Journey in the Dark

We are on the last stretch — finally. Once the containers arrived, all that was left to do was inform my backers about the incoming delivery of their game: 1) Get the tracking numbers from Floship 2) Email my backers and share their tracking link — easy.

That’s the theory.

U.S.: The containers took much longer to arrive than expected. Since the FedEx labels had already been created in Hong Kong, they expired before the containers managed to arrive in the U.S. All the links I had shared with backers were now useless. You can imagine the confusion…

Once the games finally did arrive in the U.S., the packages needed to be relabeled — but Floship wasn’t able to share the new tracking numbers with me in time. I was in the dark, and so were the backers.

EU: Based on my experience with the U.S. fulfillment, I pushed hard to make sure that the tracking numbers were correctly handed over. Floship worked with the logistics company Hermes for last mile delivery in Europe, but once outside of Germany, Hermes handed the parcels to local providers that used different tracking systems. The inefficiency of logistics was startling to me, and I had again no reliable visibility on the state of fulfillment for most of Europe.

UK: The final cherry on top was shipping to the UK. Floship was supposed to bulk import the games to the UK, go through regular customs, and ship the games with local mail. Instead, without prior heads up, Floship sent all parcels with UPS directly. All UK backers were rightly shocked when asked to pay a £50 fee on delivery. I immediately reacted, but the chaos continued for weeks and I spent countless hours mitigating this failure.

9. Emotional Toll: Mount Doom

A long and tedious journey came slowly to an end. All that time I tried to stand my ground, investigate problems and communicate to my backers, resolve conflicts, and escalate issues…but the endless stream of errors, costs, and support drained me.

I swam against the currents, endured the elements, fought battles, but eventually my muscles collapsed and I slowly started drowning. I stopped replying to emails, was afraid of my inbox, and developed symptoms of depression — while all that time, my loyal community stood by me, supported me, and was overwhelmingly positive.

But I wasn’t able to get back on my feet and finalize the project with the quality and diligence I was striving for.

There and Back Again

During that time my family and I decided to move away from Berlin, down to the border of Switzerland near Basel. I met up with Marc and Sam from Treeceratops, who I got to know during the campaign and admired for their clear and steady campaign communication. They showed a lot of empathy for my situation, but also admired what I pulled off with Forests of Pangaia — as a project and as a game. We became friends and decided to collaborate on a new project together.

With Treeceratops and their wealth of experience at my back, without pressure and timelines, away from the public eye, a seed was planted and a new project began to grow: The Dawn of Pangaea, which launched on Kickstarter in early October 2025.

And it fills me with joy to watch this new game come to life! 🌱

Thomas Franken