How Beasts of Balance was made, and why it still works 10 years later

Beasts of Balance is by a country mile the most successful thing I've ever been involved in. If you don't know it, it's a combination of:

an indie tabletop board game
a connected physical/digital product (of the type that got funding in the mid 2010s: ref: Kano, Anki, Reach Robotics)

It ships in a box that costs $99, it contains beautiful physical pieces and custom hardware, and connects to an app running on a tablet, phone or smart tv. It won many design awards, was retailed all over the world in Apple Stores, and crowdfunded successfully on Kickstarter twice. Most miraculously (and in contrast to many other physical / digital products that were developed at that time, including Hasbro's very expensive collaboration with Harmonix, Dropmix) players still get it out the box from time to time, and sometimes they send me a pic of their (now adult in many cases) kids having a good time with it.

It's rare in life that things work out this well, so I think it's worth analysing briefly what went right.

I had just run an experimental studio that made around 50 games with entertainment companies and cultural organisations. That had created a pretty wide network of talented people, who I had actually made things with. Making things with people - hard things with deadlines, like a talking throne for Kensington Royal Palace - is the only way to really figure out if you can do ambitious work together.
There was a moment around 2015 when it was possible to raise venture money to build consumer hardware. The thesis was that tools like Arduino and 3D printing democratised hardware development and enabled small teams to challenge the incumbents. Disruption! I don't think this thesis really played out for any investors, but it added venture money into the balance sheet.
Watershed ran a program called Play Sandbox. It provided crucial early support; grant funding, engineer feedback, playtesting and promotion.
The combination of these three things was enough to raise some angel money and to persuade a core team of 4 exceptionally talented people to join up.
They were Tim Burrell-Saward, Vee Buckenham, CJ Shaw, Lyall McCarthy. All the real credit for what's good in the game goes to them. Its errors and flaws are my own.
Makerversity was a place where teams like ours could access critical resources for developing the game, especially all the physical elements, with rent subsidised by the cultural organisation that hosted it, Somerset House. I had helped to set up a game startup coworking space next door called Playhub, with our seed venture investor London Venture Partners. Between the two, we had the right dynamic.
My main job was to create the conditions in which talented people could do good work, make payroll, and to navigate and triangulate between the creative and disciplinary perspectives of the team.
Largely, we were fuelled by naivety (none of us had the faintest idea how hard the things we were about to do would be), optimism (we believed we could overcome any obstacle), yelling (we were five guys in a soundproofed basement) and overwork (we all egged each other on to do more and fix things). There was a lot of lens bias.
Luke Crane at Kickstarter took a chance on us, based on a demo of our first prototype in a diner in San Francisco during GDC. There's no game without his early and consistent support.
Promising a couple of thousand people on Kickstarter that you're going to deliver a thing for them is excellent motivation. We were terrified of letting people down.
The game was never truly economical. It belonged to an era of zero interest rates and VC optimism. VCs never invested enough to really make the company a success. We would have needed enough capital to fail more, really grow the team, market more aggressively, etc. But they did invest enough to give us one shot at shipping the game.
And we did.
We added Alex Bertie, Andrew Marks, and many other brilliant people (too many to name).
There followed several years of the team's success, some crucial business and strategic mistakes (mine), and one glorious fundraise where we stopped raising with vision slides and instead we raised with graphs. I mean the graphs were also vision slides, but still.
One of the reasons why you should never run a consumer product business with venture money is that success at each stage buys you a ticket to a much harder game. You made a prototype? Congrats, now design and manufacture in China. You did that? Great, now handle marketing, e-commerce, retail and sales. Nailed it did you? How about you start adding global stock handling, SKU management, global logistics and cashflow management. And, keep doubling your turnover every year, because investors are deeply skeptical about what you are doing and growth is your only answer to their concerns.
One of the biggest mistakes I made was misinterpreting the intentions of Apple and Amazon as partners. I thought they saw our success - the success of startups demonstrating their technology in cool ways - as something beneficial to them. They deeply did not care.
Christmas 2018 was the worst. We were in a very deep hole. A crucial set of early stage investors loaned us enough money to try and find a buyer. We had about 6 weeks.
Closing companies is horrible. I've done it twice, and I've supported people in it many times. If someone I know is going through it, I will always make time for them. It's not a skill-set anyone enjoys acquiring. It involves letting people down, making the least worst decision as fast as you can. All of those decisions will be desperate, but not taking them is worse. There were some deeply impressive people who stood by me in that time. Ruth Jakobsen made a daily cashflow. Daily! Shout out to Ruth.
We found a buyer, but the buyer didn't want any of our physical assets. So Justin Kifer at Modern Games stepped in. The deal wasn't about the money. It was about their willingness to take on a load of physical assets that were in a total mess, deal with a bunch of angry retailers, and promise to maintain the app so that the game was still playable.
They kept all those promises, for seven years and running.
What did I do? Well, I kept this ridiculous show on the road for six years, and I did not quit. Beasts of Balance was grand, beautiful, expensive and not very profitable to make. It was a ZIRP-era product. We spent optimistic venture money on something that never really stacked up in terms of the economics of the toy and game industry, and parlayed that into a pretty decent amount of sales and player happiness. Holding that optimism, fighting the good fight with investors and the market, creating enough space for people to do good work - I think that's the job. Also, being lucky.
The game itself is very, very good. It takes an array of disciplines and weaves them into something accessible, replayable and delightful. It's co-operative, social and tactile. It's creativity in translation.