You Kick Open The Door And Find An OGRE

I haven't been talking about our recently concluded Ogre Kickstarter in this space, because, well, it's not Munchkin. However, when the elephant in the room is actually a giant cybernetic tank that has just raised more than 20% of your total revenue from 2011, it's probably worth a mention. Here are a few questions y'all might have (and if not, I still want to answer them, so there).

Why are you even talking about this? It's not Munchkin . . .

First of all, because fans of Ogre and SJ Games, including some of you reading this, pledged over $923,000 to help make Ogre bigger and better. That kind of dedication demands recognition and thanks. So -- thank you, very much, for making Ogre the most-funded tabletop game in the history of Kickstarter. Every pledge is a mark of support for Ogre, for the company, and for Steve himself, and we are absolutely NOT taking that lightly. We've made a lot of commitments and we are going to honor them.

For my part, I'm a fan of Kickstarter, so I have been consulting on the Ogre campaign for a couple of months now. While Phil was in China, I ended up spending a LOT of time working with Steve to help shape the final days of the drive. Not many things would be important enough to take me away from Munchkin development, but this was definitely one of them. (Fear not: Munchkin Apocalypse is still on schedule!) I suspect I'll be giving Ogre some of my time for a few weeks yet. And when the games actually arrive in Austin, it'll be all hands on deck -- packing over 5,000 games and sets of extras is a HUGE undertaking, and we'll all be pitching in!

(Special commendations to Sam Mitschke, who put in VERY long hours and wrecked his laptop getting all our videos put together!)

OK, so how does this affect Munchkin?

In the short term, not much at all; I'm not involved with Ogre development, and I have already taken on a larger share of Munchkin development because we knew Steve's time was going to be eaten up by this project. We'd planned for Ogre's success (although maybe not the degree of success we've seen!) so it wouldn't get in the way of Munchkin.

In the longer term, Steve's going to be focused on writing new Ogre content for a while, and we'll be hiring an Ogre Czar (title not final) to help shepherd Ogre the way I've been shepherding Munchkin. And yes, some resources that probably would have gone to Munchkin may be going to Ogre instead . . . although not as much as you might think, considering the amount of support Ogre fans have given us. (Have I said "Thank you" enough? No! Thank you!) We can't ignore the level of support the Kickstarter showed us! Luckily, we've planned so far ahead that most of the Munchkin releases for the first half of 2013 are already in development. We'll have time to make adjustments if we need to.

Will you be doing a Munchkin Kickstarter?

We don't have any plans for one. It's a very different beast from Ogre (and from Car Wars, for which we have already promised a Kickstarter at some point down the road), and a Kickstarter doesn't seem appropriate for a game that's trucking along very nicely. I'm not going to say "never," but it's not on our radar.