Brumble Quest is a peculiar inclusion in Plaid Hat’s catalog. Unlike their other touchstones, whether expandable duelers like Ashes and Summoner Wars or comedy adventures in the vein of Forgotten Waters, it’s a diminutive thing with minimal components, a ten-minute playtime, and — oh yeah — it only sells in sync with big conventions. Fortunately, that means during conventions, not at them; online ordering is still a possibility for those of us unable or unwilling to make the annual pilgrimage to Indianapolis.

For such an odd duck, though, it’s… kinda great? Designed by J. Arthur Ellis, Brumble Quest is a prisoner’s dilemma game for pretty much any number of players. Minimum three. But as many as fifty out of the box. With a projector and laser pointers, theoretically it could go even higher.

Down at its roots, Brumble Quest is familiar enough. Every round seeds three new locations onto the table. At the count of “One, Two, Three, Brumble” — I know, it’s cheesy — everyone points at the location they intend to visit. Depending on the outcome, players then take home some quantity of loot and/or suffer an injury.

There are two things that set it apart. First, the production. Rather than gussying itself up with a whole to-do, Brumble Quest is as minimal as they come. In lieu of tokens for loot and wounds, each player receives a peel-off hero from a pad, then folds its corners to track their current wealth and health. The rules are compressed onto a single card, front and back, and takes so little time to internalize that it’s closer to hopping into a childhood classic than learning something new. As for the locations, there are only fourteen. That’s a slender deck indeed, all but guaranteeing you’ll see repeats within a session.

But the second point is that the locations are nicely diversified, even if there aren’t many to play with, and really it’s the way they combine and conflict and, even at times, pre-solve their own conundrums, that make the game so special.

I’ll give an example. Let’s say the current trio is the Lonesome Peak, the Shadow Wastes, and the Cursed Prison. That first location provides four gems, but you’ll take damage if you visit it unless it’s the least visited destination. The Shadow Wastes are even more tempting: five gems, and you avoid damage if everyone is pointing there but one player. But then there’s the Cursed Prison, a locale very unlike the others. It subtracts a gem, but everyone at the table will suffer a wound unless at least one adventurer goes there.

No time to think. One. Two. Three. Brumble. (Ugh.)

The beauty of these social conundrums lies in their clarity. The stakes are always perfectly clear, barring an unfortunate misunderstanding. But this clarity is sharply contrasted with the slow departure of objectives at the table, not to mention the sheer uncertainty of human behavior.

For instance, how does the previous scenario alter if you’re the player with the least remaining health? How about the most? What if your score is meager so you’re trying to drive everyone else into an early grave? Sure, all things being equal, everyone should do the optimal thing, right? But get together a half-dozen players and it becomes clear pretty quickly that “the optimal thing” may be a matter of interpretation.

And, sure, sometimes the game coughs up a problem that really does feel solved. More than once, I’ve looked down at a trio and thought, wow, why would anybody ever go to that one spot? But, again, people are unpredictable. Almost as often as Brumble Quest seems to proffer a solved dilemma, someone at the table has appeared hell-bent to un-solve it.

The result is a pleasantly crisp little thing. There are no character abilities, no sudden reversals. Some locations might bump your health up a notch, but that’s a rare outlier. For the most part, it’s you, your friends, and pockets that grow heavier while your blood supply gets lighter. That’s it. Honestly, anything else would clutter the experience.

Barring the addition of extra junk, this is nigh-perfect in its restraint. Maybe Plaid Hat won’t be able to help themselves. Last I checked, the second edition of Summoner Wars was up to thirty factions. (Yes, I have all of them.) (Yes, they are amazing.) (No, I probably won’t have time to write about them.)

Then again, maybe not. As I understand it, Brumble Quest may soon have peers, other teensy-tiny boxes that provide their own miniature siblings. For this game in particular, I’m hard-pressed to imagine it getting any better. This is a true pocket game, slender enough it could have been compressed into one of those plastic Button Shy wallets. I expect it’ll make for a good candidate at our family dinner this weekend.

 

A complimentary copy of Brumble Quest was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

Plaid Hat Games has cancelled its successfully-funded Kickstarter for upcoming title The Monolith three days after launch, saying it failed to give prospective backers enough reasons to pledge rather than wait for retail.

The Monolith quickly beat its $20,000 funding goal after launching on June 25, but Plaid Hat CEO Colby Dauch told BoardGameWire pledges had “completely stagnated” by the second day of the campaign.

That led the publisher to scrap the crowdfund for the Phil Gross-designed game on day three, having collected $27,400 from 290 backers.

Dauch said Plaid Hat plans to relaunch the crowdfund shortly after Gen Con with additional content and more pledge tiers, while keeping the game’s existing delivery timeline intact – with manufacturing having already begun on the title.

That manufacturing process has included Plaid Hat spending $35,000 on plastic moulds alone, given the large amount of plastic components in the game – including the namesake monolith, a large plastic tower which sits at the centre of the board.

Dauch told BoardGameWire the company estimates it would have to sell 10,000 copies of the game in order to spread the mould cost widely enough that the retail price could be kept down, adding that the long lead times on making plastic moulds was a big motivator in starting manufacturing prior to the campaign – as well as a desire to launch the game at a convention this year.

Plaid Hat said in an update to Kickstarter backers, “While we hit our funding goal at a decent rate, almost as soon as we did, the pledges stopped. Another 24 hours passed, and the needle didn’t move.

“Of course, we had questions since we’ve run several campaigns now and this experience is completely new to us.

“What we found was that our visually striking campaign was drawing in lots of people, but they weren’t pledging.

“While there wasn’t a ton of feedback, one thing we heard on several occasions was, ‘Why pledge now? Why not just wait for retail?'”

“For everyone here who’s backed, you already know the answer to that question, but we must acknowledge the simple truth that along the way, we could have done better.”

The company added in a follow-up post on BlueSky, “We could have limped over the finish line, but it would have been such a disservice to a game worthy of so much more.”

Dauch told BoardGameWire that all of Plaid Hat’s prior Kickstarters had followed the common practice of setting a low goal amount which can be quickly celebrated as having been beaten, providing momentum for the campaign.

But after seeing The Monolith quickly fund before effectively flatlining, Dauch said reaching a funding target was no longer enough to demonstrate sufficient market demand.

The company has said it will revisit that practice in the wake of cancelling The Monolith, instead likely setting the target as costs plus a certain margin that would need to be crossed to indicate there is enough overall enthusiasm from backers.

Dauch told BoardGameWire, “I think it is just public knowledge that there are certain rules you have to follow to make a Kickstarter work.

“We’ve tried to challenge some of the rules – for example, as a company we try not to lean too hard on FOMO to get people to pledge.

“But we’ve accepted other rules for success as standard practice in a crowdfunding campaign. One of those rules is that you really want to set a low goal that you can blow past early.”

Asked whether the game potentially suffered due to its $90 price point – not necessarily that it was too high, but that it fell between the extremes of ‘very affordable’ and ‘massive, multi-hundred dollar multibox crowdfund’ – Dauch told BoardGameWire:

“I think there is evidence that people want a variety of price points they can buy into, and we are exploring options to make that happen. I think that is more to blame than being in some middle ground.”

Plaid Hat has been making successful board games since 2009, when Dauch created the company to sell his highly-regarded card-based fantasy battler Summoner Wars.

The publisher scored another hit with animal-themed co-op adventure game Mice and Mystics in 2012, and followed that two years later with the hugely successful Dead of Winter, which scooped a string of awards – and big sales numbers – for its thematic mix of zombie survival, traitor mechanics and story-driven gameplay.

Plaid Hat was bought by Asmodee in 2015, but became a rarity five years later as one of just two studios which have gone on to become independent from the publishing and distribution giant.

The publisher only began running crowdfunding campaigns two years ago, having become free of a “first refusal” distribution deal with its former owner that had made experimenting with something like a Kickstarter campaign functionally impossible.

Dauch told BoardGameWire Plaid Hat had long delayed embracing Kickstarter because it was uncomfortable with some of the accepted conventions of crowdfunding, including the pressure to create artificial urgency.

He said, “The reality is that we held off on doing crowdfunding campaigns for a long time as a company because parts of them do feel artificial and we weren’t looking to deceive anyone.

“These large companies on Kickstarter don’t NEED the campaign funds in order to fund a project. It’s self-evident from the fact that a campaign must have a certain amount of polish and progress to even be taken seriously, which already represents a sizeable investment made to get a game to that state.

“Our decision to enter the crowdfunding arena was based on the belief that we were missing out on a portion of the market that enjoys getting their games through crowdfunding campaigns, not because we could no longer fun projects on our own.

“We felt that crowdfunding has been such a mainstay for so long, that most people who participate in them are aware that this is how many established companies use Kickstarter – as a sort of pre-order campaign.”

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