Via Kickstarter, a new board game is born

May 8, 2015

Sof. Oric. Leaf. Thomas Evening.

Such are a few of the intriguing superheroes you'll meet in Champions of Hara, a new board game incubated in Skidmore residence halls by three English majors. Their goal is to create a new and captivating fictional universe, represented first in a board game and comic book and ultimately in a video game.

Naming their new business Leaf Pile Media for its connotation of fun, Walter Barber, Ian VanNest, and Andrew Zimmermann won $20,000 as seniors in the 2014 Kenneth A. Freirich Business Plan Competition. They set off for Seattle, home to nearly 100 gaming companies, and kept improving the game and networking with industry artists and decision-makers. 

"Champions can be described as a fast-paced, action-oriented, resource-management, adventure game," explains VanNest. "That's an unfamiliar combination for a lot of players but it's based on categories they know and love. It's fresh material that people can really understand and engage with. It piques their interest because they've never played anything quite like it before."

Development of Champions is now in its later stages with a focus chiefly on finalizing the art and fine-tuning what VanNest calls the game's “math” or "balance." 

"You have a certain number of actions each turn and a certain number of cards that can either do a certain amount of damage to monsters or allow you to gain a certain number of points if you do certain things," VanNest says. "So it's really about making sure that all of the characters are fair to play against each other and that the game has the right skill curve."

The ideal curve, he continues, is "one that starts difficult, gets easier as the game progresses, and then gets much harder. You want to be building up your hero at the very beginning. In mid-game, you want to be doing a lot of exploring. At the end you want to be powerful enough to take on the more difficult challenges the game throws at you." 

Assisting them in the effort is AdMagic, which will produce the game at a plant in China. They're a big game maker, having produced such major hits as Cards Against Humanity and Exploding Kittens. 

GenCon, the world's largest gaming convention, is coming up in late July and Leaf will be there in force. "We've already gotten some great reviews, and we're hoping to get more,” says VanNest. 

Looking back on the trajectory of their enterprise, VanNest describes the Freirich Competition as their “launching point.” 

“It was what turned our board game from an idea into a reality, and allowed us to go from designers to business owners. It forced us to think critically about our project, and begin to build a business around it.”