The Sweet Mess Story
Many may remember a sweet little game about baking being crowdfunded on Kickstarter, during early 2018, but not many may have noticed that the game, after many twists and turns, has ended up in Fantasia’s catalogue.
In the following post, we will be taking a trip down memory lane, looking back at how and why everything happened, as remembered by Yoma, one of Fantasia’s founders!
The beginning of this journey
When Jason – of Big Kid Games – first approached us, during November of 2020, in order to collaborate with the Sweet Mess’ campaign, we, at first, rejected for many obvious reasons. For starters, the game didn’t fit the kind of games Fantasia Games would like to be publishing (mid-heavy thematic euro games). Also, us, back then being a new company (having just finished our first KS campaign at that point), we felt it such a crazy risk to juggle with another project on the side, especially one suffering so much financially. It had an “interesting” reputation and it would need our full attention so we could find an efficient plan and make its delivery a reality, with the smallest loss possible.
At that point, turning the offer down felt like the most reasonable thing to do. Later on, though, early in 2021 and after a couple of worrying updates, we noticed things starting to turn ugly for the game. Worrying about the backers, the game, but also Jason himself, we contacted BKG again and extended a helping hand, offering to help for free, in any kind of human resources that the game would need. We were even willing to collaborate (for free) with any publisher that would be willing to bring Sweet Mess to life. Unfortunately, that deal never happened.
It was only then, around March-April of 2021 that we decided that we would like to try and co-publish Sweet Mess with BKG. Although this task felt so difficult at that point, motivated by a ton of passion to make things right, we just took the risk to move forward, and we never regretted it.
We really tried hard to make the best version of the game we could do, while also trying to earn back the backers’ trust, which, at one point, felt almost totally broken. Step by step, we started building a healthier relationship, so when the idea of taking control of 100% of royalties was brought to the table, we finally agreed to accept it. Again, an even harder decision to take, but motivated by the trust and hopes of many of you, we were just hard-focused on making this happen, no matter the cost.
The aftermath
The game has since reached the hands of most of the original backers. We had a first print-run of 15K copies with the retail distribution having followed shortly thereafter!
But what are the rough numbers behind this achievement?
So the current production of Sweet Mess cost Fantasia around 200K Euro (KS production & shipping costs, licensed copies and our inventory of around 1K copies). Through our licence contracts we managed to recover around 150K, so we are left with basically a 50K loss plus any sales we are going to do with this inventory.
Now, was it worth it?
Financially speaking, obviously no, not at all. But on a personal, human level, 100%! Fantasia Games exists because of this awesome board game community. Being able to give something back to you meant the world to us, and we never regretted it, nor will we ever. Seeing your posts now in social media and here, is the best reward we could ever ask for this project. Thank you for these agonising but wonderful times that we spent together during this journey. It just makes the ending that much sweeter!
The Future (Wave 2)
As you all know, we are not 100% done yet. There are several expansion products that haven’t delivered yet. Those are:
- Christmas Expansion
- Halloween Expansion
- Judges Table
- Cater Challenge
Sharing the financial state of the campaign, it would be impossible for us to deliver the above at the same time. On top of that, as you might know, Cater Challenge was never finalized during the original campaign, but also since we re-designed the game, it goes without saying that all the expansion content would also need to be re-designed. So, in order to hasten things a bit, we decided to split the campaign in Wave 1 (the one that has already been fulfilled) and Wave 2, during which the rest of the content would be delivered.
And that’s where we are at, right now! This has been the Sweet Mess story, so far, but as you can see, more chapters are being written as we speak!
