Since I joined the Rat Hole Gang, I have subscribed to a lot of game companies, both on Facebook and on Instagram. In addition to the information I get from the game developers themselves, the great and powerful Advertising Algorithm has noticed my habits and sometimes contributes things that are completely unexpected. Like when I was recently surfing social media and had foxes suddenly pop up. Foxes! Cute little plastic foxes. Charming cartoon foxes in a medieval theme. How could I resist?
Fox Matters is a webcomic on Facebook and Instagram. I don’t know much about it yet, but it’s a wholesome, humorous look at foxes in a medieval setting, with knights, rogues, a king, and… cheese? If the webcomic’s artist/creator Beata “Ari” Smugaj and her partners at Gindi have their way, it will also be a fun, cooperative board game for 1-5 players, where you work together to solve all life’s problems: Simple Problems, Complicated Problems, and the dreaded Nightmares. Gameplay will involve bringing together the right combination of symbols and colours to defeat the problem, but it’s not as easy as it seems. If you aren’t paying attention, even the right symbols can be “wrong” if you didn’t play them in the right order. The action phase of the game is also played “in real-time”, which means that if you don’t solve the problems by the end of a 2 minute round, new problems/complications will be added.
The game is intended to be simple and non-threatening, and so is the Kickstarter campaign. The campaign runs for 15 days, between August 10th and 26th, with a pledge goal of $16,000(USD). There is only one pledge level; if you pledge $35(USD) you get a copy of the game. There will, however, be stretch goals (not revealed at time of writing), because life should have goals and because, according to foxes, “stretching is love”. I also noticed that the campaign is offering a refund policy. If you pledge and receive the game, and for some reason it isn’t what you expected it to be, you have up to 6 months to return it and get a refund of your pledge amount (minus Kickstarter fees). Since I have never seen a refund offer before, I’m not completely sure how much of your pledge is, in fact, fees.
Both the webcomic creator and the game company are in Poland, which makes shipping a bit of a challenge. Packages will be sent directly from Poland. Backers in the European Union and the USA will get both cheaper shipping and faster delivery. A package delivered within Poland will cost $4 and should arrive within 4 days of dispatch. A package sent to the USA or the EU will cost $15 and also take about 4 days. For those of us in “the rest of the world”, we have to deal with not only a $20 postage fee, but also the slowest possible shipping method (that can still be tracked). The campaign warns that this “shipping by sea” could take up to 2 months to arrive. There are also four countries to which the campaign will not deliver: Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil and Kazakhstan.
If you love foxes, and webcomics, as much as I do, you can pledge until August 26th.
You can find the Fox Matters webcomic on facebook at facebook.com/foxmatters.
You can find the publisher, Gindi, online at https://gindi.pl/ or on facebook at facebook.com/gindigames.
