About
$35,524
1,200
Want to read the rules? They're available right here!
STILL CONFUSED and want us to paint a picture so you can figure out your pledge? Check out Update #13!
About Zeppelin Attack!
2-4 Players • Ages 12 & Up • 45-60 Minutes • 112 Cards • Designed by Eric B. Vogel
Conquer the world with a flip of the cards!
Indulge your megalomania in Zeppelin Attack!, a deck builder card game by Eric B. Vogel. Set in the world of Evil Hat Productions' Spirit of the Century, you play villainous masterminds bent on world domination.
Deploy your zeppelins, command your minions, and do whatever it takes to destroy your rivals. Zeppelin Attack! contains everything you need to play this high-flying, fast-paced card game.
There’s only room for one ultimate criminal overlord: you. Bring your zeppelins.
How to Play
You can grab a copy of the rules right now! Check them out here.
We also have a video that teaches you how to play the game:
Zeppelin Attack! is a deck building game featuring targeted player combat. You play as one of the villainous masterminds from the Spirit of the Century pulp setting: Der Blitzmann, Gorilla Khan, Jacqueline Frost, or the Walking Mind, bent on subjugating the world with a flotilla of machine-age airships.
At the beginning of the game, your deck contains a rich mix of zeppelins, armaments, defensive measures, and operatives. Deploy your Armada—a face-up display of Zeppelin cards—to gain the ability to play other cards. Gain victory points by launching fiendish attacks against rival players to force their zeppelins into retreat. Use defensive counter-measures to deflect your enemy’s attacks. Send your minions on cunning operations to enrich yourself with fate points. Spend your gains on more powerful mercenary cards while purging weaker cards from your deck.
Unlike many deck-building games where the main emphasis is on buying cards every turn, the main action of Zeppelin Attack! is combat. Buying cards requires careful resource management over multiple turns. Zeppelin Attack! uses Eurogame-style mechanics inside of a pulp-fiction theme. The world of Spirit of the Century is woven throughout the gameplay, brought vividly to life by the artwork of Christian St. Pierre and the graphic design of Daniel Solis.
Our Timeline
The game design is completely done; all art is acquired; all graphic design, rules layout, and editing is complete. We're ready to roll as soon as this campaign concludes. Still, this stuff takes time to make!
Roughly, our timeline works as follows:
- March 1, 2014: Handoff art and files to the manufacturer.
- April 1, 2014: Tooling samples created and approved; production begins. (Toolin', no foolin'!)
- June 1, 2014: Production concludes; testing and manufacturer-to-USA-based-warehouse shipping commences.
- August 1, 2014: Product should be at our warehouse by this point, giving us this month to ship out all orders. (Ideally we'll get all these shipped before GenCon on August 14th so we can make the public debut happen there, but our backers take first priority.)
Your Rewards
The Game: We're producing Zeppelin Attack! in a slim, portable box similar to the Silver Line games put out by Fantasy Flight Games. The base game box will contain 112 cards and a printed rules booklet, with enough room for you to put in more cards for an expansion. MSRP is set at $20.
The Print & Play Downloadable Set: Any backer of this project at $1 or higher gets access to the backers-only post containing a download of the digital files for the base game. Print these PDFs on cardstock at home, grab a copy of the rules, and get playing!
Zeppelin Conquest Print & Play Game: Also designed by Eric B. Vogel, Zeppelin Conquest is a fun 2-player game where Rocket Red and Princess Cyclone duke it out across the globe using their soldiers and zeppelins to claim an inevitably short-lived victory as queen of the world!
Other rewards may manifest as the campaign progresses. Stay tuned!
Our Goals
To get to this point, we've already spent several thousand dollars on the art, graphic design, and rules development of the game.
To take the game to print, we need your help in three key ways.
Your pledge: Your pledge money will go towards covering the cost of manufacturing the game. We're planning on printing at least 5,000 copies of the game (the minimum), which is the biggest cost. We'll also need to cover any tooling costs for creating the box and inserts, digital films, and more. Every dollar counts! With shipping and manufacture costs combined, we believe our initial target is right on the money.
Your head: That is, we need to count it! Along with funding, data is one of the most important things a Kickstarter campaign provides. By backing this project you'll help us gauge interest in the game and ensure that we're printing enough copies, helping us avoid stock outages as we bring the game to the market. You'll also help us determine how our reach in board and card games is growing, which will play into our plans for determining what other games we might produce in the future.
Your voice: We're giving you access to the rules and the print and play set so you can explore the game as deeply as you want, right away, without having to wait for the thing to get printed & shipped. As you explore Zeppelin Attack!, we ask that you talk about it, wherever it is you happen to spend your time online — your blog, social media, Board Game Geek, and elsewhere. Best of all, when you talk about this Kickstarter, you're creating an opportunity for more people to discover it, increasing the project's chances of success. Thank you!
We do have a stretch goal or two in mind if this project hits its target early (see below). We'll talk more about those when the time comes!
Stretch Goals
The first stretch goals have been announced! Check Update #4 for the details. And feast your eyes on the pretties here!
Every copy of the base game that we ship to you will also get a Robotic Promo Pack.
If you want to add a copy of the expansion, see this next section!
Add-Ons
If you want additional copies of the game, they're priced at $20 per game. Add $20 to any shipping pledge level to add another copy of the game.
If you want to add a copy of the Doomsday Weapons expansion, add $10 per copy to your pledge, at any shipping pledge level.
Check out update #13 if you still need help figuring out your options!
We won't charge you additional shipping when you add more items to your pledge.
After the campaign wraps up, we'll be sending you over to Backerkit a week or two later to configure your shipping particulars and any other items you want to add. If you need to save up while the project is running, Backerkit will give you an option to purchase add-ons after the campaign is over.
Credits
- Salvage Man (Game Design & Videographer): Eric B. Vogel
- Savage Mentalist (Artwork): Christian St. Pierre
- Manic Mechanic (Layout & Graphic Design): Daniel Solis
- Commandant (Editing): Karen Twelves
- Silverback (Creative Director & Rules Layout): Fred Hicks
- Treasure Hunters (Business Development & Marketing): Chris Hanrahan, Carrie Harris
- Hellbent Navigator (Project Manager): Sean Nittner
- Deep Cover Agent (Conceptual Development): Jeff Tidball
- Resourceful No. 2’s (Special Contributions): Chris Ruggiero, P.K. Hanrahan
- Voice of the Hat: Paul Tevis
Questions?
We love answering questions! If you have any for us, please ask in the comments, and we'll do our best to give you an answer quickly. You can also follow us on twitter at @EvilHatOfficial and on Facebook.
And now, the FAQ!
Explain your numbers! Is this some kind of insane psychic plot by the Walking Mind?
No, dear reader, no! These are merely the depths of numerical madness one is driven to by the dread specter of shipping costs! (Cue musical stinger.)
NOTE: A much more detailed breakdown of all our numbers can be found in Update #2 and Update #3. Check 'em out!
All of our tiers are based on the idea that the game will have a suggested retail price of $20, with projected costs of shipping added. It's entirely likely we'll still be picking up a few extra bucks per shipment here and there. If you care to add more copies of the game, your cost of shipping won't increase beyond what's already factored into the base.
Shipping costs aren't just about the cost of postage, though that's a big part of it. We also need to pay pick & pack handling fees (packing costs labor; picking each item to go into a box has a surcharge too) to our shippers, as well as supply costs like boxes, tape, and labeling. And since this isn't a book, we can't use Media Mail. It adds up!
Plus, you'll get all of the digital assets from the DIGITAL DESTROYER tier to help take some of the bite out of that cost. :) We also won't increase the shipping charge to you if you end up with more items in your box.
You fiend! That still doesn't do enough to explain the International tier's pricing!
Well, it does, but to get to why, we must dig deeper.
In the case of international shipping the costs are even worse, which is why our international options are basically: go low for digital, or go high to buy in bulk. The math for that tier is built around the idea that the ratio of the pledge that goes towards shipping (about 20%) should be similar to the ratio as it exists for the domestic scenario. And since most international shipping scenarios start in the mid-$20 cost range, and quickly jump to $40 and above once you hit a particular weight limit, we've arrived at the $150—$120 for 6 games, $30 (20%) for shipping.
Preserving the ratio is important because Kickstarter has no means for separating dollars pledged for shipping from dollars pledged that will actually fund the project. If we allowed for a reward tier that shipped a single copy internationally, with over half of that reward tier's money going towards shipping (thank you, US postal service), and it took off, we could end up hitting our funding goal while still actually coming in thousands of dollars under target.
It's possible we could open up a single-copy international reward tier after every stretch goal is hit, as by that point all costs should be covered if we're doing our math right. We'll need to tread lightly and with careful consideration, to make sure we don't accidentally defund a stretch goal in the process. Stay tuned!
Risks and challenges
Evil Hat is an experienced game publisher. We've produced multiple printed roleplaying games in a variety of physical formats, as well as a board game and multiple sets of dice over the past six-plus years. This game is considerably less complicated to produce than Race to Adventure!, our first board game. We'll be manufacturing it with the same folks who made our dice, so the business relationship is already firmly established and positive, and we've learned plenty about what we need to do from our prior board game.
Evil Hat's experience puts us in a fine position to take on the risks and challenges that arise—as with any project, experience tells us a few problems and bugaboos *will* arise.
Here's what we can anticipate as potential problems.
DISTANCE: The games will be manufactured in China. This can always introduce complications, particularly when it comes time to ship them in bulk. Delays could happen simply because everything is happening far away from us.
SCHEDULE: China has a different rhythm for holidays and other calendar events than we do. Occasionally our schedules won't align with theirs; that can add a week here, a week there, when it comes up.
MANUFACTURE: Problems can happen during the manufacturing process. Prototypes don't turn out like you'd expect. Materials thought to be readily available might take longer to procure. File revisions might require a second round of prototyping. Safety testing might take longer than projected. These issues, too, can create delays.
SHIPPING: Packages get lost. We'll work with you to send replacements. Our shipper may take longer than expected. We won't put the game on sale until they've shipped out all backer copies. Shipping costs can end up higher than expected. We'll absorb the overage.
FINANCES: Thanks to the success of the Dresden Files RPG and Fate Core, Evil Hat is—for the game industry—a perhaps atypically solvent game company. We've already spent thousands on getting Zeppelin Attack! to this point, and our bank account continues to look plenty healthy. If an unexpected cost arises, we've got the cushion to take the hit.
If there's any risk or challenge YOU can think of that we haven't mentioned here, please write in and ask. We love to answer questions, and we do our best to provide an unparalleled customer service experience whenever possible. We intend to impress you.
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Funding period
- (33 days)