{"id":7261,"date":"2026-08-19T19:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T18:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/?p=7261"},"modified":"2026-08-20T09:45:54","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T08:45:54","slug":"our-attempts-to-do-things-different-from-the-others-came-back-to-bite-us-plaid-hats-colby-dauch-on-the-monoliths-kickstarter-failure-and-rapid-tu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/19\/our-attempts-to-do-things-different-from-the-others-came-back-to-bite-us-plaid-hats-colby-dauch-on-the-monoliths-kickstarter-failure-and-rapid-tu\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cOur attempts to do things \u2018different from the others\u2019 came back to bite us\u201d: Plaid Hat\u2019s Colby Dauch on The Monolith\u2019s Kickstarter failure and rapid turnaround"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Plaid Hat Games<\/a> launched its Kickstarter for The Monolith in June with a trio of successful crowdfunding campaigns under its belt<\/em> – only to pull the project three days after launch<\/a> when pledges unexpectedly ground to a halt, despite<\/em> quickly beating its $20,000 goal.<\/em> Less than two months later the revamped campaign is back<\/a>, and has already pulled in almost four-times the amount the cancelled campaign managed in the same amount of time.<\/em> In this first-person piece for BoardGameWire, Plaid Hat founder and CEO Colby Dauch explains why The Monolith exposed flaws the publisher’s previous campaigns had masked, what he believes it got wrong, and why the changes made for the relaunch appear to be working.<\/em>

Plaid Hat Games is relatively new to crowdfunding and we\u2019ve experience our first major setback in that arena. We launched our fourth ever crowdfunding campaign back in June, this time for a new game called The Monolith<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the second day of the campaign the pledges had fully stalled out. It was self-evident that we had made mistakes, so we pulled the campaign with the intention to relaunch it after analyzing what had gone wrong, and doing what we could to address it.

As I write this article, I don\u2019t know if our hunches will turn out to be correct. This article is scheduled to be posted as we relaunch the campaign, so I suppose we are all going to find out together! I\u2019m more than a little nervous. Allow me to provide some background essential in understanding how we\u2019ve come to make the choices we\u2019ve made. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Plaid Hat founder and CEO Colby Dauch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve been around since 2009<\/a> and watched from the sidelines as crowdfunding took hold and grew into a large part of the board game industry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many years we swore off crowdfunding. Internally we were critical of it for a number of reasons. My biggest reservation was that it felt dishonest to me that an established company would tell its customers “we need your help to make this product”, when they had already proven previously that they were capable of putting together the funding necessary to launch a new product onto the market, without requiring the customer to buy said product a year or more in advance of its release.

However, things have changed over the years in more ways than one and honestly, it has been a bad business decision to hold out on the crowdfunding model for as long as I have. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we did finally enter the crowdfunding space a couple of years ago I told myself, and others, that there was clearly no longer an expectation that the companies going to crowdfunding needed to be there. I believed it to be understood that it was more akin to a pre-order system and that the consumer knows that. I even said as much in the article I was interviewed for on this very site, posted on June 30th<\/a>, about us pulling the Monolith from Kickstarter. It\u2019s not true. I had only convinced myself that it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m in the midst of reflecting on every decision I\u2019ve made that led to a failed campaign, and what that failure means for my company, the people I employ and my family, if I\u2019m not able to correct course. The reality is that we moved to crowdfunding because the things that made us successful in the past aren\u2019t working anymore and we were growing desperate for a solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getting attention on a board game release announcement isn\u2019t free anymore. It\u2019s not news. At best it\u2019s a bullet point on a long list of new release announcements for the week. The traditional method we\u2019ve long employed of selling to distributors who sell to retailers who sell to players, sadly seems to be falling apart for us, and I suspect for most publishers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we found ourselves trying to incorporate crowdfunding into our business model while simultaneously telling ourselves we could do it different – better. Our approach:<\/p>\n\n\n\n