Over 6,000 board games have now been successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter, making $360 million

More than 6,000 tabletop projects have now been brought to life through Kickstarter, with last year accounting for almost a third of the money raised for board games during the site’s entire lifetime.

This news came as the crowdfunding platform celebrated passing 10,000 successfully funded ‘games’ projects in total – including tabletop titles, video games, playing cards, puzzles and more.

Kickstarter told us that of the 10,000 successful campaigns, 6,222 were tabletop projects – almost triple the 2,124 video games funded since the site’s launch. (The remaining 1,654 were spread among the smaller categories such as playing cards and puzzles.)

The site previously revealed that last year alone successful tabletop projects outnumbered video game campaigns by nearly four times and raised $113 million – meaning that 2016 was responsible for close to a third of the $360 million pledged to tabletop campaigns during Kickstarter’s lifetime.

By way of comparison, video games have made $202 million since the site launched in 2009, $29 million of it last year.

In 2016, the entire games category took $142 million across almost 2,600 successful projects – more than a quarter of the 10,000 funded in the close to eight years Kickstarter's been going.

What’s perhaps interesting is that (at least by our maths) the average amount pledged to a tabletop project is $57,859, while video game campaigns (despite having fewer fully funded projects) tend to rake in nearly twice that on average: $95,104.

Kickstarter’s first games project was a series of linked crossword puzzles, which appeared on the site the day after it launched. Eric Berlin made $2,265 for the puzzles from 163 people.

Today, Kickstarter’s most funded games project to date is a board game, Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5, which gathered nearly $12.4 million from just over 19,000 backers at the start of 2017. How things change!