Tell me the shipping money was stolen without telling me it was stolen...

Now, this is the most congenial and non-committal way I've ever seen someone accuse another of stealing backer's money:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/zentensivis...l-care/posts/4179461

Hello backers,

I'm writing today to give you an update on shipping and to be transparent about some of the issues we've faced recently. As you may have noticed, we had all of the games delivered to my home instead of to a warehouse. We sourced all of the packaging supplies and we're working on boxing everything up ourselves. Simultaneously, we've been preparing to print thousands of shipping labels, many international. It has been a tremendous effort from some amazing friends and family.

Several months ago, I didn't expect we'd be doing almost any of that ourselves. We expected to clean up the spreadsheet and send it over to a fulfillment vendor that would receive the games in their warehouse and box, label, and ship everything to you. This would have been significantly faster for you and tremendously easier for me.

Unfortunately, I had to turn that option down due to the cost. Years ago, when we closed the kickstarter, we set up a website- Gamefound, familiar to many of you- to collect addresses and payment for shipping. Many of you completed that process long ago- which, I understand in retrospect, was confusing - I really appreciate you putting the time in for it! As part of that process, you paid for shipping. That was a substantial sum of money. I found out several months ago that all of that money is gone.

When I started this endeavor years ago, I partnered with Omari Akil, then a full time board game designer. Omari had run a prior successful Kickstarter with Rap Godz and I wanted to partner with someone with experience of the entire process. After the kickstarter, Omari suggested that he use his Stripe account to set up the gamefound. That meant all of the payments you made went to his account. I'm not writing this to disparage Omari. On the creative side, he offered incredible ideas that really made the game shine. There is a reason Omari's name is on the box- it is well deserved. But related to the business side, there were problems. I don't know exactly what happened, but at the end of the day the money was lost; it was not used in any way for the game. Omari did not take the money and run; he has acknowledged the loss and has been in contact since then. After many months of efforts, over 90% of the funds are still missing; I am hopeful that he will be able to return more of it in the coming weeks, but some of the damage cannot be undone.

Most important to all of you, we are still shipping the games. We've already sent out the first ~100 as a test and we have about 1k more ready to go. There are more minor issues that we're dealing with every day- it is actually quite complicated and labor intensive to load 80 games onto a truck when the courier comes to the house, so we have to organize some help to load the hundreds we expect for the next batch.

The impact on you is that it will take longer- we're doing it all manually, for one thing. But the games will be shipped as soon as we're able. Please know that we are working hard to get them ready and out the door as fast as we can- we need our space back too!

You have already been more than patient with the project. I do not anticipate further delays here- we still want to get them out of the door within weeks; it just would have been at your doorstep sooner with a fulfillment service. This resulted from my error in allowing for another bank account to receive the funds and I bear responsibility for it towards you. Unfortunately, this impacts the chance that the project will be financially sustainable, but at least these games will make their way to you!

I should also note that the delays up until this point are unrelated to this issue of lost funds. Regarding the years since the kickstarter closed and now, well, the game is dramatically better than it was back then and, yes, there are many things I could have done with the knowledge I have now to have achieved this state much sooner. I am grateful for having such a large community of backers that have patiently supported the project from the starting.

If you're able and inclined to help in some way, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. I'm not sure what we can do, but any solutions- especially for getting large numbers of games overseas- would be appreciated. If you're at all able to arrange for local pickup, please let me know- it is deeply appreciated.

More to come as we accelerate shipping this week.

Thank you
Lakshman Swamy

tl;dr summary: Lakshman Swamy partnered with Omari Akil, designer known for Rap Godz and Hoop Godz (which is also in crowdfunding hell, I believe), for his "Critical Care" board game Kickstarter. Apparently he was foolish enough to use Omari's Stripe account for collecting shipping funds via Gamefound. Now the money is "gone" and he's shipping out of his garage on his own dime. But man, is he trying to be charitable to someone that doesn't deserve it...

He’s being way more charitable towards the fulfillment scam artist than I ever would be.

Shipping out 1100 games from ones house is no small undertaking; I’ve helped a friend ship approx 500 copies on a couple of occasions…its a PITA.

And he only collected $76K..gross. That’s not a lot in the grand scheme of things esp when he’s gonna cover shipping out of his own pocket.

As usual, the only part that matters is tucked away in the middle.

I don't know exactly what happened

What happened, and they'll discover this as the shipping drains them, is that they should have hired a lawyer right away. But since they were foolish enough to leave the funds in someone else's account in the first place, I'm guessing they won't make good decisions going forward either.

Not letting someone else have access to, and control of, your money is a lesson usually learned when you are young.

He should hire a lawyer. Perhaps he’s being gentle out of hope that keeping it friendly will mean getting the money back.

Good on him for taking responsibility and finding a way forward for shipping, though.

There's also a clout issue here for this person, if they are interested in a future in the industry. It's hard to confront someone successfully who got a lot of buzz and clout around their stuff when you have none. Even if you win, you might not win. Classic social media age stuff.

For those interested, spotted this update: www.kickstarter.com/projects/zentensivis...187787?ref=bggforums

Relevant bit:

As for the lost funds: I had a blunt conversation with Omari this past week. I know there are many comments asking where the money went-- I have no idea, but it was not used for the game, so in my mind it may as well have been thrown away. Omari is committed to repaying the funds. I have asked for as much as possible up front, but so far, that has only resulted in a small portion repaid. Omari has set up a paycheck repayment plan. Twice a month a payment will be made to my business account, pulled from his paycheck. That is projected to complete repayment by the summer of 2027. Legal action will be pursued if a payment is late. This issue has caused a great deal of stress, as you can imagine. Of course, 2027 is too late to help with the shipping costs right now, which is why I am so grateful for all of you that have and continue to contribute more to help with the shipping costs. The goal is 1) get the games out to you as fast as possible and 2) create a sustainable enterprise for the near future to hopefully work towards reprints, new games, etc. We are keeping close track of everyone who has contributed extra here. After the initial crowdfunding pledges are fulfilled, our calculations suggest that we should be able to come out of the red if we're able to sell the remaining games we printed. Once we're there, we have some ideas on how to thank all of you- that is a high priority for us. I cannot stress how much it means to me that you're supporting this project even further- we are not going to forget that!

I'm not sure if this implies Omari spent the money on accident or had some debts that needed paying now. Sounds like he talked to a lawyer or something. Still really sucks for the creator.

Sounds like a gambling problem to me.

I'm guessing Omari used the money like all these KS guys, to pay the debts for his last KS with current KS funds. And the sad fact is, despite both these guys clear inability to manage money, people will continue forking it over for something that looks cool.

ChristopherMD wrote: I'm guessing Omari used the money like all these KS guys, to pay the debts for his last KS with current KS funds. And the sad fact is, despite both these guys clear inability to manage money, people will continue forking it over for something that looks cool.

Yeah, rolling kickstarters is always a red flag for me. If your project has just a long delivery time that you can go ahead and "completely create" an entire new campaign, expansions, and all the usual KS swag then either you are too big for KS, really, or are trying to keep a poor economic situation going.

Of course there are things like material costs or especially shipping costs that can balloon in the window between pricing stuff and then executing it, which is just part of the pricing strategy (or choosing a vendor that can minimize those risks).

Companies like the Tiny Epic guys have YEARS of success, but still use kickstarter, handing 10% over each time. I guess it works for them but isn't really in the spirit of the site IMHO.

There's a few like that, in which they're clearly successful business models, but they continue to use funding sites for their projects. I'm betting that it's a cash flow plus design time issue. Leder Games is obviously quite successful, but still a very small operation. Their legions of fans from Root would probably ensure a successful release of almost anything they do. But that means consistent sales in order to keep the studio operating during their lengthy design time. They don't make enough on retail sales of things like Vast and Ahoy to make those viable attempts at publishing, but they get huge surges of cash every time they put something where most of the eyeballs are: KS and Gamefound. That surge of cash is operating costs for the next x months of development time (the initial months of which were probably paid for by the previous KS) for ANY game they release; not just Root. I'm betting that Gamelyn (Tiny Epic) operates the same way. Their per unit costs aren't large enough to keep enough cash flow from the retail route, so they keep going back to KS because, again, that's where an almost-captive audience is and it provides them enough up-front capital to keep running over the lag times of insufficient retail sales.

It's not just the up front sales, the margin is much better for publishers. The middleman cut of 10% for Kickstarter is much lower than the cut a distributor takes.

Why spend your own money or borrow it to create a product that may not sell, when your customers will take that on for you?

That, too, although I'd argue that the monetary motivation that Charlie cites is the greater driver in at least some cases. Leder (and Cole's company, Wehrlegig) have shown a marked willingness to eat higher costs or present later, expanded offerings at the same price rather than disappoint the buyers. The better margin certainly enables that, as well. I know that Leder and Wehrlegig ate a lot of the increased shipping costs during the COVID years and I'd be astonished if they didn't take a bath on the KS version of Arcs and its expansion, since there's almost no way the initial pledge ended up covering what the full package ended up being.

charlest wrote: It's not just the up front sales, the margin is much better for publishers. The middleman cut of 10% for Kickstarter is much lower than the cut a distributor takes.

It's also good to remember there is a segment of the gaming population that literally "shops" for all their boardgames on Kickstarter. The marketing that Kickstarter provides is pretty significant.

That's basically what I did at my peak KS nonsense. My city does not have a proper game store. I don't even have a Target.