Links: Ticket to Ride in the News Again, Japan Boardgame Prize 2012 & Are Kickstarted Games Worse on Average?

Now 61, the seasoned game author doesn't take cash up front for his board game designs. He drops that fee in exchange for a higher percentage of sales, because if the game is a hit, that's where the money is. And Moon knows a thing or two about hits.

"I'm always working on things," he tells me over the phone from Pennsylvania, where he's on an 11-day game-playing retreat with friends, "If I don't think it has any chance to be a big seller, I put it in the file and move on."

When Apple shipped the first iPads in April 2010, Days of Wonder had already created Small World for the device.

Ticket to Ride for iPad came after, selling 100,000 copies in its first six months. In November 2011, Ticket to Ride for iPhone was released, and sold 100,000 copies in the first 30 days. The company noticed a trend: in the first 30 days of any launch, iPad versions sold 17 times faster than the board game, and iPhone versions 40 times faster.

Both Moon and board game retailers were were initially worried that digital sales would cannibalize hard-copy sales. Bizarrely, the effect was just the opposite.

"Occasionally, we'll run a promo where you can download the digital version for free. Then, six to eight weeks later, we'd see a bump in board game sales," Kaufmann says.

Having supported around twenty projects and having been disappointed by the majority, both in production value and game quality, I wondered if BoardGameGeek would show these projects to be below average.

BGG has a Kickstarter list of board games created by Kenny Ven Osdel with nearly 800 board games on it. So I went through the rankings, creating a chart for the lot of them on the BGG user reported scale of 1-10. What did I find? Nothing really. There was nothing in the curve that suggested that Kickstarter board games were any better or worse than non-Kickstarter board games.