project-image

Hike! A card-drafting racing game with huskies

Created by SnowBoardGames

A fast 2-6 player game in which you assemble your husky sled and race through the snowy wilderness.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Hike! ❄️ Last regular campaign update
6 months ago – Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 09:55:38 AM

* Hike! fulfilment is complete. If you haven't received your copy of Hike!, please contact us at [email protected]. It is very likely that you haven't completed your address survey. *

 Hello everybody,

how are you all? We are feeling a bit nostalgic, as last year this time, we were starting with the fulfilment, and it was a crazy busy but very special time sending the games to all of you. 😊 

We have some follow-up news to the campaign that we would like to share, some loose ends to tie up, and then, realistically, the work related to the Hike! Kickstarter campaign is coming to an end. Therefore, this will be the last regular campaign update. After this one, we may write an update if something special happens that we think would be of interest to you, but nothing is planned yet, we have come to the last page.

💗 First, a huge thank you!

So for us, this is a bitter-sweet moment. It is an end to a project that was very close to our hearts, both because it was our first, and because we felt like we have an amazing community here on Kickstarter, and we will miss you all deeply. It has been an awesome campaign for us, and we would like to thank you all again, from the bottom of our hearts. 🙏💗 Thank you for being with us, for believing in us and supporting us, for all the comments and likes, and interactions. Thank you for all the engagement, thank you for the feedback, the numerous polls, for being patient with us, for all the encouraging words and for writing kind reviews. Thank you for being an amazing, understanding and supportive community where we felt safe and welcome to share our creative process.

We hope you felt a bit of that Kickstarter magic too, 🎆 and we hope you are satisfied with how this campaign and Hike! turned out. The overall feedback we received from the feedback pole was very positive, but we realise there surely were moments that were not perfect, where we missed a comment or an email, and we apologise. We apologise if you ever felt you were being treated unfairly, it was not our intention.

We hope you enjoyed this ride with us, and we hope to be in touch again - online, on conventions, or maybe on the next Kickstarter adventure.

For all of you who enjoyed the updates, and want to stay in touch, we have a new web page online, and we will do a semi-regular (the goal is monthly or so) update newsletter there. We warmly invite you to subscribe to the newsletter here.

For anyone interested in more in-depth content, there is also a blog, called 'Taking the first step', that Nika (yeah, that's me writing this update too 🙂👋) kept when it all started, and is about our bigger picture and how SnowBoardGames changed it and fits in it. There are two posts online at the moment, to see how it goes, but I have several more written and waiting.

Tying up the loose ends aka the practical campaign updates

🎲 Spiel '23 in Essen + German rulebook

We are super excited to go to Essen again this year, especially because we will have our very own booth this time. 😄 We have decided to print the German version of the rulebook for this occasion, so if you are in the area, you can come pick it up (for free of course). We will be located in hall 2, booth 2C145

If you think you might come, please let us know here, so we know the approximate number of rulebooks, so we can make sure we have enough with us.

And if you don't need/want the German rulebook, but you go to Spiel, we warmly invite you to come and say hi. We are sooo looking forward to meeting you all in person (again). 😊 And of course, you can come and check out our future projects, which will also be part of the booth.

On a side note - we are looking for a person to help us do demos of the game. If you are interested, or you know someone who is, please contact us at [email protected].

🧡 Donations to dog well-being

We have told you in the April update that we will be donating 0.5 % of the funds we received from every copy of Hike! ordered through Kickstarter. The first part of the funds went to Mush with P.R.I.D.E., an organisation that promotes responsible care in dog-powered sports, provides standards for sled-dog care, and conducts kennel inspections to make sure they respect those standards. This was the organisation that received the most nominations from you during the Kickstarter campaign. We plan to make another donation to them next year, as they have the donations set up as yearly sponsorships.

We have donated the second part of the funds to The Striders Adventures Association, a Swiss-based non-profit organisation that supports the rehoming and adoption of sled dogs in Finland.

We liked the idea of splitting the donation in two, on one hand supporting an organisation that deals with dog care in dog sports in general, as a cover organisation on a large scale, through standards and inspections, and on the other hand, supporting a local organisation that is dealing directly with individual dogs. We hope our small contribution from our board game campaign helps towards the effort of ensuring the well-being of sled dogs in real life.  😊

📊 Feedback analysis

First, thank you to everyone who participated! We have received around 200 responses, and it makes us very happy that almost all responses also included parts where you wrote something, not just choose from the available options, which makes the feedback much more valuable.

You have given us an overall campaign score of 4.8/5, and we are super proud of that. 😊 When we asked you to name something that you felt we did well, the two things that got mentioned the most were good communication and including you in the design of the final project, and those are definitely things that we plan to do in the future too. 

We have also got some great suggestions for the future, and we have made a 'todo' list. It's probably not realistic to address all of the points, but we do plan to implement some. Let me mention just two points, both connected to art and components. First, I must say, we would love to see even more different husky art too. We absolutely love the illustrations and our illustrator and in a perfect world (where financial constraints didn't exist), this would be a no-brainer. Realistically, I don't see this one happening in the near future, but one can dream.

The second one, however, is very much coming to life. I think some of you will be very happy to hear that we have decided to do ...

🐕 ... custom engraved husky meeples!

We have found a manufacturer in Europe that we are confident can do what we have in mind, and we are working with a designer to do 6 different husky meeple shapes, 🐺 each with its own custom engraving, one shape for each player, and a sled meeple design, 🛷 also with custom engraving (this one will be the same shape for all players). We are also planning to add a bag with a nice printed motive to store them in.

Unfortunately, we don't have any photos yet, but this one is already happening. There is a slight chance we may have some drafts to show on Spiel, as we are definitely getting some samples from manufacturers there, but we are not sure if they will be advanced enough to show. 

If you are interested, the best place to get the updates is the newsletter on our web page - you can subscribe to it here.

🔒 The pledge manager is closing

There are still some unanswered surveys and some credit cards that didn't go through. It has been almost a year since the fulfilment, and we feel that should have given everybody enough time, so we will be closing the pledge manager in two weeks. Anybody waiting for the last minute, this is your last chance to get the game through the pledge manager.

We are reaching out and sending the unanswered surveys again, but it is possible that emails are not getting through, so if you are one of the backers who haven't completed the survey or haven't received the game, please contact us at [email protected] ASAP.

🚀 What we've been up to

Apart from the above, we have been really busy the past few months. Our next project, Secret Recipe, 🍰 is in the public playtesting phase and we are pretty happy with how it is turning out. We are already talking about the components and manufacturing, and it's looking good there too.  We plan to do a crowdfunding campaign for Secret Recipe, and I think we will start talking about the timelines after Spiel.

Because at the moment, we are pretty swamped 🌊 with preparations for the big fair in Essen. All of the materials are in print, we have the tables and chairs ready, and Blaž has measured the volume of our car and is right now calculating how many games we can fit in it. Last year, we shared the booth with a few other publishers, and this year, we will have a whole booth to ourselves (booth number 2C145), so it is quite a step up. It's a bit daunting but at the same time very exciting. 😊

We are also working on establishing sales channels for Hike! (and hopefully the future games) after Kickstarter. That means we are talking to retailers and distributors. 🛒 It is a slow process and we are learning a lot. It definitely has some challenges, but I have to say we are very pleasantly surprised by how nice and helpful the people in the business are. 🙂 We are already working with some awesome retailers who took a chance on a small new publisher, and we are very thankful to them for that. We hope to add more to the list in the future. (On this note, if you know a retailer or a distributor who would be interested, please send them our way at [email protected] - we'd appreciate it immensely. 🙏)

We also have Hike! ❄️ available through our very own new webpage for the first time, and this is an exciting prospect. 😊 The webpage now has a lot more info than the old one, and we think it is a great platform to share our work and for people to get to know us. We warmly invite you to check it out. And if you have any feedback, don't hesitate to share it. It is still pretty new, so if you catch any errors, please let us know.

https://snowboardgames.si/


Okay, so I think we are coming to the end of this update. It has been a long one, but this kind of seems fitting, as it is the last regular one.

We hope you have enjoyed this campaign as much as we have. We invite you to stay with us on the journey and subscribe to the newsletter here

Thank you, and we wish you a great week! 😊

Your SnowBoardGames team

Hike! ❄️ Hint about our next project
11 months ago – Tue, May 02, 2023 at 12:25:52 PM

* Hike! fulfilment is complete. If you haven't received your copy of Hike!, please contact us at [email protected]. It is very likely that you haven't completed your address survey. *

 Hello everybody,

first, a big thank you to everyone who completed the feedback survey! 😊 We have received over 130 responses so far, and it has been a pleasure reading your comments and suggestions.  We are keeping the survey open for another week, so if you haven't answered it, and you wish to, it is available here.

We'll do a thorough analysis after we close the survey, but I think we can already share some statistics that we find interesting:

  • 96% of backers who responded play board games in general. Others play them occasionally, in some specific situations, or don't play them at all.
  • We got a lot of different answers to the question about your favourite board game. Two games received more than 5 votes - Wingspan received the most votes, followed by Terraforming Mars.
  • 89% of backers who responded have already played Hike!, of those, around a third of backers have also played with the expansion.
  • Over 96% of backers who responded rated the campaign 4 or 5 out of 5. This makes us super happy and proud and we hope we can learn from this experience and create even better campaigns in the future. 😊 

🏳️ Rulebook is available in Slovene too

Rulebook translations for the base game are available here. Currently, we have seven languages, and we are working on another two or three. Thank you to all our amazing translators who offered to do the translation in exchange for a copy of the game! 🙏

We have finally added the Slovene translation too - we've been doing the translation ourselves, and I must admit this one took way longer than it should have. We're sorry for that. It is online now, and we have also decided to print some copies, as we want to support our local board game scene, so it feels right to have rules available in our native language too. 

Anyone who would like to have a printed copy of the Slovene rulebook - we'll be at Na Meji Nevidnega convention in Ljubljana this Saturday (6.5.2023) and you can pick up a free rulebook copy at our booth. We'll also have Hike! available for sale. Or you can just come and say hello, we're looking forward to meeting you in person. 😊


🎆 Next project announcement

For the past few months, we have been looking at several new board game ideas. Some were more promising and fun than others, and some of them were a bit too complex to execute at the moment or didn't have the best timing for some other reasons, so they will have to sit in a drawer for a while. But we think we have arrived at the point where we can announce our next project (and this is very exciting, but also quite scary, so the feedback is very welcome in the comments 😄):

It will be another original SnowBoardGames design, a competitive game about a secret recipe, in which players hold different pieces of information about the recipe and ingredients, and they have to give hints and clues about it to other players while at the same time solve other players' clues until the whole recipe is revealed.

We are currently in the early homemade prototype stage, and we have to do some more playtesting to balance the game a bit better before we can say more about it. But we wanted to let you know that we are going forward with SnowBoardGames. And that a bit over a year ago, when we launched Hike! Kickstarter campaign, this was only a wild dream. And now it is coming true thanks to all of you, who supported us and made this happen. Our sincere thank you! 💕


We wish you a great week

Your SnowBoardGames team

Hike! ❄️ Feedback please 😊
12 months ago – Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 11:17:23 AM

* Hike! fulfilment is complete. If you haven't received your copy of Hike!, please contact us at [email protected]. It is very likely that you haven't completed your address survey. *

 Hello everybody,

it's been a while since our last update. We hope you are all doing well, and that you have had the chance to get Hike! on the table. 😊 

This is probably one of the more important updates. We think it's time we ask for some feedback from you - about the campaign as a whole and about Hike! - so we get some pointers for our future work.

We have prepared a questionnaire - it's a bit lengthy compared to other polls we did, but we would really appreciate it if you take the time to complete it. 🙏 You can access it here.

If you have more feedback or wish to contact us directly, you are also warmly invited to contact us at [email protected].

💕 About Hike! donations stretch goal

We are very happy to be able to tell you, that after thorough research, we have also completed the first part of the donations stretch goal. We will be donating 0.5 % of the funds we received from every copy of Hike! ordered through Kickstarter. We have already made the donation to Mush with P.R.I.D.E., an organisation that promotes responsible care in dog-powered sports, provides standards for sled-dog care, and conducts kennel inspections to make sure they respect those standards. This was the organisation that received the most nominations from you during the Kickstarter campaign.

We will be donating the second part of the funds shortly - we had hoped we'd be able to include it in this newsletter, to be honest, but it looks like it will have to wait for the next one.

We hope this small donation from our board game campaign contributes towards the effort of ensuring the well-being of sled dogs in real life.  😊


Thank you all for the feedback and wish you a great week!

Your SnowBoardGames team

Hike! ❄️ Kickstarter is 99 % fulfilled
over 1 year ago – Fri, Dec 02, 2022 at 04:24:28 PM

Hello everybody,

we are happy to tell you that the statistics in our post-campaign pledge manager show we are 99 % fulfilled. In practice, this means all of the pledges with complete surveys and successfully charged credit cards have been shipped, which is over 3000 packages. According to the tracking info, there are less than 100 still on the way, the majority of those traveling overseas. We estimate that they should all reach their destination in a week or two.

At the moment, there are still around 100 backers who haven't completed the surveys and around 20 backers whose credit card payments haven't gone through. If you are one of them, we kindly ask you to complete the survey and contact your bank to resolve the payment so we can send you your pledge. We will be sending them out on a weekly basis. If you need any help, please contact us at [email protected].

We are currently shipping out late pledges/preorders, and the Kickstarter pledges with the late survey responses. We will keep the preorders with the preorder discount open for a little while longer, so if you know anyone who would like to buy Hike! they still have the chance to preorder it here.

📣 Hike! on BoardGameGeek and social media

Hike! has a dedicated page on BoardGameGeek, and we kindly invite you to contribute photos and rate the game here.

We are also very happy to see all of your posts about Hike! on social media, and we would like to thank you all for posting! We apologise if we don't respond to all of the posts and stories. We are still pretty busy with shipping and shipping-related customer support, but we want to tell you that we're seeing them and let you know that we are very grateful for helping us spread the word about Hike! So thank you again, and feel free to tag us in any future posts! 

🏳️ Rulebook translations

The rulebook pdfs are available here. At the moment, they are available in English, French, Italian and Dutch, the German version is coming next (hopefully by the end of the week), and we will keep adding more translations as they are ready.

The resources for customizing the empty husky cards are also available on the above link in case you want to add your furry friend to the Hike! pack.

📦 Some shipping statistics

In the past weeks, we have shipped more than 3000 packages to 56 countries across all continents except Antarctica. The majority was shipped with the standard post, and around 5 % were shipped with express shipping. Around 2 % of the backers chose local pickup, either in Essen or in Hrastnik.

We shipped all of the games ourselves. This means packing them, importing them into our order management system, creating shipping labels, signing them and sticking them on the packages. We had a pretty awesome system by the end, and we know for a fact that all of the packages have gone through the hands of at least one of the game designers, namely Nika or Blaž. That's probably not a very important statistic, but we thought it was a cool one. 😊

In the shipping process, we emptied around 7 pallets with Hike! base games, more than 1 pallet of expansions and 1.5 pallets of cardboard packaging material and we roughly estimate that the combined weight of this is between 2.5 and 3 tonnes. Which makes for a good workout. 😄 We are very proud that we shipped most of Europe in cardboard packaging without plastic, and that we have reused a lot of original packaging that came from the factory.

🧭 What comes next for SnowBoardGames

We still have some Kickstarter loose ends that we have to take care of, including shipping out the pledges with the late survey responses, rulebook translations, shipping-related customer support (if you need it, please contact us at [email protected]), shipping preorders, etc., so this will be our focus for the next few weeks. 

Then, we hope to set up an online store on our web page, so Hike! can be available post-Kickstarter too. And we hope we see Hike! on the shelves of some of the game stores around the world. We've had 8 retailers supporting this campaign, and we would like to express our sincere thank you for believing in us.

And we also have a few ideas for new board games. One of them is already partly developed, and we plan to continue with the development in the following months. 

And you know what? None of this would have happened without this campaign and without all of you amazing backers who believed in us and who made it possible for us to start this SnowBoardGames journey. So thank you all from the bottom of our hearts! ❤️


We wish you a great rest of the week

Your SnowBoardGames team 

Hike! ❄️ 2850 pledges shipped and rulebook translations
over 1 year ago – Sat, Oct 29, 2022 at 04:53:23 AM

Hello everybody,

we have some important news for you. 😀

🎉 The majority of the shipping is completed

We were on a shipping marathon these past weeks, and we are proud to say that 2850 pledges have been shipped. Our internal goal was actually 2881, the number of pledges that had the surveys completed and the credit cards successfully charged by 28th September when we created shipping groups. So we missed our internal goal by just a little - we're so sorry if your pledge is one of those and we'll send it in the 2nd half of next week (we have national holidays in the 1st part, so delivery services aren't working).


📨 Still to ship

Next, we have a little over 260 pledges where the surveys were completed later or there were some issues with the credit card payments (for shipping or things added in the post-campaign pledge manager). Some issues were successfully resolved (thank you for your quick response!) and the pledges are prepared to go into shipping. For others, the credit cards will be charged this weekend so please keep an eye out for this.

And then, there are around 300 original Kickstarter pledges where the backers haven't completed the survey. There are some pledges without rewards in there, so we're not really expecting them to complete the survey, but there are also quite a lot of pledges that require the shipping address. We will send email reminders to those backers and if you are one of them, now would be a great time to complete your survey.

We will wait for a few days to give you some time - if you have any problems, don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected]. The shipping of these pledges will begin at 9th November.


👉 Late pledges

The above info is for the pledges placed through Kickstarter when the campaign was live. For pledges, placed later on Backerkit - we will start shipping when the shipping of this second Kickstarter round is completed. You will receive email notifications before we do, and you don't have to do anything at the moment.

For anyone who missed the Kickstarter and wants to join, the late pledges (or rather preorders?) are still open here: Preorder Hike! A card-drafting racing game with huskies on BackerKit The price for the game is still a bit discounted from what the retail price will be. These preorders will be shipped in November, so now is really the last chance to join. (If you know anyone who would be interested, please feel free to share the link! 😊)


🏳️ Rulebook translations

We are happy to tell you that the first translation - French - is ready. You can download it here.

We will take the time next week to work on the other translations too and we hope (well plan) more will follow soon by the end of next week. They will be available on the above link too.

We would like to take this moment to thank our awesome translators - they reached out to us and offered to do the translation in exchange for a copy of Hike! Our sincere thank you for your work and for helping Hike! reach people in their native languages.


So I think that is all the technical details from our side. How are you all? We still can't fully believe that over 2800 packages have been sent worldwide from our garage, and it's been an exciting journey. 😀 We are a bit tired from the last two weeks' tempo, but we also feel very proud. We're glad to hear that the games are reaching their destinations - no matter how well you prepare, it's still a scary moment when you hand out those carefully wrapped packages to a postman, knowing that they're going on a 1000km and longer journeys, and you question, whether you have really packed them sturdy enough so they reach their end destination safely. It feels like skipping some steps when you go from 0 packages sent to 150+ packages sent per day, but we're learning quickly, so it feels quite natural now. The geek in me (Nika writing) is looking forward to reviewing some shipping statistics when the fulfilment is done, I suspect there will be some interesting numbers there. 🧐 Maybe they could be included in the next update. A lot of work to be done by then in any case!

We wish you a great weekend 😀

Your SnowBoardGames team