Pirated copies of the Kelp board game went on sale before the Kickstarter even ended
Everything went well Wonderbow co-founder Laia González. The latest project from her small publishing house, called a board game Kelp, had far exceeded expectations and was approaching its final crowdfunding total of over $1.5 million. Delivery was scheduled for October 2024, so there was plenty of time to start finalizing the game’s components and coordinating with a manufacturer for production. Hoping for a little extra dose of dopamine, Gonzalez did a quick Google search to see if anyone in the vast and turbulent sea of tabletop influencers was particularly excited about her company’s game. But instead of a new video of someone sitting in front of an overcrowded Ikea cupboard, she was surprised to discover Kelp already for sale on Amazon. She, Wonderbow and game designer Carl Robinson had become the latest victims of board game counterfeiters.
“We had 12 listings (on Amazon) at the time,” Gonzalez told Polygon in a recent interview. “One of them had over 400 sales.”
She took action and warned Amazon about the fraud. After days of back and forth, the dozens of illegal listings she found were finally removed. Thirty-six more appeared overnight. The counterfeiters also expanded their efforts to Google Shopping and other online marketplaces, with more listings always seeming to pop up even as Gonzalez reported them. It was like a game Whac-A-Mole. Soon, she sent a series of emails politely asking an upstart eBay competitor walking out of a Florida office park to remove a product that clearly infringed on her company’s copyright.
Then the customer service complaints started pouring in.
“They literally sent us an email saying, ‘We received the game. It looks great, but the manual is missing,” Gonzalez recalls. “’There’s also a Lego shark in there. Can you please send us a real mini?’”
In recent decades, as brick-and-mortar retail has struggled and online shopping has become the norm, an entire ecosystem of counterfeit sellers has emerged to prey on unwary consumers. Now, after years of moving bootleg shoes, trendy handbags and poorly made electronics, they’re turning their attention to board games.
The problem is only getting worse. Polygon has contacted nearly a dozen publishers in the tabletop industry. All but one said they and their customers had fallen victim to a similar form of fraud.
“The main concern for me, other than revenue, is reputational damage,” Nathan McNair, co-owner of Pandasaurus Games, wrote in an email. “The counterfeits are often of very poor quality. There was a Machi Koro counterfeit that did not contain the plastic coins, but was Wingspan dice and plastic gems. So I guess whoever made that was a fake too Wingspan.”
How are these counterfeits made? It’s easy enough to find popular board games on store shelves these days, including at major retailers like Target and Walmart, and online at Amazon and on eBay. These cards and game boards are scanned at a high resolution and thus form the raw material for counterfeiting. Some zealous counterfeiters, like those who were targeted Kelplook for game images from crowdfunding campaigns, likely using images shared on Kickstarter, YouTube and Instagram to put together their own version for sale. Table simulatora popular online platform used to virtually demo new games is another popular attack vector.
“The weird side effect of all this is that people are becoming less and less trusting of Amazon as a place to buy board games, which is driving a lot of customers to our website,” wrote Patrick Leder, founder of Leder Games, which also has its own company. digital store where it sells its products directly. But the counterfeiting trend also impacts those same struggling local game stores that are fighting an uphill battle against the likes of Amazon.
“We want local brick-and-mortar stores to survive and thrive,” Leder said, “and these deep discounts on low-quality versions are hurting them too. In the future, we may need to talk about how many of our prototypes we can make public to prevent counterfeits before they hit the market.”
That kind of secrecy is clearly integrated into the plans of Jamey Stegmaier, owner of Stonemaier games. His two most recent releases, the asymmetrical strategy game Apiary and the long-awaited sequel to Wingspantitled Wyrmspan, were revealed to the world less than a month before they went on sale – directly via its own website. He said his own, more established brand has had success moving its back catalog to Amazon’s Transparency program, which provides a scannable code on products it ships that can be used to verify authenticity. But it’s not free, and for newer publishers like Wonderbow trying to get funding for games that don’t yet exist, it may not be financially possible.
“We don’t have a good solution for counterfeits on other marketplaces,” Stegmaier wrote in an email to Polygon. “(And) even if we add components that are difficult to replicate, the customer won’t know until they’ve already purchased the product, because counterfeiters can use photos of the real game on their online listings.
“It is difficult to say at this time how much impact this will have on our business,” he added, “but I do know that there is a loss of revenue and a lot of customer confusion and frustration.”
For Gonzalez, whose Kelp is still on track for its promised shipping window of October this year, the key next step is education – both for existing board game fans and the mass market more broadly.
“We need to educate people more about the concept of crowdfunding,” Gonzalez said. “Quality photos, a great video, a (Table simulator) mod and a published rulebook are the key to a crowdfunding campaign. (…) We believe that people deserve the opportunity to get to know our games as best as possible in advance. This won’t prevent counterfeits, but we don’t want to risk losing our community because we don’t release enough information in advance.”
She’s currently working on connecting her hard-won contacts at Amazon with someone at Kickstarter for a high-level conversation. Perhaps, with a little more communication, they can improve the situation for board game publishers in the future and help push counterfeiters even further underground.