Valley-made Doxie Dash game making a dash for cash

Valley-made Doxie Dash game making a dash for cash

The Annapolis Valley inventors of a new dog-themed tabletop card game are looking for investors to back their pack.

Tongues are already wagging after Doxie Dash raised a little more than half of its $25,000 goal after week one on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. The kicker is that the campaign must raise the total amount by Tuesday, June 5, in order to get the funds it needs to take a bite out of the global gaming market.

“With treats to collect and enemies lurking around every corner, do you have what it takes to become top dog? Because there can only be one wiener!” reads the game’s pitch online.

Developers Travis Wilkins and his best friend, Justin MacDonald, grew up in Wilmot and connected at the age of three playing video games. Thirty years later, now grown up with kids themselves, they still connect to collaborate.

“We’ve spent hours roughing out card games for our kids and this is the first one we’ve published,” said Wilkins.

Doxie Dash is on the lead of Mackerel Sky Games Inc., their independent company registered in North Bay, Ont., where Wilkins now resides. The game is themed on the dachshunds — affectionately abbreviated as doxies — from a mini-breeding facility in Hants Border called Long Long Ranch that MacDonald operates with his partner, Marcie Clowry.

Clowry brought her skill set to the table to create a limited number of the nostalgic, pixel-art prototype to test the wiener dog game in hot industry markets in Canada, United States and the European Union.

“The (game) theme really shines through because it’s very specific to the dachshund,” said MacDonald. “They’re lawless in their biology; it’s hard to predict what a dachshund does, so it was fun to make a game of rules for dachshunds because they’re so crazy. They run by their own rules for sure.”

The object of the game is to collect sets of cards for points and have your doxie hero take on challenges to defeat foes. Each card has a unique ability to guide winning strategies. There are cards for lick attacks, water and kibble, hoarding undergarments, even pooing on an expensive rug.

“Everyone we’re hearing from is having a really good reaction,” said Wilkins in an interview on the ranch. “I think if someone has a connection to dachshunds, they’re going to enjoy it, but even people who don’t are really excited about how the game flows. It can be played by five year olds because of the set collection, but for a major board gaming enthusiast like myself and people I play with, enjoy it because of the strategic levels. It scales very well.”

Wilkins added one woman from the United Kingdom who reviewed the game said she enjoyed getting into the mind of a doxie, even though she considered herself a cat person.

The trio expect to officially launch the game this fall at Spiel, the world’s largest gaming trade fair in Essen, Germany, that Wilkins and MacDonald attended last year.

“It’s seven Costcos put together and it’s crammed. The money being exchanged, the numbers of games that are being produced are just phenomenal. And that’s just in one calendar year cycle,” said MacDonald.

Wilkins said the board gaming industry is enjoying a renaissance as backlash to online games and it’s part of the reason why the friends wanted to develop an offline tabletop game.

“[Board gaming] has exploded in the last five years and it’s becoming massive,” said Wilkins, adding that they’re beating out video games on crowdfunding platforms.

According to statistics from Kickstarter, tabletop game developers earned nearly $138 million in 2017 on Kickstarter, while funded video game campaigns only brought in just more than $17 million in the same period.

“We need a way to connect off the screen,” said Clowry. “That’s why board game cafes are starting to pop up and becoming a really popular avenue for people to connect, because they’re tired of (social media),” she said.

Clowry added they are grateful for the social media following that is helping them toward reaching their crowdfunding goal. Long Long Ranch just reached more than 41,000 followers on Instagram who keep up with the adventures of the real-life doxies.

The Doxie Dash Kickstarter campaign can be found at https://kck.st/2rZBuns.

Published at Tue, 29 May 2018 13:07:30 +0000

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