'Exploding Kittens' at Target
Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne looks talks about his annual fundraiser's publicity for the store, plus a look at the trends on three big volume Kickstarter-funded card games.

While I get ready for my annual Haunted Carbondale tours, (the store runs them every year as a fundraiser for the Humane Society of Southern Illinois and they generate quite a bit of press for us at this time of year), I started thinking about a few trends/ items in the gaming industry I have noticed recently, mainly among games that are a pain in the neck to stock.

Cards Against Humanity
I don’t know if it means that the fad for the game is dying off or the market has been saturated but sales of Cards Against Humanity have slowed significantly.  While sales of Cards still top our card game list, sales of the base game have tapered off from an average of 1 copy a day to 2-3 per week and a number of other retailers across the country have reported a similar trend.  I imagine we will see a significant uptick in sales again moving into the holiday season but I doubt the game will regain the sales levels it had over the past few years.  There are a slew of other games trying to move into the niche but none have had the success that Cards Against Humanity had.  Although one of my distributors has picked up Cards, paying full price for it in order to offer it to their accounts, the game still has not made it onto the shelves at Target, unlike:

Exploding Kittens
To my surprise, this top-funded Kickstarter project (see "$8.8 Million Card Game Kickstarter Biggest Ever"), raising over $8 million during its funding cycle, is now on the shelves at Target, in both "Safe for Work" and "Not Safe for Work" versions and at the price point that Kittens has on Amazon.  Since Target does not make a habit of selling its products for the same price they pay for them, I can only assume that Kittens’ publisher and Target’s game buyer negotiated a wholesale price for both games.  In addition, both games came shipped in handy and attractive cardboard dump displays which hold the boxes neatly on the shelf.  It certainly would be nice if more game publishers came out with display units with the purchase of multiple units that would not only make the game stand out on the shelf but make it more visible.  Looney Lab s is one company that does a great job with their Fluxx line, Atlas Games is one that could take note with displays for Gloom, Once Upon a Time and Three Cheers for Master.

SuperFight
This is one game that we have had a number of requests for over the past few months (see “Skybound's 'Superfight' Card Game Comes to Trade”).  I really didn’t see the attraction of the game but after we got a few requests, we decided to look into stocking it.  The first few times we contacted Skybound, the publisher of Superfight, we didn’t hear anything back.  However, after the company sent out an email expressing an interest in dealing more actively with retailers, we shot them another email and got a response almost immediately.  We brought in a dozen copies of the core game and two each of the available expansions and sales greatly exceeded my expectations as we sold through over half the core sets and almost all of the expansions within a week, necessitating a restock much sooner than anticipated.  Too early to tell if Superfight will hit Cards Against Humanity sales levels but I expect it to do quite well this Christmas.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.