Going Digital - Part II - Early Lessons

We Sigil Online on October 31st, and as of last week had 4,500 plays logged.

Sigil Online is the free to play browser-based version of our upcoming Kickstarter Sigil. Building the platform was a pretty substantial undertaking that was made possible by a few unique circumstances – we go into detail here: Going Digital – Part I.

Close to three months in I wanted to step back and talk about some of the successes and challenges.

Strong Introductory Tool

The biggest strength of Sigil Online has been it’s use as an introductory tool to getting people to learn and play Sigil. The most encouraging metric from this perspective is the 1,200 Tutorial plays.

While I’m sure some people have taken the tutorial multiple times – even if only half the plays are new, that’s still 600 people who’ve learned Sigil through our online platform.

The introductory power of the platform is further evidenced in the 2,700 solo plays.

I’ve had a number of conversations with players who love Sigil, but aren’t quite confident in their abilities to feel comfortable battling a stranger in a private match or on the ranked ladder.

Building Community

One of the major challenges – or maybe the major challenge – of bringing a board game to market is building a community around it.

While Sigil Online has is an amazing asset, it doesn’t take the place of good old fashioned community building.

We’ve done a decent job of introducing exciting features – like ladder matches we run every Thursday, better tutorial & rules reminders, and improved UX.

We’ve also run a tournament where we gave away a prototype game and have plans in the works for continued support of a competitive scene and better onboarding to get newer players confident in their skills – like strategy articles, how to play videos, and commentary on matches.

While our community is healthy and growing, we still have a ways to go. For example, one of my hopes for Sigil Online is to contract streamers to play ladder matches. We don’t have the density of players yet to make bringing on streamers make sense.

It’s a chicken and egg situation, where we need the player density to execute some of our more exciting marketing ideas, but need to further spread the word about Sigil Online to grow our community.

When are People Playing

Most games are happening in the afternoon and evening (Eastern Time), and Thursdays are our most popular day.

Part of this is because we are promoting Thursday Night Sigil as our main drive to build a competitive scene (we have a ranked ladder open from 6:00 pm - midnight on Thursdays). However, we rolled out Thursday night sigil because that is when most people were online.

It’s interesting to see that Tutorial and Solo games are more likely to be played in the afternoon rather than evening. My gut is that people are checking out Sigil Online while at work in the afternoons, but don’t have the time to commit to a full match until they are home in the evening.

What are your favorite indie game communities, and what stands out about them?