Theme, Risk & Deliverance with Andrew Lowen

If you follow the KS board game scene, you have probably heard of Deliverance. The campaign from first time published designer Andrew Lowen raised $140k in the first day, and as I write this halfway through the campaign is up to $215k. It is a runaway success, especially for a first-time creator, but that isn’t what makes it stand out. Its theme as Andrew puts it “a dungeon crawl with a Christian mythos” is what really sets it apart.

The genesis for Deliverance was Andrew’s desire to make a game that he and his family could love. He realized that some Christians have a hard time feeling welcome in traditional fantasy and dungeon crawl games. Casting fireballs through the power of some obscure or arcane force can feel like a compromise of their faith [BGDL Interview].

So why not cast fireballs for God?

After all, Christian tradition is full of epic battles between good and evil:

Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back… The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. [Revelations 12]

A Theme with a Stigma

One issue is that there is a stigma around non-secular board games. Andrew noted that it is harder to get buy in from publishers, and that a lot of potential gamers are skeptical about religious games.

Board game geek has about 1,000 games tagged with a religious theme. Many of these have nothing to do with religion but just happen to have monks in them, or you are building a cathedral (Orleans, Pillars of the Earth).

An under-representation of the remainder are well ranked (by my quick count games with the religious tag are about 70% as likely to make BGG’s top 5,000). There are of course exceptions: The Settlers of Canaan, Sola Fide: Reformation, etc.

For Cause vs For Gameplay

My intuition is that this is an issue of for cause board games, or board games whose primary focus is to push an agenda rather than create great gameplay. These could be games about environmental issues, political or social justice, or famously the Language Trivia game I made in Seventh Grade Spanish with the sole agenda of not failing.

Some of these themes can be used to create drama and incredible gameplay. Spirit Island is about saving an island from pollution. You could even argue that a game like Food Chain Magnate is anti-corporatism through its dystopian approach to our economic system.

But the point is that great gameplay comes before message.

Risk and Reward

With Deliverance, Andrew took a risk that he would be able to demonstrate that his game was gameplay forward, overcome the inherent skepticism that many have towards non-secular games.

I was curious about Andrew’s thoughts on being true to a theme and the risk and challenges he had to face. I reached out to him and he was kind enough to share a few thoughts:

When I decided to make Deliverance, I realized I was wading into untested waters. Deliverance has a theme that revolves around “Christian Fantasy” as you’re epic angels battling against demons in the hidden realm within modern day town. Christian games have been done before, but a modern epic Fantasy using Christian lore has never been done before.

The risk of pursuing this theme was quite high, because there is a negative stigma associated with “Christian games” that comes from these sorts of games putting education and religion first with notoriously poor game mechanics thrown in.

Deliverance was going to be different, but I knew we were going to fight an uphill battle anyway.

I believed that if we showcased how serious the game took itself, we could win people over! Our mission was to do this through innovating new game mechanics, weaving the theme intricately into the actual mechanics of the game, and giving players the experience of slaying demons as an epically powerful angel that survived against all odds!

Many publishers turned us down, and others weren’t willing to put their trust in this untested idea, so we had to start a publishing company to get this game to market.

We raised over $140,000 on the first day we launched, and we are currently sitting at nearly $212,000 raised with 18 days to go in our Kickstarter campaign!

Our risk certainly paid off, and it looks as though we have a very bright future with our coming expansion plans! Sometimes, you just need to believe in yourself, even when others won’t!

I am glad that Andrew’s faith in his theme is paying off and am excited to see Deliverance on the table. The gameplay looks on point, the theme strong, and the battles epic.

What are your favorite games that have succeeded in spite of, or because of an unusual theme?