THE HAPPIEST RAT! A Board Game for Rat Lovers!

Do you love rats?

Do you enjoy boardgames?

Do you want to help save lives by giving money to an incredible charity?

If you answered YES to any of those questions, this was made for you. 

Yes, you.

My name is Benjamin Cadenza, and I am a writer, artist, board-game designer and rat lover from New Zealand. I designed my first boardgame over 10 years ago, and since then have designed almost 6 more (a few are still works in progress). This is my first attempt to really publish one.

When my darling mischief (the collective noun for rats) passed away, I decide to create a love letter to them in the form of a fun and family friendly board-game, showing how cute, clever, caring and compassionate they are. Rats have a bad reputation - one they do not deserve - and I want to help change that. 

If you love rats and enjoy boardgames, then I can almost guarantee this is for you.

To see more snippets of the games production, and to join the community, please visit the Facebook Page 

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=6156198...

Help Me Make A Game... By Buying The Game.

I require funding to help cover the costs of the game, and all the time that has gone into it. From designing the rules, to making the artwork and doing the graphic design, to playtesting, and to the MANY hours in the workshop manufacturing the Limited Edition version of the game. This covers the costs of components, and manufacture expenses like dozens of hours of laser cutting time.

Unlike many campaigns, where the fundraiser needs money to even get started on creating the game, I have already made most of it! So instead of backers having to wait months and months for production, the games will be ready to ship as soon as the campaign closes (and the money comes through so I can afford shipping!)

There will be multiple tiers of support, most of which are pre-orders of different version of the games, available at a range of different budgets.

PRINT AND PLAY VERSION: This is a low budget friendly option, because money is hard, and games being inaccessible due to cost is the opposite of fun. This support tier gets you all the digital assets for the game, arranged for easy cutting and gluing to card so that you can make it yourself. You will need to provide you own dice - 1x four sided, 1x ten sided, 1 x twelve sided, and a bag and/or containers for the dice and tokens to go inside. 

STANDARD VERSION - SEMI MODULAR: This is the lowest cost hard-copy version of the game, which will be produced by the high quality print on demand services of The Game Crafter in the USA. It includes everything you need to play good quality card-stock for tokens, tiles and player cards. The semi-modular version keeps its simple, fast to set up, and is less easily bumped while playing. It allows you some flexibility in rearranging the board set up for re-playability, without you getting bogged down in the set up time of the fully modular version.

STANDARD VERSION - FULLY MODULAR: This is a slightly more expensive hard-copy version of the game, which will be produced by the high quality print on demand services of The Game Crafter in the USA. It includes everything you need to play good quality card-stock for tokens and player cards. The fully-modular version comes with completely separate game-board tiles, allowing almost infinite possibilities when it comes to arranging the board for ultimate re-playability - and only adds approximately 5 minutes to the set up time, which is basically its own little mini game in itself. Create any living room you want, you can even recreate your OWN living room.

DELUXE LIMITED EDITION VERSION: This version is the best of the best, manufactured by the game designer themselves. This fully modular version includes magnetized board pieces of oiled MDF chipboard, locking room object tiles that cannot slip,  3D printed Rat Tokens, custom made dice, 2 bonus playable rat characters, velvet dice bags, and more! 

Any donations under $10 NZD will be a simple "Heck yes!" to rats, to the game, and will contribute towards the charity portion of the fundraising, which I will talk about in the next section.

10% of money raised goes to APOPO HeroRats.

By backing this project, you won't just helping to bring a game into existence and helping me to spread the word about how wonderful rats are...  you will be helping to save lives.

As I said above, rats get a bad rap. I could talk at lengths about why this is unfair, but for now I will just say this: rats are the one of the most experimented on animal in the world - helping to create every medicine and life saving treatment known to human kind. Therefore, they have saved many more lives than were ever ended in the black plague (an event for which they were mistakenly blamed, a large factor in why they are so vilified).

Not only that, but rats are used by the incredible APOPO Organization, which uses rat's incredible senses of smell to help rid the world of landmines, and to speed up detection of Tuberculosis, two massive killers of humans worldwide - many of whom are children. 

These clever little heroes are saving lives every day, and this board-game will help them do so.

The Challenges: One Hobbit Living in Middle Earth

As I said, I live in New Zealand (Middle Earth), which is basically as far away from the rest of the world as you can get without moving to the moon. Also, I am just one little person in a big world of multinational board-game producers who are able to create tens of thousands of copies of a game to keep their per-game costs down. 

I am not that, and any games I personally manufacture myself need to be shipped from New Zealand, which is why the shipping costs are more expensive than you might have been expecting. This is why the standard version of my game is available from a Print on Demand website, and only the Limited Edition version (the one I am producing myself with all the extra fancy parts) is being shipped from New Zealand.

Please keep this in mind when considering the costs of the game, and it's shipping. 

For a full rundown of the costs involved in producing the Special Edition of the game, please visit the FB page 'The Happiest Rat - Boardgame', where I have shared and pinned a spreadsheet of my costs, and the overall value of the game. 
 

Sharing is Caring!

I absolutely understand that not everyone can afford to donate money! But even sharing this campaign with your rat/boardgame loving friends, and especially on rat related groups/pages, is incredibly helpful!

Indiegogo has some great share tools available to make it even easier than a copy-past :)

THANKS FOR READING