A small team of 5 people creates a boutique product and shakes the global Red Sea board game market
Last month we reported that WePlay under Wuhan Weipai has performed well in the Middle East and Japan, proving the huge potential of the overseas board game market. (Click to read: When cosmic werewolf kills meets board game)
However, just recently, a board game method has once again set off a global boom, and on major social software, a mysterious pattern has become the most popular "secret language" on major mainstream social apps:
I believe that young people have more or less been brushed by this board game, this game called "Blood Stained Clock Tower" has become the "golden signboard" that makes board games usher in the second growth curve after "Werewolf Kill", and the game is temporarily only overseas page games and offline physical versions, the App has not yet been launched, and may have huge hidden potential in the direction of going to sea.
In fact, this board game has been launched overseas as early as 3 years ago, as the same type of board game as "Werewolf Killing" and "Avalon", it has received widespread attention at the beginning of its launch, and was once recognized by overseas KOLs as the successor of "Werewolf Killing". As a player who has experienced it, this "high-level werewolf kill" does have a charm that makes many board game core players addicted due to its super complex characters and rules.
In addition to this, the game we found a very interesting phenomenon when observing the overseas performance of the "werewolf-like killing" game:
In China, Europe and the United States, where the "killing" atmosphere is heavier, the new "Werewolf Killing" products will spread very quickly and the acceptance rate is also very high; while the Middle East, Japan, Latin America and other markets will change more slowly.
To sum up, it should be very related to the number of core players, especially in the "sunset" gameplay of "Werewolf Kill", the technical barriers of core players are already quite high, the circle is relatively closed, and it is easy to have a good feeling for a more complex game; and even in the area where "Werewolf Kill" has not been played thoroughly, a more complex gameplay is difficult to become mainstream. This game trend is similar to the "Three Kingdoms Kill" that the Chinese people are more familiar with, after continuous "screening players", and then supplementing the "Wind Forest Volcano" and other expansion packs, and this conclusion is also supported by the local social best-seller list, we have also interviewed a considerable number of players in this experience, and the conclusion is basically the same.
(Pictured) AppStare: Werewolf Kill remains in the top ten of the mainland social best-seller list
So, since such a "volume" werewolf killing game, what magic allows "Blood Stained Clock Tower" to just appear and kill its own piece of the sky in the board game circle dominated by "Werewolf Killing" and "Avalon"?
5 players vs 6434 players
Blood Stained Clock Tower is a social game about reasoning and deception, lies and logic, murder and mystery. The game had been preliminarily designed as early as 2017, and after a long period of accumulation and testing, it launched a crowdfunding campaign for the game at Kickstarter in early 2020. The small team of just five people from Sydney initially had a crowdfunding goal of only $65,000, but after more than half a year of accumulation, 6,434 supporters raised $573,621, which made the game and developers overjoyed.
(Photo) The founding team of the Blood Stained Clock Tower
Of course, the high reward also allows players to get a board game that is quite well-made, not only the props are well-made, but also quite hardcore, and the instruction manual alone has more than 20 pages.
In fact, the game still follows the general framework of "Werewolf Kill", divided into two camps of good camps and bad guy camps, each player will have a different role, different characters have different abilities. The good guys survive to the end to find the demons in the player and execute them to win, just as the bad guys can win by killing the good guys.
The Blood Stained Bell Tower is characterized by a large number of characters to choose from, and each character has its own unique skills, and 72 characters have been officially introduced, and more than a hundred characters are being expanded and developed.
Roles in the primary version
A large number of characters allow the game to avoid situations like werewolf kills and Avalon's serious repetitive situations, giving the game the characteristics of Roglike, ensuring the player's game experience while allowing players to continue to play in characters that match their own characters.
At the same time, the game boldly added a non-death setting, and the player who is out will only lose the skills of his character but can still participate in chat and exchange and even retain the right to vote once.
Of course, without death and order, the game process is bound to be quite chaotic. Unlike "Werewolf Killing", there is no order of speech, and when I experienced it, the chaotic noise of 20 people made people think that the teacher was not in the class when he was in school. What's more distinctive is that the game can accept private chat, and if you think of a good idea, you can communicate privately with people you believe in.
It is only when a player is nominated (i.e., suspected of being a bad guy) that everyone quiets down and listens to him. This free setting allows the player to relax and not miss speaking due to nervousness or other elements that cause them to forget their prepared lines when they take turns.
There is a lot of uncertainty in the game, many times when playing the game, we will always follow the relevant clues to think deeply and find the truth, but there are two such characters in the blood-stained bell tower, their appearance leads to the clues that the player knows are likely to be wrong, respectively, alcoholics and poisoners, if you are an alcoholic, the identity you get at the beginning is not your role at all, but because you are drunk and mistakenly think that you are this character, the game may be based on the wrong information you get through the wrong character to reason, But the end result will only bring trouble for yourself and your good teammates. In the same way, the information obtained by the player who is poisoned will be wrong.
The most distinctive feature of the Blood Stained Clock Tower is the Storyteller. The storyteller is also the DM host in the game, the storyteller completely got rid of the attributes of the tool man in the game, he can give the drunkard on the field and the poisoned player the wrong information according to his own wishes, the storyteller is also a variable that needs to be considered in the game, not completely fair and just like in other games. But the ultimate goal of the storyteller must be to ensure that the game does not appear one-sided and make the game more confrontational.
In fact, there is a very common problem that leads to the loss of board game players, that is, the time is very fixed. Each sentence requires all players to be present, and then after dying, they need to wait for the game to end before rejoining the game. The blood-stained bell tower adds the identity of the traveler, which can join and leave the game at any time, which makes the behavior of late arrival and early departure of pigeons have a way to deal with.
Always from the player's point of view
In fact, special characters such as storytellers and travelers are not uncommon in "Blood Stained Clock Tower", and these have greatly improved the experience of social games, so that offline tool people with special circumstances can also immerse themselves in the game.
And the game's most proud character design, many also come from players, producer Steven Medway and his partners cater to the current hottest meta-universe concept, so that players can link through the script of the official website, with their own imagination to design new game versions and characters, to create a long-term operation method of board games.
From the explosion of "Blood Stained Clock Tower", we found that the characteristics of the market are being rewritten by Generation Z a little: from "dark please close your eyes" to "werewolf killing" to "blood stained bell tower", although it has gone through the baptism of various gameplay, "social + game" will once again usher in a high growth point in 2022, the recent so-called "Dread Hunger" of the great navigation werewolf killing is rapidly rising in the end game, in today, in the game out of the sea, there are also practitioners who broke the so-called "epidemic killing" game, It is a kind of ridicule of isolated life in the way of games
At present, games with heavy social attributes such as "Blood Stained Clock Tower" are welcomed by more Generation Z players, who like to show themselves and are more comfortable in the identity and background settings of similar script killing and werewolf killing games. More people mean chaos, but also more likely to collide, so that the "whole life" and "drama" effects are full, giving the whole game unknown fun. This is a far cry from the hobbies we recognize as millennials and Gen Xers.
In today's global world, Gen Z's preference for products is reflected in entertainment-related industries. In the "2022 State of the State of Pan-Entertainment Apps Report" released by data.ai on Friday (April 8), it mentioned the bias in the use of OTT apps by Gen Z, Millennials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers. Compared with other users, Gen Z prefers OTT applications that provide animation content, such as Crunchyroll, an anime streaming platform known as "American Station B", which provides users with East Asian media streaming services such as animation, comics, drama, and music.