This month’s Crowdfunding Carnival has itself an interesting sideshow, hosted by Backerkit itself! Pocketopia 2025 isn’t exactly Backerkit’s answer to Kickstarter’s ZineQuest, since zines aren’t the focus, but it’s definitely in the same genre. The stated goal is to be “a celebration of portable easy-to-learn tabletop games”. So, as it comes to an end less than a day from now, how has it gone?

An important note is that this is an event for tabletop games. There are a lot of card/board games (and one gaming club fundraiser), but if you want to focus on roleplaying games (and for this we will) then about a third of the total offerings might end up in your basket.

Some of them are new games adding on to an existing line of sorts. Brambletrek – Tales in the Hundred Acre Woods takes advantage of a certain honey-loving bear and friends being in the public domain to send the Gnawborn mice of Brambletrek on solo/GMless journaling adventures. Song of the Scryptwyrm is a solo mystery game that hacks the Hints & Hijinx system from Pandion Games; despite a different system and the ability to be standalone, it can also serve as a sequel to The Librarian’s Apprentice.

Others are taking the chance to move from the digital to the physical. Hit the Road, Jack, previously on itch, is a solo/duet game of adrenaline rush and creeping terror. It’s a game of chasing and being chased, of being forced to face your sins or to leave them all behind.

Still others are completely new! Some nuns with guns from Pocketopia found themselves in our usual Crowdfunding Carnival, for one example. In the Shadow of Glory is a two player epistolary game that focuses on the enduring relationship between a hero who can’t be beaten and the archnemesis that can’t be vanquished.

One thing that sets Pocketopia apart from ZineQuest and the like is that there is a fair bit more promotional functionality. One expression of this is the cross-collab, which we saw with Mothership Month last year (although that was held by a publisher, not Backerkit itself). Short story shorter, back multiple campaigns, get some extra stuff! The strongest Pocketopia cross-collabs are ones using the same system, which makes sense. The most successful with ~47% of backers backing both are a pair of using the ‘Quill’ (no relation, admittedly to my disappointment) system, GMless fill-in-the-map exploration game Wayfinder and the Redwall-coded Familiar Tales. Backing both will get you some dice and a pin.

(Huh, between this and the usual Carnival that’s three talking-animal RPGs this month. Four if you count Brambletrek… something in the water?)

The next most popular is a pair of offerings for Shadowdark, and it falls off fairly steeply from there, but every cross-collab has gotten at least 15% crossover. Backerkit itself is offering some loot, a unique dice bag that you can get if you back any 6 or more projects.

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Overall Pocketopia certainly seems like this first effort has been a success, with the entire event bringing in $972k+ so far. The most telling statistic for those hoping to create a game of their own is the success rate: of the 62 projects that make up the event, 60 have successfully funded so far (which includes all of the roleplaying games).

I’m not entirely sold on the extra gewgaws, especially the general back-a-lot-of-games one; getting backers addicted to the extra stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with getting the game made is an issue in and of itself, but takes on an added risk when you consider the rising costs (both specifically to provide gewgaws and, well, in general with the way the world economy is going).

The overall drive, though, seems solid, and I think things like cross-collab projects have a lot of potential for creators to back each other up. Pocketopa 2025 will end Apr 3, 2025 at 4:00pm EDT, so check out what you can while you can!