Gentle Jack is shipping soon. All backer orders from Kickstarter have been triple-checked and loaded into our fulfillment center’s system and, If all goes to plan, games should start going out any day now.
So What is This Game?
In case you’re new here: Gentle Jack is a gothic-comedy drinking card game. Think dark humor, crude jokes, and illustrated card art that we think will look great on any shelf. It’s a party game for people who like their games a little mean.
I made Gentle Jack many years ago just for my friends and I, and recently brought it back to the drawing board to re-imagine and re-invent the whole thing. And then Tara, our illustrator, gave it exactly the right art style to bring this drunken little fantasy to life and really do it justice. Together, we’ve tackled this as a two-person team, my first time making a game destined for mass production and Tara’s first time illustrating a game. My husband Hugo has been a third pair of hands when I needed them. And beyond that, an incredible group of friends who never said no when I asked them to playtest, spread the word, or pose for promo photos. You know who you are.
Looking Back at the Kickstarter
112 people backed this game. A bit less than what I had hoped for but way more than what I had realistically tuned my expectations to. That’s 112 strangers (and some non-strangers) who looked at something I made and said “yeah, I want that.” I still can’t believe it.
I was stubborn about doing this right. It may be my first campaign but it won’t be my last, and I wanted to start off on the right foot, with a reputation I could build on. For production, we went with the best in the biz Panda GM because I wanted this game to feel good in your hands and stand out on a shelf. For shipping and fulfillment, we picked a partner based on reputation for reliability, not price. And I padded the delivery timeline on the Kickstarter page by quite a lot, hoping to deliver early rather than scramble to meet a deadline. With so many different factors like the production queue at the factory, global freight estimates being unreliable and just that lack of control over anything outside of your own personal work scope, we still ended up stretching it a bit. But that’s how it goes, I guess.
No amount of planning could have prepared me for how hard this actually was. Fun, yes. But hard.
A game studio with two people and no budget doesn’t get to hire specialists. So you end up learning things you never expected to learn. Production logistics. International shipping. Social media marketing, which I’m genuinely terrible at. I even built a digital companion app with my rather limited coding background.
We made mistakes too. We underestimated how tough it is to run a Kickstarter campaign right now. Board games are in a golden age, which sounds great until you realize how much noise you’re competing with. But the mistakes taught us things we’ll carry into the next campaign. Expensive lessons, but good ones.
What Happens Next
First, backer orders go out. Then we ship inventory to Amazon and start selling there. After that, we launch on our own online store right here on A Little Bit Human.
And this is where I’ll need to rely on you and everyone else who has shown interest in the game. Those first few days on Amazon matter a lot. Early sales and reviews build momentum, and momentum is everything for a small game studio trying to get noticed. If you pick up a copy and leave a review, that’s not some small thing. It’s a huge deal for us.
Beyond the launch, we’ve got plans. Themed card packs to keep Gentle Jack fresh and modular. An expanded edition with the base game + more cards. And there are new games in the works: a social deduction game, and farther down the line, something much bigger.
We’re just getting started.
Thank You
To the 112 backers who took a chance on a first-time creator: you made this real. I don’t say that lightly.
To my friends and family who’ve watched me disappear into this project for months: thank you for the patience, the encouragement, and for pretending to laugh at the cards you’d already seen four times during playtesting.
To the people who’ve been following along on Instagram, liking posts and sharing stories: you might not think that matters much, but it does. Every bit of visibility counts when you’re small.
And to anyone just finding out about Gentle Jack now: welcome. Stick around. Join the Discord. It’s only gonna get better from here.
-Thor
