The (Post)Curious case of Rita Orlovs’s $650k puzzle campaigns

George: 0:00
Hi there. My name is George and I help creators launch successful crowdfunding campaigns on this podcast. You’ll hear from creators and experts, how they consistently launch record breaking campaigns. So you can do the same. Our guest today is Rita Orlov. She’s the creator of PostCurious, and she has raised over$650,000 across her previous three campaigns. And she’s currently gearing up to launch her fourth titled the Morrison Game Factory, a Puzzle Tale. Welcome Rita.

Rita: 0:28
Hi, thanks for having me.

George: 0:30
I am very excited to talk to you for many reasons. Your games are beautiful. But one of the things I want to get out of the way first is I’ve looked on your personal website and it says you have experience with tabletop games. That’s to be expected. But then we also have escape rooms which I guess is adjacent. But you also do team building and furniture making there is so many things that you do. Who are you and what does your life look like?

Rita: 0:59
I think do might be a strong word for those at the moment. I think in terms of team building it’s more of a service of creating a puzzle experiences for team building But my degree is actually in furniture design and that is, oddly enough, what led me into making physical game experiences because our furniture design program was really more of an object design program. So although we learned how to make furniture, what we really learned was how to Create objects and think about user interaction. And I think that is very relevant in game design and especially tabletop game design when you’re dealing with physical components.

George: 1:46
Because your games for those who are not familiar, are self described as a blend of escape rooms, board games, and interactive fiction. At least that was the description for the first game. Is that an accurate description for most of the work that you do?

Rita: 2:01
Yeah, I think something that a lot of us creators in this space have struggled with is finding a name for this very particular genre. And while Escape Rooms in a Box describes a lot of games that are in the genre, it doesn’t really encompass everything that’s in the genre because there are a lot of games that are not. necessarily escape rooms, even if they’re escape room adjacent or have escape room style puzzles. A lot of them are more narrative driven and are really more of an experience. So I think it doesn’t quite describe it that well. So I’ve been using the term tabletop puzzle experiences or narrative tabletop puzzle adventures to describe the games, but when people Ask what that means. Then I usually try to make them imagine combining these three things.

George: 2:52
And this is an inherently social form of gaming, right? There’s no solo mode on this.

Rita: 2:57
It’s playable solo just as any sort of puzzle game would be. I think it is better cooperatively just because. The puzzles do tend to be challenging at times, and multiple brains are always better than one. It’s really fun to watch people cooperate as they try to solve things, because there’s such a variety of different puzzle styles, and everybody is gonna click with something else. One person’s gonna figure out one part of it, and they’re… You know the rest of their team will figure out some other parts and then there’s this like beautiful collaboration that happens in the process and I think that’s really lovely to see in these sort of puzzle games but a lot of people like to play them by themselves and that’s Totally valid.

George: 3:42
That’s cool. I never realized that, but I can absolutely see myself just sitting at home, solving, a puzzle and a riddle without any distractions from anyone else. I deeply understand how that’s very satisfying. You have three projects under your belt. And you have a fourth one coming up, so let’s go back to the first one. The Emerald flame, if I’m not mistaken in 2020, it raised almost 300, 000, which is. It’s insane for a first project, so well done on that. But what made you decide at that point in your life to launch a crowdfunding project?

Rita: 4:19
So I had considered launching a crowdfunding project for my first game, which came before the Emerald Flame, and that was called The Tale of Ord, which now Has been remade as Threads of Fate, which is the most recent campaign that we had. But, when I was first working on Tale of Ord I read a lot about crowdfunding, and everybody online was talking about how time consuming it was, and it’s like having another full time job. And I thought I already have a full time job, and then my other full time job is making this game. I don’t think I can handle a third full time job of also running a Kickstarter campaign. Maybe I’ll just try to make a small batch of games and see if they sell, and just see how it goes. So that’s what I ended up doing with the Tale of Ord. I made 500 copies and just put it online for pre sale and tried to put it into the world and see what happened with that and eventually sold through them, but after I was done with it, I was working on Emerald Flame, and I realized that I was spending so much time putting together the boxes for the Tale of Ord that I didn’t have as much time to be working on Emerald Flame, and I thought for my next game, I think I need to have this manufactured because I can’t spend all my time putting together boxes, and in order to manufacture it, you really have to have enough money to put that deposit down to, to make everything and to ship everything shipping, shipping everything from China is a whole completely different task with its own very steep learning curve and very different from just assembling stuff in your living room and mailing it out to, a few hundred people. But that was the main reason why I went. To crowdfunding for the second game.

George: 6:07
Your background suggests you still like assembling boxes yourself. Is that something that you still do for smaller additions? Or does everything come from China now?

Rita: 6:20
Everything comes from China now. I did a special edition for Emerald Flame. So we did a little bit of things in house for that. And then in 2021, I did a special little release. Right before the holidays called Whisper in the Woods, which was just 40 copies of a game that had like hand weathered paper and tiny components that I had to put everything together myself, but It’s just getting to the point where that’s, even though I enjoy doing things with my hands, I feel like that’s probably better left for hobbies, and… Allowing PostCurious things to be professionally made because it just ends up being very time consuming. And it’s no longer at a scale that is really feasible to, to do by hand.

George: 7:05
That is both great, but also I can imagine as a maker myself, I have this tendency to want to do everything myself and do it by hand and find the most joy in that but so you’ve actually gone through this transformation of being a maker and making things by hand to just running a professional business now, right?

Rita: 7:24
Yes, I suppose so. I still make things by hand, but I think at this point it’s more of it’s more in the prototyping process for the games rather than in the actual finished product.

George: 7:35
Let’s go back a little bit to that first project, because to me, this is still a little bit of a puzzle tale. How does one raise 300, 000 with the first project, with the first campaign? What did you do to get there?

Rita: 7:50
Honestly, I was also blown away by how well it did not going to lie. I think part of it was. I tried my best to first of all just do as much research as I could into how to run a good campaign. So as everybody else, I’m gonna thank Jamie Stegmaier for his blog which is an amazing resource. He actually backed the campaign and I was so happy because I was like, I wouldn’t be able to do this if it weren’t for you. Thank you. But we ran ads. For it on Facebook, I had developed a modest mailing list by that point. So from all of the people who had ordered the Tale of Ord and I’d just been starting to send out monthly newsletters and collecting emails slowly. So I think by the time we launched Emerald Flame, maybe there were like 2000 people on that list. Not huge, but enough that… There were enough interested people on the first day that it funded pretty quickly. And that was, of course, the goal. I think the visual element of it was a huge factor, especially in this game, because I had a lot of people tell me I’d Facebook ad before. But this cover was just so attractive. A shout out to Liga Klavina who did the artwork for the cover, because I think that really, Calls out to people in a way that is special. And otherwise, it had pretty good reviews. So I think that at least convinced people To think that this game is probably actually good. But, I don’t know. It’s one of those snowball effects, right? Like when something is just receiving a lot of attention at one moment, I think it makes other people want to hop on. And there was also the pandemic factor because this was launched. So I was planning on launching in April of 2020 in March of 2020. I changed that plan a little bit because no, nobody knew what was going to happen and everything was just utter chaos and by the end of May, things had calmed down a little bit in the sense that we were in lockdown, but at least we knew more or less what was happening. So I was like, okay, this seems like an all right time to launch. At least things are not as crazy right now. But people were looking for things to do. And if you looked at the Google results for how many people searched the word puzzle during 2020, it was exponentially higher than ever before. So I think that was probably had a little bit to do with it as well, even though they wouldn’t receive this game for quite a while. I think people were still on the lookout for activities that they could do at home.

George: 10:43
You’re being too modest because yes, I’m sure that played a role, but you didn’t just get lucky once you did three campaigns and they all did really well. So there’s a pattern here. What do you feel is your formula for success on crowdfunding?

Rita: 11:01
I think my goal is to. Make games that are an easy buy in the sense that it looks good. It plays well it has The reviews to back that up. And it has components that people Want to look at and they want to hold in their hands and I think we try to I say we I try to make games that are You know also art in their own way and it takes a very long time for me to develop anything because i’m trying to make something that Is unique and that isn’t something like a lot of other things that are out there and I think That comes across to people,

George: 11:43
just great products. You lead with great products. Yeah. Yeah. I think I like that. I like the honesty in that because I think that very often is the answer to as to why something either does really well or fails and especially when things don’t go so well, people like to blame it on everything else, but the product. And so I think it’s a very honest answer. When you have a great product, it just. There’s just a draw to it. That’s organic. But you did also mention you run some ads is that something you do yourself and you taught yourself or do you have someone who helps you with that?

Rita: 12:18
I made an attempt at it. Facebook ads manager is one of the worst things i’ve ever experienced and I hope I never touch it again. So after trying to do that. I did end up hiring, an agency to run ads During the campaign, and I’m still experimenting with what works well for that. I’ve used a different agency for it for each campaign so far. And I’ll be using somebody else for the next one. So we’ll see how that goes. Not because any of them were particularly unsatisfactory, but just because I’m still figuring out who I like working with best. And I think the results are not extremely different across the board. So at least from what I’ve seen so far,

George: 13:03
100% agree with you. I think we’re an agency, obviously. So this, I, this, I might sound a little biased, but I had this conversation yesterday with with the creator and. And as an agency owner, I can confidently say we’re all the same in the output. But I think what’s really different and really important is the process and kind of the customer service. And one of the big things for us, for example, is we. If we can run the ads out of the creator’s ad account with the creator’s pixel so that you can learn from that and retain your own data. And hopefully just tell us, Hey, Facebook ads manager looks a lot less scary now because I’ve seen you guys do it. And thank you so much. I’ll take it from here. I ultimately think that’s like the best possible outcome. So that’s, I completely feel you. And I completely agree. Most agencies produce the same results. It’s more about the process. That’s actually another good strategy. I think just try different agencies. Are you trying different agencies within a single campaign or you’re doing like one campaign per agency?

Rita: 14:02
One campaign per agency so far. Yeah,

George: 14:04
That too, I think makes a lot of sense. Are you also doing ads for your pre launch or are you at this point right now where you have a community already built up? That covers your pre launch so

Rita: 14:15
we’ve actually never done ads for pre launch But I think we will this time around even though I have way more people built up on our mailing list now even for Threads of Fate, I think still the majority of backers came from sending out the newsletter on the day that it launched. So I think that’s the main people are going to be returning backers. But… I, but so many people have recommended pre launch ads and say that it’s like better value. So I figured I would give it a try this time around and let’s see if it works. Yeah

George: 14:56
I would agree with that. I think it is great value as long as the price of the product is somewhat high ish. But in general, I think 10, 20 products are very hard to make profitable. Yeah, that’s I think that’s words of good advice. Before we dive into your upcoming game I would like to also know the deep, dark stuff. What have been some of the toughest challenges throughout your crowdfunding journey?

Rita: 15:20
I think especially in the beginning, but even now it’s very hard for me to ignore. People who are being very loud or negative. And thankfully, I haven’t had a lot of those. My backers are absolutely amazing. It’s two people out of two thousand, right? But, it still can ruin your day when they decide to. I think sometimes that’s just a bit of a struggle, especially most recently it was, like, after. The campaign and just like launching the pledge manager and people having issues with things that are and just not actually giving me a chance to even troubleshoot with them but just like jumping to conclusions and Saying loud things in the comments. I think also like Creating engagement during the campaign is something that I’m always trying to get better at, and since Numeral Flame we’ve been running weekly puzzles through, throughout each one, so every week I’ll post a puzzle and people can solve it and submit their answers, and usually there’s some kind of drawing with a prize at the end for people who submit their answers correctly, and it’s not meant to be a competition, like whoever gets it first will get it, but it’s You know, everybody has enough time to submit whatever they want. Because it’s all, it’s all in good fun, but in Threads of Fate, I tried to drum up some more audience engagement and created kind of this, I had the idea to have a contest of submitting some artwork that we could include on the interior of the box and we didn’t get any submissions for it. So that was a little bit of a bummer but I was like, okay, I guess we’re just not gonna I don’t have anything here. But I’m always trying to, trying and often failing it feels like to come up with more ways to get people to be participating in the campaign throughout.

George: 17:13
Not getting any submissions for user generated stuff is better than getting people come up with some awful stuff

Rita: 17:19
That’s true. Consider yourself lucky. Maybe I looked at it. Yeah, you’re right. I think so. Maybe the worst outcome would have been to have one very terrible one.

George: 17:30
And just getting someone who like submits. And it’s something obscene is one thing is you can just discard it, but if you get the worst one is where someone really tries their best and they’ve put a lot of effort into something, and it’s horrible, it’s just, they say their their kid helped, and then you have to turn that down. So I think you dodged a bullet there.

Rita: 17:49
Yeah you’re probably right. It was an experiment and it failed. And that happens sometimes. That’s fine. I was inspired by the Sagrada artisans campaign that like the Sagrada legacy game, because they had opened submissions for user designed Windows for their booster pack or like the bonus pack for the Kickstarter. And Sagrada is one of my favorite games, so I submitted one, and one of my, and that design will be in the booster pack. And I was like, this is so cool! Wouldn’t it be really cool for people to have something of theirs in the game, like, how can I do something like that? So it didn’t quite work out in the same way, but that’s fine. Lesson learned.

George: 18:30
Lesson learned. And also, yeah, potential crisis avoided. Looking forward, the Morrison Game Factory. It’s coming up. What can you share with us about this upcoming game? What can we expect?

Rita: 18:43
Yeah, the Morrison Game Factory will also be an interesting experiment for me because it will be the first game I’m publishing that I didn’t design myself. It is written and designed by Lauren Bello, who is a TV and film writer, and she’s very deeply immersed in the escape room and puzzle and immersive theater space and she’s played many tabletop puzzle games. She helped do the rewrite of the Tale of Ord in creating Threads of Fate this will be entirely her creation that I… Helped improve in some small ways, we fixed some puzzles from her prototype version and we did a bunch of graphic design updates, got some new artwork made, and I’m excited to see how people react to it. I have one other game that wasn’t a Kickstarter, it’s called Adrift, and it’s… It’s probably the most beginner friendly game in the catalog right now, and I think the Morrison Game Factory will probably join it in that aspect. So I think it, I’m curious to see if it will be appealing to maybe people who are not like as crazy enthusiasts of puzzle games who are, really want to buy a game that’s going to last nine hours over multiple sessions, but it’s actually something that can be played in one sitting.

George: 19:59
So in just three short years, you have gone from hand building your things to now becoming a publisher of other people’s work as well.

Rita: 20:08
Somehow. It’s a little bit crazy. I am constantly wishing that I could create like extra clones of myself because there’s really just too many things to do.

George: 20:18
Are you happy with how things have turned out? Are you happy that you now own a publishing business in a game studio? Or it, yeah, like, how do you feel about where you are

Rita: 20:27
right now? This is absolutely my dream job, so yes. But I guess really my dream job would be somebody take the business aspects off my hands and I can spend more time on design. And I’m working on that a little bit. Starting to work with somebody to begin handling the logistical things so that I’m not doing five people’s jobs, but maybe three just to narrow it down just a little bit. Because between it’s like design, production, logistics, customer service some marketing, so many other things. So yeah.

George: 21:00
Are you hitting any of the upcoming conventions? Is there any way we can preview the Morrison game factory before it launches?

Rita: 21:08
Unfortunately, no, I will be most likely having a booth at Pax Unplugged this December. So we might have a demo copy there, but not until then. Okay,

George: 21:21
That’s still pretty good. And when’s the project launching?

Rita: 21:23
I will be in October.

George: 21:24
Okay, perfect. And do you have a funding goal set?

Rita: 21:28
It’s probably going to be$30,000.

George: 21:30
Okay, that’s modest compared to all your other successes. I think it’s, I think you’re not worried about that, are you?

Rita: 21:37
No, it’s similar to Light in the Mist in that It’s a lower priced game than something like Threads of Fate, which is a lot of premium components, and it’s very complicated to produce, so we’re looking at something that’s a little bit Simpler and a little bit more affordable. So because it is more affordable to print, we can also set the goal a little bit lower. That’s

George: 22:00
that’s great. That’s really awesome. So the Morrison Game Factory is coming in October. Folks might be able to preview it in December at PAX Unplugged. All the links. Will be in the show notes. What are the best ways for folks to learn about the upcoming game landing page? Kickstarter pre launch page?

Rita: 22:19
Yes, we do have a Kickstarter pre launch page. So if you search the Morrison Game Factory, it should come up. But you can also find it by going to postcurious. com and just going to games. It’ll come up in that list. And you can follow us at PostCurious on

George: 22:35
Instagram. Amazing. We will make that all into clickable links. So if you’re listening, wherever you’re listening. Go into the description, find those links and follow Rita and PostCurious and most importantly, the Morrison Game Factory. Rita, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. I know you must be super busy with five people’s full time jobs. I crammed into one. So thank you so much.

Rita: 23:00
Thanks so much for having me.