Hello everyone,
So this week is special in two ways – first of, I had my birthday on Monday.
Unfortunately, at the age raffle, I drew a “Repeat the Year” card this time, so I didn’t get to be one year older. Too bad.
Still 28-ish-ish.
The other thing that makes this week special is an absolute first for me though, and something I’m quite excited and nervous about… are you ready… drumroll…
I am launching my crowdfunding for the epic
German Verb Card Game and WebApp
Hooray!!
Quite a few of you have checked out the website for the project over the last few months and have subscribed to newsletter there.
And I’ve also described the project on the Kickstarter campaign page, so if you want, you can head right over and check out what we’re planning there :)
Go straight to the Kickstarter
But for those of you who have never heard about this, let me give you a quick primer here as well.
The Project and its journey
A few years ago, I had an idea for a card game for German verbs and their various prefix versions – like gehen, aufgehen, angehen and so on.
The basic idea is to combine base verbs with different prefixes and find out if it has meanings and which meanings it might have.
But the main problem was that such a game needs some sort of reference where you can check whether your ideas and answers are correct. And a normal dictionary is not the best solution because it often lists too many translation options and doesn’t order them by theme. And they don’t give you any insight into why the meanings are the way they are.
And last but not least, they’re just not fun to use.
Originally, I thought I’d do this as a kind of booklet, but there are multiple drawbacks with that – it’s expensive, it’s “big”, it’s hard to extend and it’s kind of a hassle to look something up.
So the only thing that really makes sense is… an app :).
I made a trial version, but then I did some back of the envelope calculation of how many separate entries with examples a basic version of the game would need and that was quite overwhelming. Like… hundreds of combinations, many with several meanings. And they’d all need examples.
Together with the app, this seemed like beyond what I could ever achieve but I never gave up on the idea and slowly slowly started working toward it. And over time, more and more things aligned, and now we’re actually finally at a stage where we can say:
We can actually get this done!!!
By “we” I mean Vítor and me. He’s a young developer from Brasil who’s also helping me with some of the coding for YourDailyGerman.
I’m planning the WebApp together with him and he’ll do all the coding for it, while I’ll focus on the content – so entering all the prefix verbs and their meanings and themes, adding examples and little explanations and so on. And that’s now realistic actually, because I can draw on a lot of work that I did for the YourDailyGerman dictionary :).
The Crowdfunding
So why are we doing a crowdfunding?
Well, two things – the first one is so Vítor can focus on the coding without having to worry about how to pay his bills. He’s still in university and money is tight for his family. He does believe in the project, and wants to be part of it long-term, but if he has to work on the side, he’ll have very little time to actually build it. And I can’t really fund it myself at the moment, at least not without taking a loan.
And the other reason is to get a sense of how many of you are actually interested. The card game is a physical product that we’ll order in bulk and it’s REALLY helpful to have a rough idea of how many we’ll need initially and where you all are, so we can pick a manufacturer that makes sense.
The funding goal we have should be enough to give Vítor enough time to focus on this and also to fund the manufacturing and shipping of the games. If something is left after that … well, that’ll go straight into my beer fund :).
And of course crowdfunding doesn’t mean you just give us money for nothing.
You’ll get the game and the app in return. Actually, we have different tiers of support, each with different rewards, so if you’re just interested in the app, that’s no problem.
You can find out all about the funding and the rewards on our crowdfunding page, so if this project sounds interesting to you and you want to help us make it real, please head right over :)
Head right over to the Kickstarter
So yeah… it’s done. I actually launched a freaking crowdfunding for a really cool project :).
That’s actually a pretty great start into my new year.
Anyway, I really hope you can see the vision and you find it interesting enough to back it. Of course, if you have any questions about any of this, let me know – either here in the comments or over at Kickstarter. And also let me know what you think of the idea as a whole.
Now I’ll withdraw from my beer fund and open a nice IPA.
I wish you a great week and I’ll see you all next time.
Prost :)
Oh, and here’s the original project landing page that we set up a while ago, with some more info about the game in particular:
wpDiscuz
