Funeral Board Game in the Works

FUNERAL DIRECTOR: A Race to Your Final Resting Place is a proposed board game to make funeral planning fun. It’s currently a project at Kickstarter.com, an innovative avenue for independent entrepreneurs to get funding for their creative projects.

The game is best played by four people. They pick a card to learn how they die, then the fun begins as they use coffin-shaped game pieces to navigate the funeral planning process. The game is meant to encourage conversations about disposition choices, funeral costs, environmental impact, personal bucket lists and more.

As creator Ken Kolsun describes it, “FUNERAL DIRECTOR is intended to reveal personal attitudes and beliefs about death and its rituals; it will generate considerable lively conversation. It’s a tricky subject, but playing this game enables people to talk about it without the seriousness usually associated with this subject. Believe me this game experience is fun and speaks to human behavior. Even though we are often curious about the mystery of death, it’s a subject most of us like to avoid; we would like to encourage people to feel open in discussing these issues. Hopefully our game provides a comfortable format.”

Here’s the link to a short video about Ken and his project.

http://kck.st/MB9Yhw

Kickstarter is a major player in a larger new phenomenon called Crowdfunding. It is a way to raise very small to very large amounts of money from large numbers of people to support a project.

If Kickstarter deems your project worthy it gets invitingly posted on the Kickstarter website, which enables a “backer,” that’s anyone, to “donate” money to help the “creator” put together enough funds to make that dream project come true. “Donations” can be made with a click.

Only if the money goal is met by the stated target date does the creator receive the funds. If not, then pledged funds are not collected from the backers. If the donation drive is successful, Kickstarter takes 5% of the proceeds, nothing if the drive is unsuccessful.

Currently, the project has 17 backers who have donated $1,376 toward the goal of $11,000 to fund a proposal package to game manufacturers. The deadline to raise the funds is August 26.

We’ve got The Newly-Dead Game™ as an option to help start the conversation, but we need more games like this out there. Let’s give these folks a hand!