A board game designed in lockdown by an eight-year-old and her father has raised more than £88,000 on a crowdfunding site.
Cora Hughes, from Huddersfield, designed the game – CoraQuest – in partnership with her dad, Dan, a mental health nurse. “I never really imagined myself as a board game designer, but during lockdown everything got tedious and every day felt the same,” said Dan. They created the game at their kitchen table in between home school lessons.
CoraQuest sees heroes fight their way through quests, rescuing people and collecting treasure in the process. The game’s Kickstarter page describes it as “a cooperative and customisable dungeon crawl adventure for the whole family”.
The project’s original funding target was £12,060, the amount needed to cover the cost of producing 400 games, and it took just 40 minutes to surpass this mark. By Friday afternoon it had raised more than £88,000 on Kickstarter, with more than 3,000 pre-orders placed.
“I had no idea that it would reach its funding target so quickly, but we were hopeful that we’d have enough people to tip us over 400,” said Dan, who expects the fully realised game to be ready to go in November.
“We’re just so excited. It would be incredible if the game went from our kitchen table to the kitchen tables of 3,000 other families.”
Dan said he had long been into board gaming, with Dungeons and Dragons a personal favourite, and he believed more children should get into them.
The game features Cora’s own artwork as well as submissions from children all over the world, including Canada, Norway, Germany and the US. The rulebook for CoraQuest includes guidance and encouragement on how to create and draw your own heroes, characters and adventures.
“My favourite part of the game is how much you can customise it,” said Cora, who said she wanted to be either an artist or an astronaut when she is older.
Dan was hopeful that CoraQuest will be picked up by a publisher, but said the game’s success had not inspired him to start designing board games full-time. “I’ve got no great ambitions to be a millionaire board-game publisher!”
All that’s left now is for lockdown to end so that Cora can play CoraQuest with the other children at the board game club the pair run in Huddersfield.
“We just wanted to inject some fun and creativity into lockdown,” added Dan.