a new board game for English learners

[BoardGame]

We’re English teachers (husband and wife). We’re developing a board game for English learners.
Here’s an example of vocabulary and grammar cards from our game. What do you think?

https://flic.kr/p/XpAc8f
https://flic.kr/p/XKCnPy

Also, we’d like to share the preview of our Kickstarter page. Any suggestions?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/17 ... n=8e9e9386

[Joe]

Interesting looking game! Well done. You should be aware that your claim that it is the first board game for ESL learners is not accurate:

WORD UP ESL Board Game

[John V55]

Well firstly, it’s not just a resource, it’s a selling product, as in a business promotion. Having said that, it does look interesting and encourages people to actually speak and not just learn the theory, which is what most books do, so as Joe says, well done. You’ve obviously put a lot of effort into this and I suspect you are not getting many hits.

Some advice?

You’re trying to promote English. Your grammar needs to be near perfect.
Your description
‘Scott and Nastya is raising funds for English: The Board Game on Kickstarter! The first game designed for the ESL student and teacher in mind!’

Secondly and having briefly checked your site with software I use for my own, you obviously haven’t got access to your html page and I can tell you it’s a spam farm for the kickstarter site itself. It’s more than likely it also has a ‘nofollow’ tag in place for your individual page. Your aim, I presume, is to get your project out to a wider audience, but your page has so many redirects and 403s that unless someone actually has the website address, it’s not going into a wider Internet circulation.

There are much better free webpages, with access to SEO that you could use to promote your product and actually get it out into the open.

[BoardGame]

You should be aware that your claim that it is the first board game for ESL learners is not accurate:

WORD UP ESL Board Game

Thank you! We didn't see that game. Though we thought we did thorough research. Oops! We'll have to get rid of "the first" then... :cry:

BZW, What do you think about the voice in the video? Some people say it's difficult to understand.

[BoardGame]

You’re trying to promote English. Your grammar needs to be near perfect.
Your description
‘Scott and Nastya is raising funds for English: The Board Game on Kickstarter! The first game designed for the ESL student and teacher in mind!’

Thank you!
I didn't remember writing it. So, at first I thought it was Scott's ego having a freudian slip, as if he subconsciously wanted to take all the credit for the game :evil: But then I realized it was the automatic description put together by Kickstarter. I guess they usually have only one creator. I wonder if there's a way to fix it.

Anyway, that's exactly the reason why we shared the preview. We hope you could point out some mistakes or inaccuracies that we can fix before the launch.
And yes, we haven't launched yet. You're the first people we shared the preview with. So the page isn't public yet. But pretty soon! September 13th!

[BoardGame]

One more question:
Do you think the voice in the video might be difficult to understand for non-native speakers?

[Joe]

Do you think the voice in the video might be difficult to understand for non-native speakers?

Personally I think it might be difficult to understand for NATIVE speakers, and I'm a native speaker. It's weird :twisted:

I presume it's a synthetic voice? The sentence stress is all over the place. It's not natural. Hardly surprising if it's synthetic :roll:

If it isn't synthetic then someone's doing a damn good job sounding like a robot.

[BoardGame]

It's not synthetic. It's actually Scott imitating Batman. Don't ask why :) we just liked it better than his regular voice. It seems to fit the style of the game.

[Norman]

If it fun and helps students learn English - it is a practical winner. I suggest you get 100 teachers to "test" this game in the classrooms and get the feedback. If you are lucky may have a commercial winner to take to market. Leave China out because they will just copy it and sell it themselves under some Chinese brand. Nice job. Keep us posted on your progress.

[BoardGame]

Thanks for the kind words,

We've tested it with a few language schools/meet up groups in Moscow (and a bit here in Florida with the latino community), with mostly positive feedback.

That is definitely a concern about China...
Huge market though :/. In theory we're going to decide where to manufacture based on demand, so "fingers crossed" it'll mostly be Europeans who respect intellectual property rights doing the ordering on kickstarter.

-Scott (the voice actor guy :) )

[Joe]

Who's Batman?

BTW, you posted the same question on EnglishClub.com but you didn't add the link to the video.

[BoardGame]

Thanks. Just added it in the reply.

[John V55]

My advice for what it’s worth is you’re wasting your time with kickstarter and you really both need to sit down and think about doing some proper market research, which needn’t cost anything as it’s simply a process you can do yourselves. You could bill yourselves as something like, ‘The Scott and Nastya original TEFL board game’. A bit of a top of the head naff description, but you see what I mean :)

You could try setting up a page on academia.edu. It won’t be seen much, but the edu address is a powerful ranking factor. There are also ways to increase the amount of views using free software, so it’s ranked more highly.
LinkedIn is another good place to put up a post article, which is picked up by scribd and helps distribute it.

It’s not enough just to put it on one site and hope people will find it. The distribution on social sites like Twitter, facebook, or Google+ are also necessary. At the same time, use your combined names as a brand logo and promote yourselves as part of the product. If it took you a year to put it all together, it will take you another year to promote it. Write a perfect one thousand word article on it and distribute it across the Internet. Include it in your resume as a link (which should already be on the Internet) and in your emails, on Pinterest and uploaded to google images . . .

Once it’s up and running, draw up a business plan to sell it to international schools, they’re going to be your best customers as they’ll buy in bulk . . . Eventually, your brand and product will start to become visible, but it takes an awful lot of working hours and perseverance for that to happen. It’s a long haul, not something that you just put on the spam link kickstart website and hope for the best.
What you have to be careful of is that in the absence of a poor marketing, someone else will grab the idea instead.
Hope this has helped.

[williamson19]

Hello there,

We’re English teachers (husband and wife). We’re developing a board game for English learners.
Here’s an example of vocabulary and grammar cards from our game. What do you think?

https://flic.kr/p/XpAc8f
https://flic.kr/p/XKCnPy

Also, we’d like to share the preview of our Kickstarter page. Any suggestions?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/17 ... n=8e9e9386

Nice game i seen it but you can say that which site to visit and purchase for this game please inform that.

[markwn]

Thanks

[DanielLee888]

Thanks for sharing, I already saved this!