Curb Appeal

Why Curb Appeal?

Hi! Tibor here. I'm getting my PhD in math. When people ask me what I want to do when I grow up, I tell them, "Honestly? I just wanna make games with my friends." I had the idea for Curb Appeal a couple years ago, and never really expected it to go anywhere. But the thought of a board game about decorating your home while your life is otherwise falling apart just brought a joy to me that refused to die in the face of common sense. So, I badgered my closest friends into setting aside their priorities and bringing Curb Appeal to life with me.

They say Stanley Kubrick was hired to stage the moon landing, but that he insisted that they film on-site. We took a break from making Pieces of Mind, our visual-novel-to-be, in order to make this. Partly because the scale of the project is much smaller, but also because we felt it was more likely to succeed on Kickstarter and that its success might help us bring more projects to life. But as goes Kubrick's story, we were determined to make a game that we would actually want to play. And considering that of the four of us, two have graduate degrees in math, one named an LLC after dinosaurs, and the fourth spends all her free time drawing at home... Yeah, we're no strangers to tabletop games.

Now, we're about half a year into things, with four spreadsheets for cards and the like, several Google docs for rules and clarifications (all version-controlled, of course), and a Drive full of assets drawn by Kelsey (the aforementioned art hermit). This April, we went to a board game convention with a prototype in a box stitched together from the corpses of cereal boxes. We had a blast playtesting with the people there, and we can't wait to share Curb Appeal with the world!

Central Premise

Make yours the nicest home in the neighborhood, by any means necessary. Skirt HOA guidelines in the name of earning the appraisal of your neighbors during quarterly celebrations! Just make sure to stuff all your violations in the garage in time for inspections. That's where you can put next season's decorations, your broken lawn mower, and the grass you didn't have time to mow!

Gameplay Overview

Games consist of up to four seasons, divided into a number of rounds, during which each player takes one turn, in order. On each of their turns, players can perform a number of actions, such as displaying/hiding decorations or performing maintenance. At the end of each season, a Celebration determined by the season and the current HOA President is scored, awarding an amount of Appraisal based on the alignment of each player’s decorations to the scoring goals of the Celebration. Then, each player may make one Action, their house is Inspected, and then a new HOA Committee is drawn.

Meet Your Neighbors

A neighborhood is nothing without its residents. Meet the likes of

• Officer Stevens: The head of the neighborhood watch. Officer is his first name.
• Dan Valism: A wonderful neighbor who has never been convicted of his crimes.
• Lonnie Moore: He likes to take long walks through short grass.
• Flossie Domingo: The chair of the Flamigo party. Some say her feet have never touched the ground at the same time.
• Bob.

Any many, many more!

Win Their Favor

There's nothing more suburban than putting your beliefs on display for all to see... except maybe lying about them for brownie points. Your neighbors may be staunch Gnomeowners. Or maybe they're firmly affiliated with the Flamigos. Either way, the more your decorations agree with their beliefs, the more they may be willing to overlook your HOA violations, should they inspect you. But watch out! The opposite is also true.

Get Your Priorities Straight

At some point, when you believe you have enough Moneys in your Life's Savings to decorate your home for the remainder of the year, you can choose to quit your job in order to forego regular income for the remainder of the game in order to spend more time decorating your home.

Moneys

Speaking of moneys, this is Kickstarter, after all. Your contributions are what make Curb Appeal possible, and here's how:

• Overhead
  • Tooling for the Maintenance Violation holder and bespoke d12
  • Tooling for the non-standard score trackers (they'll be adorable once they exist!)
• Materials
  • Hundreds of cards
  • Dozens of Maintenance Violation tokens
  • Four Home Boards and one Community Board
  • Five bags of tokens for voting
  • Maintenance Violation holder and bespoke d12
  • Eight standard dice
  • Rules and rules clarifications pamphlets

All of this adds up. While we don't have an exact breakdown of what each of these will cost, it's safe to say we'll be in the thousands of dollars, likely in the ballpark of $10,000 once all's said and done.

Timeline

We're hoping to launch the Kickstarter in August, which should give us enough time to finalize the game and begin sorting out manufacturing. This would end the Kickstarter in September, which means we should be able to send it off for distribution in late 2026 and begin fulfillment sometime around early 2027.