Royalty Stacks

🎮 The Game

Royalty Stacks is an interactive engine-building game about turning ideas into revenue. Players act as innovation deal-makers, developing a portfolio of businesses in parallel by protecting ideas and launching products to make money.

Players make investment decisions and take strategic bets with each path offering distinct risk–reward profiles. Income is generated over time through product launches, but stacks are vulnerable to interference from opponents via competitive actions and event cards.

The game emphasizes long-term planning, calculated risk-taking, portfolio management, and timing. Players allocate resources across multiple stacks, and adapt to shifting conditions created by shared event decks. Interaction is high, with opportunities for collaboration, disruption, and defensive play throughout the game.

Victory is achieved by building efficient, resilient revenue engines and adapting to both strategic and stochastic pressures over the course of play. The game features two directionally aligned winning conditions. 

The game can be enjoyed in "Base Mode" or "Advanced Mode".

💪 Power Play

🎴 Game flow

📖 Rulebook

📦 What's in the box?

⏱️ Timeline

*These timelines are estimates and may change due to manufacturing, carrier delays, or customs processing. Backers will be notified of any delays via Kickstarter.

📦 Shipping

Shipping costs are not charged during the campaign. The above is the current shipping estimate based on rates today. I will be collecting shipping and any necessary additional fees closer to fulfillment via a pledge manager. 

🥅 Stretch Goals

👨🏾‍🦲 About the Author

Hello, I’m Guru.

I’m a technology transfer professional, helping build startups and industry partnerships to bring new diagnostic tools and drugs to fight cancer.

Technology Transfer is the business of turning academic inventions into real-world products. Ideas from scientists are evaluated, protected, funded, developed, and partnered with industry to bring them as products to market. I created Royalty Stacks to bring the strategy, collaboration, and risk-taking behind this world to the public through a fun and educational game.

Royalty Stacks wouldn’t exist without the support and very many playtesting sessions provided by Hannah, my family, friends, colleagues, the AUTM community, and the PlaytestNW community. (Thank y'all!)

P.S.: This game has nothing to do with “royalty stacking” as used in license agreements. That’s reserved for real life.

🔥 Why back now?

This is my hobby project that started more than 2.5 years ago. By backing today, you’re helping turn my vision into a reality. I intentionally kept this campaign simple, so I can deliver a polished first edition without unnecessary complexity or delays.

Also, this print run includes fascinating facts about inventions, patents, copyrights, and commercialization history on the backs of Idea cards. Future editions may not feature this content.

Can you eventually get it on Amazon? Maybe, but why take that chance, nomsayin'? 

👶 New here?

Interested in carrying Royalty Stacks at your game store, innovation center, incubator, or accelerator? Please reach out at royaltystacksgame@gmail.com and include a brief description of your organization and estimated order quantity. I'll follow up with wholesale pricing and availability.