The Game Station Kickstarter: One Month In, Here's What We've Learned

By Colin Archer  ·  June 29, 2026

A month ago, we hit "launch" on something we'd been chewing on for the better part of a year. The Game Station Kickstarter went live on June 1, and the goal was simple to say and terrifying to do: take the custom battlemats, neoprene playmats, and 3D terrain we make right here and put them in front of the wider wargaming world. Thirty days later, I want to pull back the curtain and tell you honestly what we've learned — the good, the surprising, and the parts that humbled us.

First, the headline. The response has been better than we dared to hope. When you run a local game store in Texas, you get used to a certain scale. You know your regulars by name, you know which tables fill up on Friday nights, and you know roughly how many playmats walk out the door in a month. A Kickstarter blows all of that up. Backers came in not just from across the country but from countries we've never shipped a single order to. That alone made the whole thing feel worth it.

What surprised us most

The biggest lesson of this first month is that people care about the why as much as the what. We figured backers would show up for the products. And they did. But the messages we get most often aren't about thread count or print resolution — they're about the fact that a brick-and-mortar store still bothers to manufacture its own gear. In an era where most accessories are drop-shipped from the same three factories, "made by the people who actually play on it" turns out to mean something.

That tracks with where the broader hobby is heading. Look at the crowdfunding landscape right now and you'll see modular terrain projects pulling in tens of thousands of backers and millions in pledges — campaigns like Battle Systems and the FutureProof modular terrain line have proven that wargamers will fund gear that's beautiful, sturdy, and built to last. The appetite is there. What people are tired of is generic. Our bet from the start was that gamers want products designed by someone who has actually lost a game because the terrain was garbage. One month in, that bet is looking sound.

The numbers told us something

I won't bury you in spreadsheets, but a couple of patterns jumped out of the battlemat Kickstarter results that are worth sharing. The neoprene battlemats — particularly the 44"x60" wargaming size — outpaced everything else by a wide margin. That confirmed a hunch: serious 40K and Age of Sigmar players are done with mousepad-thin mats that curl at the corners. They want a full table surface that lies flat and survives a decade of campaigns.

The second pattern was the playmats. The TCG crowd — Magic, Pokemon, and Star Wars Unlimited players — went straight for the custom designs, and the gift-oriented backers wanted something personal. We expected wargamers. We underestimated how many card players were waiting for a playmat that didn't look like everyone else's.

What we'd do differently

Honesty time. We made mistakes. We under-built our early-bird tiers, so the best deals vanished faster than we anticipated and a few folks felt they'd missed the boat. We've adjusted. We also learned that backers want updates more often than you think you need to send them — silence reads as trouble even when everything is fine. If you're a creator reading this someday, over-communicate. It costs you nothing and it builds the kind of trust that turns a backer into a regular.

The other thing: fulfillment planning has to start before you launch, not after. We're a game store first, a manufacturer second, and balancing the daily rhythm of the shop against a few hundred pledges to pack is a real logistics puzzle. We're handling it — but I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't map it out more carefully next time.

Where we go from here

The campaign isn't over, and neither is the work. Everything we're funding — the battlemats, the playmats, the 3D terrain — becomes part of the permanent "Made by TGS" lineup once the dust settles. If you backed us, thank you, sincerely. You didn't just buy a mat; you helped a small-town Texas game store prove that it could build something for the whole hobby. If you haven't pulled the trigger yet, there's still time to get in before the campaign closes, and the website will carry the full range afterward.

A month ago this was a gamble. Today it feels like the start of something we'll be doing for a long time. Come see us in store, check out the campaign, and roll some dice on a mat built by people who actually play the games. That's the whole point.

Want to see what all the fuss is about? Browse the Made by TGS collection at thegamestationstore.com, or stop by the shop and put your hands on a battlemat before you buy. We'll have the dice ready.