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Backers threw $2.8 million at a Warhammer parody in days.
Two days ago, Flashgitz asked Kickstarter backers for $50,000 to fund a board game based on their own YouTube parody of Warhammer 40,000. As I’m writing this, the campaign sits at $2,830,715 from 7,529 backers. That’s 5,661% of the ask, with 24 days still on the clock. That’s not a stretch-goal problem anymore. That’s a “does our printer even go that fast” problem.
The campaign’s own tagline doesn’t pretend otherwise: “Crush aliens, plunder loot, and enslave children in this rip-roaring SPACE KING action game PACKED with minis and lore.” If that line makes you flinch a little and laugh anyway, you already understand the show.
If you don’t watch Flashgitz, here’s the fast version: Tom and Don make an animated series called Space King, which takes 40k’s whole grimdark shtick, genetically engineered supersoldiers, an absent god-emperor everyone worships and nobody has actually seen, a galaxy of xenophobic murder machines who call it duty, and plays it completely straight while making the soldiers act like violent, easily distracted teenagers.
The Captain wants to deploy genocide bombs because that’s just what you do. Hatemonger hates aliens so much it accidentally works as a tactic.
Bryce builds a translator that drills into people’s skulls because subtlety was never the point. Flashgitz will tell you, with a straight face, that this has absolutely nothing to do with Warhammer. Nobody believes them, and that’s the joke.
Let’s Talk About the Money
A $50,000 goal is a modest ask for a miniatures-heavy board game. Flashgitz cleared it within hours of launch, and the average pledge across all 7,529 backers works out to roughly $376, which tells you this crowd wasn’t dropping in for the cheap seats and calling it a day. Whatever number is on the page when you click through, assume it’s bigger than what I just wrote.
Here’s what actually buys you a seat, and how the crowd actually voted with its wallet:
| Tier | Price | What it gets you | Backers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recruit | $99 | The base game, $20 under eventual retail | 1,353 |
| Psycho Warrior | $299 | Base game + War World, B-Positive, Psycho Warrior Pack, Weapon Pack, Space King Favor, Lore Book | 4,876 |
| Super Psycho Warrior | $699 | Everything above plus a metal game box and a Tom & Don signed medal | 845 (capped at 3,000) |
| Psycho Monster | $1,199 | Everything above plus a custom audio line from a Space King character | 62 (capped at 75, nearly gone) |
| Globulus Maximus | $7,777 | Everything above plus your face turned into a Psycho-Warrior in a future episode | 15 (sold out) |
Nearly two-thirds of everyone who backed a reward tier picked the $299 Psycho Warrior box, not the $99 base game. That’s the real story in the numbers: this isn’t a crowd testing the water at the cheapest entry point, it’s a crowd that already decided it wants the full stack. And Globulus Maximus, the $7,777 tier that gets your likeness written into an actual episode, is gone. Fifteen people paid nearly eight grand each to become a joke character in a comedy show, and Flashgitz sold out of the slots.
What’s Actually In The Box
Strip away the merch-drop energy and there’s a real game design underneath, at least on paper. Two to four players take Psycho Warriors through five missions, working together to kill aliens and clear objectives while separately racking up points to become the Space King’s personal favorite.
That’s a semi-cooperative structure, everyone needs the team to survive, but only one of you wins, and the game hands you the tools to make sure your teammates don’t get there first. Tactics Cards let you help another player or sabotage them outright.
A Command Deck runs enemy behavior so nobody’s stuck babysitting the AI, and an Event Deck keeps missions from playing identically twice. Die in combat and you respawn instead of sitting out, which matters a lot in a game that’s clearly betting on chaos over careful positioning.
The minis are the real headline for a lot of backers, and they’re not shy about scale: Psycho Warriors run around 50mm, standard enemies come in smaller at roughly 36mm, and boss figures top out past 100mm. Pre-painted and paintable versions are both on the table depending on tier. Jacen Sievers gets the designer credit, with Edgar and Lander Ramos sculpting, Javier Navarro leading the art, and a full separate credit for whoever illustrated the Tactics Cards specifically, which tells you someone cared enough about that one subsystem to hire for it individually. The full rulebook is already up as a public download on the campaign page, not locked behind a pledge, which is more than plenty of minis-first Kickstarters bother doing before they’ve hit a dollar of funding.
Should Games Workshop Be Nervous
Probably not financially, $2.8 million is real money but it’s a rounding error against a company that size. What should needle them a little is what Space King actually is as satire.
It doesn’t invent a joke about 40k from the outside, it just plays the lore completely straight and lets you notice how insane it already is. An absent god-king everyone worships without question, soldiers whose entire personality is genocide and loyalty, a universe with zero room for nuance, that’s not a parody exaggerating Warhammer. That’s Warhammer’s actual pitch, delivered without the seriousness Games Workshop usually wraps around it.
The show works because it clearly loves the source material enough to know exactly which buttons to push.
Whether the board game earns that same read is the open question. A crowdfunded minis game backed by a comedy audience has a well-worn failure mode: gorgeous sculpts, thin rules, a box that photographs great and plays like an afterthought. Flashgitz at least isn’t hiding from that scrutiny, the rulebook is public before the campaign even closes, and their own risk disclosure says outright that the final product will differ from the prototypes shown on the page. That’s standard Kickstarter language, but it’s worth reading as the honest version of what I just said: nobody, including the people making it, is promising you the shelf copy plays exactly like the pitch. The mechanics on paper, betrayal built into a cooperative shell, respawns instead of elimination, a Command Deck doing the GM’s job, are the right instincts. Execution is a different conversation, and it’s one nobody can have honestly until the game ships and actual tables get to break it.
Should You Back It
If you’re already a Space King fan, you already know whether $99 buys you a fun night or just guilt about unpainted plastic sitting in a closet. That’s not a knock, it’s just what backing a comedy-brand board game before release always is: a bet on the people, not a reviewed product.
Kickstarter delivery is pointed at December 2027, with a wider retail release expected to follow into early 2028. Anyone who’s backed a miniatures campaign before knows that date is a starting point for negotiation, not a promise, especially once shipping and customs get added back on top through the pledge manager later.
Most of this campaign’s own backers already made the call for you: 4,876 people skipped the $99 base box entirely and went straight for the $299 Psycho Warrior tier with the full expansion stack. If you’re going in at all, that’s clearly where the crowd thinks the real value sits.
I’d treat anything past the Psycho Monster tier as a donation to a YouTube channel you already like rather than a board game purchase. At $7,777 a slot, that’s honestly closer to what it is, and the fifteen people who bought one already know it too.
I’ll circle back once actual copies exist and people who aren’t already fans have had a table with it. Until then, the only thing confirmed is that Flashgitz found out exactly how much their audience will pay to own a piece of their own joke, and the answer was: a lot.
