Electrify designed by John D Clair and Ian Hutchison by AEG

The Turn of the Century
17 days ago – Fri, Oct 16, 2026 at 05:02:59 PM

And just like that, we’re done!

We are so proud to have reached over 2,000 backers! We know how hot kickstarter is with new game launches these days, and we are very honored that you chose to help us bring our vision to life.

As the campaign comes to a close, we shift our focus back to the work of getting the game made. Our top priority for this product is to get it into backers’ hands. We know the frustration of having to wait ages for your pledge to arrive. Luckily, the production files are already completed and in the process of review and handoff to printers. After a few samples of components, we should be up and printing.

I, for one, am very excited to get a final production copy. Those dual layered boards are going to heal my soul (and keep my cubes organized, too). I will finally have an official physical version of all the expansion content to play with!

We’ve also unlocked one last stretch goal, adding a free set of stickers and coasters to the visionary pledge! The set of eight coasters represent the eight energy sources in the game (including fusion!) and feature some of Inkgolem’s fantastic and whimsical art. The sticker sheet has a variety of stickers to put on waterbottles, laptops, your planner, or your friend’s back when they aren’t looking. There are even gold stars to award your friends when they remember the game rules without asking!

Now for all the boring stuff that you need to know in order to get your copy of the game secured.

In the following few days:

• Kickstarter will charge your credit card. If your card fails to process, Kickstarter will retry it several times in the following week

• Late Orders for those who missed the campaign will open in the pledge manager as soon as this campaign is over. Simply click the Late Pledge Now Open button on the Kickstarter main page here. DO NOT MAKE A LATE ORDER IF YOU MADE A KICKSTARTER PLEDGE

• The Pledge Manager for Kickstarter backers will be opened three to six weeks from today, with the exact date depending on when Kickstarter transmits the funds from this campaign to us. You will receive an Update and an email from us and emailed notification from the pledge manager when the pledge manager is ready to begin processing your Kickstarter orders. Until then, you do not need to take any action.

• We’ll Update you periodically over the next year when the campaign hits a major milestone. The next major milestone will be when we begin the production process by approving files; that will happen several months from now.

When the pledge manager is ready to allow you to complete your Kickstarter order, you will be sent an email from the pledge manager with a link to access your order. Use that link to complete the checkout process. You can change your Reward, and include add-ons with your Reward. The system will calculate the amount due for shipping & tax and present you with a final total at checkout.

APPLE ID USERS: Please note - if you use your Apple ID to access Kickstarter and you chose to have Apple hide your email, the email address we receive from Kickstarter is useless. Neither we, nor the pledge manager can contact you via email about your order. Please email [email protected] for assistance if you have your account configured in this manner.

How To Get Your Newsletter Promo

If you are a subscriber to our newsletter as of the day we open the Pledge Manager on the pledge manager for Kickstarter orders we will add this content to your order for free. One Newsletter Promo (the Space Base and Electrify Demand promo cards) will be added for free per order. If you are not a subscriber to the newsletter, or if you want more than one, you’ll be able to purchase them for $10 each.

If you don’t know if you are a subscriber or if you want to subscribe, please visit this page:

alderac.com/newsletter

If you sign up and you’re already a subscriber, there is no negative effect. It’s safe to subscribe to be sure. When in doubt, subscribe!

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Some Information about BackerKit, our Pledge Manager for this project

We intend to use BackerKit for this campaign as our pledge manager. We’ve used BackerKit many times in the past and don’t expect any challenges with this campaign.

When the pledge manager is open for Kickstarter backers you will be sent emails from BackerKit with links to your order. You won’t get these emails until after we open the pledge manager for Kickstarter orders. We will post an Update here when the pledge manager is open. Until you see that message, you don’t have to take any action.

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There is a comprehensive FAQ for this campaign that answers many common questions. If you need information please consult the FAQ and see if your question is answered there. If we get a number of enquiries that aren’t addressed in the FAQ, we’ll update the FAQ!

At any time if you have questions, concerns or comments please email [email protected]. We will monitor the Comments channel periodically but the best way to get a response from our team after the campaign ends is via email.

– Ian

Final Stretch and Fusion Expansion Content Feature
18 days ago – Thu, Oct 15, 2026 at 08:52:22 PM

It's Ian, again, coming at you very late with a BONUS UPDATE after a long day of gaming at GameHole con! As I mentioned in our last update, several of us from AEG are enjoying ourselves here in Madison this weekend. We have a prototype of Electrify set up in our booth, and we would love for you to come check it out in person! I am running around to all sorts of events all weekend, but if you catch me in the booth tomorrow I am more than happy to play the game or just chat about it with anyone.

As with all good things, this campaign must come to an end. Tomorrow (Friday) is the FINAL DAY to back Electrify and help us to reach our final stretch goals! We've seen a solid uptick in new backers discovering the campaign as it reaches its conclusion and we are well on our way to unlocking the last few sweet, sweet upgrades. If you are on the fence about making a pledge now, remember that you will be contributing towards making the game the best it can be for everyone!

Content Feature: Fusion Mini Expansion

The Fusion mini-expansion has something for everyone. Originally designed as a way to increase the point ceiling and add additional challenges for experienced players to overcome, this tiny-but-mighty expansion blossomed into far more.

In Electrify, you are always able to send excess resources off to sponsor research, an important mechanic in the game. In this mini-expansion, the genius scientists and engineers at The University who have been doing this research and developing the technology of the world of Electrify behind the scenes are back with a new breakthrough for you to harness: fusion energy.

The primary addition of the expansion is an eighth column for this new energy source. This extension to the player board also consequently makes room to bump your sectors up even higher than before, rewarding players who go above and beyond to innovate a unique path with more powerful activations than ever.

A new energy type requires more demand cards, so the second addition of the mini expansion is a set of demand cards. These demands have even more variety in their difficulty and their rewards than the base game demand cards, offering more variability when playing with the expansion.

These new demand cards sport a brand new type of reward for upgrading your engine: the Grant card. These cards permanently take up space in the columns below your player board, boosting all of your sectors up a column for the duration of the game. (A very powerful upgrade!)

In order to fit more content in an expansion with an economical footprint, the demand cards serve a second purpose in the brand new challenge mechanic. During setup, two challenges are selected at random. These represent the field testing and research tasks you must complete to help your friends at The University. These challenges encourage you to play with flexibility and discover new strategies, and can award you with grants or energy points!

While experienced players will find the flexibility and increased ceiling from the extra energy type very pleasing, even beginner players find enjoyment in the subtle direction provided by the challenge cards. It really is an expansion that a true Electrify fan will never want to play without!

We are so very thankful to all of our backers that have found us over the past several weeks, and we are hoping for a strong finish tomorrow. Electrify is a game that has been in the works for many, many years, and we are so glad to finally get it out to the world.

You are awesome.

– Ian

The Future is Bright
23 days ago – Sat, Oct 10, 2026 at 04:06:06 PM

We did it! Our community has officially broken $100,000 raised on Kickstarter to help bring Electrify to the world. This is a milestone to be proud of! Along with this great accomplishment comes a newly unlocked stretch goal, which adds tuck-boxes for the communal components.

As we reach the home stretch of our campaign, we hope the countdown to the end will bring in some new innovators to help us unlock our last few exciting stretch goals.

$125,000 unlocks a FREE set of stickers and coasters to be added to the bundle of goodies that comes with the Visionary pledge all-in bundle. If you are an innovator level (retail edition) backer and you are thinking about upgrading, doing so while the campaign is live will contribute to unlocking the last few bonuses for everyone.

Our final stretch goal will be at $150,000. Let's see if we can do it!

In other news, I have posted signups in AEG's Community Discord this evening for a handful of learn-to-play events that will take place over the next two days. If you are interested in learning to play the game on BGA with me, keep an eye out for it! If there is enough interest, I will look into adding some more sessions the week of Monday the 19th, after I return home from Gamehole Con.

That's right! Most of this coming week I will be at Gamehole Con in Madison, WI with AEG. We will have a booth presence where you can meet us and pick up new games, plus we will be running full demos of various new and fan favorite titles from AEG and Flatout Games for attendees to come play. There are still some slots open, so we would love for you to pick up tickets here if you are going to be at the convention.

Content Feature: Expansion Tech Packs

It's no secret, Electrify is a deep game! It packs some serious crunch and puzzly engine building goodness into an unassumingly sized box. Once you've learned how to play with the base game cards, much of the game's replayability and sense of discovery comes from the available Tech Packs. The first two (which I featured in our first update) were added to the base game as stretch goal rewards. The next two are included in the Visionary bundle and are not for the faint of engine-building heart. They contain experimental technologies that can provide both additional challenge to the Electrify experience as well as greater possibilities. Only the greatest innovators can harness them to their fullest effect!

Tech Pack Supercharged

This pack of powerful cards brings the "Upcycle" action icon into the game. This icon is both flexible and has huge potential for engine building.

During the "charge" step, a cube is placed on each card that is available for a player to use on their turn, allowing you to resolve each eligible card exactly once as you remove the cubes. Upcycling allows you to break this rule by moving a charge cube from any card to any other card. The potential for huge activations afforded by moving cubes from low-cost to high-cost industry cards can be game-breaking in skilled hands.

Additionally, this tech pack helps you charge more cards than ever before by introducing multi-arrow cards. These monster engine building pieces synergize well with existing up and down pointing arrows, adding some flexibility and consistency to the card pool for players who love arrow chains.

Tech Pack Diversified

This tech pack is for the patient planners. Every card in this pack is specially marked as a "Passive" card, similar to "Ongoing" cards from the automated tech pack. Passive cards ignore regular charging rules. Instead of only being charges when on your chosen sector or when charged by a chain of arrows, passive cards charge any time they are to the left of a sector you charge.

These cards offer small bonuses in every round so long as they remain to the left of the activated sector, making them great pieces of tech for strategies that focus on developing all five sectors or strategies that utilize the planning icons and sector multipliers from the Optimized tech pack.

This was a longer update today! We will continue to post further updates through the last few days of the campaign highlighting our progress as well as the rest of the expansion content and stretch goals. We hope you are as excited as we are! Let's finish strong!

– Ian

Poll Results and Development Musings
28 days ago – Mon, Oct 05, 2026 at 06:59:54 PM

Happy Monday, innovators!

I am writing to you from a coffee shop where, many months ago, I worked on designing a Solo mode for Electrify as part of my role as developer. At that time, I was playing with different methods of automating an opponent using cards and a simplified version of the player board that could be printed on the back of the regular player boards.

Turns out, automating something as complex as Electrify is very, very challenging. Tuning to the correct level of difficulty was a sisyphean task. Eventually it became clear that if I did manage to craft a system that worked consistently as intended (and that’s a pretty big “if”), it would still be very tedious for solo players to operate.

I challenged myself to attempt to understand the intention behind an automated opponent and to find ways to achieve the same results in a more efficient way.

Eventually I landed on a method of automating the systems that typically rely on player interaction and creating challenges for players to overcome that boiled down the interesting bits of multiplayer into a simple set of tokens and scenario cards. Much friendlier and more economical than an automated opponent.

One of the best ways to learn game design is to try, fail, and ask yourself why you failed until eventually you succeed!

Future Content

In our last update, I asked backers to vote on what kind of free PDF content they would be interested in seeing in the future between solo content or a competitive variant. In an effort to avoid causing division between the solo play enthusiasts and social gamers, I offered “both” as an option. To my surprise, the competitive side of our audience came out in force in favor of a more competitive multiplayer variant (even above the option of both).

We are already ideating, and I think we have some strong ideas to test. The challenge in designing this variant is similar to the challenge of creating the solo mode: it needs to be effective while keeping things simple. Given the nature of digital content, it needs to rely as much on the components already available in the box as possible.

At this point in time, it isn’t possible to incorporate any additional content into the game without rushing the design and subsequently delaying production and fulfillment for our lovely backers, but hopefully a printed version can find its way into an expansion in the future once Electrify becomes available and finds its audience. Fingers crossed!

For you fans of solo gaming, don’t fear! Although the competitive gamers won the priority this time, there will still be additional solo content coming down the pipeline later.

The digital competitive variant is planned to be available by the time the game is in the hands of backers, so you will be able to play your choice of variant straight out of the box. I look forward to seeing how people enjoy playing the most and if anyone shares their own variants on BoardGameGeek!

The Campaign

The numbers continue to grow every day. We are getting close to our next stretch goal, which will add tuckboxes to help organize the game when stored. After that, we just have a couple more stretch goals that add some fun goodies and cool bling upgrades!

We have tons of games being played on BGA every day as well. The developers just recently deployed a number of great quality-of-life changes that have further improved the experience.

Thank you to everyone who has been along for this journey. In my next update, I will highlight the expansion content available in the campaign and the awesome things they add to the game, so stay tuned!

– Ian

We are listening... Not in a creepy way!
about 1 month ago – Thu, Oct 01, 2026 at 09:58:28 AM

The BoardGameArena implementation of Electrify continues to improve every day! After some initial hiccups with the transition to Beta, we are now running smoothly. 

Although the game has been tested extensively already, there are still bugs to work out and plenty of ways to improve the experience. If you are playing at all, I highly encourage you to submit bug reports and suggestions for improvements you would like to see through BGA's built in report system. The developers are very fast to respond to these.

Check out open reports and suggestions here. You can "thumbs up" suggestions you agree with or reports of bugs you have experienced.

Speaking of suggestions, I am opening a poll below to gauge interest in some potential free PDF content that may be made available in the future. The first is a more competitive variant to increase interaction and tension, and the other is more solo mode content.

Competitive variant: Early reviews have shown that players who love puzzly social-solitaire games like Space Base, Cubitos, Quacks, or Wingspan have been loving Electrify. Although there is an important element of player interaction that drives much of the decision making in the game, Electrify is intentionally designed to give players space to build their engine and complete their goals simultaneously with their friends without fear of being thwarted. While this is very appealing to many, it can be a turn off for players looking for a game with more competitive teeth. A more competitive variant gives players the option to choose the experience they want to have.

Solo mode content: The solo mode comes with 8 scenarios out of the box, with 4 more introduced in the Fusion mini-expansion. The variation in setup within each means you will be playing a different setup every time, but avid solo players may feel that they run thin on variety after playing through all 12 scenarios. Additional solo mode content could include rules for a four game campaign, additional scenarios, and/or rules for generating your own scenarios.

If you are curious about the solo mode, we've had several great (and very entertaining) streams of the solo mode this week! Check the replays out, here:

• Banzaiator (youtube)
• Board Game Garden (youtube)
• Salt and Sass Games (twitch)

Thank you to all of our backers for being awesome. Hang in there, it's almost the weekend!

– Ian