Dark Web: the hacking card game that never shipped
- Planned: 2017
- Players: 3–6
- Cards: 128 mini cards
- Status: Kickstarter cancelled
Dark Web was a planned 128-card game for 3 to 6 players: 1990s hackers race to download evidence against an evil corporation while one or more players secretly work for it. It mixed hidden roles with push-your-luck drawing. The July 2017 Kickstarter was cancelled after a month, and we found no record of a release.
This is an archive page about a game from the original Spider-Goat Games. We Geek Together runs this site now and is not the game’s publisher. About this site.
Dark Web was the Spider-Goat Games campaign that didn’t fund, and the publisher was unusually open about why. That openness is the reason this page, and our Kickstarter mistakes series, exists.
How it would have played
In the 1990s, a group of hackers who only know each other by screen names team up to take down the Moore-Ally-Good Corporation. One or more of them is secretly working for the corporation’s IT department.
- Four rounds. The hackers need to download enough data files across four rounds to expose the corporation.
- Push your luck. On your turn, play any action scripts in your hand, then decide whether to bank the data you’ve found or keep drawing. Draw too many locks and your connection drops, and you lose everything you found that round.
- Hidden roles. IT players win by stopping the hackers, but once they reveal themselves the hackers can work around them, so they have to sabotage quietly.
It is a semi-cooperative game: most players work together, but they can’t be sure who they’re working with. Our guides to social deduction games and push-your-luck games explain both mechanics.
Why the campaign failed
The campaign launched July 11, 2017 with a $14 pledge and a $3,000 goal. To keep the goal low it used mini cards, with standard-size cards as a stretch goal. It was cancelled in August, and the publisher listed three causes:
- Nobody knew it existed. There was very little press or audience-building before launch.
- The art didn’t sell it. ASCII art looked great printed on cards and “homemade” on a Kickstarter page.
- The cards were too small. Backers wanted full-size cards.
The publisher planned to relaunch it with a haunted-house theme, after art for that idea got a much warmer response. We go through the first two mistakes in detail in mistake #1 and mistake #2.
Questions people ask
Was Dark Web ever released?
We found no record of it. The July 2017 Kickstarter was cancelled, and the publisher said it would retheme the game as a haunted-house game before relaunching.
Why did the Dark Web Kickstarter fail?
The publisher named three reasons: almost no marketing before launch, ASCII art that looked homemade on screen, and mini cards that backers didn't want.