How AEG Celebrates 30 Years With Unique Board Game Campaign

Milestones are a big thing, whether it is for a person, organization, or business. Alderac Entertainment Group is celebrating its 30th Anniversary in 2025. AEG just wrapped up its huge Kickstarter campaign, “Into the Fun Factory.” The aptly named campaign featured the new game “Into the Machine” plus a slew of AEG classic games, and expansions like “Smash Up,” “Space Base,” “Tiny Towns,” and “War Chest.” AEG’s John Zinser joined Table Talk (WJON’s bi-weekly show on board gaming) on Saturday to talk about Into the Fun Factory and other upcoming projects.

Zinser says the project was kind of a fun Gumbo campaign, and everything just came together to get all the games to come together in one project:

“We’re always working on expansions and additional content for our evergreen titles, and so we had a bunch of this stuff when we sat down and said we want to do something special for our 30th Anniversary, and the idea of putting them all together in a single campaign sort of jelled and came together pretty quickly.”

He says the most interesting part of the campaign is the benefit of getting the new game “Into the Machine” for a reduced cost:

“I think the thing for me about the Fun Factory campaign that is the most interesting is the fact that we have gameified what’s going to happen in the pledge manager. When somebody backs the campaign and goes to the pledge manager, they are able to, the price of the “Into the Machine” game will be tied to the number of things that you have in your cart. If you buy a bunch of micro expansions or if you go shopping and buy the Smash Up stuff, the price of “Into the Machine” goes down with the more items that end up in your cart.”

Zinser says people may be able to get “Into the Machine” for free if they purchase enough other games. Not to worry if you missed out on the Kickstarter campaign, because Zinser says they will have a Late Pledge option coming in about two weeks.

In addition to talking about AEG’s 30th Anniversary campaign, we also spoke about the latest game coming from John D. Clair, Mystic Lands, on Kickstarter. Zinser says Mystic Lands improves upon Mystic Vale’s card-crafting mechanic:

“It is a leveled-up experience in all ways, and I personally think it is, there were other people who took the card-crafting craze and sort of leveled up what card crafting looked like, and I think we’re gonna take back the throne as having the best card-crafting game ever made.”

Zinser says Mystic Lands is due to launch on November 7th, and people can sign up to follow it to be notified when the campaign does officially launch.

Co-host and gaming expert William Pankratz with Games By James also updated us on three new games hitting the shelves in the last two weeks in “Lunar Skyline” by Charlie McCarron, “Cupcake Craving” by Nicole Fende, and “Knitting Circle,” a new release from Flat Out Games and AEG. Charlie McCarron and Nicole Fende are local designers, and Fende will join Table Talk live on November 1st to talk about her game and Minnesota Protospiele. You can catch Table Talk every other Saturday at 8:10 a.m. on WJON opposite the Woods Garden Show.