Update about the En Garde Reforged Kickstarter Campaign
Hello, backers. First of all, please allow us to apologize for the confusion around the En Garde Reforged Kickstarter campaign and ensure you that we do plan to ship games to all backers very soon. It has come to our attention that backers just received notification from Kickstarter of an intellectual property dispute around the game. Here is some background.
In the 70’s a role-playing game by the name of En Garde! was created. By the time of our release of our swordfighting game in 2005, that property appeared to be abandoned. However, when our game came out, the owner of that property contacted SlugFest Games and an arrangement was made allowing the two products to co-exist. With the upcoming reboot of our game, the owner of the role-playing property reasserted his claim to exclusive use of the title, asked us to change our name, and filed an IP dispute with Kickstarter. Conversations with the RPG owner have proceeded cordially, and we have agreed to change the name of our product to En Garde Reforged, as previously announced.
Kickstarter takes it as a policy to generally avoid acting as arbiter in an IP dispute, and has therefore locked our campaign until such time as the RPG owner informs them that the situation has been resolved to their satisfaction. We are working with the other party to see that this happens as quickly as possible.
Please rest assured that the only dispute here involves the game’s title, not the game itself. This allows us to confidently say that we will be able to ship the game as promised.
We will give more updates as the situation develops. Thanks for your patience, and sorry for the trouble.
Jeff Morrow
President, SlugFest Games