I’ll ask it again, “How is this even legal?” According to BoardgameWire.com:
The troubled Kickstarter for the miniatures-heavy Cthulhu Wars board game has reached a new low after the company posted personal details of some of its Kickstarter backers online while asking them to contribute more money to the campaign.
…
But despite 87 pallets of the game having now sat in a US warehouse since late April ready to be sent to backers – three years later than expected – Petersen said it only has available revenue to move about six pallets per month.
That means backers with copies in the last clutch of pallets won’t receive their games until December 2024 – four-and-a-half years after the initial delivery estimate.
Petersen says the cost for distributor Gamerati to ship the contents of each pallet is $1,640 – meaning the company is still short almost $143,000.
To combat the delay, Petersen has asked each backer for an extra “contribution” at an average of $55 to get the games shipped “as fast as Gamerati can send it out”.
But it added that asking Gamerati to cut open pallets to find individual backers’ games would be a “logistical nightmare”.
The company has now launched what some backers have described as a Russian Roulette-style operation – adding all of the pallets to its web store as individual items, and allowing customers to find their own and pay part of the $1,640 shipping contribution in $10 increments.
Petersen said it will prioritise the most-funded pallets for the six it ships out every month, adding that any completely funded pallets will be sent “as soon as Gamerati has the bandwidth” – likely within a week of funding. It has not mentioned how much it is costing Petersen to store the pallets while they wait for the money to send out the games.
boardgamewire.com
Thankfully I am NOT a backer of Cthulhu Wars. Even so, I am beyond-totally gobsmacked by the sheer audacity of Petersen Games. It’s so frakking stupid…I don’t even know what else to say.
Yet, apparently there is more!
To make matters worse, a delay in getting emails out to backers about their pallet contributions led to a Petersen Games official posting a spreadsheet on the company’s Discord channel, to help backers identify which pallet their game was on.
But the document of partly redacted emails and pallet numbers also contained hidden tabs with backers’ full names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses – and was on the Discord for several hours before being removed.
boardgamewire.com
I wonder if Petersen Games has factored in the the cost of paying for a year of credit monitoring for all those compromised. Bet not!
I see that “4,339 backers pledged $302,250 to help bring this project to life.” I feel for you, really. But anybody, anybody who supports another Kickstarter or GameFound or whatever “giv’em money and run” campaign from Petersen Games; well, don’t say you weren’t warned.
For the record, I own zero / zilch / nada games published by Petersen Games or written by Sandy Petersen. This whole situation assures me that will never change.
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Rocky Mountain Navy Gamer 
I had a similar situation with Holy Grail over in France and the Rallyman: Dirt game. The COVID crap meant a lot of the people working with China got screwed on their delivery times, and prices on shipping jumped in the meantime, thanks to canceled sailings and fuel prices. So the US/Canadian backers are not getting their games, even though they are sitting in a warehouse in Canada, ready to go.
I now see that Catalyst Games has “teamed up” with Petersen though I have to wonder if “bailout” is the better descriptor.
Generally speaking I like Peterson’s work. But I rebelled at the recent spate of hugely-expensive games he’s produced, so I gave them a hard pass. I even saw him post somewhere about how people complained about the pricing and suggested something, well, cheaper, without the huge expensive pieces. He scoffed. Well, so do I. I’m also pretty skeptical about Kickstarter. Seems I really dodged a bullet on this one. Also, I don’t really think getting a free year of credit monitoring makes everything OK. An identity leak is potentially devastating. We need to re-think the whole idea of storing a person’s data. Maybe there are no pre-orders, no private information, nothing stored, and no damned mailing lists for the rest of our lives.
I’m with you on pricey kickstarters; NO THANK YOU! The free credit monitoring is actually sarcasm. The U.S. government has been paying for my free credit monitoring—one year at a time—for the past decade because they can’t protect my data. You’re right…it doesn’t make it ok. Even the latest incident, which now comes with 2-years coverage and loss insurance up to $5 million, still don’t make it “ok.”