I have been building boardgames for years, just for me and my mates using art from the web or earlier comics, books etc.

Thanks to circumstances I have managed to wrangle a redundancy package from work and now find myself with money in the back 4 months paid notice and a bunch of projects.

I was thinking about taking a couple of my game ideas and launching them through kickstarter. Now there are a bunch of obvious issues here, I have no rep, the games aren't based on well known IP they are all from my head, I have no experience of Game Publishing. Putting these to one side for a moment from a practical perspective how much of a game do you need to have complete before you go to kickstarter?

Here are some images from my latest game, a Pirate game. I have basic rules written up, I have a complete set of printed cards etc from web art and map stuff I did myself.
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Obviously to go to Kickstarter I need all the art replaced with original stuff. Do I need to do all that prior to launching or what % of the art do I need to have sourced?

I have no experience in launching products through Kickstarter but I have backed several and thought I would share some thoughts that might or might not help.

First of all, as a backer I want to see a product that is mostly developed already and/or a designer with a "name." For example, I trust Goodman Games to deliver because they have created quite a few products in the past. I know their quality and their reputation. I've gotten burned by folks with great ideas but no ability to deliver. (One RPG book I backed has been at around 4 years and they finally got out a PDF of the rulebook, with actual printed copy still promised. Some projects just take money and seem to vanish. These things make it harder for the next guy to sell his project to potential backers.)

My understanding of Kickstarter is that it was designed to be a crowd funding process, so I think that you don't need to have all of the artwork commissioned and paid for prior to the Kickstart -- that's part of what the money is supposed to do for you. However, if you have a complete game designed (minus art and polish) and can quickly share a playtest version to backers, I would see that as a plus. I think that the tricky thing would be to accurately estimate costs. How much will the art run you? How much will the actual printing of the game cost? Are there special tokens, etc, that need to be purchased for the game or made special? What will this cost? Do you intend to make any sort of a profit for yourself? All of that has to be wrapped up into the decision of how much you will need in order to finance the thing, and bad estimates will result in you losing money or the project becoming vaporware and customers getting angry with you.

Good luck with your project. :-)

You definitely can't use web art on the Kickstarter, and you'll need attractive art and digital mockups as a strong selling point, so you'll need to get your artist(s) in hand before you launch. You'll need good samples to show.

If you haven't seen it already, you should look at the Stonemaier Games website and read (and then re-read) all of his Kickstarter lessons. He's got a lot of experience publishing board games through crowdfunding.

http://stonemaiergames.com/kickstarter/lessons/
http://stonemaiergames.com/kickstarter/lessons/develop-board-game-projects/

Thanks guys useful especially those links.