Interesting Kickstarter Projects

Admittedly, I posted that before checking the link.

Jesus is a grossly over-budget, horribly over-schedule, huge box office bomb of cinematic fiction?




We're going to the Promse Land! (I hope the Promse are ok with that).

Man, I was hoping for some type of mini-game where you have to launch your camel through the eye of a needle or something, but nope:

You can't accuse this guy of being out of touch or not having any business savvy. He knows what young boys in this demographic want: stone-simple, pedantic, sermonizing board games with camels, none of that sheep crap.

(For real, though: there's a ton of the Bible that little boys would go nuts over. Especially the Archangels. Blizzard understood that, but none of these clowns ever seem to).

Edit: cut obnoxious language; there's no need for it even in a sarcastic post.

This game is amazing:

If everyone gets in, why is there a gate in the first place?

God loves drama, OK?

I like that one of the "you might also be interested in" links at the bottom of the Heaven's Gate page is for Salem.

Martin Wallace's Moongha Invaders: Mad Scientists and Atomic Monsters Attack the Earth has popped up on KS. They want to stick a ton of minis, which is why they're going the KS route rather than just selling it on Treefrog's website. The goal is $40k (they're already at $20k+) and that gets monster figs. At $50k they add hero figs. And at $60k they include the necessary parts for a 2-player game. At $90k they'll make an iOS app, which is where it loses my interest.

The only tiers for funding at $60 to get one copy of the game, $100 to get two copies and $200 to get six copies.

I think I'll move aside and let other people make the game better. I love Wallace, but his designs are hit and miss with me. I wish this was the new game using the A Few Acres Of Snow engine.

My first (and so far only!) kickstarted thing arrived this week. My book for Dog Eat Dog, which is a kind of roleplaying game about colonialism and assimilation. I've never really played in-person roleplaying games, and I didn't really have any playing partners in mind when I kickstarted it, but the themes and aims of it sounded like something I would be particularly interested in.

Reading the rules, it does sound really powerful. I've only found one online writeup of a game so far, but I'm going to keep an eye out for more. I'm not sure yet how I'm going to get a game of my own going - this kind of pure roleplaying looks quite intimidating. But I'm going to try.

I kickstarted it as well, but just the pdf. I haven't looked at it yet but the premise sounds fantastic.

Got my Car Wars shirt via the Ogre kickstarter. Very nice!

I was wondering why "Nothing Personal" had made it to the top of the hot list on Board Game Geek, and then saw that it's a Kickstarter project co-designed Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower.

I was pretty impressed with the rules description. At least on the surface, it looks like it's going to have the production quality of a Days of Wonder game, but actually have some depth to it. It sounds like Vasel made good on the design intent of making it more interactive than the games I usually end up playing. I figure I'm in for $45 at least; still wondering whether getting 18 more cards is worth 15 bucks, since I'm not particularly interested otherwise in a bunch of in-jokes among board game designers.

I was thinking the same thing: $15 seems like a lot, especially when the $45 level gets you access to all of the stretch rewards (including the "historic" gangsters deck expansion). I haven't pledged, but it is very tempting. I enjoy the game Kremlin quite a bit and it's one of the inspirations for Nothing Personal.

Still about 1.5 days left on the Hillfolk Kickstarter.

Also includes about eleventy billion stretch goal pitches. $10 for the finished PDF, $25 for the print edition, PDF and PDF of the companion book, Blood on the Snow, then for $55 you get the print edition, PDF, companion book PDF, HillFolk playing cards, semi-precious stones and immediate access to the preview draft.

$41 for the two print books and PDFs is a steal. They're hardcover, illustrated, and I believe Blood on the Snow will be printed in color. It also looks like a wonderful system, and Robin Laws is worthy of giving money to.

Ars Magica been mentioned yet? I might throw a few bucks its way, tapped out after Project E and Star Citizen, but I've always loved the PnP system.

One of my buddies is raising funds to create an original and in-depth d20 campaign. If you're into this sorta thing, he's got 8 days left but he's only at 40% funding.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/40878955/the-isles-of-the-sun-campaign-setting-d20

The Rough World Map that leaves permanent scars on your retina and has "Empire" misspelled is not inspiring confidence. Nor is his use of the Papyrus font. I just can't see spending money on this when I can get a copy of Midgard or some other wholly professional campaign setting for around the same amount of money.

I'm backing the latest Sentinels of the Multiverse expansion: Shattered Timelines.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gtgames/sentinels-of-the-multiverse-shattered-timelines

Will be over in the next couple of days, lots of bonuses for backers. I'm guessing Legendary is getting most of the current superhero interest, but this is still a pretty good game.

THAT FONT.KILL IT.

It was successful, beware the Emipire of the Sun.

It totally blows my mind that the funding on this expansion has climbed past 150K. The game is okay, but the art and the graphic design are... um, not great. For that kind of money, I would hire half a dozen really good artists and an art director, and just remake the base game.

More power to 'em, though.

Well, for $30 backing level you'd be getting the new expansion, 3 (or 8?) promo cards, a bunch of extra tokens, a backer-only bunch of decks: a hero, a villain, and one or two environment decks (depending if they get to $175k), plus a bunch of other junk that I don't really understand (oversized villain cards?). It seems like pretty great value if you've got any interest at all in expanding the game, especially since they're not fly-by-night.

The art is not offensive to my eyes, so I'm ok. I wish the bonus hero didn't look like such a schlub though.

I just backed Up Front. It looks like they're going to unlock a ton of stretch rewards, and I've always wanted a copy, so it seems worth it.

Hot damn. I've been waiting for this one. Now I just need to figure out what level to back it at. I want all the expansions, but I'm a cheap/broke mofo....

I went in for 40 to get the stretch rewards. Everything else should be available at an OLGS for less than what they're charging.

D-Day dice has definitely established that WWII themes are not going to be winners in my house.

It's going to be really, really hard to get even the people I know who like WWII games to play this one. It's pretty obtuse, so I'm counting on the power of modern day tutorial videos to help me sell it.

I find myself wondering if this will be a good ebay investment.

Edit: I really need to get over my laziness and unsubscribe from some updates. I'm tired of the D-Day Dice guys emailing me about shit.

No question it's a great value, I'm just too nitpicky about design and visuals for my own good.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/critsuccess/dice-rings


Apparently, my girlfriend pledged for three of these.. (I'm getting a 2D6 ring, because Apocalypse World owns) Though I don't think I can really bring myself to wear it, without at least growing a neckbeard and wearing a fedora.

Crapola. It seems Valley Games is up to their typical shenanigans and the Up Front reprint may potentially be affected. Why can't that company just shoot straight?

Yeesh... I'll probably pull my kickstarter funds. I didn't know they did this kind of stuff.

I'm losing faith that I will ever get Ace of Aces. The guy keeps sending messages about the shirts, the challenge coins, the pins, the patches. But his last few updates about the game itself were him holding a poll to see if people would like cool new computer generated art or if they just want the old lame art. Shockingly the old art won by a fucking landslide. Then a few days later he sent out a message that they'd lost all of the old art in a flood, so they're going to have to redo the old art but he doesn't know anyone who can do it. Oh boy.

"We got the money! Now what are we gonna do?" is a wonderful Kickstarter tradition.

The other way to look at it is that if they don't get funds, the people they screwed over will never get any money. So I'm on the fence.

Now I'm expecting Hasbro to file a cease-and-desist one second after the Kickstarter ends.

One question: did Valley Games or their subsidiary do D-Day Dice? I don't really like the game, but they sure did deliver on their Kickstarter promises.

Valley Games set up an American company (VG is Canadian) so they could accept Kickstarter payments via Amazon. That company did D-Day Dice, Airborne In My Pocket, and now Up Front.

I don't think that's a strong position absent conclusive evidence that they intend to use those funds to pay the people in question. Which would require a great deal more transparency and a change in management to be credible, I imagine.

True, but VG already has judgments against them, so there's at least a chance they will be forced to pay something at some point. If that happens they'll either have money to pay it from their Kickstarter proceeds, or they won't and they'll go bust and the Up Front backers will get nothing.

At least that's how I'm reading all this. After reading up more on the game I'll likely pull my funding anyway because it will never, ever get played.