Interesting Kickstarter Projects

I passed on Rivet Wars, though that $150 pack was a helluva deal. I just had no desire to play or paint it. Really glad to see that company have yet another wildly successful Kickstarter, though.

It's odd, here the mood is "wow they did well" while over on BGG the mood is glum and "they're barely going to scrape a profit".

BGG folks have a weird complex about Kickstarter games these days, though.

It has brought out the armchair publisher in everyone. Including me.

Glad to see that Rivet Wars did well.

Rivet Wars looks neat but not really for me. I'm very interested in Beyond the Gates of Antares. I'm not sure we need more scifi miniatures games but the pedigree is great and their design approach is pretty neat.

That's an interesting one. One of the things that has definitely annoyed me about GW is their inability to adapt to new technologies. I just skimmed it, but it looks to have lots of interesting features.

YOU KILLED IT

I guess I'm not too terribly surprised. It seemed like a neat idea and I'm a sucker for miniatures kickstarters, but I passed on this one because something about the miniatures didn't call to me. Most of these things I can justify by telling myself "well, even if nobody else you know wants to play it, you'll have awesome stuff to paint", but here I just didn't really want to paint any of it.

Yeah, it was all pretty generic in the end.

So here's an interesting one, apologies if its a repost. It looks like someone is attempting a very streamlined, but still somewhat deep tactical wargame:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1893407396/war-stories

They have hexes, but they are part of larger pieces, and movement is actually done via the larger pieces, while the shooting is done via the smaller hexes. Shooting is done by drawing cards, and checking the range, with firepower and cover being modifiers.

Hey, that's from Conquistador Games--Bill Abner's company. I'll take a closer look at it knowing that.

I only briefly read a bit on a design blog here: http://boardgamegeek.com/blog/2018/reinventing-tactical-wargames-game-design-blog-for

Which I found to be interesting, as he comes up with ideas and scraps or revises them over time.

I was just reading through that. The reference to Phoenix Command in the first post cracked me up. Sometimes I forget how good we have it these days.

That looks really neat. I'd read about this on BGG before. But $60? I really shouldn't complain, that's not much for minis....

Actually, if I'm reading it correctly, it's worse than that, it's like $175 to get to the minis level. Though if one is looking for pre-painted, WWII military figures, one can usually find them all over the place, and for fairly cheap.

Huh... Well, it's going to get made, so I might as well just wait to get it for $40 online when it's released. Unless the stretch goals are really nice.

Kickstarter, oh Kickstarter.
I love you, I hate you, and sometimes you hurt me so much be you make me want to cry. Every time I see a project where it's clear that the person behind it has poured their heart and soul into their work, and I sit on the outside and sadly shake my head 'No, I'm so sorry, but this was a bad idea'.

I saw this one today: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/283907128/california-vacation-game-is-8-games-in-one-for-kid

A lot of the project is wrong, and capped with the expectation to sell a million units in the first year. It seems to me that the person in the video honestly thinks they have something good on their hands and their hours and hours of time have not been wasted, it's just got to be crushing have to hold that up face to face with the reality that it's not, based on the reaction on Kickstarter. The worst of it all is the piles and piles of completed games stacked up in the pictures, games that will in all likely hood never sell, but have already been paid for manufacture.

Judging from the board art and palette I don't think these were manufactured recently. My guess is they were made in 1972 and he went back in time to fetch them.

I just love that logic. "Well, Monopoly's sold 250 million over its lifetime, and probably it didn't even sell that much its first year, so I think a million copies a year seems like a conservative estimate for a random new game."

He's 100% sure about it.

Blood, sweat, and tears.

Lots and lots of tears.

The Zombicide Season 2 kickstarter is up:

On the one hand it's a little ridiculous that they're going back to the kickstarter well after the first season sold so well, but on the other hand they hit their funding goal in a couple minutes and are already at well over 500%. So clearly it's a good model for them.

So here's a sci-fi mini tabletop game by a friend of mine:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/178087494/thon

I like the style. And I have headroom in my pledges after Antares got pulled. In!

So, I am going to advertise a friend's kickstarter here, mostly because I have played the game he developed, and I think its a pretty good one.

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

I am not going to claim this is a hardcore gamer's game, but it is a really good casual game that both the younger and older players at our local game store have had a lot of fun with. The essential idea is that you (as Alice) are trying to work your way through chapters of the book by collecting and turning in pages. Each turn a selection of cards are laid out. Some are simply worth pages, others have special effects. You roll dice and get a set of symbols to spend as you choose from the available cards. At the same time, the Red Queen is bouncing up and down the chapter list, forcing players to discard cards.

It has a lot of randomness, but a decent amount of strategic depth (IMO), and has a lot of "screw your neighbor" fun. Also, I think Tony has done a bang up job with the art, and the patches/t-shirts that he has as incentive gifts are going to look fantastic. He should have pictures of those up soon.

Anyway, thats my plug, and I really can't recommend the game enough as a casual group game.

The guy I played board games with last night mentioned The Emperor's New Clothes. How in the hell did I miss this? The whole Kickstarter and its fallout is just delicious.

Where is the fallout?

So I saw that the other day, and it's a great joke, but... what's the deal? I mean, it's a real Kickstarter, and people have pledged real money to it, so I am just baffled.

Some people are into the joke. Some people insist that there's a game there which uses blank pieces. And some people truly believe that at the last second he will reveal amazing art and compelling rules and it will all have been worthwhile.

The fallout I've seen is at BGG, revolving around the stuff Bahimiron has mentioned. My guess is that on April 1 they are going to cancel the Kickstarter so nobody loses any money (it ends April 2).

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/139388/emperors-new-clothes

Ah, good guess. It'll be interesting to see if he does that, given how much money he's pulling in (pushing $10G!). If you scroll down the page, there's a part where he writes about "kicking back," which led me to believe he would be taking the money and putting it toward other kickstarter projects, but an April Fool's joke certainly seems more likely.

He needs to take the money and disappear, to truly represent that final stage of the shady KickStarter.

This is pretty cool, but kinda expensive at $15 for the deck.

Well, it seems my decision to back Up Front has a much higher likelihood of being one of my dumbest: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/941553/what-does-this-mean-for-up-front/page/53

For those who don't want to read all that, the nutshell version is that Rik Falch was told by the court to not move any money around, which prompted him to immediately transfer all the Up Front money and then some (over $350K) into his seedy lawyer's bank account. Then, fireworks.

Time to ask for a refund once I get done kicking myself.

I was about to post the same thing. I ended up going for Up Front as well :(

Also, Thon (mentioned by JoshV as being done by one of his friends) was cancelled just now, despite it getting enough funding. No idea why yet.

They seem pretty screwed. D-Day Dice and Airborne in Your Pocket line-for-lifers will likely get the shaft, too.

The saddest thing is that Valley had good enough games and production values/experience to run a legit business, but Rik is apparently a modern-day pirate. Those legal docs, if true (and I have a sneaking suspicion they are), are pretty damning.

Prediction: The lawyer absconds with the cash, and even Phil Sauer gets burned.

Like we discussed earlier, I didn't back Up Front. I don't really feel vindicated, though, as it seems even more people are going to be screwed over by this. And Up Front looks like a good game, too.

Just got an email indicating that Mobile Frame Zero backers will be able to pick up their hardcopies at Pax. Pretty cool.

Unfortunately, it's one of those things I backed on a lark and am less likely to play than even Mage Knight or Netrunner given that I don't have easy access to cheap LEGOs and have no one near who'd want to play.

Aww man, that looks cool.

Actually what am I saying? The LEGO looks cool. I have no idea what the game is like.