I got a chance to use the Tabletop Simulator to check out Too Many Bones. I read the rulebook and walked through the tutorial battle and then finished it. It seems pretty cool! Tabletop Simulator is a little clunky to manage the chips and dice - so I don’t know how much more I can handle with it. Hopefully my wife will sit down and look at the tutorial battle so I can convince her we should get it :-)
I’m tempted to try the Windows version of this but I’m always hesitant downloading stuff and installing it. It was written by some guy. That sounds pretty cool too and would probably be much easier playing out a test game before committing to buy and can let me wife see it.
I ordered Agents of Mayhem after listening to Tom talk about it last podcast. Arrived yesterday, playing some tutorials (which Tom skipped) today. I didn’t love the video game, didn’t hate it. I have to echo Tom saying this clearly looks like a labor of love. The components seem almost unbelievably well thought out, particularly the character boards, which have cut out notches for various cubes/ tokens. One wishes every game was made this well.
Agree with Tom, too, in that one wonders what the audience is for this. I think it will be a niche hit if it turns out the gameplay is good. Two player (yeah, it can be played with more, perhaps not ideally) games like this can be a hard sell.
I am enjoying it so far. Just a solo run to learn the rules.
Question for people who kick start board games. Is it usually cheaper to buy a game during the kickstarter, or when it eventually gets to someplace like Amazon? I guess not all games make it to general resellers, so I guess that is a risk.
I don’t kickstart many games, but it seems like the price is a bit of a wash. As you note, sometimes they don’t make it to retail, so you have to weigh that.
Yeah, like Mike said, the price isn’t really the issue. You can sometimes make out better later with free shipping at retail and whatnot. But that’s not what KS is about. KS is about:
(1) Getting the game early, and satisfying that urge to “know you have it coming” regardless of eventual plans for retail, and
(2) Having that guarantee of a game in your hands should the game get great buzz and sell out everywhere, which inevitably leads to
(2a) The ability to flip it for extra cash when the secondary market clamo(u)r starts because of presumed retail scarcity.
It is hardly ever meaningfully cheaper on Kickstarter, because online retailers discount more than 99% of the people making the games. Sometimes you might get stuff rolled in for free that will be sold separately at retail, at best.
That said, retailers may not get the game at all, or run out of stock quickly. And it’s reasonably common (if, IMO, gross) for there to be exclusive content and/or bling only for Kickstarter backers.
It’s cheaper later almost always, from the games I’ve seen, but there are some KS exclusive components or content that you might miss. Shipping can make a large difference too depending on the campaign.
OK, so I won’t let myself feel too tempted to jump into the Kickstarter, especially because I’m working on the wife for us to get Too Many Bones. It almost seems like Divinity Original Sin may work better as a board game than the video game.
I would say it depends on who is publishing the game. If it is Eagle griffin, yes. You’ll get extra stuff get the game in advance and it will be more expensive or the same price as in stores/online without the extras. If it is Awaken Realms, yes. You’ll get all the expansion content for “free” you’ll and the game a year or more before anyone who didn’t back. Other companies it just depends. If it is a Fowler game, you can get it cheaper if you wait and there typically isn’t anything extra, but you will wait.
Most companies will end up publishing game even if they say it’s a kickstarter only release (example: City of the Big Shoulders). I backed City with the idea that the game wasn’t going to be sold even though that changed right before it delivered.
I think that’s about right where we are. The only difference was we played those 4 or 5 chapters way back at Christmas last year. My family really enjoyed it too, even my son who hates co-op, and we still reminisce about getting murdered by each other ;-)
We just need to get back to actually playing again. Hopefully over the holidays.
I like kickstarter because I can essentially order a bunch of games and then I ignore kickstarter for awhile and every so often a big box shows up at my office…xmas year round!
I got my first chance to play A Study In Emerald (1st edition) yesterday!
Conditions weren’t quite optimal (3 players, all first-time, and we had about 2.5 hours to finish learning, setup, and play), but I was really excited by it.
Right out of the gate, Player 2 recruited an agent and moved to assassinate Player 3. He mostly thought it was crazy that he was given the option to potentially end the game on turn 3, Far-Cry-style. We didn’t have enough information to guess who was on which team at that point, so it was a wildly reckless decision. Fortunately, I had the Double Agent token for the would-be assassin, so I was able to stop that from happening. The game did end about an hour later, when Player 2 tried again and succeeded.
We had 2 Loyalists and 1 Restorationist. Very few cards were even brought into play, but it still felt like there was a huge breadth of options in front of us. We all walked away saying that we would love to get a 5 player group together when we aren’t pressed for time. I really look forward to playing again, and I no longer regret my admittedly crazy decision to pick this up on eBay having never played it…
Just as a quick check: did you play that you can’t assassinate anyone until they’re “Known to the Authorities” (ie have any points)? It’s a really easy rule to miss, but gives players time to setup a network of defense (because you have to kill all their agents before you can kill the main player) and can help deal with someone trying to end the game early. In general, it’s a good idea to be very careful about when you gain your first points because doing so often puts a target on your head.
What a great game. I’ve got a big board gaming session coming up this weekend and you’ve reminded me how much I miss this.
