Kickstarting and Screaming

My understanding is Phil & OSS have had communications problems, which is a real shame as High Frontier 3rd edition is easily the best version of any Eklund game I have played. OSS did a fantastic job on the game, it really shines.

I was hoping they would team up again in the future. Alas it seems not :(

I disagree. The game was (re) designed before OSS step in to manage the KS, production and distribution. There was no playtesting and all graphic design they did was rules and box (and maybe glory cards, but I saw those before their involvement, so I think not).

While the quality of some physical components are good (rules, box and map) and that probably has to do with OSS, others are underpar (chits) and there’s a couple of significant errata that for the look of it they might not replace (since they have been really quiet on that front) .

And they where very very late.

In a boardgame company can get in a bad relationship with their designer AND their printer it’s a pretty clear red flag.

Had they been part of Bios Genesis KS I would definitely Not have pledged.

I’m in for that! Eklund, science, solo play, high complexity, and fairly cheap.

Assuming it was them I wouldn’t put making the rules intelligible as a minor point in their favour. Thats a pretty massive deal given Phils, errr, rules writing style :)

I grant you the delays and obviously the behind the scenes conflicts they clearly had, but this is my third OSS purchase and the third one which is just excellent right out of the box. I dunno they just seem good. I am disappointed they and Phil didn’t get along because I would love to see Phil’s games get more of this kind of massive upgrade.

I happened to see that one yesterday and bought in because it looked pretty cool. Didn’t know of any issues from his past stuff at all but glad it’s not continuing!

Bought Cosmic Star Heroine from the Humble Store (so I’d get a DRM-free version as well), since GOG will apparently have to wait until May or something. I haven’t played the game yet, but the soundtrack is easily worth the asking price if you’re a child of the 70’s/80’s. :)

So while I was backing Aeon’s End (I don’t know when I’ll have time to play it what with Gloomhaven, but maybe we’ll finally have finished that by the time AE actually ships. Ha.) I noticed a project that sure looked like a Sentinels of the Multiverse ripoff, right down to the font on the title, called Sentinels of Earth-Prime.

Well, turns out joke’s on me because it’s actually a licensed collaboration between Greater Than Games and Green Ronin Press, using the default setting of the latter’s Mutants and Masterminds RPG and their art team, with design from the SOTM designer. It’s a full, standalone base set, so if you’re not already into Sentinels but, I guess, you really dig M&M’s setting, you can still play it perfectly well by itself. But the bit that got me to back (since I neither know nor care about said setting) is that it will be fully compatible with SOTM and distinct from all of the decks in existing Sentinels products. (Despite some character role overlap - obviously this setting has speedsters etc as well.)

Oh man, a buddy of mine that loves card battler games and Mutants and Masterminds something fierce is gonna be all over this.

Holy heck, here’s a blast from the past - Cheapass Games is Kickstarting a new version of Button Men. For those of you not familiar, it’s a game where you take characters and pit them against one another in a savage conflict of polyhedral dice-slinging. Back in the day these were printed on pin-backed buttons you clipped to your shirt (hence the title) that had the character art and the dice set they used, and with that and a pocket full of dice, you were set to take on the world. The mechanics are actually really elegant and interesting with an enormous possibility space as they rolled out various expansions, but it nonetheless plays very quickly. For a while there was a really comprehensive online version where you could do async play but this game came out back in 1999, so it’s been a while.

The new edition is not going to default to the buttons (although they still want to make them and you can get button versions on the project), opting instead for character cards, because it turns out that’s way less expensive and you can do a high quality set of 48 character cards and 30 polyhedral dice in a box for less than one 12 character button set with no dice. So that’s a little sad, but on the other hand, very value conscious. It’s still my favorite game Cheapass Games ever put out, so I’m in.

Oh, and they’re reviving the online version, details on the project page.

In April the kickstarter for The Lady and The Tiger finished with $56,848 pledged when they asked for $5,000 and they expect the project to deliver in Sep 2017.

Today the producer posts an update about eloping and getting married! Congratulations! But you know how the internet is… So I really hope they deliver on time and don’t claim budgeting problems, as people might start pooping on their sudden desire to fly to LA and get married after getting $56k in their (business) bank accounts. (I don’t see any one claiming this kind of thing yet in the comments or anything)

I have lost a lot of desire to Kickstart project when one projects I backed, Agent Smartwatch, was abandoned and another one, Blink for Home, was not delivered for almost 6 months after they went production. Also, many of the software project such as games seemed to released at the same, if not cheaper, price as the Kickstarter pledge and as such, lost the motivation for me to back. I understand that backing is to help someone achieve the goals but there are just too many projects. Besides, after the initial feel good feeling, I would have forgotten about the project in the later months. And in the months when these projects were being developed, something similar or better would be released in production, making me wonder why I bothered in the first place.

Years ago i was a big user of kickstarter, but i’ve also gone through the same thing. Now i don’t back anything unless i’ve had previous experience with them and/or it is truly exceptional (and reasonable, ie i won’t back a major AAA game that is just asking for 200K).

The other problem was the amount of time it took to find anything remotely interesting (which is probably 75% kickstarter’s fault in having a crappy website). These days, i check kicktraq every few weeks for things that catch my eye only.

I still use Fig though but those games are a lot more secure i feel.

All I’ve tended to back for a while is boardgames. Often they may be relatively limited runs, so KS works to get you in if it’s something you are interested in and don’t want to leave to chance it ever getting to a local FLGS. They also tend to deliver, for the most part, on or around time, particularly those from established teams that use KS as basically a pre-order platform for an established production line.

I’ve given up on games (though there are a few exceptions - Sunless Skies and AI War II of late) for the reasons mentioned.

I have been tempted to back boardgames as well but the shipping cost (to international, in Malaysia) is very high and that also put it beyond my affordability, unless there is something extremely exciting.

After two and a half years of waiting, the Bandit Clan DLC has finally showed up for Armello players. They’re probably the coolest characters of the whole bunch, so it made a lot of ruckus that they were backer exclusive, even more than the usual very expensive Kickstarter exclusive DLC. So now they decided to sell them to everyone for ten bucks, but some backers are pissed of losing their privilege, so the madness still continues. Did I say I like this kickstarting business less and less?

Tom’s review was quite negative even though the game looking gorgeous and very promising. I mostly agree with the review, but I’ve stopped playing and haven’t followed all the patches. Anyway, the game has become a weird mess of DLC and crates-and-chest nonsense, but worst of all, I couldn’t get into a game in a reasonable amount of time, perhaps because of a lack of players.

Damn, Gloomhaven 2nd ed pushing nearly 4mil now.

33K+ new copies sold. amazing.

So I went to check out my oldest not-fully-fulfilled Kickstarters…

  • Two Guys SpaceVenture: Funded 6/12/2012 Still showing progress
  • The Return of Tom vs. Bruce: Funded 6/28/2012 (They fulfilled the important part, but I’m still awaiting my name on the glorious Founders Wall! Not worried about it, I’m just happy to see the articles! ;-)
  • Timber and Stone: Funded 6/12/2012. Developer worked on it for four years and stepped away in 2016. There’s a somewhat playable alpha seemingly stuck forever in Early Access. Very doubtful it will ever be fully finished, but I got something for my money.
  • Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption: Another Sierra classic sequel, and like SpaceVenture, still in slow development. (Oct. 2013 original delivery target)
  • Shroud of the Avatar: They’ve shipped about 200 test versions. Still in development. Original ETA 10/2014
  • Frontiers: Funded 7/17/2013, still an early access buggy mess. Passion project by the dev, but most updates are about other games they’re doing to try to keep the doors open.

Some other more recent stuff still unfulfilled but still in progress, a lot of stuff was really late (a sous vide device that delivered about 15 months past estimate), etc. But I’ve funded 63 Kickstarter projects and only had two flat out not deliver: Pebble Time 2 (they sent me a refund) and, ironically, a now-apparently-dead interactive graphic novel project from a guy I used to work with (not going to call it out, because I know the guy’s circumstances) that I funded in 2014 and lost $25 bucks on. That’s not a bad overall record.

Reasons not to give up hope:

  • Meriwether, the Lewis and Clark game, actually went 1.0 a month or so ago, a bit past the 11/2013 delivery estimate. It has a horrible start (forced and tedious tutorial) but is a cool concept.

Yeah, I’ve funded around 4x that many projects and had a pretty good track record of fulfillment overall, including some really incredible games like Gloomhaven. Also Sentinels of the Multiverse, Scythe, Shadowrun Returns (Dragonfall more so than the first release but hey), Millenium Blades, Argent, various Battlecons, Pillars of Eternity, Torment: Tides of Numenera, the new edition of Unknown Armies, and many more. There are certainly plenty of projects that sputter out or flame out in more dramatic fashion, but if you do some due diligence it’s not that hard to identify risky projects. Unfortunately, I have also reached the conclusion that most of the time it’s not in my best interests to back random indie videogames because they’re significantly riskier than, say, Obsidian or inXile projects, there’s no real financial incentive given sales etc, and it’s pretty rare that I care enough about the concept at this point that I just must see it exist. Boardgames and tabletop RPGs seem like better bets overall and are a lot more likely to be worth getting into at the Kickstarter phase.

Was just about to post about how tempted I was by the Gloomhaven reprint, but I see I missed the 2-day reminder and it’s all done now. Decision made, I guess.

Oh, well. Not sure if it would have ended up hitting the table enough to justify the cost. If it ever manages to hit retail, I’ll read some reviews and try to get a sense of how fiddly setup and teardown is.