The Crowdfunding Thread

[yashima]

In another confluence of collection growth, my oldest undelivered Kickstarter is now Frosthaven.

Behold the biggest polyominoes game I own as of today:

(I manipulated the colors a bit to get the red couch in the background to fade.)

Infuriatingly, the revolting susan (I know I know. She’s lazy and revolving) makes it so the box doesn’t close flush and she doesn’t have a lid so can’t put the box upgright. One might have considered making the box just a few millimeters bigger. But overall the game looks AWESOME. There are a bunch of maps, a bunch of different company boards (the tracks on the left) with nice-looking triple layer thingies so the cubes stay put. The little rovers and asteroid craters and whatever the third is look really nice—I wonder if these are 3D printed these days.

It’s been a while since I played Planet Unknown at SPIEL 2019 and so I will definitely play this soon (but I got so much other new stuff lying around right now…). Beware when I gush about it (because I will) that it still needs to prove it’s as good as I will say it is.

[mistercrayon]

Oh nice I think I have that waiting to show up at my house!

[VictorViper]

I’m backing Monster Pit right now, though I may drop to a buck (or 7 or whatever) to buy some more time to think on it. Elzra will be launching their reworking/reimagining of SEAL Team Flix soon and I want to be ready for it; Indefinite dad-mode has forced some serious frugality. I’ve been pretty keen on WP games with dice and dynamic win conditions recently, however, so I’m interested in seeing how they handle it. The promise of a second part in the future with a dex-based showdown doesn’t hurt at all.

[Phil]

@yashima

The little rovers and asteroid craters and whatever the third is look really nice—I wonder if these are 3D printed these days.

Interesting question. For things done in bulk I presume that injection moulding is the cheapest option, but I’d be fascinated to learn if that’s not actually the case.

[RogerBW]

To the best of my knowledge injection moulding is still cheaper in any sort of bulk. Last time I heard hard numbers, “any sort of bulk” meant somewhere in the 1,000-10,000 range, but that was a few years ago.

[GeeBizzle]

That still holds up although the quantities depends on the part and size. 3d printing is a lot more expensive so it mostly comes down to tooling cost.

[lalunaverde]

Habitats, Nine Lives, and Basketboss by BoardGameTables.com — Kickstarter

Another board game tables KS

[lalunaverde]

Twin Palms by Bink Ink LLC — Kickstarter

Another trick-taking game.
Reasons:
1.) It’s low cost, so I’m like “why not?”.
2.) I am not sure if it’s gonna be in retail. Not exactly a big name publisher
3.) Trick-taking!

[bort]

You had me at trick-taking

[Brattyjedi]

My pledge of Return to Dark Tower arrived today. I haven’t unpacked the shipping containers yet. I may need to clean the game room some to have even the tiniest chance of finding shelf space for it.

My Doctor Who PJ legs for scale.

[Brattyjedi]

Haven’t yet put it on a shelf, but have got Dark Tower to the table and played two games of it. It barely fits at two players. We’ll have to bring in side tables if we want any more people.

[Phil]

Tower needs more Giant Flaming Eyeball.

[yashima]

Why are the player boards not rounded to fit with the board? That tower thing is huge…

[mistercrayon]

That’s a beast!

[GeeBizzle]

Round table suits the board well.

Still waiting on my copy to arrive let me know how it plays.

[Brattyjedi]

Both games we played so far were 2-player, coop, with the expansion. We had one tight moment in each game where a wrong turn could have made us lose but then got out of it pretty quickly and otherwise never felt like we were in serious danger. We’re going to try clicking the option for higher difficulty next time to see how that goes. We’ve enjoyed the two games we played and the puzzle of figuring out the best course to get all the current mini quests while still making progress toward the overall quest.

@yashima

Why are the player boards not rounded to fit with the board? That tower thing is huge…

The expansion has mini boards that add to the sides that are curved to fit the edge of the main board (visible in my image above). Perhaps player boards couldn’t be curved because they weren’t sure if they should fit outside the original board or the expansion boards? The expansion boards already don’t quite line up with the main board in my image because we are playing on the mat which is larger than the actual board that comes with the game. The mat has the same layout as the actual board, just larger.

Somebody else’s image stolen from the internet comparing the mat and the board:

Source

[Brattyjedi]

@Brattyjedi

We’re going to try clicking the option for higher difficulty next time to see how that goes.

That did not go well. We lost. Then set it up to try again and immediately lost again. Oops.

[GabrielH]

So this arrived:

Given the dimensions, I’d imagined it as a standard TTR box.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It’s actually about 50% larger than that in both directions, making it easily the biggest game I own, even discounting the fact that it’s made of wood.

Then you unfold it and… Yeah. It’s as wide as my (RV sized) bed.

(All the stuff, with 30cm/12in ruler to scale)

And who needs some flimsy 3-10 pages? It’s a rule book, not a rule leaflet!

Here you can see, it’s about 1.3 cm (admittedly it’s footprint is quite small, and it repeats everything in English, Italian, French and German). But there is an additional pamphlet thing for the lore. So yeah.

I don’t expect to ever play this and never did, it’s pretty much purely as a display piece, documenting two golden ages: that of Airships, and that of Kickstarters

[yashima]

Has anyone taken a closer look at Casting Shadows?

When I first saw this I was intrigued: cute characters and art and hex fields and spells and custom dice. But then I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled… through Kickstarter exclusives and those aren‘t just deluxe components but a lot of extras that every other campaign would have as stretch goal (and even that I dislike these days). It feels like if you just back the base game and not the Kickstarter Exclusive version you are getting half a game. So next I looked up pricing:

• VAT not included
• Shipping meh
• 30€ for the incomplete basic game
• 50€ for some additional cards and hexes and…
• it goes up to 250€ for the super collectible Collectors‘ Superedition (isn‘t it ridiculous to offer a collector‘s edition for an unknown game?) with collectible Collectibles?

I looked up what else they did: Here to Slay. Which I have seen everywhere and mentioned nowhere. So widely available and yet I have not heard anyone who played it?!

How does this game get 20k backers? Is it really on the presentation alone or did they all check out the rules and go „this is going to be soooo awesome“. I admit I have not checked out the rules.

This is the kind of thing I want to back so badly because it ticks a lot of boxes but the parade of red flags on the KS… … so I backed and unbacked it 30 minutes later. Anyone else confused like me?

[RogerBW]

The first rules thing I see is “at the start of your turn, you roll dice to get resources”. And I think about Alien Frontiers, where you similarly can’t make any plans for how you’ll take your turn until your turn actually starts, and how much that drags if a player is at all AP-prone.

I’ve played Unstable Unicorns and it’s all right as a play-once amusement. I don’t intend ever to play it again.

Kickstarter-exclusive gameplay content is a bit of a black mark for me as well.

I mean, points back on for having an axolotl, but that only gets you so far.

And with all these extras you still only get 5 dice even in the super-duper vinyl figures edition? So you have to pass them round the table?

The only people who get photos rather than cartoon representations are two white dudes. (Granted, if I designed a game it would also have a photo of a white dude.)

Lots of emphasis on all the stuff you get, very little on the gameplay.

No indication in the rules that they’ve done anything about the “A and B fight, C wins” problem. (Mind you not every game can be War of the Nine Realms.)

Very little that’s positive for me here. It smells of having had a Kickstarter-advertising person in charge.