I haven’t been much around the forum last week, and this is one of the reasons.
Mug for size comparison
Even Luna came to have a look: what’s inside the big box? Can you get it out so I can use the box?
That is what The Witcher: Old World takes with all the expansions…
Looking for a new shelf in 3, 2, 1…
I backed the crowdfunding campaign for an expansion to Atlantis Rising ages ago. They just posted an update that basically said games are ready to ship or very near but shipping costs have gone up and production costs were more than expected so they need more money. Some people (e.g. USA) will get their games as is, but are being asked to donate more to be nice. Others will be charged more for shipping, over the price they already paid for shipping specifically, before games will be sent. If people want a refund because of the extra cost, they’ll be charged a 10% processing fee.
I kind of get it, but this whole thing rubs me the wrong way. Especially charging people a fee if they want a refund at this point when they already paid everything they thought they needed to and are getting hit with extra costs at the last minute.
Ppl are getting their copies of Yucatan and the game is blemished with production issues and an awful rulebook (according to BGG users). Glad I dodged that bullet
That’s the Matagot project, yeah?
I’m not sure exactly what’s going on with them; their games have real potential but their crowdfunding is always a bit of a s**tshow.
I completely understand, but there have been huge, unprecedented increases in shipping costs due to COVID and while it’s absolutely companies’ fault if they delayed enough to end up post-COVID in their shipping, the rest couldn’t reasonably have been planned for. So I dunno. It’s nice if companies can tank those sorts of unexpected costs but lots of boardgame companies don’t have those kind of margins.
That’s why I kind of get it. A small business working tight margins, this could literally destroy them. But some of what they were talking about was over $100 extra shipping for a less than $50 expansion. People wanting a refund rather than paying that unexpected extra cost is perfectly reasonable and charging a fee seems ridiculous when they’ll still have the product to sell to someone else. But that fee isn’t really going to the business either I expect. It’s the credit card processing costs and whatever the crowdfunding company took. It’s just a bad deal all around.
Not sure exactly why, but Tuesday, 13 June appears to be the best day to launch your boardgame crowdfunding campaign.
So far 5 emails this morning for project launches.
Aiming for an Essen release? It’s ambitious…
Anything good?
Firefly 10 year edition 
Oof, that price tag, though…
Nothing I’m going to back.
I might be interested in Firefly 10 Year, but I don’t get my existing Firefly: The Game stuff on my table often enough to justify spending $13, much less $130.
That was the only one I was “following” pre-campaign. The rest were just new projects from creators I had followed or backed in the past.
I made the mistake of clicking on the trailer video and now I have the music from the show in my ear and I think I have to back it on general principle–also I saw my partner’s face light up when I showed the campaign to him.
I am a bit bummed at the options in the Firefly campaign. It sounded like there would be a tier for just the new content, but there isn’t. There is the Veteran’s upgrade which has painted resin ships, an enamel first player token, a mat, a storage box, dice, and the expansion content. All for $130. All I really want is the new expansion and ship, and would not mind getting the existing promo cards. I am also missing the Artful Dodger and Jetwash, but get that they probably can’t find tune add-ons that much. But to put a new expansion that should probably only be $40-50 behind a $130 paywall just sucks.
That said, this is a great campaign for people that do not already have the game, or just have the base game and no expansions.
This game is on kickstarter at the moment and I think it looks broadly fun but also I can’t help but think they’ve missed an opportunity or there’s s fun game based off this.
In this game there’s a score track which doubles as the board you put your polyominioes on. The missed opportunity (at least to my face eggs) is that the tiles don’t interact with the pawn at all. I think it’d be really cool if you constructed the ability to “skip” points in a strategic way as you placed more tiles down or if you put easy to place tiles it impeded your ability to get more points some how (eg if the pawn has to cross a particularly cheap tile to put down the ability to cross it and therefore get points is harder).
I was in Watestones (the UK’s biggest bookshop chain) the other day and they had a bunch of games from this publisher and they all had the most boring cover art. It felt like someone looked at bad 90s board game boxart and thought - ‘yes, that is the look we’re going for’.
Glenn Drover is a mixed bag to me. This sounds like that pirate game where it has interesting decisions but you build your deck by top decking it. Interesting, but Drover manage to sneak something stupid in it
Glenn Drover sounded familiar, and then I looked at the cover art and realized it looked very similar in style to Raccoon Tycoon, and sure enough, that is also one of his.
Glenn Drover has been around for a long time and has a very mixed bag of designs. Most notably, he has design credits on Railways of the World (which, with the lineage of RotW, who knows what that actually means) but is the sole designer listed on Age of Empires III – The Age of Discovery which is BGG Rank 286 at the moment and was reimplemented as Empires: Age of Discovery (which allegedly was just a new edition, but without paying to renew the vidja-game license).
It’s also worth noting that Forbidden Games was cofounded by Glenn Drover along with some guy who was involved in the PopCap games money-printing-machine back in the early 2000s.
I own a few Glenn Drover and/or Forbidden Games games, but haven’t played any of them yet. But based on my understanding, everything they do seems to iterate from past designs – for better or worse, I guess.