I think I just failed to defend Pluto.
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'salright. Not even a planet, innit.
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This is how it started last time.
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Spent too much time exploring. Hereâs the base of it for anyone else:
- Cyclades is an amazing game. Usually listed third of three for the Matagot Wargame trilogy but all three were top 100 at some point and I think Cyclades has aged better than Kemet and is much more accessible (strategically) than Inis.
Major changes
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Art style. Art went more toward Santorini, minis are now much more detailed and impressive. Take your pick, Iâd like the old art with the new minis. (Apollo making it rain FTW)
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Modular map. Cyclades had no modular map, Cyclades needed no modular map. But it turns out this is really more of a way to compromise between the Island-to-Island play of the core game and the Supercontinent play of the Titans expansion. The modular map creates some more large islands and small islands to combine the two styles, and the variability is just a cherry on top.
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A bunch of tweaks to prevent the âno buildâ meta. Apparently, many players decided that it was best to save up money, wait for someone else to build a city, and then conquer it (in the original). The new ruleset makes building cities more attractive (bonus on completion, possible second bonus) and compulsory (troops cost more and city components are free). It also provides a third path to city and now requires three cities to win.
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A small tweak to strengthen the creature market, you can sacrifice priests to keep beasties around. This is great, as Polyphemos or the Kraken were often very tech / situation dependent and this will strengthen their role in the game.
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Includes 6th player and team play in the base game (formerly Titans content)
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Heroes, which take aspects of Titans and old Heroes but donât exactly duplicate either. These allow more combat on larger islands and tweak troop strength, augmenting the combat portion of the game.
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Hera, which takes a bit of Kronos (Titan god) and Hades to, again, augment the combat portion of the game but not overhaul it as wildly as the old expansions did.
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Bid tracks are no longer linear. This one most worried me but Iâm mollified as they still go 1,2,3,5,7 which is going to keep most of the game unchanged. Higher bids start dropping more numbers. I donât like this one but a) I get that bidding 21 just to have someone bid 22 could be frustrating, and b) itâs not as aggressive as the pre-read material made it sound.
The base game is 59 euros which is quite good (Old Cyclades + Titans was 90 US, iirc). However, shipping is ridiculous (~25 euros to Europe, 35 to US). And the base game strips EVERYTHING, including the faction minis. You get tokens, standees, and meeples. If you want any sculpts, like the old game, you need all of them (factions, monsters, heroes), which ups the price to 100 euros.
Sheesh.
Iâm definitely on a wait and see - if I can get base game with just a army sculpt add-on, that might be appealing. Otherwise see how it hits on retail. OG Cyclades is one of my 10/10 games so, despite now being convinced that most of the above are improvements, I donât have a felt need.
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I mean I donât know what you would call firing almost the entire staff to be able to operate at all and being years late with 5+ Kickstarters, the majority of which I am still pretty sure will never fulfill as this latest move is essentially how they hope to fulfill the first outstanding KS in less than another solid year or more. To me, that seems pretty disastrous.
I donât have any problem with them making a voluntary contribution available to help speed their timeline, especially since it seems like people were asking. I didnât back CW ever, let alone on this one, so I donât have to decide if I feel like it makes sense to actually contribute, though. I donât expect to ever see the three projects I do have outstanding with them.
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I was wondering whether I might go for the Legendary edition of Cyclades (even though I have the original) if looked pretty and was reasonably priced. If weâre being generous we might say theyâve gone 1-1 on that count.
They have priced the stripped down version (no miniatures) at ~ÂŁ75 including shipping.
There is a version that is still in stock across Europe that you can buy for ÂŁ50 and is multilingual. Sure it doesnât have the expansion stuff, but increasingly Iâm realising that Cyclades doesnât need it. Base Cyclades is best Cyclades.
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Yikes! Thatâs some negligence.
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Spreadsheets⌠still hiding their tabs at the bottom of the UI where no one ever looks.
Or where I never look, anyway. Honestly, I couldnât count the number of times Iâve been sent a spreadsheet file for some reason and never had any idea that it contained more than one spreadsheet until some time later when the person who sent it to me came to a realisation that there were things they expected me to know that I seemingly didnât know.
(I kinda get it â I use other applications with old UIs which are set in their ways â but Iâm still slightly surprised that this one has never been changed, given the modern web browser situation.)
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Some people are very conservative about user interfaces, and one might reasonably speculate that heavy spreadsheet users have a strong overlap with those people.
(When I have to send someone tabular data, I usually end up dropping them into CSV - not as well-documented format as one might like but the obvious traps are reasonably well understood, and at least I can glance over it and say âyup, those are the bits that should be there and nothing elseâ.)
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Thatâs the format I usually encourage the researchers I teach to take from the instruments, normally as the output from the instruments own software is less than satisfactory for publications and the like.
It means they can drop it into the graphing software of their choice.
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Yeah, and since Iâm used to being the Linux Guy in a world of Windows users, itâs usually my job to say âhang on, thereâs a world outside this proprietary toolâs software suite, if we do it this way then anyone can read the data weâre publishingâ.
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The Cyclades Pledge I want⌠doesnât exist: meeples for the factions and plastic for the monsters and heroes. Meh. At least the 19% MwSt is included in the pricing
VAT & Sales Taxes included in the price, see our âShipping and Taxesâ section for details.
I need to consider the fact that I ended up selling my standee version of Wonderlandâs War in favor of the fully blinged one (which has yet to arrive).
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So Phantom Division was cancelled, to be rebooted later this year. Without getting into it, we never got an answer about AI art assets, and one of the designers in particular showed his ass throughout the campaign. His crass, loaded language ended up reminding me of the bizarre , tasteless jingoism present in Seal Team Flix and thatâs before we get into the finger pointing.
His latest comment is fuming about having to go to Gen Con on his birthday to sell a game to people with no money.
Easy pass going forward. Gross.
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As someone whoâs not big into crowdfunding, Iâm rather scratching my head at what just happened with Phantom Division (from what Iâve read anyway).
Aside from the usual board game âhey letâs get some sweet art assets, then hand the thing over to my mate John who has a Creative Cloud account for the rest of the graphic designâ, it seems like they set a target, met it within 3 days, then cancelled because⌠they didnât have a prototype ready yet?
I mean, if the target was truly the target, then why stop after youâve succeeded? Why schedule a campaign before you have a functioniing prototype?
Weâve all had things go wrong, but this seems very basic given this is not their first rodeo.
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One of my bigger beefs with crowdfunding. Their targets are never realistic funding goals.
Funding goal: $10. Pledged: $1000 => âWE HIT 10,000% OF OUR FUNDING GOAL!â
Okay, yeah⌠but can you produce 100 copies of the game for $1000? Could you produce $10? Could you produce even one for $1000? No.
From what I understand, â10000â is the magic quantity number for most game publishing; itâs approximately the break-even cost for most publishers and manufacturers to both be profitable after accounting for fixed overhead (e.g. art asset commissioning, rulebook consultants, and manufacturing tooling). So any campaign where the funding goal is less than (base pledge * 10000 * 0.4) is pretty suspect to me. The 0.4 in this case is about the cost-vs-msrp ratio I expect is the norm.
But Iâm not on the inside and I donât actually see the real numbers anywhere, so who knows what the real truth is.
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Light fraud, understood.
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And itâs worth noting that this sham has been part of their (Elzraâs) schtick for the last few years. Since Catacombs Cubes theyâve had a relaunch without fail and Aron himself is transparent about âplaying the gameâ in terms of funding goals. All under the guise of being a âtrue underdog story made for Kickstarterâ.
Itâs amazing how transparent he continues to be, in that regard. Particularly since we never got an answer to the AI question.
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Taking their update at face value, they were expecting to have a functioning prototype and not all of it turned up. It does seen nonsensical that they wouldnât have postponed the campaign launch date at that point, though.
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And now we get more petulance from the team with Aron West outright refusing to answer the AI question, citing what he perceives as bullying from an online mob.
Granted the BGG thread asking about it devolved into 4 pages of people belittling us for daring to ask the question in the first place. Maybe heâs just sticking up for us. 
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