What KICKSTARTER(S) are you BACKING and WHY?

Dan Thurot loves it to. If both of us agree, we have to be right.

I think Matt enjoyed it but didn't quite find it as brilliant as I do.

But seriously, I hope you dig it. I think it's one of the best emergent narrative focused designs in recent years. I expect it to be remembered fondly for a long time, similar to a peak FFG design.

Nemesis is absolutely worth the effort.

Kicked in for the latest Heroes of Normandie KS because I'm a sucker for it.

I saw that and was confused, as I thought the Heroes of Normandie company had been in serious financial trouble, to the point where they were going to be lucky to fulfill a prior KS before they folded. Maybe they got bought?

They pulled themselves back from the brink by doing a couple of in-house crowd-funded projects, one of which was marketed literally as a ‘save our business’ campaign. After a few screw ups they’ve gone back to HoN WWII as a safe cash cow. Seems like the increased visibility of being on a crowd-funding platform is worth the 10% fee if they’ve moved away from the in-house stuff.

Yeah, that WH40k game almost sunk them I think. Too bad, a fully fleshed out tactical ASL level 40k game had always been one of my dreams.

The 40k game was great.

If I had unlimited space I'd bring it in, it's still sometimes being blown out after all these years.

If I saw it cheap I might take the plunge but after playing it a few times HoN didn't seem to have enough gameplay/variety to be worth the cost. It had some cool concepts, and the tongue in cheek approach/artwork actually was kind of refreshing. But the set up templates for each unit seemed more trouble than they were worth. And at the time, there was a very limited force pool and it was expensive for what you got IMO.

Never tried the WH40K version but I might be more interested in that than the WWII version.

I had the Mythos-themed one... Secrets of Normandie? Anyway, it was a cool system but I recall being frustrated with very lopsided scenarios. I sold it off.

I had Heroes of Black Reach. It felt like it was trying too hard to be that ASL thing that Gary is referring to. There just seemed to be way too much effort that had to be put in to get through even the most routine of scenarios. If anything, it felt like it overcomplicated 40K? I ended up trading it (to Ah Pook, IIRC) for a copy of Outer Rim which I then detested after one play so I traded it for Ethnos which is cool.

I recognize I am an extremely weird niche to design for but that sounds great.

I enjoyed black reach but didn't have anyone around to play it with that wanted to get into army building, and the system seems really set up for playing around with customization. Without that it's a lot of faffing around for questionable return. Plus you couldn't solo it well with the cards are hidden unit activation stuff. So I ended up trading it out. It's worth a shot though if you have an opponent to go down the rabbit hole with you.

Yeah, part of my disaffection with it is probably that my regular two-player partner disappeared a while back (moved on to other things of interest) and I have no one that really wants to do that "army building" thing around here. We were hardcore Battlelore 2nd Ed. players for a long time, in addition to block wargames, and I haven't put any of them on the table in years because it's harder to set up 2-player games than it is multiplayer unless you know that one person and that one person also has to be into games like Black Reach. I've recently reached out to a bunch of groups and game stores in the area to try to drum up some new regulars because I'm tired of looking at the shelf and trying to remember the last time I played something.

I'm hoping that moving to the new community in Florida full of retirees will uncover a pocket of grognards open to the C&C collection, HoN, and my various other 2p wargames.