What KICKSTARTER(S) are you BACKING and WHY?

Gary Sax wrote: woo hoo! Did you have just the expansion box or did you get the extra tokens?

Expansion and tokens. Haven't opened either and probably won't anytime soon. Never got a shipping notice.

Oh man, nobody better steal it from my doorstep while I'm vacation before someone brings it in.

southernman wrote: ...
I backed a very cheap pdf dice solitaire adventure game, Holdout, if anyone is interested
www.kickstarter.com/projects/thehumblebard/holdout

S.T.A.L.K.E.R by Awaken Realms started today (on Gamefound). I'm on the fence at the moment as there are stickers in the game (don't know what for yet) and having just three campaigns with 12 missions total I'm not interested if you permanently change them so they can't be p[layed again. Also there doesn't seem to much game/content so far for $100 + tax + shipping price but I'll see what gets added over the next few weeks.

I ended up keeping the Holdout pledge (really cheap, great deal), and as it is P'n'P I've already received the PDFs.

And also kept the S.T.A.L.K.E.R pledge - they put enough variety/variation in the Core pledge, along with two recharge packs for the campaigns, that made it worthwhile (for me) to get.

Mantic's WORMS board game Kickstarter launched today, and I liked what I saw enough to pledge. There are two pledge tiers but the higher tier offered no real value in my opinion so I kept it simple.

I had been really curious to see how they were going to adapt it. They did not attempt to do anything like the video game landscape; you are not viewing a cross section of land, instead it's top down hexes like a map of Survive!. Gameplay is chaotic but there are enough ways to calculate odds that you can somewhat make smart decisions. Still, much like the video game, sometimes things just won't go your way. In that respect, it almost channels a VERY simple Wiz-War. I think it will be easy to get to the table.

edit: I took a look at the KS comments... of course someone asked about a solo mode. For fucking WORMS. Gamers....

If anyone wants some good ol' fashioned Kickstarter schadenfreude, check out the shitshow that is Broken Anvil Miniatures (BAM).

The short version: They launched a new miniature line / skirmish game called Rivenstone. Minis looked great, the campaign made about $230K.

They they launched, failed, and re-launched another miniatures-only campaign called Forged. Clearly they were trying to get some of that sweet sweet Reaper Bones cash. The campaign was nowhere close to a Reaper KS campaign, and made about $250K.

Then, they launched ANOTHER campaign, this one for a new line of paints. That one made only about $140K.

So now they're juggling three active campaigns, and ... PLOT TWIST ... it turns out the whole thing was a house of cards. Stop me if this sounds familiar, but they blew through the Rivenstone money, and had to launch Forged and the paints campaign in order to fund the development of Rivenstone. A disgruntled former employee spilled the beans here:

www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list...803404.page#11581248

And then a YouTuber connected all the dots and posted a highly critical video here:



It's always hard to know exactly what happened, but some toxic mix of incompetence, terrible business decisions, and outright fraud seems likely. None of the above campaigns are likely to ever get fulfilled.

And it really is too bad, because the minis looked great. They have some VERY talented artists and sculptors. It's a shame they're so bad at the business end of things. Ah, Kickstarter! It's always an adventure.

From the DakkaDakka forum post " It funded but didn't make nearly enough to even fund it's own production".

Pro tip: set your funding goal so it you know, covers your costs.

What a goat rodeo. From the three KS metioned they raised a little over $600K, but that's including whatever vig they have to pay KS. A half million sounds like a lot but obviously these ass clowns learned the hard way that hiring employees can burn thru cash FAST.

Some publishers think there is value in setting a low funding goal so that you can say "FUNDED IN 8 MINUTES" but I don't personally see the appeal of that "strategy".

Joebot wrote: If anyone wants some good ol' fashioned Kickstarter schadenfreude, check out the shitshow that is Broken Anvil Miniatures (BAM).

Three projects that will likely never deliver, and the folks at KS couldn't give a flying french-fried titty-fuck about any of it. Hey, "Kickstarter is not a store!" Not our problem!!! (***feverishly counts $$$ for 3rd vacation home & diamond ring for 4th mistress***)

And it's not like the whole "use the funds of the current KS to fund the last KS" is new or unique, companies are usually just better at doing it. I mean, look at DVG, they run buckets of Kickstarters (Warfighter, Leader Series, Field Commander series, etc) and can't possibly be keeping each bucket neatly contained in each game they do. But they remain afloat somehow.

I, for one, question the wisdom of signing on to anything produced by an entity whose name leads with the word "Broken", but that's just me. (They always tell you who they are...) But, yeah, I'm also with hotseat in that I think a number of campaigns these days are run with a low target so they can claim their record funding time and encourage more people to hop on the bandwagon because it's obviously SUPER-POPULAR to anyone who doesn't actually look at the numbers and understand what they mean. But if they hit that low target and not enough suckers actually sign on, they're screwed and then it's either abandon the campaign or come up with new stretch goals that will somehow also cover the gap of the original campaign (Doubtful.)

I had the latter thought when Petersen produced the Dunwich Horror expansion to somehow cover the costs of shipping across the Pacific for the recently-ended Cthulhu Wars debacle. (Well, ended for the Yanks on this side of the pond, anyway. Sorry, Euro-gamers.) Was the cost of producing and packaging (and, y'know, adding to the overall shipping and warehousing cost) really so low that it covered the container fees? Makes you think about the profit margins on those ridiculous "minis",

Not Kickstarter but Gamefound, the Fighting Fantasy Adventures game by , or at least invoking the name of, William Wallace. As a big fan of the books back in the day and a hopeless collector of solo games I'll never really play, this one got past my shieldwall. Making it a 4 player co-op or 4 characters for you to manage solo game makes me fear there is very little real co-op here (i.e. each player has few actions, no hidden agendas or traitor possibility, really they are just aspects of 1 complete character). But I'm hoping the kiddos will like it.

I think that one is Martin Wallace. Looks good.

I like a good video breakdown of shitshows, but King of Average just makes things up and puts these videos out to capitalize on our natural tendencies. He does it for the clicks and not to provide valuable information.

Joebot wrote: If anyone wants some good ol' fashioned Kickstarter schadenfreude, check out the shitshow that is Broken Anvil Miniatures (BAM).

The short version: They launched a new miniature line / skirmish game called Rivenstone. Minis looked great, the campaign made about $230K.

They they launched, failed, and re-launched another miniatures-only campaign called Forged. Clearly they were trying to get some of that sweet sweet Reaper Bones cash. The campaign was nowhere close to a Reaper KS campaign, and made about $250K.

Then, they launched ANOTHER campaign, this one for a new line of paints. That one made only about $140K.

So now they're juggling three active campaigns, and ... PLOT TWIST ... it turns out the whole thing was a house of cards. Stop me if this sounds familiar, but they blew through the Rivenstone money, and had to launch Forged and the paints campaign in order to fund the development of Rivenstone. A disgruntled former employee spilled the beans here:

www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list...803404.page#11581248

And then a YouTuber connected all the dots and posted a highly critical video here:

It's always hard to know exactly what happened, but some toxic mix of incompetence, terrible business decisions, and outright fraud seems likely. None of the above campaigns are likely to ever get fulfilled.

And it really is too bad, because the minis looked great. They have some VERY talented artists and sculptors. It's a shame they're so bad at the business end of things. Ah, Kickstarter! It's always an adventure.

hotseatgames wrote: I think that one is Martin Wallace. Looks good.

Ahh jeese, William Wallace was some sort of weird historical freudian slip

I don't think Wallace these days is as interesting a designer as he was 10 years ago. Seems more quantity than quality.

Will be looking at the reprint of Secrets of the Lost Tomb coming to Gamefound on 17 October, it's a 10th Anniversary edition and will have all the rules and mechanics cleaned up a bit plus double the number of scenarios. I had it about 5 or so years ago and it was a good bit of fun so it is on my radar to get an updated version.
It's basically a standalone campaign based dungeoncrawl with a bit of narrative, uses a tile laying mechanic from Betrayal at House on the Hill for building the dungeon/map, has trigger options for the campaign as you find certain tiles, characters gain and lose abilities as their fear level changes (if it ever gets to the bottom your turn is running to the entrance shrieking), and just some extremely fun Indiana Jones type adventuring/fighting.