What KICKSTARTER(S) are you BACKING and WHY?

Stationfall There aren't any compelling reasons to Kickstart this instead of waiting for retail and I really don't see this game getting much play but the design itself seems pretty interesting. www.kickstarter.com/projects/455725875/stationfall

ISS: Vanguard pledge manager opened on Thursday and that was a no-brainer, just had to restrain myself a bit on the extras - not the minis add-on as the game doesn't need them (they're there for the painters and collectors), grabbed the player mats as they seemed a decent price, no to the deluxe dice, and also said no to the space being dice tower (restraint rather than not liking) and the section boxes for dice and cards - but let's see how long that lasts over the 3 months it is open .

gamefound.com/projects/awaken-realms/iss...ection/project-story
Space being dice tower for those interested gamefound.com/projects/awaken-realms/iss...guard#/product/13296

On stationfall, yeah, Dan Thurot's positive preview does not make this sound interesting to me at all: spacebiff.com/2021/05/10/stationfall/

I think Stationfall sounds like a cool game that would never hit the table. It also seems to have notes of Nemesis and Duhr, both games I already own and don’t get to play enough.

I definitely got Nemesis vibes.

WE CAN PLAY - because we should know more about significant female figures in history.

Hidden Leaders - the mechanics sound good.

Miniquest Adventures - portable-looking dungeon crawler.

The Also Ran: Wanted to support I C E but can't from the UK
Fab new mechanics. Love a bit of strategy.

Gary Sax wrote: On stationfall, yeah, Dan Thurot's positive preview does not make this sound interesting to me at all: spacebiff.com/2021/05/10/stationfall/

this sounds like an actually playable by humans version of The Artifact, a game that i have looooong wanted to play (but realize that, even if i tracked down a copy i would maybe play once. double blind requiring agame master, long, complicated, insane... yea its just not feasible for me). so much so that i googled around and found this designer diary ( boardgamegeek.com/thread/2647057/designer-diary-map ) where matt eklund talks about it largely being inspired by The Artifact, and his early prototypes using lots of borrowed components from that game etc.

so... now yall got me tempted by a kickstarter over here. i see that theres no kickstarter exclusive stuff though, so this seems like a good game to buy at retail later...

edit: also matt eklund codesigned The Artifact with phil eklund so i guess it all makes sense

I'm currently in for The Witcher - Old World. Looks to be an adventure game ala Runebound, but has a focus on monster hunting, of course. Standard mode is competitive, but cooperative is there as well.

There is a deluxe pledge that includes monster minis, but I am going standard. It almost doubles the price.

The game looks to have tremendous value for what they are including.

One thing that bothers me is that all of the playable characters are white dudes. I seem to recall that only males can be Witchers, but.... I don't really fucking care. My girlfriend will want to play this, and I have no doubt that she would prefer to play as a lady Witcher. I suppose it is also possible that they literally don't have permission to do that.

You're in luck, they just announced female player characters as upcoming add-ons in their latest update. It looks like they'll be mages which is congruent with the rules of the universe.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/goonboard/t...itcher/posts/3200331

I want to back Paperback Adventures, which is a solo game based on the word making deck builder Paperback. The price doesn't jibe for me though. $35 only gets you one character, and if you want all three available characters it's $80. Doesn't seem like an $80 game to me. It does look fun though.

hotseatgames wrote: I'm currently in for The Witcher - Old World. Looks to be an adventure game ala Runebound, but has a focus on monster hunting, of course. Standard mode is competitive, but cooperative is there as well.

There is a deluxe pledge that includes monster minis, but I am going standard. It almost doubles the price.

The game looks to have tremendous value for what they are including.

One thing that bothers me is that all of the playable characters are white dudes. I seem to recall that only males can be Witchers, but.... I don't really fucking care. My girlfriend will want to play this, and I have no doubt that she would prefer to play as a lady Witcher. I suppose it is also possible that they literally don't have permission to do that.

I think it may be a bit light in gameplay for me but I'm in, I can always sell it straight away if it lets me down.
For your girlfriend - they have announced that females are showing up as a SG, apparently in the Witcher canon females are uber Mages so that is how they will fit in.

I'm still in on Witcher - Old World, and still at the standard pledge level. The deluxe minis are nice, of course, but very expensive and unnecessary. Some pros and cons to this campaign / game have surfaced, for me:

- they seem to be caving way too much to the mob. This may sound anti-consumer, but I don't like it when a publisher continually capitulates to the KS commenters; have a vision and stick to it. You always end up with too many cooks.

- they have now said that they aren't going to be showing the beta rule book while the campaign is running. This is a huge red flag, but it is lessened by the fact that I actually watched their full 3 person playthrough. I was only able to do this because it was the designer, his wife, and a friend of theirs. Had it been "content creators", I would have never made it. I can't bare those types of videos. Anyway, having watched that video, I can pretty much tell exactly how the game plays. It is light, but has a lot of fun aspects to it. I like how easy it is to get around the board, not a slog like Runebound.

+ The structure of the game makes PvP actually look viable and fun, while not devastating to the loser.

+ the Monster Trail expansion appears to make trailing and hunting a monster much more interesting than the base game, so I'm pretty excited that there are now like 24 monsters in the game.

+ the card play is channeling Nightfall, which really interests me. I really liked that game.

So for now, I'm staying in. They have yet to reveal the female mages, so perhaps that will be the make or break point for me.

I backed the Tussie Mussie expansions, because they're cheap and the game is great.

I appreciate the updates on big KS games. I'm going to pass on Witcher but I am curious.

hotseatgames wrote: I'm still in on Witcher - Old World, ....

+ the card play is channeling Nightfall, which really interests me. I really liked that game.

Their card system is implementing what Middle Earth Quest did - cards for your health, for your movement using terrain symbols, and for combat. It was a very good system in MEQ and looks like it will work well in this game.
I also don't want a big box of expensive miniatures but from the prototype play-throughs those Monster tokens look hard to distinguish, especially lying flat on the board - I may buy some stands and do as per Arkham Horror monster tokens.