Yeah it's really made me loathe some companies (CMON, Mantic etc) who use it as a pre-order system to bait people into buying their shitty games.
Yeeeeaaaah, I may have backed hate for the job lot, not sure if the rules will be any good but the models and the Adrian Smith art look pretty faultless and it could be the chaos wastes path to glory game I've always wanted, and if it isn't i'll just write better rules for it. I fully admit however that I have no time for Mantic, ive never backed any of their KS however I do have some of their stuff; their rules are bad, their quality is worse, and their business model is (or at least was) kickstarting to pay for their last kickstarter.
Nothing wrong with a KS for a board game, just a wank KS for a board game. Miniwargames I don't think KS is right for at all mind. Just seems to kill games.
Indeed the mantic pre-order system just meant that by the time it got to brick and mortar stores everybody who was interested in it had already got it, and got more than was available to retail months in advance, so it was taking food from the mouths of the people you wanted to promote and grow your community and stock your product.
And also anyone watching someone playing on of those games in the meantime is just shit out of luck for getting minis, and therefore interest in the game is destroyed. Makes me weirdly want to support non KS'd games more. Like I'm tempted to try the Batman game just because I like that Knight released it properly.
I think this nails it, the KS they run give you so much extra stuff it both alpha-strikes those interested, and can really turn away those interested post-KS because the retail releases seem such poor value in comparison. FWIW, I personally wouldn't buy zombicide or SDE because I missed the KS, there was just so much ks-exclusive stuff and extras that it made the retail boxes seem like a real bad purchase to me. (Saying that I did back mantic's Hellboy KS, but hey, I was a hypocrite long before that came along... ) Which reminds me I need to trim my collection a little before that comes along and Yokai Quest ships in Sept...
It's pretty easy to do a game via normal retail launch when you've got a safe IP like batman, that's pretty much a given there's a market for it, Board Games can suffer in that if the concept isn't well received that initial print run is dead money, KS for board games (particularly for smaller independent outfits) is fantastic because you can gauge the market before you spend tens/hundreds of thousands on a product
Kingdom death aside I'm avoiding board games with miniatures. Too many seem to focus on the minis and completely lose sight of the gameplay. I feel pretty burnt by the 4 kickstarters I backed from Soda Pop Miniatures with the fourth one almost certain to not deliver at this point.Can't even begin to explain what a waste of money relic knights 1.0 was. I did what I could to persuade people not to get on the 2.0 bandwagon... All those free minis make people go blind. I've learnt my lesson. Very happy to have backed 2 card based kickstarters this year. Even tested one of them out on tabletop simulator extensively before purchasing. That's probably me done for boardgame kickstarters for the year. How much time/space can people have to keep backing these things? Especially ones with millions of minis (that recent space Zombicide KS omg... do you people never intend to move house?)
yeah Minis and Kickstarters seem to be a recipe for disaster which is why I refuse to back them, I'll wait for reviews post launch.
With the happy exception being Kingdom Death: Monster I have to confess, I backed it originally in a weak moment. I had put in $150 before I even watched the pitch video. And a few hours before the campaign closed, I had put in another $150, still oblivious of the gameplay. I was in it for the minis. So I was really pleasantly surprised that the game is as fun as it is. I'm now 5 campaigns in with three different game groups, still excited to start a new one.
At the risk of derailing the topic, am i the only one that will back a KS just to get the minis, regardless of the game itself? I tend to not make a habit of it because i have enough boardgames already, plus my backlog is terrifying, but more than once i've backed a KS because it has minis that i haven't seen anywhere else, utterly ignoring playability and those other concerns. Is this unusual?
I think I heard on Facebook that Prodos will open a KS to launch Warzone Resurrection's Illian in plastic sprues... nad I have the feeling that if that KS tanks, the game will do so too.
People actually play Warzone? only thing I've heard about the game is people occasionally buying the miniatures to cannibalise for 40k conversions...
There's one REALLY Welsh couple who plays it, they told me it was a good game, I nodded my head much like I do when someone asks me in the street if I'm interested in finding the path of god.
Only do it better and be on time. And finish sending out their KS I got into it for a short time, It wants to do the granularity of infinity, the mass battles and giant units of 40k and the synergistic paper rock scissors of warmachine and it just sort of crashes down in between the three burning, achieving little more than wasting a lot of time.
Yep, there is a "national" tournament in Spain (where people from outside Spain do come aswell) in Talavera (it's called "Invasión Talavera") close to Madrid, and I thing there are players in Poland. And then they added "strategy cards"... I got Cybertronic, and my usual game goes "WTF, I need characters or heavy weapons to kill enemy vehicles, and the heavy weapons are killed ASAP by my enemy". It bogs down a lot thanks to vehicles (tons of RANDOM locations unless you aim... and then you better suceed shooting and the enemy fails its armor roll) and some troops that heal themselves (which are actually the ones doing the heavy lifting...). Tons of "must have" troops, at least ofr cybertronic. And then there comes Mishima, where it comes down to Ashigaru mounted on mules (think Domaru inside transport vans you have to blow up before getting to them) and Gigamek (thing three Avatar one on top of each other... its a HUGE model). Or go "bad guys" and spam grenade-launching monkeys (Razidas). There is a reason I haven't taken the models out of the box after playing a few games.