Ogre...Kickstarter...you in?

Well, that's not quite fair, Shellhead. It's not going to be 13 lbs. of vanilla OGRE. From the sounds of things, it's going to at least include Shockwave, and probably most of Battlefields.

I agree with you that the original was a pretty good $3-$5 game, and that's it. GEV is about in the same class, but with the two expansions, the game is fleshed out quite a bit. You get more rules for missile fire, intercepting missiles, personnel carriers, buildings, combat engineers, towing, and probably other things I don't remember at the moment. Plus, the scenarios get more involved in the supplemental stuff. I just happen to have my VHS box sitting right here, and I've got:

About 500 counters, and there are something like 20 different combat units and 5 different kinds of building, plus a bunch of miscellaneous shit. So, you've got a large number and variety of stuff you can use. 7 maps, though it looks like there are only going to be 4 in this version, it also looks like they're going to be more modular. Around 15 scenarios, with a few different variations for each one.

If you're getting more content than that for your $100, I'd sure like to know where. That's just what I have with the game and printed expansions. I never got the OGRE book, or any of the slew of semi-official stuff people have been adding to the game for years. From the sounds of things, there's going to be a good chunk of that in this version as well.

Now, I'd prefer Jackson wasn't using Kickstarter for OGRE, but it's clear he's bound and determined NOT to lose money on this game. Honestly, I'm not sure I blame him for that. It's his baby; he's obviously proud of it, and he kind of built his company off of it. Sinking a bunch of capital into a lavish new presentation only to have the game tank on you is going to sting more deeply than when your other games don't sell. On the other hand, it's clear he wants to do a lot more with this edition than he could if he printed just what he knew for sure he could sell. Kickstarter just happens to be a pretty convenient preorder mechanism, and it allows him to get a bunch of stuff into the game that wouldn't be worth adding if he was going through the traditional channels.

The game isn't for everybody, but from the looks of things, the final product is going to offer you a hell of a lot of game for your Benjamin. For one thing, there's just a ton of shit that's going to come in the box. For another, you can go from ultra-low to moderately high complexity, depending on your mood and taste, without too much fuss involved, and the game plays consistently well on both levels. Also, you can play a 15-minute, 2-player pickup game, or go all out and play a huge battle for a few hours, and with multiple players. Again, it works about as well either way.

From where I'm sitting, that's not too shabby a prospect. Compare this to the new Space Hulk. For the same price as this game, I got a box full of awesome looking toys and that's about it. With a few exceptions, the scenarios in the box have the shelf life of a head of lettuce. I'd make my own, but I'm limited by what they put in the box for miniatures and map tiles, and that's only half of what was originally produced for the game. The result? Our group still plays the 1st edition. Doesn't look anywhere near as nice, but we have the shit we need to do what we want with the game.

So yeah, hopefully this Kickstarter deal allows SJ to get this edition as close to what it's become after years and years of growing as possible. I'll put the $100 up front for that. I could be doing a hell of a lot worse.

Not to mention that many games are never actually played, Shellhead. Bought, rules consumed, chortle of clever understanding and self-appreciation chortled, and off to the OCD shelf it goes.

The game isn't for everybody, but from the looks of things, the final product is going to offer you a hell of a lot of game for your Benjamin.

The first clause in this sentence is where I'm standing right now. The amount of material in the box means that this is a lifestyle game instead of a casual play, and I just don't think that's going to be an option for my buddies and me. So for me it's likely a no-go.

One of my buddies just asked if he should get it. I told him I played Ogre in the early 80s at a Star Fleet Battles session and the thing I remember asking at the time (keep in mind that hundreds of 1980-dollars worth of SFB material was on the tables around me) "why are we playing SFB when this thing is around for ten bucks?"

These days I'd love to play a bunch of my games 100 times each but it's not going to happen. I'm an adult now. So the only way I'm going after anything over $100 is if its aftermarket value is going to stay up there so I can sell or trade later. It would help if the box was a shippable size as well.

If anything I'll get a copy used. It sure looks like there's going to be more than a few of them around.

S.

Hey -- check out BGG's page for it. There's a kickstarter widget advertising the pre-order. The assimilation has begun.

S.

SuperflyTNT wrote: Microloans in India have been big for a long time, and it's the same model. Those cats are building a fucking nation on this concept.

I was pretty excited about microloans at first, too, but sadly their track record is not good:

blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/...-before-study-finds/

Regardless: I'll point out again that KS isn't a loan system, it's a crowdsourced funding system. But yeah, I do see the similarities.

I agree with you (I hope I'm not misstating your position) that the closer KS gets to traditional business models, the more it has the potential for breaking down. For pure charity, it's amazing. Niche products and small inventors and indie artists? Still pretty great. If BP starts crowdsourcing oil rigs, I'll reserve judgment, but it would be interesting if nothing else.

I'll make another point that I haven't seen made: KS users are, by and large, educated and engaged. Company X may sell shitty products in Wal-Mart and be somewhat removed from fallout due to layers of distribution, but woe unto the company that screws over a large KS base. It's simply a more engaged economic model by its very nature. I suppose that consumer base could be diluted by a huge influx of new users, but I'm hoping that, instead, new users are slowly socialized and educated. We'll see.

mjl, you made some good points. It's true, there is likely to be a lot more gameplay in this big Ogre set than in the similarly priced Space Hulk 3rd edition set that I bought. But I was so underwhelmed by the original Ogre that I never even played the G.E.V. or Shockwave expansions that I got from friends for my birthday a year later. I eventually traded them away, though I kept Ogre.

wolvendancer wrote: I'll make another point that I haven't seen made: KS users are, by and large, educated and engaged. Company X may sell shitty products in Wal-Mart and be somewhat removed from fallout due to layers of distribution, but woe unto the company that screws over a large KS base. It's simply a more engaged economic model by its very nature. I suppose that consumer base could be diluted by a huge influx of new users, but I'm hoping that, instead, new users are slowly socialized and educated. We'll see.

Yet, the educated, and engaged still allow this company to exist, Kickstarting and all. Educated and Engaged can be fooled with Shiny and Precious.


But back to MJ, who I respect immensely, but in this case disagree with. Space Hulk has had more plays in my house than any other game save Heroscape and Red November. It is The Game That Cannot Be Sold Or Traded. Ogre looks neat and all, and I played it several times back in the day thinking it was a mediocre one-sided version of Panzerkreig or something. One big tank to rule them all and in the bloodbath bind them? Really? Just wasn't all that shit hot in my opinion.

And it may have more plays to TO SOME in it, but to a lot of people, Space Hulk 3ed is the dog's bollocks with incredible replay value.

Space Hulk has had more plays in my house than any other game save Heroscape and Red November. It is The Game That Cannot Be Sold Or Traded.

That's all well and good for you, Pete. I don't know how long you've been playing the game, but I started with it about 20 years ago. The base game and Deathwing, which is more or less what 3rd ed. is, exhausted their potential to keep me interested a loooooong time ago.

I will play those first 6 scenarios the same way every single time I play the marines. Ditto for most of the other ones. So will everyone else I play the game with. There's just nothing left for us to do with what's in that box. OK, maybe that's not a problem for people who haven't been playing it since they were six, but how much longer will that handful of maps and loadouts last for everyone else?

My guess? Not too damned long. I'm basing that guess on the fact that those scenarios got fairly boring fairly quickly the first two times around, and in order to keep the game interesting, things had to keep getting added to it. With Genestealer, the campaign book, and all that White Dwarf stuff for the old game, there was that potential. Here, there is not, and there never will be.

If you're happy with the new version as-is forever and ever, then I'm happy for you. I just don't want to keep playing the meat and potatoes version of the game, and haven't for a good many years.

Ogre looks neat and all, and I played it several times back in the day thinking it was a mediocre one-sided version of Panzerkreig or something. One big tank to rule them all and in the bloodbath bind them? Really? Just wasn't all that shit hot in my opinion.

Well again, I agree with you guys on basic OGRE. One side gets one thing to move, the other gets one target to shoot at, and terrain hardly matters. Nothing to write home about, especially now that there are games like Astra Titanus out there that basically render it obsolete. I get it.

But that's not what you're being sold here. The basic GEV rules alone deepen the game considerably. You have a lot more obstacles, cover modifiers, close assaults, and splash damage. You have to use roads effectively, and provide transportation for your foot soldiers. You can attack the terrain itself and divert enemy approaches. Once you throw in lasers and cruise missiles, you introduce LOS and some simultaneity into the game as well.

You may still not like the game, and I'm usually of the opinion that, if you didn't like something to begin with, no expansion or modification is going to do much to change your mind. I will say, though, that playing the original OGRE is not a very good basis for deciding whether or not you're going to like this thing. The gameplay itself is appreciably different and more interesting, even if it uses the same CRT and basic units.

However, this does illustrate one thing SJ has done seriously wrong with this product line, which was to keep making some distinction between OGRE and GEV as two separate games (which they are), but never doing the logical thing and start calling GEV "Advanced OGRE" (which it is). When you see someone refer to OGRE, you can never quite be sure what exactly they're talking about, since the two games have been packaged and expanded together for so long, were never properly married into one comprehensive ruleset.

The first clause in this sentence is where I'm standing right now. The amount of material in the box means that this is a lifestyle game instead of a casual play...

Eh, I wouldn't say that. Even at its most complex, it's about on par with Valor and Victory in terms of rules weight, and a lot of the extra rules only apply if you're using the units that those rules govern. For the most part, which units you take is up to you, so you can determine how much complexity you want to deal with without having to shackle your opponent to a lighter or heavier ruleset. The learning curve is about average, and you can get a lot out of it without having to include everything there is to use.

But then again, it's a $100 game. You should probably be aiming for about 20 plays at least if you're going to invest that much.

If Steve Jackson Games hadn't lost the partnership with Interplay for the Fallout franchise in the late 90s, I bet they wouldn't need kickstarter now. Welp!

Well, at least they have Munchkin :v

MJ, I've played SH for a great many years. I, too, had the original set, with the scenario book (later). It is one of the few games from my childhood. But, I am an imaginative little bastard, which is why I liked LNOE and the D&D Adventure Games so much. I have yet to run out of ideas on what maps to build, including large-scale shit. At one point I had three 12 mission scenarios on my PC, all mapped and shit. I had every tile image photographed in a light-box, cut and photoshopped to be just the tile, and all that jazz.

Then my PC HDD took a shit. Music, photos, game files, and my most precious loss, my Fallout 3 character.

So, eventually I'll get my photo booth set up again (not much effort there...it's a USPS box with the back cut out and replaced by white copy paper...) and will go back to making badass scenarios that are essentially unbalanced bloodbaths where the Marines have a snowball's chance in Hell of winning. And I still won't care because it's the body count I'm after!

To be fair, though, in all honesty I wish they'd have had the old-style Genestealers...the new ones look way cooler but are WAY more of a bitch to actually play with.

One of these days I'm just going to buy a bunch of the standard ones and swap them out.

SaMoKo wrote: If Steve Jackson Games hadn't lost the partnership with Interplay for the Fallout franchise in the late 90s...

They didn't 'lose' it, Steve Jackson tore up the contract after Brian Fargo and the Fallout team refused to lower the amount of violence in Fallout. Specifically quoted as a 'problem' was Fallout 1's opening sequence where the Ink Dots music plays over a scene of a guy being executed by powered armor troops. Good call, Steve.

Steve Jackson is Anti-American.

Mom, Apple Pie, and Power Armored BOS Paladins ripping shit up with plasma rifles...that's All American Values in a nutshell.

Holy shit! I just checked the KS page and SJG has raised nearly a quarter of a MILLION dollars on this thing already. WTF!

flim_flam wrote: a quarter of a MILLION dollars

I've always felt that phrase is only used to make the amount sound like more than it actually is. A MILLION dollars is still a very long way away.

[Note: I'm not saying $250K isn't a lot, because it is.]

I'd never heard of Kicktraq, but it apparently graphs some basic stats. Here's how Ogre is doing:

www.kicktraq.com/projects/847271320/ogre-designers-edition/