Up Front on Drivethrucards

Has anyone bought this? It says that it's sold by Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro), so...it's legit? Is the DTC printing quality worth the 60 bucks? It's cheaper than the only available 1st edition copy at Noble Knight.

Up Front

I can't answer as to quality but my understanding is, yeah, it's legit.
A local used (turned out to be unpunched!) copy of the original turned up here, which I nabbed. The quality, isn't great, to be honest. I mean, it's good for the era, it's fine, but if that's your only concern, I doubt that the drive thru edition will be worse. From memory, you can get the drive thru version with cards that replace all the chits. Not sure how much that appeals to you but it wouldn't be the worst thing to have, either.

Haven't seen it personally, but I've not read any bad reviews from those that have gotten it from the site. Yes it's legit.

Awesome, thanks both of you. I'm on a retail therapy kick lately since they ordered us all back to school to teach. I've been wanting to try Up Front for a long time!

I got so burned by the kickstarter of this back in the day....

It's still a pretty interesting game, it's just the AH rulebook is pretty dense to get started with. Dogmatix sold me a reasonably priced copy of it years and years ago, I still have it. Of course, it's the version with the SS guy on the front UGH.

There's another version of the cover?

But yes, it's an interesting game, a lot to like about the system. For all the detail in that rulebook, it's not too complicated in the end.

No, that's the only AH version. But I assumed if you got the pnp version it wouldn't have an SS officer on the front of anything! Maybe I'm wrong.

jason10mm wrote: I got so burned by the kickstarter of this back in the day....

I saw some huge threads over on BGG about it. I have no idea what happened, but it seems like ignorance is bliss on that point. Your pain is my gain, I guess.

I don't think the drive thru version comes with a box at all, but I might be wrong.

Cambyses wrote:

jason10mm wrote: I got so burned by the kickstarter of this back in the day....

I saw some huge threads over on BGG about it. I have no idea what happened, but it seems like ignorance is bliss on that point. Your pain is my gain, I guess.

I could give the whole sordid tale if anyone is interested. UF and the associated game Airborne in your Pocket, along with the Robotech Tactics disaster, pretty much turned me off of kickstarter forever.

UP Front was very one of the very earliest KS games, way back in 2012. It got a lot of attention due to not only offering a reprint of a long OOP grail game, but for having raised the at the time unheard of sum of $339K. It blew through a ton of Stretch Goals - when the campaign closed, full backers were promised something like close to 2000 cards, a pretty good deal for pledging $125.


While we'll never know the full details, what appears to have happened was that Valley Games' prior debts caught up to them. While they had previously done well regarded reprints of other grail games such as HANNIBAL and TITAN, they had also done a bunch of other games that were duds as well as paid money for rights to other games they never got off the ground. A private lender filed a lawsuit for a shit ton of money he ( foolishly ) lent them and the KS project never printed.....and people were out the money they put into it. Where the money ended up, who knows. Maybe the lender got some, common wisdom says the Valley guy moved to Australia or something. It was the subject of much BGG drama.

Pretty much. They had another game in the KS pipeline was well, Airborne in your Pocket and were coming off the successful (and not half bad) D-Day Dice game. The issue is they tried to create a new game company (Radiant Games IIRC) to shield themselves from the debt of the other company. This info was available during the KS period but greed at the amount of cards and trust from the prior KS won over a lot of folks (including me).

I created the original Up Front thread when the KS launched warning people of the lawsuit, which I discovered when doing some digging in different forums. It grew quite large before a BGG admin moved the thread to the Radiant Games publisher forum (this was Valley Games new LLC created to avoid the debt and print Up Front). Unfortunately moving the thread effectively hid the warning, but it birthed two more enormous threads later.

Phil Sauer, the lender who later sued Valley, is a member of these forums although he hasn't posted in a long while. We've talked a few times briefly and he's a good dude and his intention was not to kill the Up Front reprint. The lawsuit actually began before the KS but Valley/Radiant proceeded anyway despite the huge risk to backers.

This is a very interesting story with lots of drama, including an employee leaking emails to Phil which highlighted how big of an ass the Valley Games CEOs were.

I don't believe Phil was awarded much if any money as it was all gone by then, but he did claim a ton of Valley's stock of older games. I ended up actually connecting him to the owner of Miniature Market who he liquidated it all through.

I thought they delivered Airborne to backers when they did D-Day Dice 2nd.