What KICKSTARTER(S) are you BACKING and WHY?

$75 of that must go towards some kind of app integration.

Was not expecting to see a Prospero Hall kickstarter.

Part of the value of Propsero Hall games to date has been the excellent compromises made to squeeze a highly thematic game into impulse buy price points. I really liked what they were doing but I felt like all of their games fell into the "consumable entertainment" side of the hobby rather than the "deep game that warrants exploration" side. A legacy game is presumably a lot more design intensive but I don't think any game they've produced to date would convince me that their next offering warrants such a high price point.

I hope there's a whole second game locked in an envelope for that price.

I had a look at the Polygon preview. "24 hours of total gameplay"? I paid less for Sleeping Gods and I've played that for twice as long already.

@charlest: Jokes aside, about the only thing I can imagine would justify that price point is if there were a ton of "unlockable" stretch goals baked into the cost.

Yes, truth is it's difficult to know what is added throughout the campaign since it's legacy. There could be twice as much physical material as what is shown.

sornars wrote: I really liked what they were doing but I felt like all of their games fell into the "consumable entertainment" side of the hobby rather than the "deep game that warrants exploration" side.

I think that's a good assessment. When I look at the four I own (Villainous, Jaws, Godzilla Tokyo Clash, Funkoverse), they're all pretty much in the category you described, although I think there is more to be said about depth and variety of gameplay with Villainous (which is why I wrote thousands of words on it that pretty much no one else bothered with), such that you could suggest that there's a bit more "heft" to it in terms of which decks could compete best against others, and so forth. I have similar thoughts about Funkoverse. But, yeah, there's almost no way I would've expected a price point like this from Prospero Hall. Maybe their business model just wasn't working? Maybe this is a Funko initiative to get in the big peoples' pool while the water's still warm?

I'm waiting on Silver Coin: Age of Monster Hunters to go live sometime Q1/Q2 next year and that should (must!) be my last kickstarter for some time (I have enough to play for a couple of years plus now). They're taking their time in its design (not a bad thing), they have a decent play-thru video on their site ( here ) and I like the look and feel of it so, barring it being over-priced due to any tsunami of plastic not being optional, it has my attention.

dysjunct wrote: It is just fascinating to me how wide the gulf is between Sirlin’s skill at game design and development, vs. his skill at marketing, market analysis, branding, and basically everything else related to getting games out into the wild.

Like who TF names a game that is a completely new game “Puzzle Strike 2”? You could call it Gem Crashers, Puzzle Crash, Scepter Crash, Gem Fighters, or a million other things that would prevent you from having to waste valuable time and energy explaining how a game with a “2” in its title is not a rework of your old game.

Everyone needs an editor in their lives. Or a producer, in this case.

Either way, this is a new game then? I've often thought about getting Puzzle Strike because it seemed interesting but I had heard about a possible new edition so I didn't. Now apparently it's not a new edition but a whole different game? Weird.

With all this blockchain nonsense going around, I hope Elzra decides to use Gamefound instead of KS, whenever the hell Phantom Division actually gets to that point. If anyone is curious, the hold up is art. Plain and simple.

Yeah, the announcement of KS switching to blockchain means no more KS at all for me. I'm not going to be even a tiny party to that bullshit.

Gross.

How ironic that the purveyors of concentrated FOMO are now feeling FOMO themselves about the blockchain and want to to get in on the MLM scam. Haven't touched KS in well over a year, and sure as shit won't be starting now.

What is it you all have against Blockchain? Everything I've read shows the technology to be very useful.

I don't want to wade into the ethics of blockchains but from a business perspective DAOs represent an existential risk to Kickstarter's whole business. The ConstitutionDAO was one of the most high profile crowd funding events ever; why couldn't that have happened on a traditional centralised platform? The answer is it could have but not without these platforms innovating and changing how they fundamentally work. Kickstarter is probably looking at that and wondering what would happen to their business if most crowd funding ends up happening via DAOs and trying to keep in front of that. I suspect that this is motivating them much more than wanting to get onboard the hype train; that's probably just an incidental benefit.

Nothing I've seen from Kickstarter suggests that they're motivated to do anything innovative otherwise, I mean how is their mobile app experience still so terrible?