What KICKSTARTER(S) are you BACKING and WHY?

jeb wrote:

hotseatgames wrote:

jeb wrote: The game is a nice dungeon crawl,

... it takes place on an overland map...

Is this a for-real critique of my post? If I have swords and armor and kill spiders and shit: it's a dungeon crawl.

The dungeons might actually be one of the cooler things in the game, you have to use the app to "wander" a little maze of options and try to make it out before you get smacked. Reminded me of REIGNS.

And you don’t crawl, you walk.

sigh... That's why they're euphemisms, people. I submit that "dungeon crawler" is simply a tag for a style of game these days. I call The Others a dungeon crawler because it's a miniatures game about heroes moving from place to place in a contained area, fighting monsters, even though it's set in the streets (and buildings) of a modern city.

That said, hotseat is correct about the original, in that there wasn't much "dungeoning" actually taking place and it was actually closer to an adventure game, a la Talisman. I don't know much about the new one, either. Looks pretty cool, though. The skulls reminded me of the cube towers in things like Wallenstein. Is that how they work?

Jackwraith wrote: sigh... That's why they're euphemisms, people. I submit that "dungeon crawler" is simply a tag for a style of game these days. I call The Others a dungeon crawler because it's a miniatures game about heroes moving from place to place in a contained area, fighting monsters, even though it's set in the streets (and buildings) of a modern city.

That said, hotseat is correct about the original, in that there wasn't much "dungeoning" actually taking place and it was actually closer to an adventure game, a la Talisman. I don't know much about the new one, either. Looks pretty cool, though. The skulls reminded me of the cube towers in things like Wallenstein. Is that how they work?

Don't dogpile hotseat everyone, they have a beef. It's NOT as dungeon-y as GLOOMHAVEN or DESCENT, but it's still a party of folks stabbing goblins and what not, so you can see where I am coming from. The original was like this too, if a little more in the abstract. It's an ~adventure game~ and your adventure is being a paladin or whatever killing monsters in the service of some evil master. Sometimes you are literally in a dungeon.

Here's how the Tower works: Four layers, and four sides (with openings, but the top three on each are covered at the start of the game.) At the end of each player's turn, they drop a skull into the top. The Tower senses this (knows the turn ended), and triggers some event. It might be a seal breaking (remove a cover), a rotation of a layer, or some on-the-board effect like the rivers become flame or whatever. Sometimes the skull just immediately drops out of an opening (skulls are placed on buildings on the side they come out on, a fourth skull on any destroys a building), sometimes it lives in there until a rotation or seal breaking spills it out. Cool sound effects, cool light-up shit, and all that.

What's missing in this new version is actually attacking the Tower. In the previous, you had to ascend it for the endgame, but here, it's just a thing that keeps the clock ticking (sometimes literally) while you try to vanquish the Adversary that's also moving around the map. There may be other quests that have you more directly attack it; we've only done the suggested intro.

Cooling on Puzzle Strike 2 after watching Rahdo’s playthrough. I know he isn’t the fastest player as he talks through all his options, but he only got through three turns in 50 minutes. There were some explosive turns and combos that took forever to get through. I love my dumb long Dominion turns, but if those are happening every other round and everyone does them, it looks like a slog.

The more I think about those gems and that scepter, the more I hate them. If Sirlin could just do cardboard tokens, he could have a $40 game in a reasonably-sized box.

I think there’s good stuff in there. Physical gems give a much better sense of what the game is about, and Sirlin is pretty good at making games where you’re actually playing the other people at the table. It just looks too chunky for something that should feel more spry.

Keeping an eye on Skytear Horde. Any cooperative card game has to give me a reason to play it over Arkham, but a glance does suggest a much different feel.

Any card game with insanely long combos for a given player is just a middle finger to the other players at the table from a design perspective. Whenever I play Ascension online and string together a 20 card sequence I can't help but think how miserable it'd be to play FtF. Dominion , depending on the cards used can have this issue as well, where once players trash the garbage start cards they can cycle their entire deck almost every turn. Its fucking miserable to sit thru, which is one of the reasons I stopped playing not long after it came out.

Msample wrote: Any card game with insanely long combos for a given player is just a middle finger to the other players at the table from a design perspective. Whenever I play Ascension online and string together a 20 card sequence I can't help but think how miserable it'd be to play FtF. Dominion , depending on the cards used can have this issue as well, where once players trash the garbage start cards they can cycle their entire deck almost every turn. Its fucking miserable to sit thru, which is one of the reasons I stopped playing not long after it came out.

This is kind of why I prefer Race For the Galaxy and 7 Wonders live.

But if you can have conversations during other player’s turns it’s less of an issue. I probably get more annoyed in worker placement games when AP takes hold when a player only has 10 play options and maybe 1-2 make sense at any given moment.

Man Puzzle Strike 2 doesn't look like a $70-100 game. (+$15 shipping)

Edit: to be clear, I think it looks like a pretty fun head to head deckbuilder... But the price point seems out of whack. Presumably because of the silly flashing scepter and fancy gems? Make those things cardboard and price this reasonably, put the expansion content in the base box, and offer an add on for the toy scepter etc...

I would love to try it out but I'm not going to be able to afford it so...

Ah_Pook wrote: Make those things cardboard and price this reasonably . . .

Who let 2005 into the room? You want it to be “elegant” too?

Do they make games now as good as the ones they made in 2005?

I had heard good things about Final Girl and was interested in the season 2 Kickstarter but there are two major issues stopping me from getting involved:
1) The price. I could get a single game which would cost me $48 + shipping but doesn't seem like it'd provide a ton of variety (which seems like half of the appeal of the system). Or pay $250 + shipping for the gameplay all in which seems like it'd provide way more game than I'd need. There are obviously a bunch of numbers inbetween those that I could choose in order to get some of the content but looking at both numbers made me feel like I was getting a terrible deal on either end of the spectrum.
2) The storage. I think it's clever that they introduced a giant storage box for all of the content. The problem is I don't want a giant fucking box to store my boxes. I want a small box to store the contents of my boxes. The fact they advertise the big box for a season as being equivalent to "half a Kallax shelf" is both clever and sad. Get both for a full Kallax shelf filled!

Van Ryder has terrible distribution in the UK so I'll probably end up not playing this game. Too bad I guess but I've got plenty of other games to be playing.

I'm with you, I was considering season two but the price is too high in my opinion.

sornars wrote: I had heard good things about Final Girl and was interested in the season 2 Kickstarter but there are two major issues stopping me from getting involved

Wow, three days in and the KS already over $1 million, for what is essentially a beefed-up version of Hostage Negotiator. I guess it shouldn't shock me though, the only group more insistent than the people paying $400 for "all-in" pledges for miniatures games are solo players willing to shell out mad cash for what is essentially a $20 game with limited upside.

The Season 1 sets (5 of them, plus the core set you need to buy to play any of them) just got released to retail recently, and from what I can see there aren't many/any KS exclusives to the Season 2 stuff. So you can always digest at your own pace in the future.

fightcitymayor wrote: the only group more insistent than the people paying $400 for "all-in" pledges for miniatures games

I'm grateful to that demographic for making Monsterpocalypse happen and giving me an easy in to v2.

Van Ryder openly offered to reprint Camp Grizzly. I guess nothing ever came of that?

Virabhadra wrote: Van Ryder openly offered to reprint Camp Grizzly. I guess nothing ever came of that?

No, it ended up looking like just an elaborate troll in order to promote Final Girl. I’m still a little embarrassed about excitedly repeating it here. Camp Grizzly is a game i’d back in a heartbeat if it ever comes around again.