Why Go Through This Crowdfunding?

I think that it is interesting, every now and again to look back at what I’ve backed. And there are a number of games out there. But the interest is often tied to how my gaming tastes have changed. What did I back on Kickstarter when I started in 2014 and what am I backing now.

It provides an interesting opportunity to see that growth. Normally, you get a game and it leaves and there is no way to track it. I could go through Amazon, CoolStuffInc, and Miniature Market Purchases, but a lot of those are more recent. Kickstarter and now Gamefound give you a history of what you’ve backed over that longer period of time.

Plus Jesse from Quackalope went through his backing history, shorter, but larger than mine, with Devon from Devon Talks Tabletop. He had something like 225 games to go through and that’s almost a five hour video. I should have known that mine would take longer than it did. I thought probably two hours would be enough, it is not.

The Drink

Last nights drink was a Negroni. Back to a classic for me. I really like the flavor and it is a good summer drink. With how large I made it, I wish I’d started streaming and sipping on it sooner, but the flavor is always good. It’s also a nice mixed drink to make because it’s a 1 to 1 to 1 ratio with gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari.

Upcoming Streams

So, clearly I have some more to talk about here with Kickstarter and Gamefound. My hope is that it’ll be about an hour and a half to finish up with no thunderstorms. So that is going to be on Monday at 8:30. Then on Wednesday, I plan on playing some more Paper Dungeons. Like I said, I want to get through that campaign. While I am working on an idea for a bigger game in the roll and write campaign space, you can see my Designer Diary here, I want to finish off the one that I already have.

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So let’s start with the two late backed honorable mentions:

Roll Player Adventures and Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor

Now, these two are only on the list because they were ones that I backed later. Roll Player Adventure because I picked up everything for Roll Player on Black Friday deals. Roll Player is a dice drafting game that has you building up a RPG character, basically. It’s like you’re making a D&D character, you just have specific stats that you are going for. Roll Player Adventures takes those characters and runs them through a story. It’s basically a dungeon crawl for the characters you roll up.

Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor, is also a cooperative game, but a very different type of one. It is a 4X cooperative game, in a fantasy setting. 4X cooperative games really aren’t something that’s heard of that much. What also drew me to the game is that this could have been a $150-200 game with minis, but instead they went with standees which look amazing. Finally, it has two bad guys that everyone in this cooperative experience is trying to beat. You don’t win unless everyone has beat both of them, that gives it a really interesting cooperative experience. And the two bad guy AI’s will fight each other as well as the players.

Alright, let’s get onto the list.

10 – The Night Cage

This one has me excited because I mainly back campaign games, but this one gives me a tense game in a small package. Big campaign games are the ones that I’m not sure will show up at retail. This one I know will, but I wanted to support it because of the tension that it has. You, and your fellow players, are lost in an underground labyrinth that is always changing around you. You are looking for keys and a portal out but trying to avoid monsters who will snuff out your candle and make it even harder to move around. It’s a cooperative game and everyone needs a key and to get to the portal before the tiles run out.

9 – The Reckoners: Steelslayer

Another cooperative game and one of two expansions on the list. This is an expansion for the Reckoners board game based off of one of my favorite series by Brandon Sanderson. In this game you are rolling dice to determine your actions and then researching and battling Epics, think evil superheroes, as the team of The Reckoners, not superheroes just regular people. This brings in the last two books of the trilogy and makes the game play a little less brutal in some ways and possibly more brutal in others.

8 – Project L: Finesse

Project L was a game that I had glanced at but wasn’t that interested in until I saw the Dice Tower play through. First, let me say that the game has some amazing pieces in it. The dual layered cards where you are filling in shapes with basically what amounts to Tetris pieces is great. But what really drew me in is the light engine building nature of the game. You fill in a dual layer card you keep the pieces you used to fill it in and get more pieces, or you can trade up and get better pieces using an old piece. The game is fast but has interesting choices but doesn’t look hard to play.

7 – Crash Octopus

Now for something completely different we are going treasure hunting while trying to avoid an octopus. To add in even more fun to that, we are getting the treasure by flicking it so it hits our boats. This game comes from the same company that made Tokyo Highway so the game looks amazing, and I do really enjoy flicking games or dexterity games quite a lot, though I’m not always the best at them. This just looks like a fun time and a silly time, and people are generally up for a light silly game.

6 – Hel: The Last Saga

Now we’re getting into more of my “normal” kickstarter game, the big epic campaign games. Hel: The Last Saga from Mythic Games really interested me because of the Vikings theme. Then the game play itself was quite interesting in particular how the story unfolded. I like games where you don’t always know everything about the game and what’s going on in a given chapter until you are part way through the chapter. I also like the religion in this game, I believe it’s Norse, Christian, and Druidic, and the characters can pray to only their deity for a boon, which I find really unique in terms of game play.

5 – The 7th Citadel

The follow-up to The 7th Continent, The 7th Citadel takes what they learned from that game and improves upon it, in my opinion. It is still an exploration and adventure game, but this one has more of a story that seems to be running through it. It also has improved upon the death where yes, going through the cards still matters for how long you can survive, but you have a health pool to go along with those cards that dwindles down over time. I like the idea of this game even more than The 7th Continent, because of the story that it tells and how that seems more straight forward in some ways, versus puzzling out how to solve a curse.

4 – Cartographers Heroes

A small box game, though I did get the big box. Cartographers Heroes is the follow-up to Cartographers a flip and write game that I like a lot. This adds in heroes that can help you defeat monsters. But beyond that it adds in new monsters that do interesting things and with the big box for it, that comes with three new maps that all work in interesting ways. Normally you can put your shapes anywhere, in those they limit you and give you restrictions on how to build. And it comes with colored pencils which is important for making it look pretty.

3 – Nemesis Lockdown

Now, I actually didn’t get Nemesis Lockdown, so why is it on my list? I got Nemesis instead. Lockdown is the planetary base version of Nemesis, which is a game where you are fighting off aliens who are trying to overrun your ship and get your ship back to earth. However, each player has their own secret objective as well. So it’s a semi-cooperative game, but one that works really well from what I’ve heard. Mainly because it isn’t like Dead of Winter where you’ll hold back something that could end up tanking the whole scenario for everyone. You more have a goal that you are trying to do, and it might be that crew member X doesn’t make it, but you can’t push them out the airlock.

2 – Marvel United

This was the first big Kickstarter I backed last year, and I’m really glad that I did, it’s also the only one to have delivered anything this past year. Marvel United is a card playing cooperative game where players battle a villain. I like how simple this game is for a cooperative experience. It’ll be one I can play with my kid when he gets a bit older. But I also like that it gives you a superhero team-up feel. I, on my turn, get to take my action as well as those of the previous card, so if someone plays down two punches, and I put down two punches, I can punch four times. Plus there are cute chibi miniatures in the game for the heroes and the villains. I’ll be backing more of this in 2021 as they come out with the X-Men.

1 – Frosthaven

Finally, no shock, Frosthaven is my #1. I am going to be really curious to see if I like Gloomhaven or Frosthaven better when I’ve played both. I think that it seems like Frosthaven will have improved upon a few things, and it adds in city building. But anything more with that dungeon crawl feeling and that great card play, I’ll be really happy. I also think that the starting characters sound really really interesting, so I’m excited for it when it comes out, most likely this next year.

That’s my Top 10 Kickstarters that I backed. How about you, what are your favorite Kickstarters that you’ve backed this past year? Are there any that you are waiting on from longer ago than that?

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Nemesis

Technically the Kickstarter that I backed was for Nemesis: Lockdown. But the part I backed was going in on the original Nemesis kickstarter to get that stuff. The original Kickstarter by Awaken Realms was while I wasn’t backing as many Kickstarter games or paying as much attention as a whole to Kickstarter, but when I heard about it after the fact, I was bummed that I hand’t backed it. The way the game was described was Aliens, just without the Aliens IP (intellectual property) rights.

In this game there are aliens that have gotten aboard your ship. You need to deal with the alien nest and queen and other monsters while trying to get the ship back to Earth. But, you might not be trying to get back to Earth, depending on what your objective is. You might be trying to get to another planet, or you might be trying to get back to Earth, but Jim can’t survive, so you might encourage Jim to fight and kill some aliens that are a little bit above his pay grade in hopes that he doesn’t make it.

I like this cooperative but not cooperative idea to the game. I also like that conflict isn’t really in your face between the players. Sure, you might leave Jim in a bad spot, but you aren’t going to be pushing Jim out the airlock yourself, at least if you don’t want it to be obvious that’s what you’re doing. And the fact that you still need to win the game, get to earth and not have aliens on the ship or at least not have the next on your ship is really interesting ad really well thought out. The game is going to be way harder if Jim is dead in round two.

This really seems like my type of game, and I like that this is a game on kickstarter that I can know a lot about. There are reviews out there for it because people have it from the original kickstarter. And generally it’s really well liked as a very thematic and interesting game. I’m very excited to get this one in.

Excitement Meter: 8.5/10

The Night Cage

So the other horror survival game. This one almost more fantasy in nature, but mainly just more horror in nature. You are a group of people who wake up alone in a labyrinth with nothing but a candle. Using that light you need to navigate around the ever shifting corridors in hopes of finding a key to get out. But you have monsters to worry about and you only have a limited number of keys and portals to escape from and when your light no longer illuminates them, they are gone forever.

The Night Cage really interested me after watching it played and talked about on the GloryHoundd youtube channel. What made this one feel unique was the tension that is created as tiles slowly count down and you feel the time running out. It’s not a tension that you find in a lot of games. A whole lot more have more abrupt ends to the game, but this one even if you reach a point where you can’t win, you’ve already been feeling the pressure of time dwindling down. And the fact that all four (or five) characters stuck in the Night Cage need get keys and get to the same portal at the same time makes it intense.

The game does really well allowing you to push your luck and spread out early in the game, which will probably let you find the keys faster, but if you aren’t close to each other, it can make it harder for everyone to get to the same portal because people have having to travel from further distances away. So do you want to risk that, or do you want to stay closer together so when you find the keys you can escape faster, but you might be attacked by monsters more so. The monsters, in the base game, will attack in a straight line down the paths that they can see, so they might get you if you’re too close together.

This game works because while the theme feels like it should be kind of abstract the game plays with the tension that the theme has on it. And while it was fun on Table Top Simulator, I think it’ll be a whole lot better in person as they have really created a beautiful looking game and a beautiful way to keep track of the tiles as they are counting down.

Excitement Meter: 8/10

Which of these horror survival games seems more exciting to you? Did you back either of them on Kickstarter?

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Pros

• Based on existing game
• Awaken Realms has a great track record
• Cooperative/Semi-cooperative/Solo play
• Theme, described as playing Alien movies without the IP (Intellectual Property)

Cons

• Spendy
• Even spendier if you go all in base game and standalone expansion
• Game Length

Page Thoughts

Awaken Realms is the current “King of Kickstarter” having taken that crown, in my opinion, from CMON. And even though they don’t hold the top spot for a board game, that’d be Frosthaven, they just do consistently good work throughout and the quality of their games is very high.

I don’t actually love that you get so much in terms of components and minis to start, I want some game play information higher up, and in particular, how does this different from something like Nemesis, the base game. However, even with that, I’m glad to see that the core concept of the game seems to have said the same.

Back or Brick

For me, this was one that I had missed before I was really checking out kickstarter, that is the base game for Nemesis. So when I heard a standalone expansion was coming for it, I thought that might be a good jumping off point, and then it came out that you can actually get the base game as part of it as well. So for me, this was an easy Back but not for the standalone expansion. If that hits retail I’ll get it later, but more because I wanted to get the base game. So I am backing for that, to get the original game and it’s expansions, even though that’s a bit more expensive. For me, the theme just sounds great, and while it can be played and is made to be played semi-cooperatively, it seems like one that is going to be tough enough that you can probably just play fully cooperative. But, yeah, I love the alien theme, I like the horror element to the game, this is the type of game for me.

How about you, is this a back or a brick?

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