Rogue Trooper Kickstarter

So the Gates of Antares Kickstarter has been cancelled.  Can't say it's a huge shock, despite a flurry of publicity and updates, they were nowhere near their financial goals.  I found the fundraising process quite interesting and I looked forward to the regular updates to come through.  In particular, drip feeding the miniature designs was intriguing, especially when going back on the images and seeing the final sculpts take shape.

The cancellation was also rather poorly timed, as the D6G put up a rather good episode featuring Rick Priestly.  I'm sure we'll see a revised Kickstarter project soon and I'm sure I'll back it again.

Of course, that frees up some future funds for another project.  Enter Rogue Trooper!

I was a rabid 2000AD collector back in my youth (and still pick up the occasional comic) and RT was always an excellent read.  Mongoose have already done a successful Dredd Kickstarter and seem to know what they are doing with the RT one.  They have a very different model for their project compared to GoA, very low pledge total with a very small product range (two boxes.)  The juice is in their hope of reaching their "stretch goals" meaning they will make a bigger range of models.  Things look very promising so far, the Skorpion tank has already been made available and the funding target has already been met twice over already.

Check out the Kickstarter page and have a read of the draft rules, sounds good.

Found My Kickstarter? Beyond the Gates of Antares

A Kickstarter has appeared for Beyond the Gates of Antares (GoA,) A sci-fi, army level game penned by the esteemed Rick Priestly.  I mentioned earlier that I wanted to get involved in a Kickstarter, if only to say that I had done so.  Nothing out there is really grabbing my attention, but there looks to be a lot of potential for GoA.

There are three essentials that any sci-fi game need to nail down; miniatures, background material and rules.  Oddly, GoA hasn't really touched any of these yet.  They've put up a few concept pictures up, but not much else.  The rules are touched on, basically D10 based, but again no real detail.  Lastly, beyond the phrase "hard sci-fi" the background material isn't covered at all!

The big sell for Gates of Antares is that the developers want input into, well, basically everything in the game.  Sounds like my kind of thing.  The big risk is that, much like western democracy, most of the people can be wrong and, in this case, the game swings wildly in a direction I'm not keen on.  Still, I think the names and companies involved will manage to avoid anything too ridiculous.

As long as they drop the cat people.

So I've found my Kickstarter, pledging a "modest" amount for whatever the box set eventually looks like.  The delivery date is the end of the year, but that's so vague that it could well be earlier or later.  Still, check one for my resolutions for this year (admittedly, the easiest one and one that only involved spending money!)

Check out the Kickstarter page here, as well as the Dark Space Corps page here and an interview with Priestly on Bell of Lost Souls.