Dreadball Xtreme

Well, the Dreadball Xtreme Kickstarter has been live for a couple days now and has already garnered a smack-ton of cash.  Your truly and Mr B have jointly signed up to it, at a fairly hefty, but not ridiculous, level.

 

At the moment I'm reasonable happy with what's on offer, but, given the previous projects Mantic have launched this way, I'm expecting to see a lot more value added over the next three weeks.    Given how much we've collectivly dropped on the original Dreadball, it still's still a good deal so far.

Very little information is available about the actual gameplay, but the core seems to be the same as the original Dreadball game.  Dreadball was easily the best (miniatures) game I properly invested in last year and is one of those games that I would play without resevation.

One of the notable decisions Mantic have made is to move away from their heavy plastic (rastic?) figures to preassembled plastic miniatures.  If there's one thing that frustrated me about Deadzone, Dreadball and some of their other figure ranges, it's cleaning those hideous mouldlines and glueing the pieces together.  I've had Deadzone for a week now and have suffered through assembling a whole seven figures!  Hopefully this new material will be easier to work with.

The big draw for me so far is the customisable board; appropriate given that DB:X isn't played in a traditional arena, but in back streets, warehouses and prisons.  I'm also anticipating what new teams or races Mantic add into the mix.

Three weeks to go with eleven updates so far, looking forward to seeing what the final package will be.  Check out the Kickstarter here.

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.