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The_Doctor posted:The comments on this now are great. Barry Cake has involved himself directly. He's a BGGer who for a long time made it his business to back terrible game projects for $1 and provide some advice. He "retired" after the 500th such project, but still returns for special occasions. If he's commenting on your project, then it is especially bad.
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Jan 4, 2021 14:39
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Cooperative, narrative-driven games have been a huge hit around my table the last year or two, so I decided to jump in on the Gamefound campaign for ISS Vanguard. Am I just being sucked in by hype about the game/Awaken Realms? Or is it generally being considered something that will be mechanically/thematically a solid game?
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Jan 4, 2021 19:21
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You might want to have a butchers at Roll Player Adventures. It's by Thunderwork Games who make Cartographers. They recently got their pre-production copy which looks great The only reason I didn't back it is because I have so much poo poo coming, and I don't have a partner with whom to enjoy during this pandemic.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:27
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Jcam posted:Cooperative, narrative-driven games have been a huge hit around my table the last year or two, so I decided to jump in on the Gamefound campaign for ISS Vanguard. Am I just being sucked in by hype about the game/Awaken Realms? Or is it generally being considered something that will be mechanically/thematically a solid game? There are gameplay preview videos for you to make your own assessment. I've been very pleased with their previous efforts in that vein (as I've said before, Tainted Grail is probably my boardgame of 2020 and top five all time for me) and see no reason to think ISS Vanguard will be notably worse, but YMMV.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:34
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I am a huge sucker for a good co-op narrative but Tainted Grail was a swing and miss for me. Still, I am cautiously optimistic for ISS Vanguard, for some reason I don't remember. I did look into it and decided to give it a shot, then promptly marked it on the calendar and otherwise forgot all about it 
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Jan 4, 2021 19:56
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Jcam posted:Cooperative, narrative-driven games have been a huge hit around my table the last year or two, so I decided to jump in on the Gamefound campaign for ISS Vanguard. Am I just being sucked in by hype about the game/Awaken Realms? Or is it generally being considered something that will be mechanically/thematically a solid game? Well kickstarter and the like pretty much exist to be hype/fomo engines so be cautious, but Awaken Realms' games are generally well regarded.
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Jan 4, 2021 22:18
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The Moon Monster posted:Awaken Realms' games are generally well regarded. How many of these are from people who didn't spend the money on the Awaken Realms games? I mean, I guess I would be pissed if I spent luxury KS money on games as bad as Nemesis, but I'd also be more prone to delude myself into thinking it was a good game.
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Jan 4, 2021 22:31
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GrandpaPants posted:How many of these are from people who didn't spend the money on the Awaken Realms games? I mean, I guess I would be pissed if I spent luxury KS money on games as bad as Nemesis, but I'd also be more prone to delude myself into thinking it was a good game. I haven't played nemesis but people seem to love it, you're the first person I've heard say it was bad 
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Jan 4, 2021 22:44
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Reviews on Etherfields have been pretty mixed. Tom Vasel loved it, Shut Up & Sit Down and No Pun Included felt it had some neat ideas but really badly flubbed the execution, etc.
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Jan 4, 2021 22:45
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Although I'm not convinced Quinns understood the game mechanics, since he himself says he found the rulebook obtuse and he talks about, e.g. cheating to skip slumbers when the game explicitly lets you do so and has listed consequences. But yeah, I don't think SU&SD has been unreservedly positive about any of the three Awaken Realms games they've reviewed (Lords of Hellas, Nemesis, and Etherfields) and Nemesis was the only one they recommended at all. I don't know from Lords of Hellas, but I've liked both Tainted Grail and Etherfields a lot, and when I've watched people play The Edge: Dawnfall and The Great Wall I thought those looked pretty great also.
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Jan 4, 2021 22:55
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I think ISS Vanguard will at least be good trade fodder, probably not too hard to get value out of it that way if nothing else. A buddy of mine lives the used game trading lyfe and has inspired me looking at KS stuff though that lens sometimes.
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Jan 4, 2021 23:13
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The Eyes Have It posted:I think ISS Vanguard will at least be good trade fodder, probably not too hard to get value out of it that way if nothing else. A buddy of mine lives the used game trading lyfe and has inspired me looking at KS stuff though that lens sometimes. Personally I think this is the right attitude. There are vanishingly few board games that stand up to enough regular play that they’re worth keeping long term. Acquire it, get what you get out of it, and get rid of it, though I recognize I live in an area where selling or trading games is feasible without getting hosed on shipping.
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Jan 4, 2021 23:18
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Zurai posted:Reviews on Etherfields have been pretty mixed. Tom Vasel loved it, Shut Up & Sit Down and No Pun Included felt it had some neat ideas but really badly flubbed the execution, etc. Etherfields is excellent, but you have to be ready for that particular ride. It's a series of dreamy escape rooms with a Tales of the Arabian Nights-style choose your own adventure book providing a significant chunk of the story. The deck building is relatively straight-forward and the mechanics themselves, while enjoyable, aren't super-deep. I regularly spend too much money on games and have buyers' remorse, but I have none here. I am getting *exactly* what the KS sold me and I think the main gripes (repetitive slumbers, obtuse rulebook) are relatively solvable (the former actually has a number of gameplay elements which address the issue, but I think the *prospect* of it being repetitive is daunting if you don't know those are coming to freshen things up and the latter... well, they're working on a revised rulebook, I'm sure.) It sold me Tainted Grail and ISS Vanguard. But it's bound to be a polarizing game and there's definitely a number of people who aren't going to enjoy it and that is okay.
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Jan 4, 2021 23:28
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senrath posted:Fragged Cyberpunk is up. I have no idea what the target audience is for this. It's not cyberpunk. It's post-singularity dystopian sci-fi. Just pure trendchasing.
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Jan 5, 2021 00:43
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I really respect SUSD and to a lesser extent NPI, but they can be real contrarians sometimes just to be the “too cool for school” kids. They rarely like big expensive Kickstarter games and are more the classic cube-pushing euro types. It may be a guilty pleasure and verboten on these forums, but I really like Tom Vasel/Zee Garcia (The Dice Tower) and Rahdo (although he definitely leans Euro).
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Jan 5, 2021 01:19
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JazzFlight posted:I really respect SUSD and to a lesser extent NPI, but they can be real contrarians sometimes just to be the “too cool for school” kids. They rarely like big expensive Kickstarter games and are more the classic cube-pushing euro types. What's great was I'm a big fan of SUSD and I CLEARLY remember how much they shat on Gloomhaven for months, if not years, before properly reviewing it because it was a KS game. Then they loved it and started using it as the gold standard by which to poo poo on subsequent KS dungeon crawls. I like them a lot but they can be maddening that way.
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Jan 5, 2021 01:40
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I think they feel some obligation to be relevant by reviewing the occasional big KS game but they're really not the target audience and mostly don't end up getting on with them.
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Jan 5, 2021 02:05
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As someone said, it's almost certainly possibly and likely easy to onsell AW games for at least what you paid for them. That said, having now played Nemesis, TG and Etherfields I have become convinced that AW cannot design even a mechanically competent game let alone a good one. TG and Etherfields I think get a lot of mileage out of the beautiful art, setting and creative design but the mechanics in both have glaring problems that imo they only get away with because they are co-op games. Nemesis doesn't have the benefit of being pure co-op and as a result my play of this was one of the worst gaming experiences I've had in the last few years as there's stuff in it that is just absolutely broken. Overall, my experience with these games has been similar to Betrayal at House on the Hill (albeit they're a lot more involved/complex and also more creative and beautifully produced) - they can create unique, interesting and cool situations but you have to wade through a lot of really bad gameplay to experience them. There is absolutely a huge market for games of this type and more power to the people that enjoy them, but I would 100% recommend playing a few hours of one of their previous games before backing unless you are happy to try and onsell.
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Jan 5, 2021 02:24
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Eh. I'll acknowledge there are things in Tainted Grail that don't work as well as they could* (and the same could probably be said of Etherfields) but I didn't feel like they were ever core to the experience or especially crucial, and a lot of it I thought worked really well and was clever and unusual. Etherfields' core mechanics are simpler and not inherently that interesting but there's some really evocative individual stuff in the Dreams I've played so far. And I'd still handily take it over Betrayal at House on the Hill, where there are zero interesting decisions or mechanics before the Haunt happens, that can take an eternity to come about, and once it does hit you can easily just be unavoidably screwed. But yes, I'd try for yourself if you can swing it, and/or watch gameplay vids. *The main example for me being Reputation, which you can accumulate at a terrific rate even if you're a character like Beor that's theoretically bad at it, and has very little utility.
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Jan 5, 2021 02:30
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Liquid Communism posted:I have no idea what the target audience is for this. The target audience is easy: People who already like the Fragged system and want more of it. Also to a lot of people there's no real distinction between the two things you've said.
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Jan 5, 2021 03:02
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Can't you play Nemesis purely co-op if you want to?
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Jan 5, 2021 03:02
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CODChimera posted:Can't you play Nemesis purely co-op if you want to?
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Jan 5, 2021 03:19
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senrath posted:The target audience is easy: People who already like the Fragged system and want more of it. It's also about a highly stratified society whose ultimate class is literally willing to trade away the lives of an increasingly trodden upon humanity to realize their own dreams, which is a considerably more punk setting than a lot of so called "cyberpunk" settings out there.
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Jan 5, 2021 04:07
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Liquid Communism posted:It's not cyberpunk. It's post-singularity dystopian sci-fi. Who cares? I'm going to guess you're not the authority of what defines cyberpunk and there are enough words on the Kickstarter to describe the setting well enough that people should realize if they dig it. And like the above people said, it's likely the Fragged part that people care about. Also lol if you think "cyberpunk" is trending in any way aside from the negative connotations associated with a certain game.
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Jan 5, 2021 04:22
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Fragged Empire was already the best Shadowrun game on the market, and now it supports it explicitly. If you mean "who's in it for FE's interconnected original setting"... certainly not me, I've only ever used Fragged to run homebrewed versions of third party settings. It's easy, the game is not very strongly tied to its lore. And they already released a game that blatantly screams "this is here so you can play Bloodborne, and here's some bullshit generic setting so we can pretend it's not copyright violation" so I can only assume the devs know this.  e: More seriously Wade Dyer has progressed significantly as a developer with each of these games; vanilla FE is fun but the ability/perk design bogs down badly at higher levels, among other things. Aeternum is deliberately more light-weight than Empire, Kingdom is comparable in crunch to the original but addresses some of the issues with longer or high-level games, and Cyberpunk is supposed to basically be a preview of the still-in-development Fragged Empire 2E. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 08:21
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Trying to rigorously define "-punk" genres reminds me of the people who make names for new sub-sub-subgenres of music until there's only fifteen songs in existence that are actually "bubble trip haze funk" or whatever. Unrelated, but if Fragged Cyberpunk were available in print, even POD, I would back it, but it's not, so I won't. Looking forward to 2E, though!
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Jan 5, 2021 16:24
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Travis Hill just launched a Cube Rails game called Card Rails. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/travisdhill/card-rails-a-54-card-cube-rails-game The physical version is already sold out (it's a Make100 project) but the pnp is available
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Jan 5, 2021 18:04
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LeSquide posted:It's also about a highly stratified society whose ultimate class is literally willing to trade away the lives of an increasingly trodden upon humanity to realize their own dreams, which is a considerably more punk setting than a lot of so called "cyberpunk" settings out there. homullus posted:Trying to rigorously define "-punk" genres reminds me of the people who make names for new sub-sub-subgenres of music until there's only fifteen songs in existence that are actually "bubble trip haze funk" or whatever. People seem to think that cyberpunk has to be punk in the left-wing political sense because it has 'punk' in the name, which brings to mind baby oil and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The term was coined through describing authors who approached the staid 1980s (anglosphere) science fiction scene as outsiders armed with radical modernism as 'cyber punks', and later what they wrote as 'cyberpunk', taking its name from a 1982 short story about a cybercriminal, a literal cyber punk. It invoked the amateur and especially outsider nature of these authors, by referencing punk rock as amateur and outsider rock: rock (and science fiction) by punks. Which isn't to say that the term wasn't applied ignorant of how cyberpunk, like punk rock, often had political themes to it, but the primary reason the term was coined was to describe new wave of radical, modern sci-fi challenging the Campbellian establishment. In terms of what cyberpunk, as a whole, actually is about thematically, different people narrow it down in different ways (and genres are always inherently vague), but the recurring throughlines seem to be that it's a reaction to the economic uncertainty of the late 1970s and the growth of corporate power, that it's neo-noir, that it explores the worry that the terribleness of the present will continue for seemingly forever, and that it explores themes relating to the four C's: crime, corporations, computers, and corporeality. So the question shouldn't be whether Fragged Cyberpunk is 'punk' in the sense of the modern radical punk politics, but whether it's explores present fears and uncertainties related to crime, corporations, computers, and/or corporeality, in a neo-noir setting/with neo-noir themes.
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Jan 5, 2021 18:23
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I always thought cyberpunk was best summed up as "high tech, low life" The idea of people drawing hard and fast tribal lines over what is or isn't proper counterculture / punk etc is, well, idk exactly but it's definitely kind of funny.
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Jan 5, 2021 19:28
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The Eyes Have It posted:I always thought cyberpunk was best summed up as "high tech, low life" My favorite addendum to that was Mike Pondsmith saying that in his view of cyberpunk you save yourself, and if that happens to also save the world that's a bonus.
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Jan 5, 2021 19:41
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cyberpunk is when corporations do stuff and the more stuff corporations do the cyberpunker it is
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Jan 5, 2021 19:42
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Anti-Semitic Hangman plus optional Covid denial t-shirts has been suspended.
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Jan 5, 2021 22:26
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Not soon enough to be honest.
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Jan 5, 2021 22:45
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I made the mistake of reading the comments and wish I hadn't.
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Jan 5, 2021 22:48
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JazzFlight posted:I really respect SUSD and to a lesser extent NPI, but they can be real contrarians sometimes just to be the “too cool for school” kids. They rarely like big expensive Kickstarter games and are more the classic cube-pushing euro types. E: NVM did a search to find out for myself Phigs fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 23:36
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Phigs posted:
What was the answer? I always thought they were fine and basically well-meaning
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Jan 6, 2021 10:39
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I also did a search to find the answer. Apparently Tom Vasel is one of those 'quiverfull' weirdos who believe that it's their duty to have as many children as possible or something.
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Jan 6, 2021 11:33
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Heh, I only made the remark because when I first checked out the general board game thread here in TG like 3 years ago, it seemed like everyone hated The Dice Tower and Tom Vasel because he liked almost everything and just reviewed based on "fun." I got the impression that goons thought he was the mainstream ameritrash reviewer and that goons hated that and preferred dry euro sophisticated "real games." (Actually from watching DT content, it seems like Sam Healey might have fit that description more?) I haven't really checked in on the board game thread since then, so maybe I was wrong? Like I said, I love The Dice Tower. JazzFlight fucked around with this message at 13:14 on Jan 6, 2021 |
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Jan 6, 2021 13:12
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potatocubed posted:I also did a search to find the answer. Apparently Tom Vasel is one of those 'quiverfull' weirdos who believe that it's their duty to have as many children as possible or something. That’s weird, but I guess if everyone’s consenting and he’s not being an rear end in a top hat, uh...good luck, I guess...?
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Jan 6, 2021 13:48
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Mors Rattus posted:That’s weird, but I guess if everyone’s consenting and he’s not being an rear end in a top hat, uh...good luck, I guess...? "Quiverful" and "not an rear end in a top hat" are mutually exclusive. It's a movement of religious nuts with unhealthy attitudes towards women.
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Jan 6, 2021 14:03
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