Reaction Tuesday - Kickstarter

One of the most interesting things to be happening right now is the absolutely insane success tabletop games are doing on Kickstarter.

Mantic is well over their initial goal of $5000, and even though they only have but a few days left, the total is still aiming skyward.

This is proving to be a fairly good way to jump into the game, and I don't doubt that is what is really pulling most folks into being backers in this regard. Even I backed for $100 just for the army option at that level, although I haven't figured out if I wanted to get Dwarfs (for my daughter) or Orcs (just because). Either way, the amount of miniatures you get at even that level is pretty astounding.

At $100 a person comes out with:
Exclusive Undead Skeletal Dog handler
Free Plastic Elf Palace Guard
Free Dwarf Berserker brock Rider
Free Gargoyle
Free Mummy
Free Troll
Free Orc Chariot/Fight Wagon
Free ticket to Mantic Party (No clue what good this does for me since there is just no way I can go at that time of year)
Name in the hardback rulebook
Free Electronic rulebook
Free Electronic kings and Legends Supplement
A signed map

That is a pretty good haul when you think about the fact that isn't counting all the core items listed as the basis of the $100 backing (the armies, and the Vampiress).

Of course Mantic isn't the only success story for tabletop right now either. In fact, they are pretty far behind the current hard hitter. Coolminiornot is not to be outdone with another board game, a game that has some major popularity behind it. Sedition Wars has completely crushed it's goal and only recently looks to be even slightly showing a slow down.

This is another game that just makes it far too worthwhile to get in at $100, once again finding myself backing them at this level. You actually get enough miniatures to makes some decent sized forces for a few games, it is just that loaded.

As above a $100 backing would get you:
LE Kara
12 additional Vanguard
12 additional phase 1 and phase 2 Strain
2 additional Brimstone
2 additional Scythe Witches
1 additional AI Drone
1 additional Grendlr
6 custom dice

And that's not including the signed cover art and patch.



Now of course these two are the biggest winners of the current crowd funding group, but there is one more I'd like to mention that certainly isn't the success I was thinking it would be. To be honest, I didn't think it would be a great success, but I figured they'd be successful nonetheless.

The Avatars of War Dwarf army fund on indiegogo.com was dragging its feet for a long while, not even getting to the double digits for far longer then expected. It seems as though they have really went through and tried to make it more worthwhile to fund, but it might just be too little too late. We'll have to watch to see if they can close the gap quick enough.

It could be timing, it could have been the way the rewards were initially setup, it could have been a lot of reasons, but at the end of the day the point is that the funding just didn't roll in fast enough at the start. They may well make their goal, but not nearly to the degree Mantic or CMoN did. For me, one of the biggest turn offs was the 'X strong' perks. At least with Mantic, it was very set in stone what you were going to get with their armies. It would probably have been more tempting if I knew I was getting 3-4 full units and a warmachine rather then 100 various dwarfs and each warmachine will eat 5 of those dwarf's heads.

In the end, it is interesting to see how things panned out, and I think the next time these batches of crowd funded wargames occur, there is going to be a lot of changes, as people look at what worked and what didn't work.

Reaction Tuesday - GW Price Increase Reactions

Something that is still making waves after a couple weeks has been GW's latest price increases. I made a blog about it last year when it happened, and didn't really expect to write about it again, and yet people are still making the same 'deer in the headlight' type posts/sayings again this year.

GW has this thing called an annual price increase, which people really shouldn't be shocked by, prices go up on nearly everything every year. The difference is though that the consumer of GW products actually does hold all the cards in this area, and yet they refuse to actually play with those cards they are dealt. you see the exact same posts as you did last year about how people were going to stop playing GW games because of the prices, and yet six months down the line you find those same people happily handing their credit cards over to GW at some new release.

If you dare ask them why they play WFB or 40K, they almost always have some terrible excuse that apparently helps them sleep at night. 'Oh the background is what keeps me', 'No one else at my club at play anything else',  'I don't like the rules of Warmahordes'. All these excuses are complete rubbish in the best of cases and on multiple levels.

First and foremost, while WarmaHordes might certainly be one of the more popular competitive products, that doesn't mean you have to play it. Mantic's Kings of War and Warpath rulesets are much closer to WFB and 40K respectively then WarmaHordes is. To top it off, the Kings of War and Warpath rulesets are FREE, no excuse why you and your club aren't willing to give it a shot. That is also assuming you aren't willing to start up a new game in a new scale. Heavy Gear Blitz, Drop Zone Commander, Dust Tactics, and many other games are simply amazing foot based armies in varying scales.

The background excuse was one I always did hate to hear as well. Where in the background does it say Teclis is going to be in 500 different battles throughout the day? Where in the background does it  talk about dice rolls not going well? Simply put, nowhere. The background is something that is completely separate from the tabletop game. if you play a game of Warpath, the background for 40K just doesn't change. You can easily keep up on the background of the game without having to buy multiple $33 dollar codexs/army books.

The last point was slightly hit on already about no one else using the system at the club. With free rules for Infinity, Kings of War, Warpath, Full Thrust, and multiple other games out there, there is no reason not to give something else a try. Most of those other system even allow easy conversion to use of your current miniatures to work with their systems. Even if you don't want to use one of those systems, most other game systems rulebooks are a half to a third the price of the GW rulebooks (and most tend to actually give you the full force rules as well).

In the end, if you don't want to give up GW games, simply say it. We live in a great time for tabletop wargames, with almost every type of game having multiple rulesets to use within our grasp. If you choose not to take advantage of that, then simply sit back and suck up the annual price increases and stop acting like their blindsided you again.