Kickback: The 9th World

The 9^th World: A Skill-Building Game for Numenera – set 1 Billion years in the future.

I backed this game at the very end of 2015, although the campaign only closed/card got charged in January of 2016, with delivery expected that October.

 

The History

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat again, for anyone who hasn’t read the entire blog (i.e. everybody who isn’t me!)

9^th World came from the makers of the Apocrypha ACG, and the campaign was announced to Apocrypha backers with a definite tone of “as we’re basically done with Apocrypha, here’s our next project.” At the time, we had no notion of the nightmares to come with Apocrypha, so I doubt I was alone in thinking “these guys seem like a nice bunch, let’s have a look at their other game.”

The rest, as they say is tragedy… history. Delays, followed by other delays. Claims that things were nearly ready, which with hindsight were clearly nonsensical.

Apocrypha finally arrived in October 2018 – (base game only, there was a further 13 months to wait for the expansions). It was a real let-down: a worse version of a game we’d already moved on from, with a virtually indecipherable rulebook, and mechanics that tried too hard to be clever, so ended up rarely being fun.

 

The 9^th World

A few years wiser, this would make me run a mile nowadays…

Despite the mutterings above, this isn’t another Apocrypha article, so let’s talk about The 9^th World. Overall, this was a smaller, simpler project, although it still had plenty of issues up its sleeve.

For one thing, when the campaign launched, The 9^th World was a multiplayer/competitive only game, with solo/cooperative mode being added mid-campaign. 3 years older and (hopefully) wiser, this is the sort of reactive pandering that would make me give the campaign a really wide berth.

The game rarely seemed to make it very far up Loan Shark’s priority list – Apocrypha, Thornwatch, and (of course) Pathfinder all seemed to be given much more time and attention, with The 9^th World creeping along slowly, as-and-when they had a bit of spare time.

Arrival

June 2018, I finally received my copy of the 9^th World roughly 20 months late. I couldn’t really remember much about it, and I was still very annoyed with the designers for the run-around they’d given us, across both of their projects.

I tried playing the game. Not immediately, as I had my biggest-ever UKGE haul of new stuff, but it hit the table a few times in July. The rulebook wasn’t great, and it seemed reliant on people learning the rules of the competitive version thoroughly, and then spotting the changes made for solo/and co-op, rather than being accessible as a co-op/solo-only title. Still, you could piece stuff together, and it certainly wasn’t Apocrypha levels of bad.

 

What’s in the box?

For reasons known only to themselves, the designers opted for a really convoluted box design – it starts off looking more -or-less normal: a box with 2 trays of components stacked on top of each other. However, the score-board is a strange fold-y thing that wraps around the top of the box, and is attached to the box along one edge! Lastly, you have to slide a cardboard sleeve down over the top, to keep the fold-y scoreboard from unravelling, and to make the whole thing feel like a fancy box of alcohol.

As far as I can tell, the reason for this box-design was “The creators thought it looked cool.” The practical implications of the fancy box were 1.) The factory messed it up, delaying the game even further, and 2.) the game sits really awkwardly on the table, as the score-board (which you need), has a box (which you don’t need during the game) stuck to it.

 

The Game

The 9^th world is a “skill-building” game. Set 1 Billion years in earth’s future, you control a character who is exploring the world – a place where abandoned advanced technology is basically undistinguishable from magic. This place is known as Numenera, it has its own RPGs, and generally seems like an interesting place.

There are 5 skills in the game: Scout, Tinker, Charm, Combat and Focus: At the start of the game, you will have level 1 skills in 2 of these, plus 3 generic “effort” cards. You will need to increase the skills you have, and level your ‘efforts’ up into the remaining skills, in order to take down the challenges faced round-by-round.

Each round you will have a certain number of cards dealt from the “town” deck, and others into the “wilderness” Scouting is a pre-requisite of doing any other interacting with Wilderness cards.

There are 3 main types of cards in both the Town and Wilderness decks for The 9^th World to chuck at you. 1) Cyphers, which will sit in your play area and provide either ongoing or discard-to-use effects. 2) Creatures, which you simply need to defeat for their victory points, and 3.) Quests, which require you to perform a series of other activities.

Once you’ve scouted Wilderness cards, you’ll then proceed through 3 fairly similar phases. In the Charm phase you spend Charm points to claim Quests, in the Tinker phase you spend Tinker points to claim Cyphers, and in the Combat phase, you spend Combat points to defeat Creatures – in each case, the number in the top left is what you have to pay, and the number in the bottom-right is your reward for doing so. Many of these cards will have additional effects, modifying the encounter by making life harder or offering an extra reward.

If you use a card in its own phase, then it’s worth the value printed on it. If you use it in any other phase, it’s automatically worth 1. So a Combat 3 card (ideally) counts as 3 points of combat, but in a pinch it can be a single point of Focus, or a point of Charm.

 

Any bidders?

The 9^th World is also a bidding game – each phase, you bid the number of skill points you want to spend that phase. The highest bidder gets to go first, and decide which cards they want to claim with the points they have spent.

Bidding is one of the game mechanics my wife hates the most. I’m not sure if I’d ever get her to play the competitive version of this game. I certainly can’t imagine getting her to play it twice.

Fortunately, the co-op version of the game (effectively) removes the bidding. You still have to decide what skills to allocate to which phases, but you are allowed to discuss your bids, which just makes it a planning step at the start of the round. Sadly, as already noted, the rulebook isn’t really set-up for people to start with the co-op version, and there are quite a few little things which work slightly differently between co-op and ‘standard,’ which makes for a lot of flicking back-and-forth.

Where 9^th World has proved surprisingly frequent in its play, is as a solo game- the solo game is virtually the same as the co-op version and a few solo sessions spent trying to get the rules and mechanics down, quickly turned into a recurring activity – unlike a lot of the games I play solo, The 9^th World is quick to set up, quick to play, and quick to set-down after – 40 minutes from leaving to returning to the shelf is comfortably enough time.

 

Victory?

If you play the standard, competitive version of the 9^th World, the winner is simply the person with the most Valour (victory points) at the end of pre-set number of rounds (9 for a full game, 5 for a shortened one). In co-op and solo every player has to hit certain point thresholds and if any player falls short, everyone loses. (The thresholds are 15 points by the end of Round 3, 40 by the end of Round 6, and 75 by the end of Round 9).

The fact that you’re not competing for which cards to spend your skill points on, and shouldn’t ever end up over-bidding, only to find that there’s nothing to do removes a lot of the frustration of the head-to-head version. However, the game does then need a certain amount of balancing to ensure that it remains a challenge.

Every round in The 9^th World, you re-stock the town to 5 cards, and you add cards to the Wilderness. To begin with, it’s simply 1 card per player, but any quests that you haven’t been able to complete (it’s virtually impossible to complete most quests in a single round) will increase that number by one, meaning that the Wilderness can quickly fill with an unmanageable number of cards.

Any Cyphers that remain unclaimed in the wilderness increase the points threshold that players need to hit to remain in the game.

These two could chew some serious holes in town

Lastly, any creatures which remain in the wilderness will attack the town – roll a dice for small creatures, 2 dice for big creatures, and each dice has a 1 in 3 chance of damaging the town. In the short-term this can reduce the number of town cards available for you to claim (which has rarely been a big deal in any of my games), but much more worryingly, if the town ever takes 5 wounds, you lose the game immediately. This is probably the key element for understanding the “shortened” version of the game – you can afford to take more risks with creatures, and prioritise scoring points quickly.

Having these two out early on is going to make things start to snowball

The game certainly isn’t perfect. For one thing, the fancy box that delayed the delivery by a month or more actually hampers playing the game – the place you want to place it for easy access to the score-board generally means that I either end up with a ridiculously cramped playing area, or else the box is constantly on the verge of falling off the table..

Zooming in on the mechanics, the solo game is a fun, puzzle-y co-op, but it can be a bit random: too many quests early on can easily see you swamped, whereas locking things down in the first few rounds can allow you to build up a fairly unassailable position – it’s rare that I lose a game on score, but creature numbers getting out of control and destroying the town is a real threat.

 

Retail vs Kickstarter

different box art for retail? or just an online shop using some stock art?

The 9^th World did make it to retail, albeit with very little fanfare (I’ve yet to actually see a copy in a bricks-and-mortar store. As such, I’ve been struggling somewhat to establish exactly what the differences between editions are

0.

As far as I can tell, we got extra locations in the KS edition – the locations do alter the game slightly, bringing in different effects in certain rounds, but it’s not a massive element, and I’m not particularly convinced as to how much this added to the gameplay. These cards are notionally a “preview” from a future expansion but, even I believed that the game was popular enough for these expansions to see the light of day, I don’t think I’d bother seeking them out.

There were also 1 or 2 extra town and wilderness cards. Both of these decks are fairly large, so one or two cards shuffled in here has a fairly limited impact (i.e. I’ve already long-since forgotten which ones they were).

As far as I can tell, the characters and skills are all part of the retail edition. It’s nice to vary things up a bit with the character you play, but again, I never felt like we were particularly short on options: there’s a whole set of character powers that you can place over the ability box on their sheet to customise who you play as, and I’ve never even got to the point of using these.

Numbers

I spent just under £60 on this (based on historic exchange rates). The RRP for the retail edition is about £47, and the people who actually have it in stock aren’t really offering much discount on that (the image above with the £38 price-tag has been oos for months). As noted above, I do have more content than the retail-only folks, but I’m not convinced it’s that different.

A game of 9^th world rarely takes more than about half an hour. That means I’d need to play it about 25 times to be getting value for money, nearer to 35 to cover the loss vs RRP.

So far I’ve played this seventeen times. Not at all shabby, but still a fair way short of value.

 

Final Thoughts

I’m not really sure how to feel about the 9^th World – I backed it on a bit of a whim, and had almost forgotten about it by the time that it arrived.

Overall, it’s a decent game, and I think my gaming life would be poorer if I’d never played it (not something I’d say about Apocrypha), but £60 poorer? Highly Doubtful.

 

Of the 7 Kickstarters that I’ve backed and received in the past 4 years, 9^th World does currently sit somewhere near the bottom, in terms of how much I’ve played it, and how good it appears as value. The overall ranking, in terms of how glad I am that I backed the project tends to mirror this fairly closely, (although The 9^th World definitely ranks well above Apocrypha).

All that said, there are definitely multiple factors to bear in mind. Of the Kickstarters I’ve backed since 2015, Apocrypha is the only real lemon so far, and 9^th World is actually in a fairly small group, going up against some games that we really enjoy  – 1 or 2 places behind Gloomhaven is scarcely ‘failure’ by most definitions of the word!

Overall, I’d put The 9^th World as a Qualified Success – it’s definitely not a game I would have noticed when it came out at retail, so Kickstarting was more-or-less-necessary to get it. I’m sure I would have survived just fine without it, but it tends to get played most months, and I generally enjoy it when I do.

Coming of Age – Looking back at ’18

Another year has been and gone.

All-in-all, it was another strong year, over 700 plays of games clocked up, across a variety of titles old and new. As I generally do in early January, I just want to take a bit of a look back at some of the highlights of the past year.

The Titans

The most popular games of2018 were familiar titles, albeit with a fresh twist: Zombicide accounted for the most hours, but with the new Green Horde taking over from Black Plague as the main element. Likewise Arkham Horror LCG had the most game sessions and was the only title to get anywhere near 3 figures (94 at the final count), but there was a lot of new content released – the final part of the Path to Carcosa Cycle, the whole of the Forgotten Age, Return to Night of the Zealot, Labyrinths of Lunacy, and Guardians of the Abyss – all-in-all, the vast majority of what got played. It’s also worth mentioning that these 2 titles, my literal “A-to-Z” of gaming, were also the only games to be played in every single month of 2018, a feat that no title managed last year.

Lord of the Rings fell just short of becoming the only game to have been played 50 times in each of the 4 years I’ve been tracking my plays – although it’s not quite such a nice round number, 46-per-year for 4 years is still a solid amount of longevity. There was a fairly long period were this had fallen out of favour early in the year, but I returned to it in the summer, and have been enjoying it again, largely thanks to having given up on “standard” difficulty for the most part, and focusing my energy on “Easy” mode.

Beyond the big 3, Elder Sign hit the table in 10 months out of 12, with Marvel Legendary, Mansions of Madness, and Eldritch Horror each reappearing in 9 different months.

 

Spreading Out

Despite these big-hitters, 2018 was an even broader year than those which preceded it, with less-and-less time spent on the top few most-played games, relative to everything else.

There were a few big new games for 2018: The City of Kings was a brand-new release in March which made it to 14 games, 20+ hours. Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle had been available in the USA for a while, but it only made it to the UK in 2018 – over 20 sessions, 18 or so hours. I also clocked up nearly 20 hours playing Arkham Horror 2^nd Edition – most definitely not a new game, but new to me.

Whilst they didn’t manage quite the breakthrough of those big titles, I also picked up several other new games – World of SMOG: Rise of Moloch, Star Wars Imperial Assault, Village Attacks, and Spirit Island all made a few waves, and I’ll be interested to see whether any of them manage to establish themselves as real favourites in 2019.

 

Kicks

It was another busy year for Kickstarter, both arrivals and new pledges.

Zombicide Green Horde was a massive hit, and worth every penny. I also took delivery of The 9^th World which has been a bit of a slow burner, but has established itself as one of my go-to solo options.

Somewhat less impressively, in November 2018, I finally received the expansions for Apocrypha, bringing the whole debacle to an anticlimactic end, a mere 30 months later than promised!!

So far, the most questionable Kickstarter for 2018 was Folklore the Affliction – our first game of this was really hampered by following the game’s advice to just dive in to the tutorial without reading the full rulebook – LOTS of time spent fumbling for rules, I don’t think my wife really enjoyed that session, and it really robbed the game of any momentum. We have revisited it on a few occasions, but have yet to really figure out the sweet-spot. It’s currently sitting at a rather hideous cost just under £20 per hour!!! (Just under £10 if you measure per-player), so I’m really hoping for some improvement here soon.

In terms of new games, I’ve back the expansions for The City of Kings, a re-print of 7^th Continent, Cthulhu Death May Die, The Everrain, and Tainted Grail. I missed out on Zombicide Invader, and have a $1 pledge for Sword & Sorcery: Ancient Chronicles that I haven’t made my mind up on.

 

All-in-all I played over 100 different games in 2018, the first time I’ve broken 3 figures (92 and 90 for the previous 2 years), and 70 of those were played at least twice. As always, there were a few lemons, but most of the games I played this year were enjoyable, even if they weren’t the sorts of things that would get enough play in my house to be worth keeping around.

 

Top Ten

Statistically speaking, my top ten games of 2018 were as follows: Zombicide, Arkham LCG, LotR LCG, Pandemic Legacy, Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle, Marvel Legendary, Dragonfire, Massive Darkness, Mansions of Madness, The City of Kings, Elder Sign – the more observant amongst you might have spotted that there are actually 11 games on that list, but the last 3 are tied.

Last year, I did a little mosaic-graphic-thing and (clearly having forgotten how much of a faff it was) I decided to create another one this year – I added the other 4 games to have been played at least 10 times this year: Gloomhaven, Kingdomino, Escape the Dark Castle, and Scrabble, along with Eldritch Horror and Arkham Horror – low session-counts, but big numbers of hours (20+).

Overall, I think that picture feels like a reasonable reflection overall of the year in gaming – there are some that could do with being a little bigger or smaller, if relative size were a factor, but generally speaking, there’s nothing which leaps out at me as a major feature of 2018 which isn’t up there.

 

Numbers

Overall, 2018 presents a fairly familiar pattern – about 1/3 of all gaming was Fantasy Themed, about ¼ was Cthulhu-related, and Zombies were down on about 13%. The only other categories of note were Historical (just over 5%) and Medical (mostly Pandemic) which dominated the first month or so of the year, but faded out as the year wore on.

Financially, I spent less in 2018 than in either of the 2 previous years, but I also sold a lot less than last year, so my net spend was up a bit. I’m hoping to start 2019 with a big(ish) clear-out, to hopefully start the New Year on a positive note. That said, as mentioned in the December round-up, my main source of free games is no more, so I’ll need to keep a careful watch on spending in 2019 to keep the figures sensible. I suspect that the main impact will just be far fewer newer games this year, but increased cost is definitely still a risk.

 

Where it comes from?

Beyond genres and mechanics, I’ve also been taking a look at the origins of the games I spent most time playing – new acquisitions, old favourites, expanded titles and the like. Through this lens, I was interested to note that over a quarter of this year’s gaming was on Games I paid money to expand, an impressive figure when you consider that there were only 7 of them! – Arkham LCG, LotR LCG, Zombicide Black Plague, Massive Darkness, Eldritch Horror, L5R, and Dice Masters.

 There’s a definite mix here, between games that got a very small add-on (Eldritch had some dice, Massive Darkness a deck of crossover cards), games with only organised-play fees (Dice Masters, L5R), and games where the collection was significantly expanded (the LCGs – LotR and Arkham).

The next-biggest category was New Free Games – either reviews, or things I picked up with store credit. This was a much broader category, around 25 games, with the big headliners being Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle, Arkham Horror 3^rd Edition, Village Attacks, Kingdomino, and Escape the Dark Castle. Overall, this was 18% of gaming.

Around 13% of this year’s gaming was on Free games from previous years (i.e. things I reviewed or got with store credit): Pandemic Legacy Season 2 and Dragonfire were the big ones in this category, plus lots of things that only got played a few times.

Games that were expanded in 2018 for free (Legendary, Mansions of Madness, Elder Sign, Shadows of Brimstone) and New Kickstarters (mostly Green Horde, but also The 9^th World and Folklore) each accounted for about 10.5%

I’m not sure that money has been spent on this in my lifetime!

The remaining categories were much smaller – around 8% of time on Games bought previously and not added to in 2018 (lots of these, Pandemic Legacy S1 and Scrabble being the most notable).

 

About 6% of my gaming was New Games I Bought: The City of Kings, Arkham Horror 2^nd Edition, Star Wars Imperial Assault, Days of Ire – technically, there was a bit of trading and/or store credit involved in some of these, but all of them involved shelling out some actual cash on the game at some point in the year, so this is where I’m grouping them.

Beyond that, we get into the odds-and-ends: Old Kickstarters, things Expanded with Kickstarter, RPGs, and things I didn’t own.

 

I expect next year to look very different: for one thing, “New Free” will be a long way down, if it still exists at all, and likewise for “Expanded Free,” both due to review work probably no-longer being a thing. On the other hand, I’m hoping to be more involved in an ongoing Dungeons and Dragons campaign at the FLGS, and starting up my own D&D Group (where I’ll will be DM-ing for a few unfortunate souls), so I’m expecting RPGS to be a noticeably larger chunk, by time, if not by session.

The 2 obvious options are for spending to go up, leading to a year like 2016, where 73% of gaming was filled by games I’d spent money on that year, or for the “Old” group to go up to a point where it accounts for more than ¼ of my time. Only time will tell!

 

Un-Played

2018 did reach its end with a few games that I own still completely un-played – there was 1 brand-new arrival in Crisis at Steamfall, along with 7 older titles, including 3 repeat offenders.

Several of the un-played pile are games that I’ve tried unsuccessfully to sell: AYA, B-Sieged, Runewars Miniatures. Others are games which are more highly valued in theory than in practice, like Firefly (which my wife is very attached to, but rarely ever plays) or Shadows Over Camelot, which holds many fun memories from years gone by, but is less suited to the low player-count world that comes with everyone having children. This is definitely an area of the collection that needs slimming down, and I’ll probably do a general clear-out fairly early in the New Year.

 

Looking Forward: 2019

I expect 2019 to be a lot more static than 2019, but I’m still expecting some significant new arrivals.

Legends Untold, 7^th Continent, Cthulhu: Death May Die, The Everrain and Tainted Grail should all be arriving.

The rather-delayed expansions for Gloom of Kilforth will hopefully kick this back onto the table, and there should also be more The City of Kings content any day now.

I’ll keep picking up new content for my 2 LCGs – Arkham and Lord of the Rings, and will be keeping a close eye on the rest of FFG’s Arkham range – no doubt Mansions of Madness and Arkham Horror (3^rd ed) will both have interesting shiny new-ness.

Beyond that, I don’t really know what else is yet to come – CMON’s Trudvang is on my radar, as is Arydia: The Paths We Dare to Tread (originally slated for a 2018 KS, but pushed back).

The more observant among you may have noticed no mention of a 10×10 (or similar challenge) for 2019 – I’ll explain more about that in another article over the next few days…

As previously mentioned, I’m hoping to give more time to D&D in 2019, but otherwise I don’t imagine any major changes. Whatever happens though, this will be the place to keep up-to-date. I hope you all have a good 2019!

 

Kicking things down the road

Delays happen with Kickstarters. Anyone who has backed more than one or two knows that.

That said, there are delays, and then there are delays.

If I look back at projects I’ve backed over the last 3-4 years, there’s a very broad spectrum.

At one extreme, I received the Green Horde core box 7 months earlier than the original estimate.

More commonly, I’ve received things with slight delays – Aeon’s End War Eternal and Gloomhaven were each about 2 months late, Massive Darkness was 4.

I think that mentally the cut-off point where I start getting annoyed, is about 6 months.

You can probably guess then how I’m feeling as I look at 3 of the longest outstanding projects I’m waiting on.

Apocrypha Kickstarted in May 2015, with an estimated time of 12 months. The base game arrived in Septebmer 2017 – 17 months late. To add insult to injury, the expansions are currently sitting at 2 years late, and have (apparently) only recently been sent to the printers: who knows when we’ll actually see them.

The 9^th World, another Lone Shark project is 18 months late. According to the most recent emails, these have (probably) left Shanghai not that long ago, so we might see them in the next month or two.

Far more recently, it was the end of 2016 when I Kickstarted Legends Untold – currently it’s only 10 months behind schedule, but there’s nothing to suggest that it’ll be arriving any time soon. ‘Autumn’ seems the best bet, by which time it will definitely be over a year late.

 

Legends Untold

I’m going to start by looking a bit more closely at Legends Untold because, in fairness, I can see some reasonable factors behind a lot of the delays here. As far as I can tell, these were guys who hadn’t worked in the Board Game industry before, and it was a small-scale Kickstarter that exploded, far beyond what they’d anticipated. From a £12,000 goal, they raised £129,000!!

Obviously that had an impact on how the campaign developed. The various stretch-goals (linen-finish cards, bigger cards etc) were very quickly swept aside, and they made some BIG decisions, most notably that this initial Kickstarter would be for not just 1 game but 2!!

Legends Untold has always billed itself as “Deep as an RPG, Quick as a Card Game” which is quite a claim given how many people have tried (with varying levels of success) to deliver the fabled RPG-in-a-Box over recent years. Theirs was certainly not a narrow vision, and the game they promised us was to have been just the first in a vast network of games, all of which could be woven together into some grand tapestry – Novice Boxes would take you from the beginning up to “Apprentice” level, at which point you would select an “Apprentice Box” to take you up to “Journeyman” level. By the time you had completed one of these, you would not only have reached the great city of this new Fantasy World, but thoroughly explored it, and be ready to go venturing into wilds as a “Skilled” Adventurer.

All very grand, but first thing’s first – this campaign was just for the first of the Novice Boxes, The Caves. Or at least it would have been, had they not raised more than 4x their original funding goal within the first 6 days of the campaign. At that point, they decided that the campaign would be for 2 mutually compatible Novice Boxes: The Caves, and The Sewers. Similar in overall structure, this second box would feature different heroes, different enemies, and different environments, but with a reassurance that the content from the various different boxes could be freely mixed-and-matched.

Personally, I felt at the time that they should have stuck to their original plan – balancing a new game is a lot of work, and balancing 2 mutually compatible games I’d wager, is more than just twice the work.

At the time, I was also a bit miffed that they seemed to be avoiding the question of whether or not these sets would be available at retail later. Personally I would have preferred to just get the one game (around £20) and see whether I liked it, rather than committing to 2 for £40ish, but they got me with some good old FOMO.

In reflection, the second was probably an unfair complaint – as already noted, Inspiring Games (the people behind Legends Untold) seem to be very new to the business, and time-and-time-again, to have been caught out by the sheer length of time it takes for stuff to get done. The most recent update talked about how they would like to go to retail with the game, but are unsure whether a distributer would be willing to work with them, given that they only have a single title to offer. When they didn’t give an answer 17 months ago, it seems a pretty safe bet that they genuinely didn’t have one.

They have already named the world, which will make this game a lot easier to track and categorise!

There have been a lot of KS updates for Legends Untold – generally the communication has been reasonable on the project, although not amazing. It certainly looks like the game has changed a lot. This sort of thing is inevitable in this type of Kickstarter project, but it does make it very difficult for me to muster any real enthusiasm about the game right now. I know that these guys have a really expansive vision for where this line of games will end up – I just hope that they haven’t tried to run before they can walk. Hopefully the game will arrive when things are quiet enough for me to give it the table-time it needs to prove its worth, and above all, I hope that the gameplay lives up to the hype.

 

Beware of Sharks!

I have a lot less sympathy for the guys at Lone Shark games. The lead designer of their projects is Mike Selinker, the man behind the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Lords of Vegas, and the 2004 re-implementation of Axis and Allies. Also involved, aside from a whole host of Pathfinder ACG folk, were Paul Peterson (Smash Up) and Liz Spain (I’m just glad I never backed Incredible Expeditions…)

The point is that, even if it was their first (and second) self-published game, a lot of these people were industry insiders, and they really should have known better. The communication on both projects has tended to be poor, the claims disingenuous. In the various updates which have trickled out to us, they spend a lot of time blowing their own trumpet – “you’ll be glad we took our time, because this game is really worth the wait” or similar, and a lot of time talking about just how clever this or that game feature is.

These campaigns have been going on so long that memories start to fade, and details blur into legend or myth. I had a distinct recollection of reading a comment from the designers on one of the Lone Shark games about how they’d been working hard to make the game the most intricate thing they possibly could. Not the best, or the most enjoyable, the most intricate. Weirdly, when I went back to find the source/ get the exact quote, I couldn’t find it and, in the interests of fairness, I should say that the quote could well be simply the product of my own embittered imagination.

Whether they said it or not, it’s definitely a statement that fits the vibe of the campaign. It might never have been plausible to get things delivered within the original time-period they estimated, but I have to think that the delays might have been kept to a year if they hadn’t spent so much time getting distracted by pointless stuff.

Based on a recent update (and this one definitely really did happen), it looks like there were several months of delays on Ninth World, which could be boiled down to “we wanted a really fancy box, but that created loads of problems with the image being printed the wrong size and/or upside down!” They sounded especially pleased with themselves when they announced that they’d finished applying the spot gloss. Don’t get me started on spot gloss…

 

 

Good game?

It’s also important to factor in how good a game actually is – our love for Zombicide means that we’re probably going to be pretty happy with any project that gives us loads more Zombicide stuff.

By contrast, Apocrypha (at least in Core Box form) was a game that (for us) wasn’t nearly as good as it should have been, or nearly as good as it thought it was. The abysmal rulebook, the convoluted set-up, the lack of driving force to the narrative which turned “non-linear” into “why bother?” I’m hoping that the expansions will help, along with the FAQs and errata that are so sorely needed (I believe there’s one “Structure” that they’ve decided to replace altogether), but realistically, I’m resigned to the likelihood of selling this, probably at a significant loss.

If The Ninth World turns out to be amazing, then I’ll probably get over the rubbish campaign (at least a bit), but if it’s another dud, then that over-elaborate box with its unnecessary spot gloss is just going to annoy me.

 

Where next?

It’s important, of course, to realise that no 2 projects on Kickstarter are the same. My Massive Darkness experience was brilliant, and my Green Horde experience has been good so far, with nothing (at present) to suggest that there will be a problem with wave 2. That said, I know that there were a lot of complaints about Black Plague (which I acquired retail/via secondary market) from backers who received their games after retailers did.

The next project always has the potential to be the next nightmare.

Even so, experience matters. And my experience tells me that, if I back a CMON game on KS, I’m going to get great value for money, a lot of cool minis, probably a decent game, and a fairly timely delivery.

By contrast, going to a small independent, the types of people who Kickstarter feels like it should be for – well, that’s just pot luck. I might get some first-timers like the guys behind Legends Untold who underestimate the challenges and take a bit longer – I can live with that. Or I might get another project like one of the nightmares from Lone Shark – delayed beyond the stretch of plausibility, poor communication, muddled priorities.

I’ve increasingly been backing things for a single Pound or Dollar, allowing me to put off a decision until later. As I try to make the decisions to actually get the game or not, all the thoughts in this article come whirling back round.

I’ve recently upped my single-dollar pledge to something more substantial on KS projects from a couple of smaller creators – but in both instances these were re-print/expansions campaigns: a lot of the risk is reduced when you can see that they’ve already done this once, and managed it successfully.

In some respects, Zombicide Invader is (for me) the least necessary of the $1 projects – whilst the modifications made for the space version look cool, it’s still Zombicide, and I own A LOT of Zombicide. Should I avoid this in favour of more innovative independent projects, and take a gamble financially? Or do I just double-down on what I know will work out as a good deal financially, and not risk being landed with a White Elephant?

Whatever I end up doing, I’m sure you’ll be able to read about it on here…