Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

After a month filled up with discussion of the Mantic Dungeon Saga kickstarter, I will return to my normal topics.  Lets seem what we have coming up.  I got a new batch of X-Wing Ships to go through, also Lego sets specifically from the LOTR and Hobbit lines, and the Impact Miniatures Trollcast Teams should be on hand in about 2 weeks to take a look at those.  Not much action on the GW front.  Already talked about fiscal year 2013-2014 and not much interest personally in 9th ed WHFB.  I was looking recently at some Mordheim based rules as a use for some fantasy minis but the Dungeon Saga stuff will probably fill that interest in nicely.

Dungeon Saga Kickstarter: Final Thoughts

If you have been following this or many gaming blogs recently you will know about the recent Dungeon Saga Kickstarter from Mantic that closed this past weekend with like 5000+ backers and 1M+ dollars pledged.  This makes it their most backed and second highest funded kickstarter for a company that runs like 2 kickstarters a year.  They often are running the next kickstarter before finishing shipping the previous one.  Mantic is still a small company but many feel that their way of doing kickstarters is not aligned that well with the propose of kickstarters but it seems to work for them.  They get great social marketing out of it, it helps get around their poor trade sales presence, it minimizes their risks allowing for ambitious projects, and does appear to allow accelerated development where if they had to wait on the revenue from the first releases to work on the next it would be significantly delayed.  Here they get all of it a head of time.  They probably could have funded the basic game internally but now a much bigger package is available in one go for players to pick and choose from.  I know I bagged on them in the beginning of this kickstarter for the way they were doing the stretch goals and such for the basic set where they set the initial funding value very low and used stuff that was obvious already developed as stretch goals.  They plowed through all those without a problem so in the end it does not matter so much.  Unlocking stretch goals is probably more interesting than just setting the basic set at the real 300K funding level.

Dungeon Saga: Dwarf Kings Quest Kickstarter Final 10 Hours

The current mantic kickstarter has reached in final 10 hours with about 850K raised.  They need 925K to add a Dragon expansion which I am not really hot for myself but whatever.  Maybe they will get more stuff in it if they break the first stretch goal  Since I last checked in the basic pledge has picked up plastic doors, like 5 demons, a large yet to be revealed undead monsterous creature, and about 8 missions plus Abyssal Dwarf rules.  So some nice bonus but nothing that makes it a must buy value in terms of miniatures.

Dungeon Saga: Scenario 1 Playthrough

In my continuing coverage of the Mantic Dungeon Saga kickstarter,  I played the real scenario provided with the alpha rules.  The first two test games, Journeys from the East and West,  are more of training exercises to help you learn the rules and are not designed to be balanced.  This scenario starts with all four heroes together at the entrance of a small room with 6 piles of bones and 2 armored zombies (represented by Reapers Bones Liches/Wights) and 2 normal zombies.  Behind the zombies are two pairs of doors which need to be opened to get to the next stage of this scenario.

Dungeon Saga: Journey From the East

Last night I got a chance to run through the second of the training missions for the Dungeon Saga Alpha rules.  The set up is to train in spells and range attacks with the Heroes being the Elf Ranger with her bow and the human wizard.  The bad guys are 2 archer skeletons, 3 regular skeletons and 5 piles of bones to reinforce the skeletons during the game.  The heroes start near 2 magically warded doors and need to open one of them by casting the break ward spell on one a total of 5 times.  Since only the wizard can do this the archer is there to delay the advance of the Bones.

Dungeon Saga: Dice Mechanics Probability Analysis

Anyone who follows this blog will know that I have an interest in the probabilities in Gaming.  I have my Math Hulk series where I examined the attacks in Space Hulk for all the possible interactions.  I played around with an X-wing attack calculator and even calculated how many missiles to the center of a Razorback before the advent of hull points.  Today I am going to look at the Dungeon Saga dice mechanics.

Dungeon Saga Kickstarter: Final Week Check Up

The Mantic Dungeon Saga: Dwarf Kings Quest kickstarter is now in its last week.  I looked at the progress last week and report that the project in my eyes was sort of in the fair value stage.  Mantic is an essentially professional kickstarter company that builds its kickstarters to be at the point they will be a good value but not anything amazing.   The project has moved mostly in a parallel direction in terms of value over the last week.  They added a Hero to the base game, finished the 25 dollar Greenskin expansion with 18 monsters and 1 villain, and starter a 25 dollar Demon expansion with 8 minis(update 10) with a Bonus Hero being placed in the base pledge.  The base pledge also picked up some expansion models finishing a 9 figure set for the greenskins and starting with 3(update 4) demons.  So a total pick up of 8 models for 57 (58 Currently) models plus the dungeon decor in the 100 dollars.

Reaper Announces Bones II Kickstarter will Miss Initial Shipment Date

Reaper in their lastest kickstarter update let everyone know that they will not be shipping on time again.  It appears that this time they decided to actually check there production samples to prevent the appearance of any more alien cowgirls and children.  Some failed the inspections so the molds will have to be redone.  I was on reaper a lot about this before backing the second kickstarter and am glad that they are trying to maintain the model quality better this time even if it slows down delivery.  The models are supposed to be my christmas present so hopefully they will still make it.

I think I had a feeling like this was going to happen.  I hardly every comment on the kickstarter updates but about a month ago I was asking why we were not see more production sample since they were supposed to be shipping so soon.

Dungeon Saga: Journey from the West

So Mantic posted the alpha rules(which are not currently linked on the front of the kickstarter) for the Dungeon Saga game along with 3 starter scenarios.  I recently picked up a couple of the older mantic boardgames at clearance prices from their site.  I also get an extra dungeon tile set which matches those needed for the demo scenarios.  I was able to get the minis for the first two scenarios from my Bones line and even whipped out my Dungeonbowl doors since the first two scenarios are about opening the doors to the dungeon.

Lego Ghostbusters: Who you gonna Call?

Lego released a Ghostbuster set a few months ago from their consumer designed line.  The box comes with 508 many small pieces for $49.99 and is only at Lego Stores or through online merchants.  No decals which is great.  Everything is printed.  The box is a nice tab lock one that allow the set to be kept together after it is assembled.