Ogre...Kickstarter...you in?

mjl, you made some good points. It's true, there is likely to be a lot more gameplay in this big Ogre set than in the similarly priced Space Hulk 3rd edition set that I bought. But I was so underwhelmed by the original Ogre that I never even played the G.E.V. or Shockwave expansions that I got from friends for my birthday a year later. I eventually traded them away, though I kept Ogre.

wolvendancer wrote: I'll make another point that I haven't seen made: KS users are, by and large, educated and engaged. Company X may sell shitty products in Wal-Mart and be somewhat removed from fallout due to layers of distribution, but woe unto the company that screws over a large KS base. It's simply a more engaged economic model by its very nature. I suppose that consumer base could be diluted by a huge influx of new users, but I'm hoping that, instead, new users are slowly socialized and educated. We'll see.

Yet, the educated, and engaged still allow this company to exist, Kickstarting and all. Educated and Engaged can be fooled with Shiny and Precious.


But back to MJ, who I respect immensely, but in this case disagree with. Space Hulk has had more plays in my house than any other game save Heroscape and Red November. It is The Game That Cannot Be Sold Or Traded. Ogre looks neat and all, and I played it several times back in the day thinking it was a mediocre one-sided version of Panzerkreig or something. One big tank to rule them all and in the bloodbath bind them? Really? Just wasn't all that shit hot in my opinion.

And it may have more plays to TO SOME in it, but to a lot of people, Space Hulk 3ed is the dog's bollocks with incredible replay value.

Space Hulk has had more plays in my house than any other game save Heroscape and Red November. It is The Game That Cannot Be Sold Or Traded.

That's all well and good for you, Pete. I don't know how long you've been playing the game, but I started with it about 20 years ago. The base game and Deathwing, which is more or less what 3rd ed. is, exhausted their potential to keep me interested a loooooong time ago.

I will play those first 6 scenarios the same way every single time I play the marines. Ditto for most of the other ones. So will everyone else I play the game with. There's just nothing left for us to do with what's in that box. OK, maybe that's not a problem for people who haven't been playing it since they were six, but how much longer will that handful of maps and loadouts last for everyone else?

My guess? Not too damned long. I'm basing that guess on the fact that those scenarios got fairly boring fairly quickly the first two times around, and in order to keep the game interesting, things had to keep getting added to it. With Genestealer, the campaign book, and all that White Dwarf stuff for the old game, there was that potential. Here, there is not, and there never will be.

If you're happy with the new version as-is forever and ever, then I'm happy for you. I just don't want to keep playing the meat and potatoes version of the game, and haven't for a good many years.

Ogre looks neat and all, and I played it several times back in the day thinking it was a mediocre one-sided version of Panzerkreig or something. One big tank to rule them all and in the bloodbath bind them? Really? Just wasn't all that shit hot in my opinion.

Well again, I agree with you guys on basic OGRE. One side gets one thing to move, the other gets one target to shoot at, and terrain hardly matters. Nothing to write home about, especially now that there are games like Astra Titanus out there that basically render it obsolete. I get it.

But that's not what you're being sold here. The basic GEV rules alone deepen the game considerably. You have a lot more obstacles, cover modifiers, close assaults, and splash damage. You have to use roads effectively, and provide transportation for your foot soldiers. You can attack the terrain itself and divert enemy approaches. Once you throw in lasers and cruise missiles, you introduce LOS and some simultaneity into the game as well.

You may still not like the game, and I'm usually of the opinion that, if you didn't like something to begin with, no expansion or modification is going to do much to change your mind. I will say, though, that playing the original OGRE is not a very good basis for deciding whether or not you're going to like this thing. The gameplay itself is appreciably different and more interesting, even if it uses the same CRT and basic units.

However, this does illustrate one thing SJ has done seriously wrong with this product line, which was to keep making some distinction between OGRE and GEV as two separate games (which they are), but never doing the logical thing and start calling GEV "Advanced OGRE" (which it is). When you see someone refer to OGRE, you can never quite be sure what exactly they're talking about, since the two games have been packaged and expanded together for so long, were never properly married into one comprehensive ruleset.

The first clause in this sentence is where I'm standing right now. The amount of material in the box means that this is a lifestyle game instead of a casual play...

Eh, I wouldn't say that. Even at its most complex, it's about on par with Valor and Victory in terms of rules weight, and a lot of the extra rules only apply if you're using the units that those rules govern. For the most part, which units you take is up to you, so you can determine how much complexity you want to deal with without having to shackle your opponent to a lighter or heavier ruleset. The learning curve is about average, and you can get a lot out of it without having to include everything there is to use.

But then again, it's a $100 game. You should probably be aiming for about 20 plays at least if you're going to invest that much.

If Steve Jackson Games hadn't lost the partnership with Interplay for the Fallout franchise in the late 90s, I bet they wouldn't need kickstarter now. Welp!

Well, at least they have Munchkin :v

MJ, I've played SH for a great many years. I, too, had the original set, with the scenario book (later). It is one of the few games from my childhood. But, I am an imaginative little bastard, which is why I liked LNOE and the D&D Adventure Games so much. I have yet to run out of ideas on what maps to build, including large-scale shit. At one point I had three 12 mission scenarios on my PC, all mapped and shit. I had every tile image photographed in a light-box, cut and photoshopped to be just the tile, and all that jazz.

Then my PC HDD took a shit. Music, photos, game files, and my most precious loss, my Fallout 3 character.

So, eventually I'll get my photo booth set up again (not much effort there...it's a USPS box with the back cut out and replaced by white copy paper...) and will go back to making badass scenarios that are essentially unbalanced bloodbaths where the Marines have a snowball's chance in Hell of winning. And I still won't care because it's the body count I'm after!

To be fair, though, in all honesty I wish they'd have had the old-style Genestealers...the new ones look way cooler but are WAY more of a bitch to actually play with.

One of these days I'm just going to buy a bunch of the standard ones and swap them out.

SaMoKo wrote: If Steve Jackson Games hadn't lost the partnership with Interplay for the Fallout franchise in the late 90s...

They didn't 'lose' it, Steve Jackson tore up the contract after Brian Fargo and the Fallout team refused to lower the amount of violence in Fallout. Specifically quoted as a 'problem' was Fallout 1's opening sequence where the Ink Dots music plays over a scene of a guy being executed by powered armor troops. Good call, Steve.

Steve Jackson is Anti-American.

Mom, Apple Pie, and Power Armored BOS Paladins ripping shit up with plasma rifles...that's All American Values in a nutshell.

Holy shit! I just checked the KS page and SJG has raised nearly a quarter of a MILLION dollars on this thing already. WTF!

flim_flam wrote: a quarter of a MILLION dollars

I've always felt that phrase is only used to make the amount sound like more than it actually is. A MILLION dollars is still a very long way away.

[Note: I'm not saying $250K isn't a lot, because it is.]

I'd never heard of Kicktraq, but it apparently graphs some basic stats. Here's how Ogre is doing:

www.kicktraq.com/projects/847271320/ogre-designers-edition/