Space Cadets: Away Missions has launched on Kickstarter

I confess to a little sticker shock when I first checked out the Kickstarter page. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't a $100 game. If the free worldwide shipping wasn't available, I would have flagged it. Even with free shipping, it's a lot of money especially as the NZ dollar has weakened against the greenback in recent days. But I trust the Fatties who have designed it and played it and I trust Stronghold games to back a good game. This type of game is right up my alley and I don't have anything filling this spot at the moment after selling Doom a few months back. Fingers crossed that the KS meets all of the stretch goals to make the production the best it can be.

For anyone who hasn't read the rules, it's good. I really like how enemies aren't just variations of stat. They are different. At first the AI looks difficult, but later it can be seen how shortcuts have been made to make them *really* simple to go through, unlike most tactical co-ops which need more than desired amount of attention from the players.

The only negative for me is the campaign which is not a real campaign with development and carryover flags.

Thanks Sevej. We worked hard at keeping the rules as simple as possible without losing any of the games "depth". It's not "mainstream" simple, but easy enough that rules don't disturb the immersion. Every time we started to go down a creative path we remembered our mantra: "No Special Rules".

As for the campaign, we went back and forth on this many times. In the end we decided we wanted a game where you could play ANY scenario at ANY time with ANY group.

VonTush wrote:

Mr. White wrote: I'm going to go against the grain here and defend applejack's comment.

Yeah, I feel like were it not for the connections to here people would be singing to old "Bubblegum Machine Models" "KS is going to be the death of the hobby" "$100+ games are going to be the death of the hobby"

I'm blindly backing because of the connections here and because of the trust I put into the people here who have played.

Agree with pretty much all of you points, though I may have backed it because of the Stronghold connection alone. The KickStarter has some issues (confusing shipping and backer levels, many stretch goals obviously being removed content to help drive the KS machine, a much higher price point than I'm used to spending for the amount of content), but I try to support projects by people I like.

ubarose wrote: Maybe someday I will write the behind the scenes story of "A Game Design Widow: what happens when four passionate, talented, stubborn men develop and publish a game together."

I would really like to read this.

engineer Al wrote: I'm just glad that Stephen let us post ads here first so that all my FATie friends could have first crack at the free shipping.

Wow, that's a really nice thing to do.

I just watched the gameplay video and now I'm pissed.

I don't want to wait 6 months for delivery...I WANT IT NOW, DADDEH!

Looks outstanding!!!

Yeah, I was borderline before, but the gameplay video really shows a lot of positives. Much happier that I backed now.

The gameplay video that EVERYONE is talking about:

boardgamegeek.com/video/61893/space-cade...ions-game-play-video

Whomever put that video together did a nice job choosing a situation that illustrated more than just a simple "here's how you do a basic action!" move, which I think was very helpful from a marketing perspective.

Who knew Al had such a sexy voice? (Well, other than Uba).

Seriously, that was a very nice and informative video. Lots of gameplay details in just 6 minutes.

Ice cubes to Eskimos. Buonocore knows how to present. His response in the "On the Fence" thread was perfect pitch too.

I'll be honest, my dice never roll well enough to get the kind of result in that video, but in theory they could. Showing that long a maneuver gives potential buyers an indication of the level of complexity and capabilities that are available, and how much you can do if things go your way. It's a nice part of the game, because even if things are going very wrong you have a chance to dig yourself out of a jam.

The only thing it didn't show is the ability to preposition another player -- use your overkill (did I see that the term is trademarked in the video?) to move another player out of harm's way or into position to start their turn ahead of where they currently are. That would have been a nice touch considering the game is cooperative. But a minor detail to be sure. That's a great video and your numbers have jumped a bit because of it this afternoon. You may do better than yesterday.

I'll be curious to see what happens with the free shipping runs out. That's when the whiners will come around.

S.

Shit, I want to watch the video but have to get to the office in 20 minutes (still eating my breakfast).

Fuck it, I'm in.