Valley Games announces UP FRONT! Hot

No Fucking Way.

*grumble grumble* Kickstarter...well, if that's what it takes...

I think there might be a zero missing from "2012."

They could do a Kickstarter level just for the rules. The game itself is what--a deck of custom cards? Something Artscow can poop out for $5. You could spend a person-year trying to get those rules in a comprehensible state.

At the bonus level, they'll include a little white Sharpie so you can put the SS back on the collar of the sure-to-be-cleansed art redux.

This game is orders of magnitude more complicated than anything they've ever done.

Add in Kickstarter, and it's totally Get Yer Popcorn time.

Given what they raked in on D Day Dice, the fact that they are using the Kickstarter crutch is both lame, as well as making it more complicated. How many different extras can they do for a well established game. More stuff = more things that they can screw up or cause a delay with.

I can't wait to see fools dumping their old AH copies at news of this.

No, it isn't.

Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage is at least as complex as UF, if not more so. The basic rules you have to know to know for every scenario are fairly simple; it's the special rules for all the different weapons and vehicles that bulk up the rulebook, and you're only going to be using a fraction of those in most games. As for the production itself, what's the big deal? It's a booklet, a few sheets of tokens, and a big deck of cards.

Really, all they need to do is reorganize the rulebook, clean up some of the wording, and come up with a better card design. That should just be a matter of replacing of all this "0r RNC > 4" stuff with English, and whipping up a good reference sheet.

How hard can that possibly be? Even if they fuck it up, they'll have to fail awfully hard to come up with something worse than the original.

Well, there's the Japanese, British, and Italian OOB. They could do terrain for the PTO, or the African theater. More scenarios would be cool. I'd pay a little extra for a nice play mat to keep everything more organized on the table. There's a lot they could do that's either already been done for the original, or that wouldn't be too ambitious.

Or, you know, just keep playing with your ugly ass old set.

The playmat idea is a fucking good one. I would be enticed there. Playmats for PUZZLE STRIKE make that game a hell of a lot easier to explain, and would help here too.

I could see the information design being better in the new edition, but I cannot imagine that the art in the old edition will be more ugly than whatever Valley Games shits out. They're pretty consistently screwed the pooch in that respect; either they've hired a relative to do all their art, or they just think that "teenagers who think in-game video-game screenshots are the coolest-looking possible thing" and "boardgamers who want to play complex Avalon Hill wargame designs from 30 years ago" have HUGE overlap.

This is good news, though. The combination of Valley Games AND Kickstarter makes me a little scared, especially as someone whose Hannibal was sent to the wrong address and was told by VG to shut up and wait when I alerted them to this fact, and who got the wrong Hannibal miniatures and NEVER got them replaced by VG (I fixed it via swaps with other people with screwups). I definitely swore off preordering from Valley Games at that point, and with Kickstarter, it's like pre-preordering. I genuinely don't understand sentences like the one below:

The idea of paying money for a game, sight unseen, from a basically first-time designer, without any reviews existing, I guess because of a Killer Bunnies-esque "haha evil BABIES get it?" Is pretty much unfathomable to me.

I'm definitely interested in this. It's true that Valley Games has some terrible looking games. Their Die Macher is the only English-language game that is actually less usable than the same game in German. But Titan looks pretty great.

Could be my first Kickstarter.

FWIW, they did a bang-up job on D-Day Dice. The cards are good, the boards are good, the dice are good.