Kickstarter Weekly—Sept. 20, 2013

Well here we are again, wrapping up another busy week at TOG. You'll be seeing our 2nd podcast episode pop up in iTunes really soon, (seriously it's uploaded, just waiting on the Apple folks to do their thing) and we thought, "Hey! Let's do that Kickstarter Weekly thing that we do. So here it is.

Featured Campaign

Ninja Dice - Greenbrier Games

This looks like a fun little dice-driven fast-paced game. Players are rolling dice, trying to grab loot, and beating up the other players in dicey-ninja action! The components in the video look slick, too!

A pledge of $25 gets you the game, The campaign ends Oct. 29 and you can check it out: right here!

Current Campaigns

Shadows Over the Empire - Artipia Games/MAGE Company

I'm drawn to this game for a couple reasons: It looks cool, and when I say "looks" I'm referring to the bright and shiny artwork; the game looks fun, too. Card-based area control, with some intrigue and influence tossed in for good measure.

The campaign for this ends Oct. 10, and a pledge of $32 gets you a copy shipped to your door. You can find the campaign here.

Planet Defiant: Onslaught of Vanas - Pangalactic Entertainment

Galactic exploration for the sake of the future of Earth's population...in a board game. Lots of cool plastic minis included in this one. So if that's your thing, check this one out! It's a bit pricey though, so be ready.

The campaign ends Oct. 20, and an $80 pledge get's you a copy of the game. You can check the campaign out right here.

8 Bit Mafia/8 Bit Werewold - Michael Scott

Because we needed another deck of cards to help us play Mafia and Werewolf, there's this campaign. The good news is, it's 8-bit type of fun, and it's an inexpensive campaign to jump in on. The bad news is, it's another Werewolf/Mafia iteration.

A pledge of $6 will get you both decks, and the campaign ends Oct. 31 and you can check it out here. 

Thanks so much for reading us here on the blog, watching us on YouTube, and listening to us on our podcast!

Let us know what Kickstarters you're backing in the comments below, or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!

Presidential Meeples!

So, a few months ago we reviewed a great little deck builder of presidential proportions called Pixel Lincoln. They're plugging away on production and unfortunately we don't have a release date to report. But they did leak out a photo of the production sample Lincoln Meeples on their Kickstarter page, and I have to say they look AWESOME!

When we reviewed the game it was a print on demand prototype version so we had to use our own tokens to mark our movement in the game.  And a game like this, while it doesn't rely solely on ascetics, it certainly was born of a theme, and having a glimpse of the meeples we can see how they're going to add to the game play experience!

We interviewed Jason Tagmire and President P. Lincoln last year, and you can read it here!

You can also read our full review of Pixel Lincoln here!

And you can check out the Pixel Lincoln website and pre-order your copy right here!

Thanks for reading! Check us out on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and be sure to answer our question of the day! 

Who's the Boss Monster? An interview with Brotherwise Games

Today we have the pleasure of chatting with Johnny and Chris, the masterminds behind Brotherwise Games, and the ridiculously successful Kickstarter campaign for their upcoming game, Boss Monster the Dungeon Building card game.

Hey guys, thanks for taking a few minutes to answer some questions for us! For our readers who may not know who you are, could you introduce yourselves and tell us one random fact about yourselves?

Johnny: We are Johnny and Chris O’Neal, two brothers who share a lifelong love of all things geeky. Comics, novels, movies, video games... but especially tabletop games. A random fact about me is that I used to write for a video game review Web site called Nintendorks.

Chris: As the elder brother I like to take the credit for the nerdification of my younger sibling (although I can’t take all the credit). For years after I went to college we lived in separate states, but a common move to Southern California in 2009 put us within an hour of each other, and reinvigorated our common love of gaming.

How did you first get into gaming? What game was your first love?

Johnny: Growing up, of course I assumed that everything my big brother did was cool, which included playing D&D with his friends or video games on our family’s TI-994A. But it was our family’s acquisition of a NES and the original Super Mario Bros that really got me hooked.

Chris: Being almost a decade older, I was already playing a lot of tabletop games (Morrow Project, anyone?) when the first home video game systems came out. Video games derailed my investment in tabletop games for a while, but after college I got back into them pretty heavily. First love game? Probably D&D. I was one of those kids who would sit around and make character after character that would never see the daylight of an actual adventure. I loved it.

Is Boss Monster your first attempt at releasing a game through Kickstarter? If so how shocked are you at the number of backers the game has received?

Chris: Boss Monster is our first Kickstarter. Despite feeling like we had a solid game, a good look and theme, and a decent understanding of how to appeal to our gamer compatriots, I think it’s safe to say that we were pretty overwhelmed by Boss Monster’s success. I think it’s natural to keep your hopes and dreams a bit in check when you do this sort of thing. On launch day I called Johnny at six in the morning and said calmly, “don’t freak out if we don’t hit $1000 this week. We’ve got a month to raise $12,000. Chances are good we can pull this off.” Two hours later I was gibbering into the phone like an overexcited idiot as we passed through $3000. Even once it was clear that the campaign would be successful, we were still underestimating the final amount by a huge amount. Kickstarter is a strange and wondrous beast. Despite what could only be called a huge success, we made a truck-full of mistakes, and learned a number of lessons that we’ll take into our next campaign.

So if you would, take us through the creation and design process of the game. It seems to cross multiple genres; how did you put all of that together?

Johnny: It was a highly iterative process. In the very beginning, weirdly enough, it was a game about acquiring friends in high school instead of acquiring dead adventurers in a dungeon. When we stopped worrying about what game would be “marketable” and “mainstream,” and focused on making a game that we’d love to play, that’s when it came together.

Looks like Pixel Lincoln is making an appearance in Boss Monster; did you approach Jason Tagmire about putting that together, or did he come to you?

Johnny: As our Kickstarter campaign went live, we sent preview copies of the game to a number of Web sites. To our surprise, one of these copies was actually passed on to Jason. I’ll admit we were anxious to hear his opinion of the game, and thrilled when we heard he liked it. The crossover cards were his idea, but we embraced the idea wholeheartedly. Pixel Lincoln appears as a promo card for Kickstarter supporters, and it’s a card that can really shake up the game.

So what is it like designing games with a sibling? Who usually wins the arguments?

Chris: Every game that Brotherwise has in the pipeline has one of the brothers designated as a Lead Designer. The Lead Designer, in theory, wins every argument for that particular game, and we think it’s important to have one person who is ultimately in charge and on the hook for a game’s success. In reality, we’re very good at listening to one another, and relatively unabashed about criticizing work in progress. In almost every situation where we had a disagreement about a key decision, the resulting discussion led us to a good outcome.

Johnny: I have to say that Chris is awesome at keeping things positive and never letting discussions turn into arguments. My natural instinct in a game design debate is to stick to my guns and rarely concede a point right away, but often I’ll sleep on a decision and realize that Chris was right. From pointing out that we should use pixel art to removing dice-rolling as a core mechanic of the game, he managed to change my mind in some very important ways.

What are some of your favorite board/card games?

Chris: I am first and foremost a Heroclix player. I gravitate to complex games and they don’t get much more complex than that one. I’m also a wargamer, with World in Flames as my hands-down favorite. I’ve been playing a lot of Small World recently, and I just marvel at it. It’s my standard for what a quickie game should be: balanced, simple, thematically compelling, and a lot of variation in a small package.

Johnny: My favorite recent game is Ascension. I know some of the team at Gary Games and they’re a bunch of geniuses -- I can’t wait to play SolForge. I also love the classics: Magic, D&D, and Settlers of Catan.

Are there any other games on the horizon you can talk about?

Chris: The success of Boss Monster: Master of the Dungeon allowed us to move forward our production time table for expansions considerably.  Summer 2013 will see our first Boss Monster mini-expansion, Tools of Hero-Kind, and in Fall we will launch a Kickstarter for our first full expansion, Crash Landing. Tools of Hero-Kind will add a whole layer of complexity to the game, turning our heroes from mere resources into honest threats. Crash Landing will riff on some famous fantasy/sci-fi crossovers and introduce sci-fi themed dungeons to the game. Crash Landing will work as a standalone game or as an expansion of the base game. If you missed out on some of our customize-your-card pledges this time around, we’ll repeat those sorts of pledges for the Crash Landing Kickstarter campaign.

2014 will see the release of our first non-Boss Monster title. We can’t say much about it now except that it’s a totally different genre and will introduce a novel card-play mechanic that comes right out of its theme.

One Word Response Time:

Favorite NES game?

Johnny: River City Ransom

Chris: The Legend of Zelda

Best villain of ALL TIME?

Johnny: When you put it that way, Darth Vader

Chris: Kaiser Söze

Megatron or Starscream?

Chris: Megatron (Starscream is soooo whiny)

Johnny: As a younger brother, I relate to Starscream’s constant efforts to overthrow his superior.

He-Man or Thundercats?

Chris: Thundercats HOOOOOO!

Johnny: He-Man. But I’m biased because I had the chance to work on He-Man toys when I was at Mattel.

Legolas or Gimli?

Chris: Gimli, son of Gloin, son of that other dwarf.

Johnny: Legolas and his flowing mane of golden locks.

Thanks, guys, for talking to us!

Make sure you check out Boss Monster, at www.bwisegames.com, pre-order your copy at shop.bwisegames.com and follow Boss Monster on Twitter @BossMonsterGame ! And thank you for reading!

Like a "Boss Monster" - Kickstarter Weekly

Hey gang, we're rolling in super late in the game on this one, but it's definitely worth checking out! Brotherwise Games is totally crushing their Kickstarter campaign for Boss Monster: the Dungeon-Building Card Game. I mean their over funded by like $145,000, they've got 3 days left on the campaign and if the get $3,000 more in backing, they will have hit every stretch goal they have planned. Here's the cool thing about the campaign, it's super cheap to get in on. To get yourself a copy of the game you'll only have to buy in for $20! Ok, enough about the campaign, let's talk about the game for a minute or two. From what I can tell Boss Monster, is like the Grand Theft Auto of 8-bit side scrolling card games, in a fantasy realm setting... Instead of playing the hero or the adventurer, players take on the role of the main bad dude, and try to create a dungeon to lure as many adventurers in and then slay them. The theme sounds like a geeky good time and most of the cards look pretty silly (in a good way). There's even a surprise visit from our favorite pixelated president Pixel Lincoln!

So you've got a few days left, head on over and check it out, and maybe help them hit that last stretch goal! You can find the campaign right here!