Rifts Board Game Kickstarter - Buyer Beware

Well, consider this a kind of public service announcement.

Today, the Rifts Board Game Kickstarter began:

Rifts Board Game (Kickstarter)

Like many teens in the 90's I played a variety of role-playing games, including cutting my teeth with Palladium Book's TMNT and Other Strangeness, and Robotech (my long-time favourite IP).

Siembeda and crew provided a clunky rule-set, but buried within were some neat and interesting worlds and IPs.  Rifts came out a bit later to much fan-fare and garnered quite a large following.  Palladium was never a very progressive company, leaving Robotech as an IP to flounder in the US market for decades (basically putting a stranglehold on it in the US - limiting it to a mediocre role-playing game).

Several years ago Palladium launched a Kickstarter for Robotech as a new type of miniatures game.  I risked buying in, and have regretted it ever since.  As a heads up for people looking at Rifts, please be aware of the following:

• Robotech Kickstarter successfully funded with $1+ million.
• First wave of miniatures shipped (albeit late).
• Second wave (50-60% of the KS content) has never shipped...it's been 3-4 years at this point.
• Kevin Siembeda has been making hollow promises in vague emails, continuing to develop and create excuses with no progress made (at all) toward producing the final materials or delivering them.
• An individual named Carmen (having previously worked with Palladium) sought some rights to produce a Rifts board game (the one in question)
• This individual attempted to quasi-blackmail Robotech backers, attempting to stave off any future repercussions by this fanbase (based around the semi-fraudulent activity of Siembeda etc.)
• Internet mayhem ensued and Carmen disappeared.
• Palladium stated that Carmen had attempted suicide due to mental duress caused by the internet discussions/arguments based around his behavior/communication/antics etc.
• The majority of this material was scrubbed from the KS comments section and users were banned, etc.

Then this Kickstarter showed up.  It is inextricably linked with Palladium/Siembeda and a questionable third party (Carmen, or not?).  People have already been banned on Kickstarter for bringing up this information on the current KS page for this game.

TL:DR Version: Avoid this Kickstarter like the plague if you don't want to get involved with a gigantic nonsensical amount of drama and nonsense - with a questionable company, questionable IP and even more questionable people involved.

Buyer beware.  If you invest in this, please be careful. You may lose your money.

Kickstarter: Miniature Wargaming (and some metal!)

I stumbled upon this and it looks quite interesting.  It's a film about the hobby, surrounding the origins of miniature gaming and its current status.  I'll probably buy into this for a digital copy, but it looks pretty slick.  Production values look pretty good.

Miniature Wargaming: The Movie

I've hit a bit of a speed bump as I've painted so quickly I've run out of bases...primer...and some paints.  I have a shipment from Neal over the The Warstore on the way (I hope), so I'm assembling, doing some painting where I can and stripping down incoming ebay stuff.

Here is the latest grab, a metal warwalker from 2nd edition.  I've given up on the current plastics that I put together and will be replacing them with metals from 2nd ed.  However I will be using plastic weapons and weapon shields - and possibly the rear vanes if necessary.  I just can't get over the look of the new plastic warwalkers, they're dreadful.

Assemble the masses! (oh, and zombies!)

I managed to knock out another 18(!) guardians.  I originally had planned for maybe three squads of seven or eight guardians apiece.  After sorting out my ebay auctions, some Eldar passed to me by my friend, and bits and bobs I realized I have enough components for four full ten-man squads.

I decided to go for it.  I may never use all four, but it'd be fun to do a huge game with heaps of Eldar guardians (and it fits many Eldar narratives).

I used the eight lasgun guardians I ended up with to make special weapon fellas for each squad.  Four were turned into flamers (above)

Four were turned into meltaguns.  The weapons have intentionally been painted different colours and given some highlight colours to help other players pick them out on the table-top.

The assembled new squad(s). 

The last eight guardians I have to paint are (luckily) my squad leaders, sergeants etc.  They're mostly different interesting sculpts.  Twenty four of my basic guardians consist of a whopping two poses!  It got rather tiresome painting these guys.  If it were anything other than my Eldar army I would have let them sit for years before attempting to complete a bunch of figures.

I paint quickly, but I've never ever enjoyed painting large numbers of similar troops - particularly not when the poses are limited/static.

Stay tuned for more Eldar!

PS: I did receive a treat in the mail yesterday (well, I had to drive two hours to a distant post-office to pick it up after they refused to change the mailing address when I moved!):  Black Plague from Zombicide...an absolutely fantastic game.  And boy was the box big!

(insert rather large shit-eating grin)

Kickstarter: Massive Darkness

The folks over at CMON have teamed with Guillotine Games again for another good looking Kickstarter: Massive Darkness.

This is a 1-6 player co-op dungeon crawl based around the Zombicide mechanics but with a lot of added elements (minor character development, optional character classes, a "darkness" mechanic for hiding from baddies - roaming monsters etc.).  Much like Zombicide Black Plague, this features no Game Master.  Already rocketing to $500,000 at the time of this post (a mere hour after the pledging opened up).

If you like dungeon crawls and/or like Zombicide this may be something worth looking into.

Massive Darkness Kickstarter