A Few Thoughts On The Dreadball Kickstarter

Kickstarter seems to be the in thing at the moment, with many gaming companies running successful campaigns to launch new games/ranges.  The one that is interesting/tempting me is the dreadball one from Mantic Games. 

The first question I had was why on earth kickstarter? the game was clearly already done, designed and the models produced.  One of the earliest 'stretch' goals was the refbot which was in the rules and the model had already been produced and an example painted up.  It all sort of looked like a bit of a con.  Also the deal at the beginning frankly didn't look that good at the $150 'striker' level that the campaign has been centered around.  But a lot of this was because I didn't understand how kickstarter works, Mantic sensibly started out not promising too much so that they could add more stuff in later, and we are at the point now in the goals where things like Hex-bases seem to be genuinely stuff they couldn't do without this upfront funding.

Onto the game itself, firstly I want to give big respect to Jake Thornton (the writer) for addressing the big question over on his blog, that is of course, have you just copied Games Workshop's classic fantasy sports game Blood bowl?  And whilst it is aimed to appeal to the same people that like Blood Bowl Jake has purposely designed it to not be blood bowl.

How the game works is slowly coming out and it has some interesting mechanics, I like the standardised class system, but the big one for me is no resets after scoring.  This is massive and will add a whole new layer to the game, no good scoring if the opponents can easily score straight back again.  I'm also a fan of 'sudden death' and that there will always be a winner.  It can be difficult to see how it all adds together at the moment and I hope a video of someone actually playing turns up before the kickstarter ends.

That's the positive, there is also one negative for me, and that's the selection of the standard fantasy races as teams (although I understand that that is to match the races from warpath), as this makes it look a lot more like blood bowl and opens up the copying accusations.  Having said that some of the MVP's starting to be shown are taking it more in the sci-fi direction I like to see.





In the end it's very, very tempting, and the deal is starting to look good, at the time of writing you get all this for $150, with 28 days to go, and hopefully many more stretch goals to be reached: