Looking Forward to Lots of New Toys

This post may not be of great interest to you, but I wanted to collect all my thoughts together about several items I've ordered, pledged for or am planning to do this year. Not really a resolution list, but more of an...itemized accounting I suppose.

I supported a lot of crowd-funding efforts in 2012. Sadly the first one that I supported I've not yet seen anything from and they seem to be suffering delay upon delay: Sedition Wars. As of early this week though, it does sound like they're finally getting on track.

This was the first time I really jumped in and pledged for stretch goals or extras, and the amount of stuff I will (eventually) receive for my money was pretty astounding. While I am looking forward to the game itself, I'm also looking at using the Vanguard figures for other things, more likely as Colonial Marines for some Aliens-related gaming.

The next thing I jumped on was the now-ubiquitous DreadBall. I went way overboard throwing cash at this beastie, but on the upside I've already received a goodly amount of product, and the game is pretty fucking fun. As I've mentioned previously I'll be running a league beginning in a few weeks. I'll be expecting two more shipments of gaming goodness from Mantic throughout 2013. In fact now that I think about it, I have only actually received about one third of all the stuff that I paid for. Wow...

Obviously not satisfied with those two, I ended up supporting the Reaper Miniatures campaign that was running concurrently with that of DreadBall. While much of the stuff was fantasy-themed, the amount of figures that they were offering up for the price was simply too good to pass on. There are a lot of figures I don't have an immediate use for, but are still pretty damn cool looking. Also, since I now have a massive amount of fantasy figures on the way, maybe it will give me an excuse to play some more games using the Song of Blades engine...

Sadly none of that stuff will be shipping until March at the earliest.

It seemed I was hooked on this crowd-funding bandwagon and I carried on for the ride, piling on to support the Carnevale folks on Indie-GoGo (and netting a massive amount of awesomeness). That stuff arrived in record time, less than two months after the campaign closed I had everything I'd paid for barring a few of their stretch figures. I know for a fact I'll be nowhere near finished constructing and painting all the stuff I have for this game before those few items arrive in the mailbox.

Queue up another investment into Mongoose Publishing's Judge Dredd miniatures game. This one most likely snagged my attention due to my like of the recent Dredd 3D movie. I loved that movie and have always enjoyed the JD universe, so supporting the game seemed a good plan. Unfortunately I'm one of the few folks who has yet to receive ANY of their paid-for product, so my enthusiasm has waned a lot since my investment. I do hope that my product will arrive soon and that excitement can be largely recaptured. Bring on my Dark Judges and Zombie Horde please!

Anticipating a massive backlog of figures to construct and paint (right, like I didn't already have a huge pile of those) didn't stop me from continuing down the path of insanity. I jumped in on the campaign for Freebooter's Fate next. I dig the sculpting style and thought "why not?" Besides who doesn't like pirates? I've received part of my order already here, and have supplemented it with two more starter boxes that are on their way now. The use of cards instead of dice really intrigues me, so this game could be a lot of fun. It'll be a few months before I actually have a chance to find out though...

Lastly comes Blackwater Gulch. I gave their free rules a couple of test runs in the fall and thoroughly enjoyed them. They are simple and effectively give an old-west gunfight atmosphere with minimal trouble. This campaign reached their funding goal early in December, but disappointingly they haven't been terribly effective in communicating the what's-next since then. I've prodded several times for information and have finally heard that they're building their own pledge manager (which seems unnecessary to me). So a lot like the Reaper folks, they'll be wasting their time and effort building something that doesn't really need to be built. Suffice to say I simply want to be able to fill out my survey and then move on to impatiently waiting for all my western-themed toys.

I did look at a few other campaigns that I ultimately decided not to back: AE-WWII, Studio Miniatures Deadlands, and Kingdom Death. The first two simply didn't have appealing campaigns. The prices for pledges were essentially retail price (or a minor discount) and offered very little in the way of stretch rewards. I very nearly pledge for AE anyway, but ultimately couldn't find the value in doing so. The Kingdom Death campaign was nice and they made ass-loads of cash, but I thought that the single game play video they posted up wasn't terribly interesting. As nice as the figures were, I simply felt that the game didn't look interesting...although I may certainly have been wrong.

As to actually painting and playing games, I have a bunch of things on the docket for 2013.

Most notably of those would be my Zuzzy mats. These things are great looking but I recommend no one order from Zuzzy. They're slow as hell, have shit customer service (as in they'll NEVER answer your inquiries), and I simply can't recommend a company that doesn't seem to care about their customers.

I will however be painting up my mats this year. Of the four I have I'm hoping to get a minimum of two done, and well also be working on more buildings and terrain. A lot of that terrain will be WorldWorks Games stuff. Back around Halloween they had a nice discounted sale that I took advantage of. I think I'll be doing up some city buildings, cars and things for urban themed games, and then some western & pulp themed items for the other board.

Additionally, my Stargate themed stuff is starting to take shape and I hope to get that whole pile of insanity crashed through this year. I'll be posting up several updates throughout the next while detailing my progress on that.

And finally, I'm eagerly awaiting my paint table and racks from HobbyZone in Poland. I already have a paint station plus from Games Workshop, which has served nicely but isn't quite what I wish it was. I'm anticipating the new items will be a large step up from it, both from a usability and organizational standpoint. Now I'm off to go check my tracking number status again...