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Closing soon...I made a placeholder pledge on the launch day, possibly because the big guy "mini" was an example of proper madness (as a concept) and I was slightly worried about missing out in that initial confusion and frenzy. However, now I feel like scaling down or just cancelling. Random thoughts:Do I need another game? No, absolutely not. I have a boatload of mythos games, combat games, semi-mini games and mini games, yet not enough time to play them. (This rarely has stopped me from buying another one, though.)Mechanics: to be honest, I only took a quick look, but it definitely looked like a "shoot it in the face" railroad with sanity points thrown in for another resource as usual. No real adventure, investigation or mystery there. An occasional 4+ test with a random skill doesn't really count. OK, I admit that this is fundamentally a difficult task. One just cannot create a RPG-like experience in a standard board game unless you essentially reinvent RPG. What kind of mythos investigation can you model by moving minis on a board? I've run into the same problem with my convention games. Is there any point in building terrain and moving painted minis if the characters are reading books in a library for two hours? Still I'd appreciate a little bit more effort than just making up a weak excuse for advancing to the next tentacle monster combat.And then there's the general attitude. These days it's quite unavoidable that Cthulhu gamers are heavily in a "Woo, a monster! How many hit points? Pass more dynamite!" mode. However, it's disappointing that here the characters are in that mode as well. As pointed out earlier, the "real" spirit of mythos stories should be that humans are small, weak, insignificant and deeply puzzled/disturbed by what they encounter. In fact, in most stories they don't even see a single tentacled monster, let alone try to fight it. In this game (like many others), the characters seem to come with a massive arsenal to begin with and start stocking up on dynamite already in the starting square.Minis: dunno. The investigators are quite varied, characterful and well made, but I repeat the "too many guns" sentiment. Scale-wise they probably won't match particularly well with my collection which has a lot of classic 25-28mm stuff. Regarding creatures, I'm generally open to new interpretations, because truly official ones barely exist. HPL left a lot to the reader's imagination. From a technical perspective, these look nicely detailed and menacing. I see some Gigerish approach, maybe. Then again, there's some "more tentacles" and overdetailing which starts to lose the main form like in GW's modern plastic kits. I could paint these and add them to my merry menagerie, but the more likely scenario is that they'll sit unpainted in a huge box for years. The Hastur mini is great, though, regardless of whether I'd personally envisage Hastur like that or not. It's just a neat mini. Shoggoths look very useful too. The rest is around average, not something I'd want to insta-buy if sold individually. The cost per piece is quite acceptable in the basic box.Then, the maxiature... At this point of collecting I'd already "need" a ridiculously huge centrepiece, but I'm not sure whether this sculpt is what I really want. It's acceptable, but not a must-have. Somehow it feels more like "CMoN Cthulhu" than "The Great Cthulhu". Also, the cost with shipping is well over $200 and the delivery estimate is almost two years ahead. Admittedly, any resin kit of this size would probably be more like $500, but, well, with over 4000 of these ordered already (and undoubtedly some bought in a whim and/or eventually thrown out by angry spouses or a general reality check), I'd suspect that plenty will be available second-hand whenever they actually ship. Maybe I'll just invest in stock for two years instead?Finally, one thing that really saddens me that they've already got some basic mythos stuff like names wrong several times. It may be a small thing but somehow it makes me think that (some of) the people responsible for the campaign are not very well versed in the topic but just piggybacking on the Cthulhu hype. The "Investigators fhtagn!" greeting they use smells like someone doesn't know what they're writing. Added to the "shoot it in the face" and "tentacles everywhere" factors, it makes the whole project feel a bit bland. I didn't buy Cthulhu Wars either, because it was essentially only about smashing plastic tentacle monsters against each other, not adventure or mystery. I may still leave a pledge in, for example the $1 which can be upgraded, but in reality I'm not very excited. The game may be playable for a couple of sessions, but I'd be mainly in for the miniatures. Even those may end up in a huge plastic pile in the attic.Maybe there's not much hope of a big publisher producing a game which is really faithful to the True Spirit of mystery and madness.
damn I torn, I'd be buying for the solo game play but wouldn't Mansions be better - I could go 100 and sell of the minins to part (or fully?) fund it and use my current minis....