Mantic gets another liscense! This time, The Walking Dead!

[obsidian3d]

I'll probably wait for retail on this one too. I've had Deadzone for like two year and haven't played it, despite having built all the models LONG ago.

[zemjw]

They're quoting a retail price of £35/$50 - source, so I'll just wait for retail as well. I have enough zombies to start my own apocalypse, so the buying decision will be based on the quality of the survivors and rules.

My biggest gripe with Mantic is that bits are often missing from their games. I bought a boxed set of their Deadzone rebels and one figures was missing. I bought Dungeon Saga just before Christmas and the bestiary card was missing.

They replaced the missing figure and I will get the bestiary card, but I've been told it's at least a six week wait. The email that told me that also said that they'd had to hire six new staff just to deal with boxes that had stuff missing I don't know who does their packing, but they need to find someone better!

[Maccwar]

The email that told me that also said that they'd had to hire six new staff just to deal with boxes that had stuff missing I don't know who does their packing, but they need to find someone better!

The DS sets were packed in China at source. Mantic simply don't have the capacity to pack that number of boxed sets themselves. The actual % of errors may be low but when you are packing that number of sets with such a large number of components it is more or less inevitable that some will get through. With the quoted price of £35 I'm hoping that this will be a reasonably straightforward release.

Incidentally I spotted an interesting bit in a recent interview with Rick Priestly which might help to explain to some of you why Mantic Kickstart their new games. (The interview is well worth a read)

But it ended up being one of the great dividing points of Games Workshop. We’d grown internationally at a very fast pace, and we had to deal with French, Spanish, Italian versions of the games. The print runs of the foreign language editions were always bigger than we could sell, and after several near-disasters where we’d printed way too many of something, GorkaMorka being a classic example, we’d nearly bankrupted the company.

http://unpluggedgames.co.uk/features/blood-dice-and-darkness-how-warhammer-defined-gaming-for-a-generation/

GW in the 1990s were huge compared to Mantic - and they couldn't get the order quantities right with all their experience. A KS campaign gives a company a good steer on the popularity of a game as well as being a powerful marketing tool. It isn't a magic wand and it does have its well documented drawbacks but I don't know if a company of Mantic's size could reasonably have taken a punt on a license like this without Kickstarter in the current climate.

I'm undecided on whether I'll be backing this one myself, I'll have to wait until the campaign starts before making my mind up.

[Too Bo Coo]

Like I wrote, my standard rule now is:  Thou shalt not back any game that has not been playtested and vetted.

[Elbows]

Given the piss-poor quality of Dungeon Saga, Mantic is now off my "will consider" list...but then I hated the Walking Dead series so this is no big loss for me. 

[Too Bo Coo]

Given the piss-poor quality of Dungeon Saga, Mantic is now off my "will consider" list...but then I hated the Walking Dead series so this is no big loss for me. 

But I think that was almost a guarantee.  Anytime some business is given money sight unseen for a product or service, it seems the rule of the day is 'deliver as little as possible'.   It makes me think how Mike McVey ruined his reputation with Sedition Wars.

[Malebolgia]

I assume that's mainly because of the Restic drama and not because of the rules...because the game itself is quite solid. Played it a lot and liked it a lot. It has 1 silly unplayable scenario, but the rest works well.

[nic-e]

Given the piss-poor quality of Dungeon Saga, Mantic is now off my "will consider" list...but then I hated the Walking Dead series so this is no big loss for me. 

I don't really see what people are angry about with dungeon saga.I backed it for the minis, and yeah,they're boardgame minis,of course they are, it's a boardgame!  they're nice enough and paint up well, the rules are fun enough. It's basically just heroquest, but if heroquest was released today everyone would moan about the lack of depth and replay value.

[robh]

............ everyone would moan about the lack of depth and replay value.

But that is my main gripe with Dungeon Saga. The figures are pretty poor, but given it was sold as a Boardgame with PVC figures that was expected*. The real issue for me (and why I will not back any other Mantic project) is that the rules we got do not contain a lot of the depth that was discussed and promised before and during the KS campaign. The so called "advanced" rulebook is a joke and IMHO the weakest part of the whole thing.
Mantic are very good at making promises they can't (or probably have no intention to) keep when it comes to generating KS hype and pulling in backers.

*Unlike the Warpath KS where figures were in Hard Plastic during the fundraising but have switched to soft PVC as soon as the KS funds were transferred to Mantic.

[ced1106]

Well, I'm hoping the game production will be more like Mars Attacks, another licensed game, than Dungeon Saga.

BoW video: http://www.beastsofwar.com/the-weekender/mantic-walking-dead-gw-starter-sets/

From Dakka:

Confirmed now that we're allowed to gush. Here's my braindump.

It's a skirmish game, not board game. Inches not squares.

Players each control a band of survivors fighting against each other. You build your gang like other skirmish games and campaign, injury & advancement rules are a core aspect. There are rules for "special characters" or whatever they are called (I played with Rick & Carl) but I've no idea how you'll go about hiring them in the actual game as opposed to generics. The scenario we tested was a small gang on gang fight over supplies placed randomly all over the board. Fairly simple but what I gathered to be a fairly typical pick up game.

Zombies are part of the scenery and AI controlled. They move towards loud noises so if you have a gun then you need to choose the right time to use it. Ammo is limited and you struggle to get more than a few shots off before needing to find looted ammo on the board (or if you purchased spare ammo when building your band). Most models can handle getting attacked by 1 zombie. 2 start to be a problem and 3+ means you're going down.

One of the fun-time tactics was running behind a stronger opponent, firing a gun randomly which draws the zombies straight at your opponents model. Chomp chomp. Problem is that your opponent shortly gets up as a walker.

The most Zombicide reminiscent rule is an escalation tracker, otherwise the guidelines is to stay away from how Zombicide does things. Rather than being based on how many zombies you kill, it's based on noise. Each time you fire a gun or do something noisy (like running or shouting) the escalation tracker goes up and the stronger and more numerous the zombies get. You can forgo actions to "shush" the escalation and drop it down so you have some great matchups where one players has a gang based on stealth and the other armed with a gakload of guns. The guns blazing player goes in making as much of a racket as possible while the other player tries to de-escalate it. At the end of each turn you draw a card to see how many zombies "activate" and who activates them (you, your opponent or a bit of basic "amble towards the nearest car" AI). The higher the tracker, the more zombies activate, in addition to those which are automatically triggered by noise.

Mechanics were very fun and intuitive. It took a while to get used to personally because I'm just used to flat D6 x+ rolls, but the dice rolls are based on coloured D6 with different symbols on them. Like with X-Wing but with several different variations of dice. Your gun might give you one red and one blue dice to shoot with, both with different chances of rolling what you require. We all had the mechanics down within a turn but then had to learn how to manage the escalation tracker.

The pre-production models I saw were fantastic. Right up with the best of Dungeon Saga.

Yes it's a zombie game, yes zombies have been done to death and all the rest of it. I'm not a huge Walking Dead fan either - before playing this I'd stopped watching the series towards the end of season 3. However, I fething LOVED it. I had an absolute blast playing it and it felt more like a Necromunda/Gorkamorka/Probably other games like Frostgrave that I've still not played than anything else. It was a really fun game (cue derail of "but how do you DEFINE fun man...). Everyone at the playtesting loved it and said that regardless of the license/setting, the game was fantastic fun.

Set amount of stuff to fund once funded that's it regardless of how long the KS has left to run.
Ronnie mentions that if they do fund everything it will be their biggest KS so they have planned beyond $1.2 million then.
Base pledge $100 - $125
1 pledge level only all in no add ons to prevent packing mistakes.
Retail starter box £35/$50.
Papermat and card terrain in box. KS may fund 3D terrain.
Retail blisters $12.50/$20 - 1 Hero, 1 secondary hero, 1 unique zombie, character and equipment cards
A few unique heroes will be retail only - not available in KS
120 sculpts in the product range. Sculpts are bulkier and a bit bigger than Mars Attacks and DS

[Hupp n at em]

Hmm thats a big KS buyin. I will still probably do it but it's nice to know that if friends like the game it's only 50 bucks retail.    The mechanics sound very fun.

[Wachaza]

Interesting. It'll depend on how the miniatures scale as I've got the population of a small town in zombie form.

[carlos13th]

The rules sound good at least but not sure I have any faith in a mantic KS any more.

[Too Bo Coo]

As I wrote, if I can buy the rules separately then I'm in.  As of now, I have enough Zombies to run my of NFL league.... or to take over a bird sanctuary in Oregon....

[obsidian3d]

Given the piss-poor quality of Dungeon Saga, Mantic is now off my "will consider" list...but then I hated the Walking Dead series so this is no big loss for me. 

I've only played the two intro missions for Dungeon Saga, but finally having a look through all the figures last night, I pronounced out loud to an empty room that "these are sh!t." Several of my figures are broken on a foot or hand that would connect to the base. The rest are all bent six ways from Sunday. I can fix them and they'll be paintable, but anything they release that is made in this material again will go immediately into my go-F-yourself category.

I think I'm one of the few people who liked the restic stuff they were using for early Dreadball and Deadzone. Yes it was a bitch to customize, but I was able to clean it up pretty nicely. It took paint well, and was more resilient than standard resin. I'd prefer nice plastics, but would take the restic over the garbage plastic they used for Dungeon Saga any day.