29 Jan
Posted by Thomas Deeny as Card Games, Modern Board Games
The last of the Sentinels of the Multiverse expansions, OblivAeon, will launch on Kickstarter on February 9th. The final installment of the popular superhero card game will include addons and lots of stretch goals., like the limited edition hero promo cards, previously only available as convention and Kickstarter exclusives. “We have been pretty public about the fact that the story we’re telling has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” said Christopher Badell. “And we’re finally nearing that end.”
Greater Than Games had announced that they were moving away from Kickstarter to a pre-order system for expansions for their games, only using the crowdfunding platform to launch new titles. With the announcement for OblivAeon, Badell says they are heading back to Kickstarter to help organize the launch of that product. Citing technical difficulties and issues with some international orders during last year’s self-hosted preorder for Villains of the Multiverse, he said past experiences with Kickstarter campaigns help to avoid those issues. “We wanted to include a number of products [with OblivAeon’s launch] that have been long-promised and long-anticipated, and we didn’t want them to get lost in the shuffle with a preorder,” he said.
14 Jan
Posted by Thomas Deeny as Card Games, Miniatures, Modern Board Games
Greater Than Games will begin a pre-order of three “major” items for games set in its Sentinels of the Multiverse setting Monday, January 19th. A supervillain-centric expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse, titled Villains of the Multiverse, provides ten villains and two new environments for $29.95. Battle for Broken City ($39.95) is a standalone game for the Sentinel Tactics game line and can be combined with The Flame of Freedom core game and Uprising expansion. For Profit is a $19.95 expansion for both Sentinel Tactics’ Battle for Broken City and The Flame of Freedom. The pre-order period ends on March 12, 2015.
In a recently-cancelled Kickstarter campaign for a new game in the Sentinels setting, GTG’s Christopher Badell stated that after the Shattered Timelines expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse, they “would not run any more Kickstarters for Sentinels of the Multiverse products – that game is well established enough to support its own expansions. Since then, we have decided to go a step further and not run Kickstarter campaigns for expansions for any existing products.” For funding the production of expansions, the company has gone to a pre-order system, with orders placed via their website. In the fall of 2014, the company received nearly 4500 pre-orders for SotM’s Wrath of the Cosmos expansion.
Next week’s pre-order will be the company’s first for multiple products. Greater Than Games also mentions that there will be additional items to be pre-ordered, such as oversized villain cards, and pre-order promotional materials. Expected delivery is end of year, 2015.
Greater Than Games cancelled their Story War: Sentinel Conflict card game’s Kickstarter campaign on January 5th, citing lack of interest. “We consider this Kickstarter campaign to have successfully done its job. It let us know whether we should make these products or not,” reads the most recent update to the project. “We are glad to have learned that now and not after printing several thousand copies of the game.”
Story War was to be a new party game set in the Sentinels of the Multiverse setting. The Kickstarter would have also funded Cosmic Contest, a 50-page comic book, and (at a $75k stretch goal) a revised version of Freedom Four Annual #1, the first actual comic book from the Sentinels of the Multiverse setting.
“We were more surprised by a general lack of interest in the comic book,” Christopher Badell of GTG states. Requests for actual comic books are received by the company quite often, but with the lack of backer support for comic book reward levels, the company was surprised to find that while “people may be interested in reading comic books from Sentinel Comics, few are interested in purchasing them. And that is good to know. We are still interested in making comic books, and Adam and I will continue to work on them, but they will remain side projects at most…”
The cancellation occurred three days prior to the close of the campaign with $28,097 pledged of a $40,000 goal and 688 backers. In fall of 2014, the Wrath of the Cosmos expansion to Sentinels of the Multiverse received 4481 pre-orders.