DEAD ZONE kick-starter unboxing.. Video Blog?

DEAD ZONE kick-starter unboxing Video BLOG (Drum roll please)




Something special for everyone who follows the blog today. The unboxing of my DeadZone kick starter package from Mantic games.
http://www.manticgames.com/

Some details:
Last spring DeadZone went ape shit on kick starter raising $1,216,482 on a $50,000 dollar goal.. or ...2433% funded, that sir is “magic bananas funding” level


I was an early adopter of “Dread-Ball” and then vacillated over whether or not to back the DeadZone kick starter when it came around. Dread-Ball was super fun so I was sure Deadzone would be  as much fun.

So why the vacillation abut deadzone? Good question. I knew they would make their goal, Mantic had just killed it with Dredball and had that kick starter momentum that any company would die for. Dead Zone was by the same designer+Jake Thornton (Whose Design Blogs I really enjoyed and were an influence on me starting this blog for Shards.) I knew they would have another home run. What was holding me back was the “damn one more game to play??” syndrome and the fact that I may have to paint all these miniatures at some point.


ON the first point I am sure we all feel it sometimes. A game looks great but we have no clue when or if we will ever get to play it. The backlog of games a dedicated hobbyist can amass is staggering. And I have one, Shards of Thimbral needs to be worked on, The Block game needs to be played, AD&D 2ned ed about twice a month, Fate now and again, a bazillion board games (it goes on) I did not see Dead-zone fitting in. (I told my wife thank you for the gift we WILL PLAY IT so it will happen.)


Secondly is the painting issue. I have one gripe with Mantic and it is a purely personal one. I don't expect anyone to agree, but I hate painting these smaller scale plastic minis. For me it is a nightmare. I am a fair, not good miniature painter, and I have a hell of a time with these sculpts. I don't know why. Just putting together some of the Dread-Ball teams was enough to make me never want to see them again. (I'm looking at you guys Z'Zor..) I want to make clear this is not a knock on Mantic games and their mini's. I think they offer a great product at a good price point and clearly doing smaller scale plastic mini's is a big part of that. The fact that my fingers are to stubby and shaky to paint them is no fault of theirs.
mine will not look this good.


Lucky for me my generous and ever understanding wife backed it as a Christmas present without telling me. She funded at the strike zone level which gets me honestly a pile of stuff, I don't even know what , I lost track at stretch goal “crazy.” (the shipping weight is a bit over 8 pounds, that's a-lot of lil plastic mini's)

So what we're going to have for this Friday is my first Video Blog, with me as your happy host and a bunch of tinny baggies containing dismembered plastic figures as our subject.
I hope you enjoy.

This video Blogg will be hosted on You-tube and is likely best watched on that site.

I will be recording with a web cam, so this is nothing fancy. I apologize in advance for any quality issues, there will be some, I'm not set up for this kind of thing.

(side note: Monday's Blog will be about how i'm going to present Shard's of Thimbral's rules as it pertains to the  lay out of the rules and such.. may be less exciting.. but really yeah it's less exciting.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thoughts on Kickstarter from the smallest of fish..

Image
Why you no Kickstart? Kickstarter and why I'm not going that route, the small fish view: More than one person as told me, “Hey you should kickstart your game, that would make producing it that much easier!” I paraphrase liberally, but that's the gist. I love kick starter. I think it is a great idea for groups and start ups who are looking for a boost. The whole Idea of “crowd-sourcing “ has revolutionized the gaming hobby and provided start up funds that have allowed companies to explore original ideas that may not have fit perfectly into other more traditional business plans. Bravo. With all that said KickStarter is also not built for the really little guy.  "Hold on!" you say, "The little guy is the whole point of crowdsourcing!" I hear ya...and.. I know there have been some success stories in the past. Here are some of the biggest ones, naturally they have big names attached to them. http://www.cnbc.com/id/48725154 I bet if I looked around enough there
Read more

A long look at ADnD 2nd ed, Players Options Spells and Magic.

Image
Two years ago, almost to the month I wrote my deep dive on Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition Players Option Skills and powers. (TSR 2154.) An article I was pretty proud of at the time, even if only Russian web bots ever read it. Then the world fell apart. A pandemic made camp here in New York, hasn't left yet. For about a year my job went from how I make a living to how I lived. Furthermore, I have by any real measure stopped gaming. I even took this Blogg completely down for nearly 2 years. It's been a strange, sad, busy time. I kept occasionally thinking about The Players options books. How they seem to have been forgotten. Or if not forgotten dismissed. In reality I would love to ask the author how the Players Options books came about. I would like to know what their internal dialogs and the internal discussions at TSR were while the books were in production. With that in mind, I'm going to embark on part 2 of the AD&D 2ed Player's Option deep dive. Featu
Read more

WISH, not the spell. 2023 Year in Review

This Year 2023: (I will miss something) I wrote: Phantasmagorical caves of Rynthia. Golden Brothers Kung-Fu cinema game. A character supplement for AAIE Three previous posts on this blog. Minimus  Ludus Created: A large-scale poster sized map of Aleria: I played: Finished out a major storyline in the Aleria Campaign. (Ric Vs Melvyn Arc) Started a new major story line in the Aleria Campaign. (dragons) Three new people played in Aleria {WOOT} Hero system supernatural game. {Died So Soon} Spell-Jammer Ravenloft. car wars  Jen's Be67 game minimums Ludus. D&D with Ernie Gygax. AAIE a few times. I started: An Alerian World Book A single player exploration supplement for Caves of Rynthia. I tinkered with: Reviving the Blocks tabletop game. revival of the Phase ballgame Tabletop game. A Fate Game amount monster hunting in the American colonies. I read: There are many more RPG things that I skimmed or read quickly ... A bunch of stuff that I remember particularly: New Robotech RPG, Beyo
Read more