The Great DreadBall Fumble...

I wasn't going to post on this topic again but my blood pressure is rising the more I look into it...

Allegedly all the Kickstarters have now been shipped. I say allegedly because on 26th November Mantic posted that "all trade is shipping at the same time as the Kickstarter pledges!"

 A few days earlier they posted: "Just to keep you informed we will be shipping out distributor orders next week as well, so if any are super quick they may hit shelves next Saturday – but they should be arriving at the same time as yours the following week – though obviously without the MVPs and the other goodies you'll all have in your first shipment!"

This is why I am upset with Mantic. I accept crap happens and things get delayed but they are making decisions and moving goalposts without explaining why directly to the people who put almost half a million quid in their bank account at the end of September.

I don't know why they have not done what they said they were going to do on the 26th November. I'm also a bit confused how some UK Kickstarters got their stuff two weeks back (one two separate parcels) which contradicts either waiting for the MVP stock or sending overseas orders out first (which I don't mind if I believed that was true as it clearly isn't)

I appear to have been quite restrained in not getting miffed until two weeks after it went on sale with retailers having now come across the following interesting blog posts from November:

Frontline Game: Dreadball Launch

Meeples and Miniatures: “Mantic have the ball, it’s the last rush of the game, they must score…wait…FUMBLE!!!”

Incidentally it didn't arrive today...

A Dread(ful)Ball Experience...

I must confess to being a bit jacked off...

Back in October I told you all how I'd been seduced by Mantic's shiny new Dreadball project and had been looking forward to painting up the miniatures and having some games. I was planning to paint up two of the teams and give it to Saul as a Christmas present, but it looks like that won't be happening.

Mantic collected over $700,000 from gamers who invested in the project to get it off the ground, but since collecting the money they have treated the Kickstarters pretty poorly.

First off was the decision to supply retailers before the Kickstarters. They have tried to justify this as part of building a gaming community for players by getting it into shops where the game could be played but many of the retailers they supplied don't have shops. North Star, an online retailer and wholesaler, received their sets of DreadBall on 28th November and anyone who pre-ordered from them received their copies on 3rd December. Dave Thomas (who also doesn't have a shop) even had some on his stand at Recon on 1st December...

Eventually Mantic told Kickstarters that the game was shipping to us and it arrived - first in Malaysia... then New Zealand... then Canada.... It is 141 miles from Nottingham (home of Mantic) to Bristol (home of me) but apparently it is easier to get an order 11,299 miles to the other side of the globe. 

On the DreadBall Fanatics FB page one UK Kickstarter posted he phoned Mantic today and was told that half the UK ones were sent yesterday, half are waiting to be collected today. Except other UK Kickstarters have received theirs. Cambridge last Thursday, Arbroath last Friday. So that's a bare faced lie to a customer...

I appreciate that Mantic have probably been overwhelmed by the response to DreadBall but they have seriously dropped the customer service ball and I am not a happy bunny.

In contrast Reaper's CEO emailed all the Bones KS customers when they had a problem with the paints and offered refunds for anyone not happy with the delay. Similarly Matt Sprange at Mongoose has been straight up and communicated any delays with the Judge Dredd Kickstarter items, even taking a hit on postage by shipping out partial orders to make sure we got something asap rather than waiting for everything to be in stock...

Before DreadBall...

Whilst there are some similarities between Blood Bowl and DreadBall, not helped by the cover for DreadBall - which bears a certain similarity to the Blood Bowl computer game... :-) there are more similarities with another, now OOP, game...

Before DreadBall there was another SF "American Football" style game around, Hasbro's Battle Ball. I picked up a copy when on holiday in Florida around a decade back and Saul and I played a few games, though I must confess it was not the most challenging of games. Sadly Hasbro (as is their wont, killed the game off rather than expanded it with new teams and advanced rules). There are some interesting fan produced advanced rules in this thread on the game here.

Having seen the DreadBall basic rules it clearly jumps up and down on Battle Ball and buries it deep, but it might be worth hunting Battle Ball down for the figures alone as they clearly will make useful DreadBall alternatives.

My Kickstarter Addiction?

Apparently idle hands are the devil's playthings and I think this must be the case with me. I haven't had much opportunity to hit the painting table and get on with the Blood Moon Orcs due to a mixture of real life work and a bad case of Manthrax causing me to cough and sneeze over everything in sight. However it hasn't stopped me adding to "Lead Mountain" after being seduced by Mantic's Kickstarter project for DreadBall.

DreadBall is a SF football type game and I must confess that the original plans for the game were to my mind pretty uninspiring with teams of humans, orcs, dwarves and rat-men. It smacked of being an SF rip off of Bloodbowl and Mantic do seem to be acquiring a bit of a reputation of being producing cheap GW-lite products rather than being particularly innovative themselves (their SF wargame Warpath is especially guilty of this background wise with its own versions of Orks, Squats and Hrud).

However (game designer) Jake Thornton's blog proved interesting reading, the game mechanics (see YouTube video above) and play were sufficiently different from Bloodbowl and his ideas for the future beyond the initial game release quite inspiring...

So I decided to take the plunge, the game would provide some fun over the Xmas period and I do like Jake's other Mantic game Dwarf King's Hold.

Then the addiction took hold...

As more money was pledged towards the project Mantic put up options for Seasons 2 and 3 with some new teams that are much more interesting than those in the initial Season 1 game, as well as some cool MVP's. There are things with lots of tentacles, robots, giant robots, teleporting dinosaur aliens (now that would be good in Warpath), damn, there was some good stuff being planned. Indeed out of the next eight teams only the SF Ape team didn't float my boat and they're still better than Space Dwarves.

Oh well, in for a penny and all that. The credit card has taken a bit of a hit but not as bad as I thought as the process is in US Dollars and the exchange rate a lot better than I mentally converted.

Coupled with the Reaper Bones Kickstarter I can see I need to recognise that this could be an expensive, if good value, element to my hobby and I should not be seduced into buying into every new shiny project that comes up.

That said the Judge Dredd Kickstarter looks interesting and there are some good deals there...