In the meantime something happened to board games: Kickstarter. Now there is a lot of negative things you can say about Kickstarter board games, because some projects are very flashy and attract lots of backers with fancy components and miniatures, while not necessarily being good games. But Kickstarter also does two very positive things: It enables passionate people to make the board game they have always wanted to make, outside of the constraints of a gaming corporation; and it allows these creators to find the few thousand customers for their niche games, and thus make these niche games happen.

The downside of Kickstarter is that it isn't always easy to buy a game that you didn't back. Sometimes a game isn't for sale at all outside Kickstarter campaigns. But usually a successful Kickstarter campaign allows the creators to make more copies of the game than they owe to the backers, and then they find their way to the market by various channels: Amazon if you're lucky, otherwise web stores from either the game's creators or third party hobby stores. As I am currently following a bunch of YouTube channels about the sort of board games I like, I often notice a game when the Kickstarter gets delivered, and everybody is talking about it. And luckily that is the moment where you are most likely to find those extra copies of the game. In a way this gets you the best of both worlds, you don't have to fund a game in advance on blind faith, but can watch reviews before you buy; but you still get those more specialized games for the niche you are interested in. Only downside is that niche board games are already somewhat expensive, and if you buy them after release, you pay more than if you backed them.

Nevertheless I just came across an opportunity that was too good to miss: Altar Quest, now available in the webstore of Blacklist Games. It is available in the same version that the Kickstarter backers got, including a box of Stretch Goals, and you can also get two expansions (First Four Hero Pack and Ruins of Arkenspire). And as from the reviews this appeared to be a game that I would like to play, I went and got just about everything for €200. That might be overkill, but for a game with just over 5,000 backers it is far from certain that you can get expansions later.

At first look, Altar Quest looks somewhat like Hero Quest. Hero Quest is relatively famous, but I never played it. It came out when I had already moved on to role-playing games, and I never bought it later, because it seemed a bit too simplistic for my tastes. Altar Quest is basically taking a highly complex system of tactical combat between heroes and enemies and puts it on a Hero Quest board, with the fixed arrangement of rooms, but variable doors and features. The interesting part is that you put together your adventure by not only selecting your heroes, but also what type of quest you want them to go on, what archvillain you fight, and what minions he has. It is called a "modular deck system", because the heroes, quests, villains, and minions come in the form of decks, and you can freely mix them. Another reason why I immediately went for the expansion, as in such a system an expansion increases the content exponentially, because you can mix any of the elements from the expansion with any of the elements in the base game.

Another thing that was attractive to me about Altar Quest is the combat system with specialized dice. In a way it reminds me of Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth, with the successes and other results that aren't a success unless you pay a token to make it a success. Fortunately in Altar Quest this is done with dice, so I avoid the problem of constant deck shuffling that drove me crazy in JIME.

Of course I also listened to the negative things that people had to say about Altar Quest. For example the rulebook appears to be somewhat dry and hard to digest. Which isn't much of a problem if you use YouTube to explain the game mechanics to you. And Altar Quest seems to be a bit light on story, heavy on game mechanics; but as I mentioned in my previous post, I'd rather have a game that way than the other way around.

I don't know how long my current interest in board games will last. I get these phases, where for several months I am very interested in a specific game or type of games, and then something else comes along and that interest diminishes. This is another reason why I am a bit wary about backing a Kickstarter now: Not only do I not know how good the game will be, I also don't know if I am still interested a year or two later when the game finally is delivered. So right now I am happy with the admittedly more expensive option of buying a recently released Kickstarter game instead, and just having to wait weeks for shipping instead of years.