So this month on Kickstarter, I was very much interested in three different games that are more my style: Malhya, Lands of Legends, then Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders, and finally Fire For Light. And it is interesting to see how different not only these games, but also their Kickstarter campaigns are.

Malhya has 3,426 backers as I write this, 4 days before the end. If you just look at the base pledge, this is the most expensive game of the three, because it is the only one that doesn't have a cheaper pledge with standees instead of miniatures. But then it is also the most complex game of the three, and the one with the biggest amount of stuff you get. Malhya is produced by a French company, so from the start they are planning different language versions. In order to facilitate that, they are using a lot of icons instead of text on their game material. That does turn some people off, because it looks confusing until you learned how everything works. But the upside is that it makes the game prettier to look at. The theme is relatively generic fantasy, but with an original fantasy world. There are a lot of new ideas in this game, and the makers are doing an excellent job of explaining those ideas on their YouTube channel, in two languages. While it is the first game of this group of developers, they teamed up with a company that already has done several successful Kickstarter campaigns, and knows what it is doing. The biggest risk with Malhya is that it is very complex, and will need a lot of energy to learn and bring it to the table. The biggest strength is that the complexity makes the game rather deep; think lifestyle game, like Gloomhaven, with lots of hours of gameplay.

Tidal Blades 2 is a much easier proposition. Base pledge with standees (and I love standees) is much cheaper at $89. The campaign still has 12 days to go as I write this, and has already 4,326 backers. It will be the most backed and most funded of the three games on my list. If you buy the deluxe version with the miniatures, you are looking at $159, and there is an even more expensive pledge that includes a RPG book. Which brings me to my point of criticism: Tidal Blades 1, Tidal Blades 2, and Tidal Blades RPG are three very, very different things that share lore, but not much else. This is not a sequel in the sense of "oh, I liked Tidal Blades 1, I should back Tidal Blades 2". Tidal Blades 1 was a Euro style worker placement game, Tidal Blades 2 is a campaign adventure game. Also it is the first campaign adventure game from the company, so we don't really have a track record that would suggest whether the game is good. The risks/strengths of Tidal Blades 2 somehow perfectly complement Malhya: The strength is that it looks a lot simpler and easier to bring to the table, while the risk is that the gameplay might not be deep enough to last you through to the end of the campaign.

Fire For Light is puzzling. I saw it played on YouTube, and liked many aspects of the gameplay. But the base pledge at $99 is more expensive than Tidal Blades 2, and the all-in pledge with miniatures is a hefty $269. The problem is that the Kickstarter campaign doesn't make it obvious enough what you get for all that money. Or as they say "The components here show a sampling of the core box", instead of showing everything, which is probably the worst idea ever for a Kickstarter project. As a result, they only got 207 backers, 23% funded, and a strong likelihood that this won't fund at all, even if there are still 15 days to go. I think where this went wrong is that it is designed to be a legacy game (a fact which isn't really explained all that well), and a lot of the components are in "secret packages", that the developers don't want to show because of, you know, spoilers. But because they show neither the total amount of components you'll get in the box, nor how the gameplay gets more challenging from chapter to chapter, this looks like a very light game for too much money. You see the first photo of the game on the Kickstarter page and think "this is it?". I think there is more to this game, but they might need to cancel this Kickstarter and rethink their marketing to make that more clear to the audience.