I did however today decide to back Shadows of Brimstone: Lost Tombs, just a couple of days before the Kickstarter campaign ends. The Shadows of Brimstone series of games is something I was aware of, but never got into. These are dungeon crawler games with a strong focus on the style called Ameritrash, which is to say games with less tactical planning and simpler game mechanics, but a strong theme and a lot of randomness leading to unbalanced crazy events happening.

The reason I decided to buy a Shadows of Brimstone game now is that with the strong focus on theme it is important to like the theme. And I find the "Indiana Jones" pulp exploration of Egyptian tombs full of mummies a much more interesting themes than the Wild West or Japanese themes of the previous games. And I will probably just buy that one core set. You *can* set up Shadows of Brimstone as a sort of lifestyle game with huge campaigns in which your adventurers visit other worlds. If you wanted to spend a thousand dollars to Shadows of Brimstone content, you could easily do so, and still would have less than half of the content out there. But I think I'll be content to just have "a" Shadows of Brimstone game in my collection. I only backed the Lost Tombs, not the Hell Train core set from the same Kickstarter campaign.

One important aspect of buying games on Kickstarter is the long delay. Shadows of Brimstone: Lost Tombs is scheduled for July 2025, and anyone who ever backed a Kickstarter game knows that this might well mean the game gets actually delivered in 2026. One needs to think whether one will still be happy when the game arrives years later, after the initial hype has long cooled down. But I think that the Shadows of Brimstone series can be considered a classic among dungeon crawlers by now, and I'll be happy to own at least one of them. And I am patient enough to wait for the game with the theme I want, even if diving right in and buying an existing game would be a lot faster.