Massive Kickstarter experience - Massive Darkness

As you know hunting 32mm zombies took a certain ammount of my leisure time lately. So it should not surprise my appreciated readers that the current Kickstarter campaign from the authors of Zombicide caught my attention. Cmon (Cool Mini or not) and Guillotine Games refined the well known Zombicide engine to a co-operative dungeon crawl for one to six players called 'Massive Darkness':

The artwork of the box and the rulebook

Judging from the trailer and gameplay video it seems to merge some elements of old school dungeon crawl games like 'Heroquest' with the newish idea of the players working together against the game itself. As usual the game is played with a bunch of stunning miniatures. It seems the heroes will face hordes of orcs and goblins as well as huge monsters.

The board set up.

However you clearly see which chord this games strikes in me. Richely equipped miniature games are simply my cup of tea. Thus I decided to make my first Kickstarter experience with the incredible pile of plastic. But when I visited the homepage five minutes after the campaign started the game was almost funded. The early bird pledges were already out of stock and the funds were increasing every second. Finally I bought the 'Lightbringer Pledge' (basic game, a Kickstarter exclusive cyclops and all unlocked stretch goals) for $120 and was lucky to be among the first 3.000 backers. From then on I stayed on the campaign website and watched the first stretchgoals falling one by one. I went to bed around 11.00pm. At that time the campaign had been running for no more than two hours and around $600.000 had arleady been collected. Gosh!

Kickstarter by 14th June

Right now the campaign is at $1,386,000 and 27 stretchgoals are unlocked. This meaning that I'll receive the basic game, around 33% additional small hostile miniatures, a bunch of Kickstarter exclusive large monsters, a dice bag and a boxed expansion which will be $30 in retail and a lot of stuff to be unlocked during the next three weeks.

Later for retail, now part of my pledge.

I've no idea how far this will go. Right now I'm really satisfied with my investment. The only thing I'm still missing is a character with the aha moment. The one where I think "It's you I've been waiting for!"...

However the campaign is running until 7th July and I'm pretty sure that we'll be able to unlock some more stretchgoals or other additional content. Here are some pictures of the resin masters for some of the large monsters. Although the final miniatures will be of that usual grey plastic they give a good idea of the excellence Cmon will offer:

The Werewolf an early stretch goal.

The Living Construct

Ogre Brute

Weretiger

Since this is my first KS experience I cannot tell you how exited I am about seeing how Massive Darkness will turn out in the end. Meanwhile it seems that the campaign won't finish as successful as Black Death did last year but nevertheless the backers will receive really a lot of stuff for a reasonable price. A couple of days ago Cmon released a WIP version of the rulebook here. To me it seems like a very good dungeon crawl game with simple but good rules. Obviously inspired by Zombicide but much deeper. In addition to this basic rules Cmon announced a 'story mode' for a more intense RPG feeling. During this special campaign the heroes shall gain experience later but will have the chance to use all their skills during the whole games. Additionally there'll be the chance to visit a village with merchants and such between the games. Sounds extremely interesting imho...

However to illustrate this post Cmon gave me their kind permission to use the pictures from their Kickstarter page. Many thanks for that, chaps! Anyway they may not be used to make personal profit of course.

Since the campaign will be running until 7th July I'll most probably give an update or two until then. In case that you're interested in the game and the campaign have a look at the Kickstarter page:

HERE

Core box heroes