General chatter - discuss anything here

[Cosmic_Guru]

1 hour ago, scottcr said:

I backed Unbroken... apparently supposed to be getting it in September.  I've not been following the shite to be honest.  What's happening?

 

Pathetic - they seem to sent the game out to US backers, and left us out to dry and with the option of making further payment for postage since they miscalculated.  Comms poor too.  Last note I have was late June ("ready to depart China").  Doubt it has gone anywhere.

 

Ironically this was the game that got me into backing board games on KS (backed some other projects beforehand so I know there are always risks).  

[scottcr]

Apparently it's due in September - we'll see.  I'm not holding my breath.  

[Kzo]

That's grim, looked like a good one too, hope it comes through for you.

[scottcr]

In other news... Mage Knight is very very good

[uglifruit]

Have you been Mage Knighting solo?  Or have you been brave/foolhardy enough to multiplayer it?

 

I've mainly enjoyed it solo. (And I think way the massive puzzle of how to optimise your hand is brilliant).  I've not been brave enough to try player vs player multiplayer yet.

[scottcr]

Solo only... will do it for a few games for a bit. I’ve got a couple of mates where I think two player would work well. Both competitive and cooperative. I don’t mind down time... I use it to drink. 

[Alex W.]

I've only played the Star Trek version (Frontiers) and I can see why it's so beloved. It was too much game for me and the Trek theme didn't suit it but gosh was there a lot to play with there.

[scottcr]

Played a few learning games and did my first proper solo game. Ran out of time and didn’t score that well but I think this might be my favourite solo game. Every action is a puzzle in using your hand and what’s available as efficiently as possible. Really quite rewarding when you work out a clever way to defeat some basts. Quite an easy game to duck in and out of as well, so can be left up and played over a couple of nights. 

[scottcr]

Contemplating selling my Arkham Horror LCG collection... I *love* the game but it's completely running away from me and has become something I just spend money on without actually playing, just to keep up before packs go out of print and hard to get.  I don't get the time I need to do it justice.. learn the cards, build decks etc.  It's a great game to play through and I suppose I could just pick decks from Arkham DB and do scenarios... but when with pals, there's always something easier to get out to play quickly and when solo, there's always something else to play.

 

I've got two cores, all regular expansions and cores to date.  Of the boxes that have been opened all the cards are sleeved.  I've got a fancy collectors box that looks like this.

 

I've got two POD scenarios - Carnvalle and the werewolf one.... 

 

I think, all in, I've probably spent about 400 quid on it all... not used to selling board games, does anyone know what's a reasonable value for selling it at... I don't even know where to begin when it comes to actually shipping it all!

[moosegrinder]

Shipping you'd send it by someone like Hermes but tracked to fuck. Insure the living shit out of it. Also look at what rare sets you've got.

 

Off the top of my head you'd probably sell it for abooooout a third less than you paid overall, maybe not that much because this shit doesn't depreciate, but that depends on the sets that are deleted.

[Cosmic_Guru]

Blimey the Hexplore it games are expensive at retail .  £72 for the base games and £38 for the expansions at BoardgameGuru (after a discount from RRP) is very steep albeit replayablity and production values are high.  Makes me feel slightly better about my bad KS habit, and goes someway to offset the two potential future write offs.

Edited July 26 by Cosmic_Guru

[Professor Rob]

On 05/07/2019 at 10:10, Professor Rob said:

Going on holiday for the next two weeks, so I thought I'd see how many games I could pack into a reasonably-sized box. I took the insert out of Unlock: Escape Adventures (we have one scenario we haven't played yet), and have managed to fit in:

 

Kingdomino

Machi Koro plus Harbour expansion

Coup

Love Letter

Red 7

Intrigue

Bohnanza

Jaipur

Sushi Go
Tides of Time

Cockroach Poker

Unlock: Escape Adventures (Island of Doctor Goorse scenario only)

plus a deck of playing cards.

 

There's a couple in the list that I don't particularly enjoy, but other people asked me to take.

 

I reckon I could also fit Port Royal in there, and will probably take out Tides of Time (which isn't that good).

 

Everything fits OK, but it weighs 2.5Kg.

 

I'm pleased to say, we managed to play everything except Sushi Go over the course of the two weeks, in addition to EXIT: Pharoah's Tomb.

 

Still not keen on Tides of Time. 

[Tourist]

Oh man, Golden Bell's trolling just gets more elaborate:

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/cjfhak/more_golden_bell_douchery_unbroken/

 

My favourite bit is not actually the main post, but this bit:

Quote

I asked if I could pick up my copy of Dungeon Dice at GenCon and save them shipping, and they asked me how much I could pay to do that.

 

For anybody who wants to avoid getting burned in future:

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/259248/golden-bell-affiliated-projects-and-companies

[Mortis]

Yeah the latest Kickstarter update basically reads like it’s unlikely we’ll see it in the UK/EU unless enough people pay extra shipping. 

 The best bit is that if you pay more you still might not see the game if they don’t raise enough. They’ve even got a lovely google survey asking how much you’d pay to get your game - I’ll be giving them £0 the bunch of charlatans. 

[Tourist]

17 minutes ago, Mortis said:

Yeah the latest Kickstarter update basically reads like it’s unlikely we’ll see it in the UK/EU unless enough people pay extra shipping. 

 The best bit is that if you pay more you still might not see the game if they don’t raise enough. They’ve even got a lovely google survey asking how much you’d pay to get your game - I’ll be giving them £0 the bunch of charlatans. 

 

And yet they've shipped it to retail! Honestly, they are just out and out crooks. And Kickstarter doesn't seem to care. What a mess.

[Cosmic_Guru]

2 hours ago, Tourist said:

 

And yet they've shipped it to retail! Honestly, they are just out and out crooks. And Kickstarter doesn't seem to care. What a mess.

 

That's the kicker for me.  This could easily turn out to be straightforward fraud - someone magics up the  funds to sling all the produced copies into a single container to US/Canada and they are sold off (again!) to repay that loan.  

[Mortis]

Yeah the idea that I'll throw them more cash to ship it even without any actual guarantee that it'll ever actually receive the game unless lots of other backers do the same. You know that they'll end up cancelling this for anywhere outside US/Canada but find the cash to send the remaining copies to retail in the states. If I could request a refund right now I would but Golden BS don't seem to want to do that unless you shout and scream on the Kickstarter comments constantly and for the amount this cost I'll just leave it.
 Can't complain it's the first Kickstarter I've had issues with and I only backed it because it looked to be a fun little solo game for not a huge outlay.

[Cosmic_Guru]

The only honourable course of action here would be a refund for all non fulfilled backers and then sell the games through retail or on line, but that won't happen.  It isn't a huge amount of money, but leaves a really bad taste in the mouth because of what has gone on.  The only lesson seems to be to avoid Golden Bell, and to ask the question of each project you back - are these or any affiliates of theirs currently or potentially to be involved with this project? 

 

I have one other project which is really struggling but there isn't any suggestion of malfeasance there, more likely the game just isn't coming together in play testing (despite being worked on for years).

[Tourist]

I think it seems increasingly apparent that golden bell are actual con artists. Can you not try to get a refund from your credit card company and/or make a formal complaint with Kickstarter? Like, if they used the proceeds from Kickstarter to fund the manufacture of retail versions without getting rewards to backers surely that is a breach of Kickstarter's terms of service?

[scottcr]

On 25/07/2019 at 14:18, moosegrinder said:

Shipping you'd send it by someone like Hermes but tracked to fuck. Insure the living shit out of it. Also look at what rare sets you've got.

 

Off the top of my head you'd probably sell it for abooooout a third less than you paid overall, maybe not that much because this shit doesn't depreciate, but that depends on the sets that are deleted.

 

Worked out total RRP for my collection is about 650 quid

.  

 

Some of these are hard to get and out of print just now - was thinking 500 quid?

 

(And now to get onto selling my rare Gamecube games...)

[Rev]

4 hours ago, scottcr said:

 

Worked out total RRP for my collection is about 650 quid

.  

 

Some of these are hard to get and out of print just now - was thinking 500 quid?

 

(And now to get onto selling my rare Gamecube games...)

 

It’s a very specific buyer you’re looking for there though. Someone who knows enough about the game to want to spend £500 and yet already owns none of it is quite unlikely.

 

That said, there’s nothing comparable on eBay at the moment and it’s probably a £1 final fee weekend this weekend, so if you’re going to try it, now is a good time. Don’t put it in an auction though, because you could easily see it go for a relative pittance. Buy it now of a bit over £500, best offers, cross your fingers. 

[scottcr]

2 hours ago, Rev said:

 

It’s a very specific buyer you’re looking for there though. Someone who knows enough about the game to want to spend £500 and yet already owns none of it is quite unlikely.

 

That said, there’s nothing comparable on eBay at the moment and it’s probably a £1 final fee weekend this weekend, so if you’re going to try it, now is a good time. Don’t put it in an auction though, because you could easily see it go for a relative pittance. Buy it now of a bit over £500, best offers, cross your fingers. 

 

Yeah - it's a bit specialised.. a recent eBay auction saw a collection similar but not as much stuff go for 450.  

[Rev]

34 minutes ago, scottcr said:

 

Yeah - it's a bit specialised.. a recent eBay auction saw a collection similar but not as much stuff go for 450.  

 

Your valuation is fine for worth, but eBay is erratic these days. Ridiculously so.

[Cosmic_Guru]

14 hours ago, Rev said:

 

Your valuation is fine for worth, but eBay is erratic these days. Ridiculously so.

 

It's very strange indeed.  Some of it surely derives from small populations of items, some of it must be heavily timing dependent as popular recent games such as Wingspan go in and out of print, and some of it, particularly the prices paid for pretty trivial KS add-ons, just seems crazy.  

 

 

[Rev]

1 hour ago, Cosmic_Guru said:

 

It's very strange indeed.  Some of it surely derives from small populations of items, some of it must be heavily timing dependent as popular recent games such as Wingspan go in and out of print, and some of it, particularly the prices paid for pretty trivial KS add-ons, just seems crazy.  

 

 

 

It’s right down to specific listings as well. I’ve been watching Pokemon cards, as per other thread, and there was a decent looking auction with a reserve on it. I looked at completed items and it hadn’t met its reserve 3 times, but ending at £23, £34 and £45. That’s a fairly ridiculous difference.

 

I think it’s mostly down to how many listings there are now. It used to be fairly easy to look at each new item as it went on, but it’s now wholly search dependent, and search now defaults to Best Match, so things can get completely screwed over by the algorithm. 

 

I like it as a buyer, obviously, but it’s fairly awful for the seller. 

 

(The Kickstarter thing is fully weird. People do pay a fortune for pointless tat, as you say, but then a complete collection including all the tat very rarely sells for much more than the available-at-retail bits added up.)

[jonamok]

Pathfinder 2nd Ed launches today. Mine is on the way, anyone else play 1st Ed and/or picking this up? This will be my on-ramp to the game.

 

I do love a good chunky RPG rulebook, and they don’t come much chunkier than this 640-page beast. And that’s without the separate 360-page Bestiary. 

[Professor Rob]

Has anyone here ever participated in GMT's P500 pre-order/reprint scheme? I've just placed an order for 1989: Dawn of Freedom (which is at 380 orders, so is some way off being reprinted), and it looks like the shipping will be free, even to Europe (on the order receipt, the shipping is listed "Euro Friendly P500 Orders via SCG – VAT prepaid to EU"). I was prepared to pay shipping/import duty, but it looks like I'm only paying $44.00 in total, which is very much a bargain. Anyone know if this is correct? If it looks too good to be true, it usually is.

[Alexlotl]

Just took a look, and all the shipping options seemed to have a price of zero. I would guess that they don’t know what it weighs yet, so they’ve keyed zero and means the shipping estimation isn’t working.

 

This table has a column for the Euro Friendly P500 shipping based on weight: https://www.gmtgames.com/t2-gmtshippingtable.aspx

 

Always wanted to play that - someone at BM has a copy, but I’m totally starved for time lately and haven’t made it in ages. 

[Tourist]

10 hours ago, Professor Rob said:

Has anyone here ever participated in GMT's P500 pre-order/reprint scheme? I've just placed an order for 1989: Dawn of Freedom (which is at 380 orders, so is some way off being reprinted), and it looks like the shipping will be free, even to Europe (on the order receipt, the shipping is listed "Euro Friendly P500 Orders via SCG – VAT prepaid to EU"). I was prepared to pay shipping/import duty, but it looks like I'm only paying $44.00 in total, which is very much a bargain. Anyone know if this is correct? If it looks too good to be true, it usually is.

 

I think I thought the same when I bought fire in the lake but ended up paying shipping fees to Japan. I think they ended up about 20-30 bucks or something. I can check but you might be better off checking boardgamegeek which I think has a thread about European shipping...

[Professor Rob]

Thanks, chaps. I ordered with the full expectation of having to pay shipping/import duty, so I'm not too fussed. It's a game I really want, and it's still cheaper than the utterly bonkers secondhand prices.