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 Gallahad wrote:

It is worth noting that CMON is doing their accounting as though they owe KS backers something... Which they don't in some technical sense because you're funding a project with zero protection, not buying something.

Well, yes and no, it seems to me. (I'm not an accountant/financial guy -- just trying to absorb the information they are offering here.) It's true, kickstarter funds would not be a liability in the strictest sense of the word, since they don't obligate eventual payment.... unless a firm wants to put the funded product on the market. Which CMON has to do, does it not, both to continue earning revenue and continue growth? Once the product is put on the market, kickstarter funds do become an obligation and a stricter liability. Failure to deliver would eventually undermine the prospect of future KS offerings. At which point, CMON's business model breaks down.

I wouldn't call myself a CMON fanboy, but all my instincts tell me it's a lot of hand-wringing over what will prove to be nothing. Their explanation came across as un-panicked, the potential red flags are all very vague for supposedly being concerns that'll tank the company inside a year, and being the internet, even for experts it isn't much fun for your take to just boringly state that there's probably nothing to see here, when you can magnify unlikely concerns into something more interesting, because they do have a greater than 0% chance of coming true after all.

CMON might eventually fold, but they're hardly acting like a company desperate to get their head above water. I'm in on a $1 for Ankh, I just don't know that I want it, or will really play it/make use of the minis in other games.

Next stretch goal is a neato scarab. Don’t stop believing.

 tinfoil wrote:

 Gallahad wrote:

It is worth noting that CMON is doing their accounting as though they owe KS backers something... Which they don't in some technical sense because you're funding a project with zero protection, not buying something.

Well, yes and no, it seems to me. (I'm not an accountant/financial guy -- just trying to absorb the information they are offering here.) It's true, kickstarter funds would not be a liability in the strictest sense of the word, since they don't obligate eventual payment.... unless a firm wants to put the funded product on the market. Which CMON has to do, does it not, both to continue earning revenue and continue growth? Once the product is put on the market, kickstarter funds do become an obligation and a stricter liability. Failure to deliver would eventually undermine the prospect of future KS offerings. At which point, CMON's business model breaks down.

100% this. I'm getting pretty sick of iterations of "[x company] (technically) doesn't own [y consumers] anything." While there might be technical truth to these claims, hobby (i.e. luxury in the general sense) companies' futures rely on customers who are willing to pay: everything that undermines that relationship, whether it's making a product customers feel was poorly designed, charging something customers feel is unreasonable, or disappearing with their money, whether or not they're legal obligations in the strict sense doesn't mean they're not necessary for sustaining their business.

I've put $100 in. I've backed three CMON KS and been very very happy with the results. For me that's more important than technical accounting issues.

All that said I am fully expecting the breakdown of the entire economic system sooner or later anyway, what with yer covids, yer ecological crisis, yer climate crisis, and all the rest. So I figure that sooner or later it all comes tumbling down and probably I miss out on around $300 to $500 worth of Kickstarters, but I am hedging my bets by spending at least as much on tinned beans and bottles of single malt whisky.

Quite impressed that Adrian Smith turned Medjed from a Gondola into the Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth.

And the long anticipated playmat is a welcome edition, but blimey, not sure if it being bigger than the Blood Rage version is necessarily a good thing. Not by too much, thankfully, but getting closer to the point of impracticality (with my table, at least, YMMV)

 Tim the Biovore wrote:
And the long anticipated playmat is a welcome edition, but blimey, not sure if it being bigger than the Blood Rage version is necessarily a good thing. Not by too much, thankfully, but getting closer to the point of impracticality (with my table, at least, YMMV)

Yea, I didn't auto-add $30 because I need to measure my tables first

Dang, they just keep adding great miniatures that look both fun and useful...
Really great setup for some Egyptian horror type games.

New Guardians expansion is quite a mixed bag. Ammit and Shezmu are great sculpts, but the other three are quite poor.

Pazuzu is particularly egregious, because you'd think if they were going to the trouble to add a mythological figure from a different culture, the least they could do to justify it is Rule of Cool.

Am-Heh would be fine if not for those mawed tentacles. As much as I admire him as an artist, I really do tire of Adrian Smith's defaulting to adding mouths and tentacles and mouthed tentacles to things (I'll look the other way with the snakes in Ammit's mouth on the quality of the rest of her)

Definitely waiting for retail on this one.

Here's a shot of said expansion:



I added for Ammit / completionism.

5 days to go, cue the next expansion:

For $45 the Pharaoh expansion Optional Buy, available in both English and French (estimated to later hit retail at a $50 SRP), introduces a whole new dimension to Ankh: Gods of Egypt. This expansion brings the divine struggle closer to the world of men, and one man in particular: the Pharaoh of all Egypt! The gods will do well to send their priests into the royal palace in order to influence the affairs of the kingdom, manipulating the different offices in order to gain political advantage and steer the Pharaoh towards recognizing the ultimate divinity of the one true god. Your struggle may be divine, but if you fail to enforce your dominance over the human sphere of affairs, all that awaits you is oblivion.

Plus lots more about how it changes the game, looks like around political micromanagement and stuff. Hard pass from me on account of no gods

I’m tempted to split that with two other people for $15 each...but it’s hard to split a pharaoh.

It’s a shame the retail version won’t have the sphinxes. Those would make excellent toppers for a System Lord’s command vessel.

Those two expansion pics seem pretty expensive for what you get (by CMON standards) right? Or am I missing something?

there's a lot of unique sculpts in there (13), normally it's fewer and more copies of each so the investment is higher

not that i'd buy it anyway

Depends what we compare it to, no? Could well be overpriced from a more general perspective, but Rising Sun's Dynasty Invasion was $50.

Of course, the main difference there is that Dynasty Invasion was the one gameplay addon in that campaign, and the Kami Unbound and additional monster expansions were included in the pledge, so Ankh definitely does end up being significantly more expensive by making all of them add-ons.

Dynasty Invasion also did double time, I guess, adding not just new Clans to play (which the Pantheon expansion does here) but also including their own unique gods mechanic comparable to the Kami Unbound expansion (free equivalent to the Pharaohs), so the $50 there covered the same as $95 here, with the extra $45 just covering cosmetic game pieces (albeit very nice ones).

Guardians expansion I'd personally just call straight up overpriced, given the second rate sculpts it contains plus Ammit as a sweetener.

From the start of the campaign you have clamored for him. As crocodile after crocodile went by, with Apep and then Ammit, you held out hope that the true Crocodile god would eventually show up. Well, your prayers have been answered, the lord of the Nile is upon us!

OH LAWD HE COMING

Once again we undertake the taunting task of unlocking a whole new Kickstarter Exclusive god. It takes a lot of components to bring a new god into Ankh: Gods of Egypt, so this endeavor will take us a few Stretch Goal to fully accomplish. Can we do this in this last week of the campaign? Stir the waters and let's bring the great crocodile into the fight for immortality!

We begin by summoning the might of the Nile himself, the great Sobek!

'Bout $180k to get there, but the bump from that Pharaoh expansion hasn't really hit yet, plus days left.

Oh hi Sobek! How's your afterlife?

Not a fan of the blue robe but that's something I have control over if I ever get around to painting it.

This campaign is getting dangerously close to “better to ask forgiveness” territory for me. If CMON didn’t have those financial red flags, it would be cinched already.

I’m somewhat surprised CMON included the Exorcist 2 homage Pazuzu but no ballet hippos and caped crocs? I am disappoint.

Those priest figures are cool, but it is another expansion I'll wait until retail for.
I do have to say, CMON really seems to be producing something pretty luxury. There are a lot of plastic tokens and unique sculpts in this one. I can't comment on the gameplay, but it seems suitably crunchy. I feel like this is really just Eric Lang being given carte blanche, which is no bad thing.
The game is just starting to look very lavish/premium.

Is there anyone planning to buy the pharaoh expansion through the KS who would be willing to sell or trade their sphinxes?

Just got my Time Machine Fedex tracking, so they’re sending those out now.

Forgive me if this is a stupidly obvious question, but as I've never backed a Kickstarter before, what risks are there to backing one of these? I really want to go all-in on this thing as they seem to have knocked it out of the park with these sculpts overall, but would it be foolish to do so?

Hard to say. The risk is always that you may not get any rewards from the creator. Only risk what you're willing to lose.

Until the audit, I would have said that you'd receive whatever you pledged for from CMON. Obviously, many backers still think so. I still think CMON is less risky than any First Created project.

Safest is to pledge $1 and wait for more information.

Really, the biggest risk is probably (hopefully) that you get Zombiecide: Invader-quality minis rather than CMON’s usual better quality monies.

 ced1106 wrote:
Hard to say. The risk is always that you may not get any rewards from the creator. Only risk what you're willing to lose.

Until the audit, I would have said that you'd receive whatever you pledged for from CMON. Obviously, many backers still think so. I still think CMON is less risky than any First Created project.

Safest is to pledge $1 and wait for more information.

I'm still of the mindset that if CMoN really is in some horrible hidden finacial state that whoever buys them will still deliver on the KSers they hadn't finished. CMoN is a pretty big independent and it would cause a lot of bad press and really hurt whoever bought them's reputation with the boardgame community to do otherwise.

 Monkeysloth wrote:

 ced1106 wrote:
Hard to say. The risk is always that you may not get any rewards from the creator. Only risk what you're willing to lose.

Until the audit, I would have said that you'd receive whatever you pledged for from CMON. Obviously, many backers still think so. I still think CMON is less risky than any First Created project.

Safest is to pledge $1 and wait for more information.

I'm still of the mindset that if CMoN really is in some horrible hidden finacial state that whoever buys them will still deliver on the KSers they hadn't finished. CMoN is a pretty big independent and it would cause a lot of bad press and really hurt whoever bought them's reputation with the boardgame community to do otherwise.

Don’t forget big names. All the names they brought together to be the core of the company have a lot ridding on its survival. If they do go out of business and don’t fulfill then anything they do later will be tarnished by their reputation. Not something good to have in a niche market.

I feel like backing the base game is the sweet spot right now. Lots of lovely KS-exclusive add-ons, but not a huge financial risk.

I find from a gameplay perspective that the base games in this series offer enough, anyway. None of the add-ons for Blood Rage actually made the game more fun, other than maybe the 5th player one. I've not bothered using any of the add-ons for Rising Sun yet because although it's also a great game, it's already a little more complex and time-consuming than BR. So I have a couple of boxes of RS add-ons that mostly sit on the shelf.

 ZergSmasher wrote:
Forgive me if this is a stupidly obvious question, but as I've never backed a Kickstarter before, what risks are there to backing one of these? I really want to go all-in on this thing as they seem to have knocked it out of the park with these sculpts overall, but would it be foolish to do so?

If you're not prepared to lose in a few years every single dollar you're pledging with no realistic recourse then you shouldn't pledge. That's general kickstarter advice though. By the time a kickstarter fails, you're generally outside of the year or so at best window most credit cards give you to dispute and it'll cost more money to file initially file a lawsuit than you'll ever get back if the company decides not to fulfill. The vast majority of the time your local and state governments will do nothing at all other than asking them for clarification as to what happens and taking their response at face value and that's only if alot of people in that state file complaints.

Now, with regards to CMON specifically, they've successfully completed many campaigns as frankly that is their core business model (at least in regards to bringing new product initially to market) but recently they've had *PRE-COVID* financial issues detailed earlier in this thread that were apparently only released because they're a publicly traded (?) company. Will that affect their ability to fulfill this and their multiple other still in various stages of production campaigns? Your guess is as good as mine and anyone else's. Additionally, we have no idea how the current pandemic will or won't affect them. My advice as someone who has admittedly never backed a CMON project but who has been burned by another company's big kickstarter as my first crowdfunding campaign is to punt. Pledge a single dollar and then drag it out until they close the pledge manager 6+ months from now as IIRC from posts in CMON threads they usually let you up your pledge level there. Wait and see whether their multiple other projects start sliding further and further back before deciding. As always with internet opinions,

Oh so I can pledge $1 and increase it later? I'm assuming I'll have more information or something later, like do they give updates on the status of KS projects or something? As I said before, this would be my first KS.

Also the main reason I'd be doing this is for the models; the game looks okay but I absolutely love the miniatures, especially the gods.