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No worries Orlando - I was just kidding with you!

We'll all do our best to keep it updated!

I know, it's cool

and it's good that others are happy to wade in when I can't get it done, nothing worse than your KS thread of choice falling off the front page away from its (hopefully backing) public

I love mm and darklands.

But I wish they would get a real gfx designer and a real boardgame designer on board.

The cards, the rulebook (darklands) they could really use a designer s touch.

I kinda wish we had mierce fantasy world and miniatures and kd:m gameplay / card designs.

 devilution wrote:
I love mm and darklands.

But I wish they would get a real gfx designer and a real boardgame designer on board.

The cards, the rulebook (darklands) they could really use a designer s touch.

I kinda wish we had mierce fantasy world and miniatures and kd:m gameplay / card designs.

I'm with you. Every time I see this yellow subline (Rulebook, Savage Hordes, Ancient Barrows) under the logo, I can do nothing but shake my head.

Mierce Miniatures 17-time creator 19 minutes ago

Apologies in advance for my silence today, but I am getting the rules formatted to show you all. Tim will no doubt be about to answer any questions and what not.

Any plans for a French translation?
I've no plans for translations yet

[although a backer who's a French magazine editor has now offered to help out with this and Rob's said he's interested and translations are certainly possible... I'm assuming pdfs rather than print at the moment... but the game needs to get funded before exploring it more]

question about where more stuff for the game will appear?
I will be publishing news on our webstore and BGG as well as others;

Are all units use on all level ?
yes, all of the units are used on all of the levels, although some monsters are restricted to some levels (i.e., each area has a "boss");

are the enemies on level 1 weaker than level 2 etc
not weaker, but in later levels there's more of them and more of the enemies that buff them, and special level rules that buff them to be stronger;

Do you need to buy the optional stuff?
You don't need the optional buys, but they will help;

can you run out of enemies... yes you can! whatever you run out of gains +1 vigour, and other nasty things. It ensures heroes can't just ignore the enemies.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Optional Buy

Resin Morag of Mann £15

your only chance to get her in resin ever

Well, I'm in for my first ever KS.


Hope it makes it!

I wonder if Darkholds will make the Darklands wargame more popular, too, as people now can mount a really large "undead" army in plastics (more or less). Would be cool to see what Darkholds could branch out into.

I've had Darklands on my 'wish list' of projects for ages! Have some SAGA, bit of creepy looking dark ages terrain so think it would be a short step from that.

Have got another project or two in the way but will hopefully get to them before too long.

Was definitely thinking that this might help with that!

a very rough draft of some of the rules

Here's a snippet of the main rules for you all: http://mierce-miniatures.com/projects/ks_dhd_01/darkholds_rules_v0.01.pdf

Bear in mind these are draft.


Bear in mind that's just a snippet of the rules for you to digest - the full document will give more info.

Hoping to have the full draft rules later on today but if not, Monday.

Mierce Miniatures

Morning everyone! Hope you are all well.

It's a family weekend for me I'm afraid, so I'll be on here intermittently; progress is this - rules are almost ready, they should be with you on Monday, and I'm hopeful of the first level up too, although that's quite a heavy graphic workload so we'll see. Either way it will be shown next week.

Next week I'll be giving you more heroes, henchmen and enemies as optional buys, and to poke this project forward we may well introduce stretch goals for such around the £65k mark and onwards; but giving you resins to use in the game rather than plastics because plastic is *not* cheap to produce and we need to get to the goal to fund that. More on that next week.

@Yx - all of the darkholds will be heroes/henchmen vs one enemy kindred; otherwise we can't do specific settings, such as the Gabrax Herdstone in snowbound forests (where enemies can enter from anywhere), the entrance to Infernus, the catacombs of Par-Ys and the Vras... they just wouldn't make any sense otherwise. Regardless, you can swap in/out monsters as you want, but we're not going to design a darkhold to encounter to a myriad of enemies.

That would be good, give us some things to buy that aren't in the game already

Looks like this will struggle to get close to funding. I knew I'd give it the kiss of death!

I think there's still a solid chance,

Gencon has eaten up a lot of the space on the news services

(I've not seen anything about this even on places that now run with Mierce's normal KS),

so hopefully next week when there aren't eleventy billion and one new releases to talk about we can get some publicity

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
I think there's still a solid chance,

Gencon has eaten up a lot of the space on the news services

(I've not seen anything about this even on places that now run with Mierce's normal KS),

so hopefully next week when there aren't eleventy billion and one new releases to talk about we can get some publicity

I hope you're right, but it needs about 1000 more backers, If I've done my sums correctly. That seems... a pretty high bar. And even then, all we'll get is the very basic set, with no alternate sculpts etc.

They seem to have rushed this campaign to launch- they need some optional buys (whether that's additional tiles, or art books, or whatever else, I don't really know what they can offer) to help the total along without needing to attract quite so many new backers.

Rob and the team are old KS hands, they won't have rushed anything and they'll have a plan in place for most likely contingencies.

It is a massive total, but there's also plenty of time.

The last two days haven't been good at all, but it is still early days here.

15 days to go...

Given the adjustments that are coming Monday, well...it's going to be close!

Just backsliding over the last few days. Whatever they whip out to get this back on track had better be good!

I think that it was rushed because of the omissions over the first few days- no gameplay video, no shots of the tiles, no rules to look at, etc.

I'm hoping to be proven wrong!

I hope things pick up and this funds. I managed to grab an EB so I was pretty excited at launch but now it seems to have hit a bit of a wall. Hopefully it gets rolling again, I'd really like to see it succeed because I want the proposed expansions to come out too.

I haven't made time to read through the rules yet, do they allow for single faction parties of heroes? It would be cool to be able to form a party from just my Ysians or Norse instead of using a group of heroes from factions that would normally be trying to kill each other but have taken a break to join forces Super Friends style to go spelunking for treasure.

Looking at it now I doubt it funds, and I imagine they'll pull the plug. Mierce are great at resin model KS but they have exactly zero experience doing board games. ATM there's isn't anything setting them apart from a dozen other dungeon crawls aside from their amazing (as usual) sculpts, and even there I think they made a big mistake with the entirely duplicate sculpts for each unit. Also for some reason there isn't a picture that shows what you actually get for your money which seems like a rookie mistake (the "you get this for £90" graphic only shows miniatures). Board gamers want to know what they get, they aren't in it for the miniatures and the miniatures alone like a typical Mierce backer. They need to see the tiles, the dice, the cards, tokens etc all laid out in an attractive way, even if it's with an asterisk saying "final contents may vary from those shown". With all that in mind I really can't see them recovering and amassing the amount of backers it'll take to get this back on track. I expect a relaunch with alternate sculpts from the beginning, a much better presentation and maybe something else to sweeten the pot (don't know what it would be though).

Look at Darklight, which managed to pull in £150 000: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/53406598/darklight-memento-mori-miniatures-dungeon-crawler?ref=discovery
And even then, that was with way less competition and before everyone and their mother was using KS.

As far as I can tell, most people are backing this to get their hands on "Mierce miniatures" at a discount (my main reason for backing), and if the game turns out well, that is a bonus. In my opinion, Mierce should view this campaign as an indication that there is an appetite for their miniatures in a more cost effective material. Additionally, while the skeletons are nice, a giant spider and a giant beetle have to be the two most generic and boring large creatures in their entire catalogue. Not sure why they chose those for their big splash board game. The skeletons are also probably the most generic infantry in their catalogue as well. I will likely drop my pledge today unless something drastic happens, but I think they have already fired a lot of their paid add-on ammo and can't/won't change the base game for a variety of reasons.

I suspect the Jutes (skeletons) were choses as they've been one of the most popular kindreds in the range ever since they were launched

and provide human sized opponents that are easily distinguished from the heroes (rather than just more humans which is what most of the rest would bring)

They have also all been digitally sculpted which means not having to pay for that all over again which would have pushed the price up (pretty much the only other choice for that would have been the Atlantes)

 Alpharius wrote:
The last two days haven't been good at all, but it is still early days here.

15 days to go...

Given the adjustments that are coming Monday, well...it's going to be close!

Well, I'm not sure what these adjustments were supposed to be, but they haven't worked.

The constant backsliding is pretty disheartening.

Well, I dropped. Good luck on the next one guys.

Mierce Miniatures 17-time creator about 2 hours ago

New Darkholds draft rules up:

http://mierce-miniatures.com/projects/ks_dhd_01/darkholds_rules_v0.01.pdf

Why are these rule drafts posted in the comments and not as updates? This isn't really helping the campaign...

Yeah, good question.

This is the third straight day of negative funding, but 'only' the first with losing backers too...

well the first one was far from finished so I can see why putting it out in an update wouldn't have been smart.....

(people seeing it was missing bits might well have headed for the exit, if they get it from the comments they are likely to be engaged enough to read more was coming)

this one, not so sure i'd have thought updating (thus giving an excuse for less active threads elsewhere to be boosted upward) would be smart

maybe Rob isn't on his KS enabled machine?

MattW wrote:
Looks like this will struggle to get close to funding. I knew I'd give it the kiss of death!

Well.. thanks a lot for that MattW !

Disappointed. We are in the mid campaign lull and losing backers.

The last 48 hour pickup only usually happens if fresh punters see the game has well over 100% funding.

Keep my pledge in, but am assuming at this point that the project will fail and I wont get billed.

They seem to have absolutely no plans to keep people interested, and there are apparently no plans for optional buys.

It looks like their plan was simply to get 1700 backers or so. :|


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
well the first one was far from finished so I can see why putting it out in an update wouldn't have been smart.....

(people seeing it was missing bits might well have headed for the exit, if they get it from the comments they are likely to be engaged enough to read more was coming)

this one, not so sure i'd have thought updating (thus giving an excuse for less active threads elsewhere to be boosted upward) would be smart

maybe Rob isn't on his KS enabled machine?

All you have to do is watermark "WORK IN PROGRESS" across the pages in big red letters, or something. Inviting feedback on mechanics would be a great way to get people invested in the KS I reckon, but they haven't done that either.