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I thought we had a thread about this game but couldn't find it. Its live on gamefound (i.e. not-kickstarter) now. Im surprised its raised as much money as it has with seemingly now marketing, advertising, mention or discussion of it being live that I can find. Even Beasts Of War/OnTableTop who did a game preview video with them a few months ago doesn't have any mention about the campaign launch on their front page.

https://gamefound.com/en/projects/ramperdesign/acherons-fall

IIRC this is a "party game for 4 players with one ship each"? Really weird niche.

BTW Andy Chambers and Gav Thorpe are writing a spaceship racing game, so if you are 4 or more casual players, maybe wait for that instead

The Ontabletop preview was a one on one game, and it definitely was not a party game - it was a very in-depth crunchy highly tactical space combat simulator with vector physics and energy management, etc. Each player controlled two ships.

I assume that bit is probably a mistranslation by the designers. Kind of worrisome if they didn't retain any translators to assist with the campaign page, hopefully that isn't an indication of poor translation of the rules.

Love the Infinity background.

Love starship games.

Still a tough call without better visibility on the rules...

Might be a bit rude to pimp other games in a crowdfund thread, but for 1-2 ships per player I warmly recommend Snapship Tactics. It has X-wing list building and maneuvering with a detailed power allocation, heat and action management, even a bit of engine building. The only obvious fault is the scope is limited by a small model range.

I think it's only rude if the thread is posted by the project creator or an obvious shill. I am neither, just sharing the news. Haven't backed it myself, unsure if I will. I'm intrigued by the game from the perspective of game design and mechanics, don't really think the minis are anything soecial, don't know that it's a game I will ever really want to play beyond a few demo games to get an understanding of how it works, etc.

Having a look at this. Although I don't play as much these days I still think Infinity is one of the best-designed games I have ever played, so anything else the developers are turning their hand to I will take a look at. Think the basic pledge level is quite reasonable and seems to be doing fairly well so far.

The BOW demo didn't do it any favors at least for me and I'd consider myself the target audience for something like this. I'll have to check out the campaign though I'm unfamiliar with gamefound personally.

all you need to know about gamefound is that its basically like kickstarter but tailored to the board and tabletop gaming industry. its been used as a pledge manager for kickstarter campaigns for almost a decade now, and sometime in the past few years started offering itself as a crowdfunding platform in and of itself instead of just being a separate pledge manager tool.

The chief difference being that backers in the EU backing creators outside the EU will be diligently hit with their local VAT on top of the pledge, which KS for some reason still isn't doing.

IIRC gamefound is a european company, which is why they care about VAT and whatnot. Kickstarter being american doesn't care about it because its not something that Americans deal with, ergo "someone elses problem".

It is absolute heresy that this game is not being pimped better then it is.

I like the look, and was almost wondering where this game was, as a transport/ ship combat game to different planet/ battlefields.

I hope it comes to market, because I'll be all over it. Great Find!!

I assume that it is being pumped in Infinity circles, but ive not seen any hype for it outside of that bubble basically, beasts of war interview/demo from a couple months ago notwithstanding. Theyre doing well for a company with no marketing, but its surprising that they aren't putting anything into trying to get the word out.

Ouch, €185.00 plus €40 shipping and conversion to USD is quite a lot for a game I may never do anything with, but I do love both Infinity and spaceships games. Looks a LOT better than the previews that were coming out, I though I was going to skip it completely based on those.

It's silly and arbitrary and means nothing, really, but I love the scale shot at the end with the ISD and Enterprise and Rocinante. There's something about scale comparison shots that really tickles my inner nerd

Yes, the minis are pretty, and I'm looking forward to seeing the various faction fleets get fleshed out.

I think this was a general spaceship game and then it somehow morphed into infinity.

The ships of the Infinity verse use standard artificial gravity generation. ie. spinning something. these look like generic ships painted in infinity colors. Except the one ship that isn't human sphere.

Rules-wise, yes, this is clearly a product idea that existed beforeand we adapted to Infinity with the partnership arrangement.

Miniatures-wise, I see CB being the driver of these designs.

Same here - I like what I'm seeing so far so...I'm in!

chaos0xomega wrote:
I assume that it is being pumped in Infinity circles, but ive not seen any hype for it outside of that bubble basically, beasts of war interview/demo from a couple months ago notwithstanding. Theyre doing well for a company with no marketing, but its surprising that they aren't putting anything into trying to get the word out.

I think part of the issue is that these games that they crowdfund tend to be "one and done". So I suspect they don't "need/want" to get too much attention and blow things way up beyond their ability to produce them in a sane timeframe; deliver and then move onto the next project.


It's one thing that keeps me from backing (even if right now I'd be putting in a low bid just to get into the pledge manager because I'm all tapped out).

The other is that it looks like a game with very few space ships and I'd honestly prefer one with more ships on the table. If I'd got confidence they were going to grow this into a main game with more ships, more expansions and such in the future then, again, I'd jump on. But I don't get that impresion.


Of course nothing wrong at all with what they are doing, just a case of "not really for me" and "not right now"

Well, going in at the 185EUR level gets you 15 ships currently, 16 if the next stretch goal is unlocked + 2 add-ons. Not sure if the funding curve on gamefound is like kickstarters where theres a sudden spike at the end, but its also possible that theres 2 more ships to be unlocked to bring it to an even 20 since it seems they want to release them in batches of 4.

Thats not insignificant, though frustratingly it doesn't look to really give you a true "fleet" of any of the ships. Its a random collection of aestheticall disparate vessels. Fluffwise it makes sense but its not quite what I want personally.

I think "naval skirmish" is something that definitely has legs. I think one of the big stumbling points of most naval wargames is that they often abstract away too much of what makes naval combat distinct and unique from other forms of warfare, unlike ground combat where its really about direct conflict between opposing forces, theres a lot of "systems" that factor into naval combat, many of which often end up being written out of naval games in order to focus on whatever is deemed "core" so that they can keep the mental load low enough to have a dozen ships on the table. Even though I personally prefer more fleet-scale engagements and whatnot, I have to admit I've been left unsatisfied by how many interesting facets of the genre end up gettting written out of most rulesets I've played. This (and the Star Trek game) seem to be attempts to correct that, but due to the complexity of the subject matter they are having to make it a skirmish experience with 2-3 ships per side or whatever in order to keep it manageable.

This one is also somewhat rare in that it makes an attempt at vector-based movement.

More than most "airplane in space" games can claim.

They added space battleship yamato and an alien super-dreadnought (i.e. really really big bad ship) as add-ons, plus a stretch goal for 2x more ships which I give it a decent probability of hitting...

I... honestly, they had me at the Yamato I think.

chaos0xomega wrote:
They added space battleship yamato and an alien super-dreadnought (i.e. really really big bad ship) as add-ons, plus a stretch goal for 2x more ships which I give it a decent probability of hitting...

I... honestly, they had me at the Yamato I think.

Lacks a central canon on the stem of the ship...



But yeah, they got me too.

It probably has to lack the central cannon if they don't want to get hit with a copyright licence?

chaos0xomega wrote:
Not sure if the funding curve on gamefound is like kickstarters where theres a sudden spike at the end

You wouldn't think so since there isn't a way to sign up for a lone 48 hour reminder email, you either get all updates all the time or none, but Wargames Atlantic's The Damned campaign followed normal KS funding patterns regardless so

Many companies that are crowdfunding send their own 48 hour notices (even those using kickstarter), as the list of people subscribed to your mailing list and the list of people following your crowdfounding campaign are often not the same (yes, there will be overlap, but there will be people on your mailing list who missed the notice about the crowdfunding, etc. and are wholly unaware).

In this case though, its not clear to me how that would work out. I've still not seen any marketing for this campaign anywhere, so I have to imagine that the vast majority of the people following it already are those who knew about it via what I assume was a Corvus Belli/Ramper Design mailing list in the first place. I don't think they followed the typical model of luring in "new blood" during the campaign with marketing and promotion, etc. and instead focused only on trying to attract a very limited pool of backers who they already had contact info for.

I kinda feel running a crowdfund that will be billed on Black Friday month is a bad call in general.

100%. Was thinking the same exact thing, but also had the thought that "maybe people will spend their black friday money on this instead of holiday battleforces or a new tv from amazon", etc.