What is your new game?
We have Last Friday, Dungeon Time, and Behind the Throne, and Age of Conan: Adventures in Hyborea. We also have some new plane miniatures out, including the Newport NI 28, the Fokker E5, and the P47.
What is your new game?
Flame of War for Team Yankee, GF 9 Tyrants, and Battlefront Tanks
What is your favorite game?
Flames of War. I love the depth that Flames of War because of the attention to detail given to the different scenarios. Our tour players are second to none. Awesome guys!
What is your favorite mechanic?
In New Tyrants the deck building and board supremacy influence each other, yet each can be considered a separate game in itself.
If you like ____, then you will like ____.
If you like X-Wing, then you will like Tanks! Tanks! is just as fast and furious as you are used to in X-Wing. You are just playing history instead of sci-fi.
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What is your new game?
Crucible of Force. It’s our core World War 2 rules book, in the same system as our game Fields of Fire. Crucible of Force is a stand alone rules book; though it wouldn’t hurt to have Fields of Fire, it is not necessary to play Crucible of Force.
Crucible of Force covers the period from the beginning of the war to the summer of 1943. We will be publishing two supplements to cover the rest of 1943 and 1944, and for the late war.
What is your favorite game mechanic?
Our main tank guns fire in a way that is fun and fast, and maintains accuracy without requiring a degree in calculus.
What is your favorite game?
We have one in development that we can’t talk about, but of the ones we have published, Fellowship of the White Star, a Victorian fantasy in the D20 system. I really love Victorian history and fantasy RPG’s like Seven Seas. This has all the Victorian history, plus monsters!
Fill in the blank for us: If you are a fan of _____, you will like ____!
If you like Flames of War, you will like Crucible of Force.
If you like steampunk, you will like Hive, Queen, and Country. We have a roleplaying game in that setting, Stars of Empire, on Kickstarter
Thanks – have a great show!
Chat about it below, or in our forums, or hit our FaceBook page >>
All images from pre-production artwork.
Compass Games has had The Lamps Are Going Out on pre-order for a while now. The design team behind the game – designer Kirk Uhlman, developer Hermann Luttman, and artist Tim Allen – dropped by for a chat.
GrogHeads: There’s no shortage of WWI games populating the marketplace over the past 5 years or, perhaps inspired by the centennial of the war. What is it about The Lamps Are Going Out that separates it from the pack and should put it on a gamer’s “must buy” list?
Kirk Uhlmann: All of the various WWI games bring a different perspective or emphasis for the players. Lamps came about because I was looking for a WWI game that was historically accurate, had reasonable playing time, gave one an overall perspective of the war, and was fun. While I enjoyed many of the games on the market, none of them hit the sweet spot for me for how I wanted to game WWI. So in a sense, Lamps started because the game I wanted to play didn’t exist. Even if players enjoy marathon monster games, I think Lamps has a place in any gamers’ collection because it plays in an evening, is educational and accurate about the war, is fun without sacrificing realism and conversely, is realistic without being extremely complicated. My intent was for all the hard work to be up front in the design, so that the end result was a streamlined, fast-playing, accurate simulation of the war from a grand strategic level.
Hermann Luttman: I had this very same concern when Compass first offered to publish the game, as I saw that they had Balance of Power and Fatal Alliances also in the works. But they were not concerned as they immediately realized the same thing that we all already knew – that Lamps is a totally different type of strategic WWI game. It can be played in one long evening, is easy to learn, the graphics are unique and the game is very accessible to non-wargamers. All the essentials of simulating this level of WWI are there, wrapped in a simple and yet attractive package. This sets Lamps apart from most other WWI games and you could easily jump from playing any of the more traditional large hex-and-counter wargames to a game of Lamps immediately thereafter and still get a totally different experience.
Give us the 10-second infomercial for Polyversal? Why is this the game that we need to grab if we’re wanting to play a sci-fi minis game?
Polyversal is a universal set of sci-fi minis rules with an open-source design system that allows you to bring literally anything to the table in the 6mm-15mm scale range. With Polyversal at 6mm, you can stage mass near-future battles in a compelling setting, and even help us fill in the details of the story as your own campaigns progress. It’s easy to learn the system, has a unique command and control system with visual ‘battlegroups’ arranged and formed as you see fit, is fully customizable, and offers starter sets with miniatures from 5 manufacturers to give you a broad introduction to what is out there. From there, you can do pretty much anything you want with the system- the flexibility is amazing.
You’d launched Polyversal once on Kickstarter before, but didn’t quite make it to the finish line. What’s changed this time around and which backers are you expecting to get this time that you didn’t get last time?
Our first Kickstarter raised about $30k and had support from 266 backers- but we had a far too high goal of $80k. The game itself wasn’t the issue- but- how we went about presenting it. I posted a critical look at all of the major differences in this blog post.