Kickstarter is a fantastic avenue for the sharing of new ideas and the creation of new board games. From small indy publishers all the way through to big publishers like CMON, Kickstarter seems to be the way to get a game out at the moment. Some of the biggest successes of the past few years have been released through Kickstarter including Gloomhaven and Kingdom Death: Monster, but unfortunately there are more rocks than diamonds…
This is no more apparent than when you sort Tabletop Games by ‘New’ and find that there are numerous Cards Against Humanity copies, political satire games and other games that seems to have been thought through for about 15 seconds before opening the KS account. The issue here is that KS have a pretty low threshold for entry, you pretty much need to have a dream and a few prototype sketches and you pass. This obviously means that the market tends to get a bit bogged down with rubbish, so when something pretty comes along it is even more appealing…
Today, the issue of plagiarism has arisen with Overturn: Rising Sands releasing a rule book that is, in most part, word for word reproduction of the rule book from CMON’s Massive Darkness. The side by side comparison can be found here.
This campaign raised some flags from the start:
- A new publisher with a large scale, miniatures game. These are tough to produce, even for seasoned campaigners;
- No game play videos except from their own people;
- CGI Renders only for products
- Cost vs quantity – we all want a great deal, but sometimes it is just too good;
- Comments section full of people offering critique that were never answered.
We were promised that there would be a rule book for weeks and now that it has arrived, I can see why it has been delayed for so long. I can’t say that this is a scam, but it definitely screams that this team aren’t ready to be producing this game.
At this stage, if you are backing Overturn I would strongly suggest that you cancel your pledge for now, or at least drop it to the lowest level so that you may pledge later, should all issues be resolved (which I wouldn’t be hopeful for).
