Geek Native defaults to one tabletop RPG Kickstarter a day as a limit. It takes a notable webcomic or board game to get on the queue, as there is no shortage of tabletop roleplaying games to take that slot.
Take note of Soul Raiders, which is more board game than RPG, and note it took €10,000 an hour in pledges to hit the €50,000 funding goal. It’s slowed down now, as you’d expect, but will spread again as news of the campaign spreads.
It’s a cooperative adventure game for one to four players. I’m a backer. I backed it because I’ve played it. I had one virtual game at virtual Spiel and was hooked. I backed it because I was sent the prototype, haven’t had time to write that up, but it was enough for me to pledge €110 for the Grimoire Edition. Let me shush now and let the Kickstarter pitch speak for a bit.
Soul Raiders is the work of Marc Andre. That’s the Marc Andre of Splendor fame.
Andre and Matagot founder Hicham Ayoub Bedran set up the company One for All, which will Kickstart games for the Running Quest system. That means Soul Raiders could be one of a compatible set.
The game works by exploring a map. It’s a hex crawl in RPG parlance. Hexes have numbers, like a choose your own adventure book, to represent decisions you can take, and they then connect to a deck of events.
When I arrived at some ruins in my game, I had to decide whether I’d scout the outside first or explore what I believed might be the dangerous interior as a priority. It was a decision with consequences (flipping cards to a different side).
In combat, characters have powers and abilities, but so do the enemies, and the use of cards brings these encounters to visual life better than a text-only adventure book.
And, I can play this solo. It’s the solo play which was the final piece of the “go on, spend money you don’t have on a Kickstarter you don’t need” persuasion for me.
The pledges are straightforward, and while there are add-ons available, the reward tiers are not shaped to squeeze every cent out of you by finding that balance between “as much as I can afford” and “are parts of the game missing?”.
It’s a pledge of €70 (about £60) for the game, minus shipping, which is available in English, German and French. You get all the standard game components and relevant stretch goals.
I, like the majority of backers, found €110 (about £95) for the Grimoire edition, which means a magnetic box, the same standard components, but also “invisible and clone” miniatures, a teleportation portal mini, chapter boxes, hero tuck boxes, a lore book and all the stretch goals.
Neither version of the box will ship until December 2022.
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