Yorkshire based Fantastic Books Publishing is getting into gaming. They’ve created Fantastic Books Gaming and launched an ambitious Kickstarter for a board game called The Gorgon’s Loch.
The game can be played with or without a dungeon master and can even be played solo. Fantastic Books are looking for £34,700 to fund the project, which isn’t a small amount, but the Kickstarter has a solid start. There’s 21 days on the clock, at the time of writing, and over £4,000 pledged. You can follow the progress at the campaign page.
It takes a pledge of £27 to get a standard edition of the game. That’s pretty good value for a board game. There’s a limited ‘First Edition’ as well which costs £60.
Higher pledges are possible, but at those tiers, you’re doing things like getting your pet added to the dungeon.
Fantastic Books are firmly pitching this at parents. The pitch video talks about avoiding computer screens and presents the dungeon game as a stepping stone between Snakes and Ladders and, say, Dungeons & Dragons.
Dan Grubb, CEO of Fantastic Books Publishing said in a press release;
In the Gorgon’s Loch, the players are not set up to play against each other, although they can choose to. Interestingly, our play-test stats show that the cooperative groups, the ones where they work their strategy out as a group, are the ones who get through more often than those where the players go off on their own. It wasn’t deliberately built into the game, but that’s how it pans out.
Games take between 90 to 120 minutes to play.
Fantastic Books themselves aren’t entirely new to gaming. They’ve been working on books-of-the-game as a business model and are perhaps best known for the Elite: Dangerous novels and The Lords of Midnight. The publisher also runs the FantastiCon event.
There’s even a Twitch Channel which contains a few video clips of their live streams of The Gorgon’s Loch.
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