It's the end of the year again, and that means it's time for the 132nd Annual The 30's! Awards Show! The 30's are a fairly random grouping of "Best ___ of 2012" with some commentary about the gaming industry while we're at it. The rules are that your product needed to be released or discovered by VideoGamingAt30.com in 2012 to be eligible for one of our highly prestigious awards. If you or your product are selected for any of our categories, you may contact us at videogamingat30(at)gmail.com and we will make you up a fancy certificate and ship it off to you.
Best Indie Game of 2012
FTL wins best Indie Game of 2012, hands down. FTL started as a Kickstarter (we'll talk about that later, spoil alert) that funded and released and became something that people were just talking about. FTL is a rogue-alike game with the difference being that you are traveling space trying to reach the end while being chased by a fleet of enemy ships. No two games are ever the same, and death is permanent, so you really need to be sure you want to send your crew to check out that abandoned station. This is a really fun game, and we here at VG30 highly recommend picking it up.
Best Method of Bankrupting VG30
To date, VG30 has backed 20 projects on Kickstarter, having discovered it in February for the Order of the Stick reprint drive. Since then, we just keep finding more and more projects that we want to be a part of and to date there's only been one instance of being a bit sorry we backed so much into. That's going to be...
Biggest Disappointment from Kickstarter
Yes, Zombicide. This was my biggest Kickstarter to date (soon to be surpassed by Kingdom Death), and it just fell flat of expectations. The mini's are great, the materials are great, the concept is interesting, but it just doesn't hold up to expectations. The game doesn't scale at all and begs for house rules to make it work. The scenarios are presented in an absurd order, the first one that they give you is one of the HARDEST scenarios in the game to win, and the presence of the nigh unstoppable Abomination early in the game will all but cause player to flip the table in disgust. Some people really like it though, so take this with a small grain of salt.
Best Experience with Kickstarter
Truth be told, we haven't had a completely positive experience with any project on Kickstarter yet. Sure, there's projects we liked, like FTL and Order of the Stick, but so far there's been something off about all of them. Usually it's missing their ship dates. This is totally reasonable as many of these are first time game creators who are trying to bring their dreams to life and don't know how finicky the production and shipping business can be. Others don't update for months on end (looking at you Mobile Frame), or didn't follow their demo schedule at Gencon (Agents of Smersh) or sold their product at a convention before I had my copy of it (Zombicide). Some continue to miss deadlines (Escape from the Temple Curse / Order of the Stick [get well, Rich!]) for fairly good reasons, but it's still not a 100% positive experience that I would recommend to anybody. My best advice for Kickstarter newbies is to expect what you're backing to fulfill about 6 months later than they say they will and you won't be disappointed.
Best Board Game of 2012
Lords of Waterdeep takes Best Board Game of 2012. After Wizards released terrible board games like Return to Castle Ravenloft for a couple years, my hopes of having a good game released were cut to nil and I left them for dead. In comes Lords of Waterdeep, an amazing Euro style board game with Western elements that are blended in perfectly. This has become a house favorite, and I can see if joining the ranks of introductory board games like Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan. Everybody should give this one a try.
The 30's! continues tomorrow, where we'll get a little bit more Video Game oriented, promise!
