Escape ... from the Temple Curse (The Curse of the Temple)
Completed funding on April 13, 2012 with $58,841 of $10,000 Goal
What did they offer: Queen games offered a real time cooperative board game in which players raced against a timer to try to escape from a temple. Backers could receive the game (regular or foil boxed), poster, expansions, and canvas carrying bag. Stretch goals included a copy of Roma, extra player tokens, and tiles.
When was the expected delivery date: June 2012 with the second expansion in September 2012
What did VG30 pledge for: VG30 pledged $75 for the game, both expansions, poster, and canvas bag.
Status of Project: The game, first expansion, and promos started shipping on September 28th. The second expansion and canvas bag have not yet shipped.
What the creator is saying: When we received our packages, Queen Games included a note apologizing for the delay in getting it to us, and what they learned from the project. With a 3 month delay this was a nice gesture. Since then Queen has been VERY quiet offering updates about once a month with very little information. Additionally, since this embarrassment Queen has been quiet on all of their OTHER projects as well, which are suffering from the same problem: main game shipped, missing expansions.
What the community is saying: The community is MAD about this one. On January 8th, the backers were told in a post inside of an update about the bag that they were waiting on art for the second expansion, the one that was due back in September. The community is willing to wait because of delays in production, but waiting on art means that they weren't organized enough to have it ready in time for their promises. Additionally, the bag looks pretty bad.
What we're saying: If this was a one-off situation for a new company, I'd consider it part of the learning process and would cut them some slack so long as they provided updates along the way. That's not the case, Queen Games is an established name in the market, they know what it takes to make a game, and I've communicated more in this post than they have in the past 6 months. Queen Games tried running multiple Kickstarters and it's the same story on each of them, except they're all pointing to this one as being the one that's slowing everything else down. They've since stopped creating new projects, but I have no plans on backing any of their projects in the future.
With all of that said, it IS a fun filler game that you break out and play for maybe a half hour or 45 minutes. If the game were terrible I think everyone would care a little less about the status of things. Unfortunately it's a very expensive filler game, so the audience on it is going to be limited.
