KICKING THE KICKSTARTER HABIT

Each month our in-house agony aunt, Ben Maddox, answers your ludological lamentations

Q. Dear Ben,

I’ve been trying to send you this message for the last three weeks. I have grazed shins, my calf muscles are screaming at me and I’m sure the puke I just had was a mild form of altitude sickness. This is because I’ve had to clamber over my recent ISS Vanguard all-in pledge to get to my laptop which is in the same room.

I like a drink, I’m not ashamed to admit it, and after I’ve had a couple of beers I like to cruise the electric highways of the World Wide Web. Some nights I pull my cyber Hum-Vee up outside of Kickstarter and have a look around. Now I know I shouldn’t visit Kickstarter when I have low impulse control but the problem is that I have low impulse control.

And the campaign pages are just so enticing. They beckon me in, show me around and direct me to the pledge button on my way out. Luckily I’m a tech douche so money isn’t an issue but yesterday I got my arm caught in my Zombicide: Black Plague pledge and thought I was going to end up like that bloke out of 127 Hours and I’ve got stuff I need to do with that arm!

When the DHL bloke arrives I feel nauseated as he piles box after box on my doorstep. It takes me three pints of Rogue Energy just to get up the courage to bring the boxes in.

Also, I’m worried I’m going to lose the dog.

Please help me Ben, you ludological legionary, before I drown in plastic and poorly conceived game mechanisms.

A. Dear Cramped,

The malign and filthy excrescence of consumerism can affect us all in time. That’s why I’ve moved to the cabin in a forest bordering a landfill site. You’d be surprised how much free methane you can get from the crap people throw out and my eyebrows are a small price to pay.

I could prescribe cold turkey. Eating the stuff will sap your will to do anything. That’s why everyone’s miserable after christmas but I have a better and far more ludological way to ween yourself from this vile excess.

I present to you, Alea Games. They are the antikickstarter publisher. Their art and graphic design is so dull that John Major once asked them if they could “brighten it up a bit”, but behind those painfully mundane exteriors hide the most wonderful games. I’ll give you three that will cure you in no time.

1. Las Vegas Royale. This is that time they thought they’d modernise their look and the 1970s phoned them to tell them what a good job they’d done. Nevertheless this is a rollocking time of chance and bluff. It’s wonderful.

2. Carpe Diem. The game in which they revamped the graphic design three times and you STILL can’t tell the tiles apart unless you’re under those lights in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This is classic Feld though and the simplicity gives way to profundity in the most delicious way.

3. Castles of Burgundy. The Big Daddy. When the public called for the game to be pepped up they turned the saturation up to eleven. The colours are sickening but the gameplay is flawless. This is Feld’s best and the perfect antidote to rubbish games that look great.

Play these three games and you’ll be cured of the wish to clutter up your hallway with useless plastic and if that doesn’t work, there’s space for you here right next to the discarded beanie baby section.

With all of my ludological love, Ben

So, you used to play Warhammer and then life, members of the opposite sex, work and outdoor pursuits took over? And now you’re wondering whether you should return to the fold and fork over fistfuls of folding money to Games Workshop? Fear not, we have some options for you to weigh up.

When we say Warhammer we’re not often talking about Warhammer: The Game of Fantasy Battles. We’re not mucking about with vanilla elves here, we’ve got space elves, we’re talking about Warhammer 40,000. This grimdark game of space marines killing Orks, demons being summoned by exploding from the body of the possessed, and xenomorphs tearing their way through interstellar wreckage is the tabletop wargame. In fact, the phrase ‘grimdark’ comes from the tagline of Warhammer 40,000.

Originally designed as Rogue Traders by Rick Priestly (with later editions designed by Andy Chambers, Gavin Thorpe, Alessio Cavatore, Jervis Johnson, Pete Hains) a rich seam of dark lore and a way to sell lots of tiny army men was unleashed into the world for teenagers to say ‘Whoa! Cool!’ and ‘is that a sword that’s also a chainsaw? Cool!’ at.

Generally, like any good miniature war game, player collect an army of an agreed size (some editions use ‘points’ for this) set them out on a table and then use some form of measuring device to get close enough to one another to start murdering each other. To murder, you roll some dice based on your unit stat, and the other side will like make an armour save to try and survive. Beyond that there’s complex stratagems, psychic powers to unleash, and the odd air-drop of terminators into your opponent’s line.

And then there’s the miniatures painting. You don’t have to, but you do really. Painting up some little space marines or deadly genestealers can be therapeutic and with new speed paints (from Army Painter) you can throw together table-ready squads in no time.

With all this the game lives and breathes at the table, you’re likely to want to join a club but it can be a bit of an investment. If this is your game then that might be all you need.