Monday, October 31, 2016

Forbidden Fortress

The Kickstarter for Forbidden Fortress started today. #FoFo is a fully cooperative dungeon-crawl game in the Shadows of Brimstone line. Forbidden Fortress lets you play Samurai, Ninja, Sumo, Kitsune, Geisha and other character archetypes of Feudal (and Mythological) Japan in a battle against various demons and other supernatural creatures.

(Hey, that's me appearing briefly on screen, flipping over some cards and moving minis, around the 3-minute mark)

It's a stand-alone that's backwards-compatible with all the many SoBs expansions that came before it. Within the setting, portals open up between worlds and times, allowing aliens, demons, and us mere mortals to travel from one era or world to the next. If you have one of the two original Shadows of Brimstone core sets, you can combine it with FoFo to have mixed parties of cowboys and samurai working together, battling and exploring across the many OtherWorlds of the combined games.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1034852783/shadows-of-brimstone-forbidden-fortress/

The kickstarter went live at 3pm today. It took us less than 3 minutes to reach our initial funding goal, and we'd hit $100,000 in about 6 minutes. We just passed the $350,000 stretch goal as I was writing this. If I'm not mistaken, getting to that level took a few days last time. It's been exciting and crazy around the office today!

SoBs was, of course, the game that brought me to Flying Frog Productions, and I wasn't on the team when that first kickstarter went live. So it's kinda wild to see things from this side. I was a random customer back then, a fan of a few FFP titles (A Touch Of Evil, first among them), but it was a big risky investment on a game I hadn't played yet at the time. A risk well worth taking, as it turns out. SoBs eventually became my favorite board game, and my persistent stalking of the designers at local conventions somehow lead to me joining the playtest team for upcoming expansions, and from there it grew in to the best damn job I've ever had.

Anyhow, I'm excited, and I think you should to be excited, too! The game is solid, and this kickstarter is exploding way faster than we anticipated, which means we're gonna hit some amazing stretch goals. Those goals will solidify the Shogun pledge level (the higher of the two pledge levels) into an amazing deal, much as they did for the Minecart pledges of the previous kickstarter. I can't reveal anything just yet, but trust me, I've seen the battle plan, and it's gonna kick even more butt than it already has.

Tiny little extra bonus: If you back in the first 24 hours (before 3 pm, Pacific Time, on Tuesday November 1st, 2016) you get an extra $5 off.