I am not sure if we will unveil this Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Probably one of those. I've teased you all long enough. But I don't want to waste the buzz building burst of energy if we delay going forward on this while we redesign it. It's almost like going to the 7th stretch goal out of the gate.

This is a game with three pages of rules and toys. While I designed it, the team (Jean, Petrick, Leanna, and I) were playing another game when the idea was born.

It's a game with starship deck plans (11x17 per deck), and boarding party actions (toy soldiers). It's not KRAG, but the maps and metal Klingon soldiers for this game can be used for KRAG, so we might just have KRAG come out a month later and use half of the parts in each one.

It has toys, a non-player assassin, cards that can send your rival (not your enemy) to a secret police interrogation or give your rival a two-handed sword to use. It has an RPG aspect, in that you can be Navy, Marine, or ESS.

It does not have zombies, although the sequel may.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, May 06, 2012 - 07:50 pm: Edit

One reason to unveil it now is to assemble knowledge and information and decisions for Kickstarter. I wanted to put it on Kickstarter the 21st but given other projects there, I'm not so sure I don't want to wait weeks longer and better plan for a higher level. We do not want to put it on Kickstarter until we have the goals and the alternate levels ready.

Leanna said this very morning "We may want to aim a little higher, maybe a lot higher."

Three weeks ago I researched and discarded the idea of plastic toys and decided to go with metal ones. (Metal costs 3 or 4 times as much but plastic as a megabuck up-front fee before you get them for a cheap price, so in lots less than 100,000 (soldiers, not games) you might as well do metal.) Now, she wants me to get that data back out.No, she doesn't. She just decided that she prefers metal anyway.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, May 06, 2012 - 07:51 pm: Edit

I gotta confess that I am not logistically ready to unveil this and won't be this week. So you guys are going to be asking questions (like the price tag) that I cannot answer (not for a while).

I can say that the staff have been debating "the $30 version against the $50 version" for months and that Leanna is now considering the $80 version and the $100 version. In all of those numbers, the cost is a guess with no hard data behind it. So the $30 version might have always been going to cost $25 or $40. I just don't know yet. I've been busy and the two weeks I lost to the injury of falling on concrete were time that was to have been spent getting production quotes. So I'm two weeks behind getting real numbers which is why it may not launch on Kickstarter before July.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, May 07, 2012 - 12:34 am: Edit

It annoys me that Secret Project T (which was never designed or intended to be the monster that Ogre turned into) is going to be judged by that standard. If we raise $40,000 I'll be happy, but compared to $596,199 we will be an abysmal failure. Not fair!

Secret Project T includes:
2 maps, 11x17, paper or hard mounted
deck of 54 cards (approx number)
rules ( one 11x17)
die cut counters 140
six klingon warrior minis
one assassin mini
100 alien warrior minis
two or three dice (no special dice needed)

Stretch goals might include
third map, mounted maps, higher quality mounted maps, larger maps, art instead of engineering maps.
warriors could be different poses
More counters, counters could be something else.
More aliens
More Klingons
More cards, art on cards, better art on cards, better quality cards
totally needless custom dice.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 01:37 pm: Edit

Ok, here's the link to the page with the info.

http://www.starfleetgames.com/Tribbles.shtml


The page isn't perfect. Joel needs to fix some typos and we have some concerns over screen size, but even if you have to slide around you can get to the information. We'll have the page better later today and even better tomorrow.

As I warned you all, I'm behind on getting the paperwork done. I know that there will be various stretch goals (female warrior, more warriors, etc.) but right now I have no idea what they will cost so I have no idea what the goals will be. We are getting quotes on t-shirts and lapel pins so we'll know where to put those.

Rome wasn't built in a day and we do not have to decide every detail of the kickstarter launch today or tomorrow or this week.

But you're welcome to comment on the game, on the components, etc. You're welcome to suggest general or specific goals or support levels, but leave the dollar figures to us.

By Mike Curtis (Nashvillen) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 01:51 pm: Edit

Looks like a lot of fun!

By Jean Sexton (Jsexton) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 02:00 pm: Edit

Please don't spread the URL yet -- we want to make sure the link is the permanent one.

Jean wearing her Marketing hat.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 02:01 pm: Edit

Random notes:

One stretch goal could be a free trader or freighter on the back side of the maps.

Yes, lots of companies made cat minis and we have a quote from Reaper for them.

I already have more volunteers offering to playtest then I need.

An early goal would be to sculpt a Klingon woman and have 3+3 or 4+2 in each game. A later goal would add different poses, eventually six of them. Or more.

Zombies vs Klingons will happen, perhaps as a captain's log article, perhaps as a separate game, perhaps as an add-on pack.

The same maps will work for KRAG and probably for Traveller and other PD games. The squares are about 3x4 meters meaning each one is four traveller squares and you can just slide the mini toward one corner.

By Xander Fulton (Dderidex) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 02:11 pm: Edit

Are the maps 'fixed'? Looks like they are from the playtest kit, but then the medical bay is also shown as a standalone unit, which made me wonder if the 'combined' view wasn't just a shortcut for testing.

A reason I'd hope the rooms might be distinct tiles would be so you could lay them out in any order. This would allow two different things:

- Some variations on the ships. The rulebook could have recommended 'room layouts' to create a D7, an F5, a C8, etc.

- Ability to have a way of playing on a 'Klingon mining colony' or 'Klingon starbase' map...drawing the tiles one at a time and letting players place them down to 'build the map as you go'.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 02:13 pm: Edit

They're one big panel per deck. Individual tiles would not really work. Overlays could be done sometime to change the ship to a variant. The medical supply locker was pulled out separately (with a lot of trouble) for the artist do do an "audition for Leanna and Jean".

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 02:18 pm: Edit

Joel is moving the url from the dummy secret test one to the real one even now. I should have the new one in minutes.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 02:25 pm: Edit

Here is the new and real link.

http://www.starfleetgames.com/Tribbles.shtml

By Jean Sexton (Jsexton) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 03:07 pm: Edit

Folks, feel free to spread that link everywhere. There's a place for people to ask questions on the page, so we can get feedback from a wider populace.

By Terry O'Carroll (Terryoc) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 03:10 pm: Edit

LOL, a few days ago I a game with tribbles, using pom-poms as the tribbles and y'all were way ahead of me!

And the identity of the non-player assassin is... Ketrick's Kat!

I like Xander's map. It does not have more utility, but it is much prettier. Xanderising the map could be a stretch goal.

I believe that there are "bags o' plastic zombies" available for the Zombies!!! game, a good source of zombies for a hypothetical Klingons vs Zombies (vs Tribbles?) scenario.

Jean, please tell the Marketing Hat that I have tweeted and facebook posted about this.

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 03:14 pm: Edit

Looks intriguing, although I prefer the "engineer" version over the "artistic" version of the plans.

By Will McCammon (Djdood) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 04:22 pm: Edit

Hmmm, I'm exactly opposite.

I can't imagine a modern game (competing with Zombies!, Last Night on Earth, Settlers of Cataan, etc.) *not* having a nice CGI/Photoshop graphic-design sheen, like the Xanderized version. I'm assuming the Xander art will get some nice high-contrast labeling done for compartment names, etc. if it went to production. It maybe shouldn't be so dark, but I'm not the designer.

This game is so not what I was expecting SVC to do. I like being surprised and this sounds like a very fun, very *not* SFB game.

Question on the tribble puffballs: Don't they just go flying, if someone sneezes or breathes on them?

By George Duffy (Sentinal) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 04:23 pm: Edit

Just as a thought for a stretch goal, how about, to be used in an expansion module, crew from the "Subject Races". That have a bonus and a penalty attached to them.

For example:

A Bargantine crewman carries fewer/ no daggers, but is immune to paralyzing effect
(they are used to to the tribbles "shreiking" )


A "Cromag" that is immune to the radioactive tribbles but cannot control the cat's movements
(The cat just doesn't like this particular Cromag ).

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 04:23 pm: Edit

We didn't have that problem with the puffballs but I can see that you might not want a lot of pepper on your pub french fries.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 04:25 pm: Edit

The mind boggles with expansions, and we already thought of those. (Hillidarians find tribbles quite tasty. Slirdarians find them itchy.)

By Rick Smith (Rick_Smith) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 04:25 pm: Edit

They'll also get extremely dirty: The Doritos Cool Ranch flavored Tribble. Who doesn't play games with snacks on hand?

By Will McCammon (Djdood) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 04:26 pm: Edit

Re: Flying-puffballs (or not).

My friends are klutzes (and one is losing his sight), so we usually can't even game with half-inch counters. They just go flying, within 10 minutes. Unique set of people/circumstances.

By George Duffy (Sentinal) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 05:11 pm: Edit

To bad the furballs don't come with a BB to add weight to them.

"Cats and a animosity toward fuzzballs. It all makes sense now."

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 05:23 pm: Edit

How about rules for Glommers? Here is a link in case the reference has been forgotten about: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Glommer
Do Tribbles move fast enough for a cat to be interested in chasing them? At least on the Tri-vids they seemed to move so slowly they didn't move at all.
What scale/size are the Klingon figures going to be? The cat looks huge and out of scale, will the cat in the game be scaled better. Reaper has a smaller cat in their familiar pack: http://www.reapermini.com/Miniatures/cat/latest/02018 Maybe it would scale better. It that the cat mentioned up thread?

By Dal Downing - Rambler (3deez) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 05:24 pm: Edit

I actually perfer SVC map Xander's is way to Dark for my taste. Possible Survey Question if you want to run surveys.

By Xander Fulton (Dderidex) on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 - 05:30 pm: Edit

I'm thinking those of you who see it as 'way too dark' might want to run a monitor calibration hardware kit.

It definitely IS dark, and some of that is the result of knocking something out quickly over the weekend (for example, you'll note only the 'top' and 'bottom' walls even have lights - the side walls really didn't get any, so there are at least 3 lights missing at the moment). However, the intent is to look like the inside of a Klingon ship, and definitely having a lot of contrast between dark and lighter areas is important for that.

For example - someone had mentioned this as a good calibration point based on what they had seen on a rather crappy old monitor vs a newer one...the metal detail on the floor is actually visible everywhere in the image. Even in the "shadows" the crates are casting, the floor detailing should still be absolutely clear to see on a properly calibrated monitor.

Dark, yes, absolutely. But still clearly visible, even in the shadows (partial exception in the crates in the lower right that have the ring handles on top - the shadow on those, where they bunch together, is just enough that the floor detail should only be just BARELY visible...still visible, but only just).

[And in any case - this is a draft rendering, and I have a hunch ADB will likely have a lot of suggestions for any potential production run. But do keep in mind that it is probably not actually as dark as it may be appearing on some of the monitors out there...]