TMI TUESDAY - 50% FUNDED AND 48 HOURS LEFT FOR EARLY BIRD!
almost 6 years ago – Tue, May 15, 2018 at 06:07:59 PM

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Wow! The campaign is 50% funded and we're still in the first week! Our Early Bird copies are disappearing fast, but you still have 48 hours to grab them. Definitely spread the word, folks!

In other news, today is TMI Tuesday, which means that you can Ask Us Anything!

 About pretty much anything!

Have questions about the game? The Stretch Goals? The Team? Sword of the Stars? Life, the Universe, and Anything?

Hit Us Up! What do you want to know?

FREE SPACE MARINES ON 3D MONDAY - JUST 71 HOURS LEFT TO GET YOUR EARLY BIRD COPY!
almost 6 years ago – Mon, May 14, 2018 at 10:45:06 PM

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Greetings all! We've had a great start to our campaign, 45% funded and still going strong! Today is Monday, and every Monday of our campaign we'll be sharing some unique 3D files with our Kickstarter Backers, so folks at Engineer Level and above can check out the miniatures that will be part of your pledge.

Today's FREE 3D is a set of four Marine Mini's! This tiny squad of Marines feature a variety of Army Men poses, including the classic Prone Rifleman and Kneeling Rifleman from the Tim Mee toys of the 1960's. If you'd like to try these on your home 3D printer or the local printer down the block, now is a great time to see how the files work and get an advance preview of your minis!

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In other news: we have some new previews coming soon from reviewers out in the wild, and lots of great content coming throughout the week. 

Stay tuned and keep sharing our updates to lure more heroes to The Pit!

40% FUNDED! JUST 3 DAYS LEFT TO GET THE EARLY BIRD DISCOUNT!
almost 6 years ago – Sun, May 13, 2018 at 07:18:46 PM

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 Wow! It's been a big three days and our campaign is going really well. We've gotten a great review from Big Boss Battle, featured in the Top Ten Kickstarter Campaigns on Kicktraq and Medium, and the Early Bird copies of the game are flying!

The Kickstarter Support Team has some friendly suggestions at times like this, to keep momentum going and help our game reach Stretch Goals. It's Sunday, so we're just going to share a few of them.

HOW CAN I HELP? GOOD QUESTION!

1. Add The Pit Banner To Your Forum Signature!

If you're a regular on a boardgame friendly forum, you can bring The Pit Board Game along for the ride! Sometimes you can link the banner image to the campaign, but if you can't link an image, you can put the short link just below it.

The short link to the campaign: http://kck.st/2K7f7mA

2. Post Our Artisan Hand-Crafted Tweets and Posts to Your Social Media!

Examples for Twitter:

Here's something you don't see every day - a sci-fi dungeon crawler #boardgame with cooperative play and custom minis! Check out The Pit: The Board Game on #Kickstarter. #boardgames #tabletopgames #miniatures  http://kck.st/2K7f7mA

You should back this science fiction dungeon crawler #rpg because it's got crazy amounts of cards and components, fun co-op play, and because I WANT MOAR MINIS. The Pit: The Board Game @Kickstarter  http://kck.st/2K7f7mA (seriously, I want my #miniatures)

3. Add Us on Board Game Geek!

The Pit: The Board Game has a page on Board Game Geek, and if you have an account, we would love to connect with you there. Please add us to your Lists and Wishlists, let your BGG connections know that you've Backed our Kickstarter and tell them what we have to offer!

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That's all we've got for now. We're going to keep posting more fun stuff and content in the days to come, for now, Happy Mother's Day!

And thank you all for your support!

Lore Saturday - 1/3 Funded in 36 hours! Early Bird Selling Out Fast!
almost 6 years ago – Sat, May 12, 2018 at 11:50:53 PM

 Hey everyone! Our campaign is off to a great start--we're over 33% funded in just 36 hours and the Early Bird copies of the game are selling out fast. Thanks so much for supporting our campaign and for sharing our updates and news. We really appreciate it!

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Today is Saturday, and our Lead Writer and Narrative Designer has a dev diary entry for gamers who have never played a Sword of the Stars game before. Welcome to Lore Saturday - "What Is Sword of the Stars"?

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Hey everyone! I’m Arinn Dembo, the Lead Writer of Kerberos Productions. The team set aside Saturday as Lore Day on this campaign, so I can talk about the world-building and narrative design in this board game. I thought I’d start off on day one with a little intro to the universe as a whole, and how it came to be.  

IN THE BEGINNING…  

Martin Cirulis and I first started talking about a space opera universe in the early 1990’s, collaborating on a science fiction setting for creative projects. We loved the space opera of 20th century, especially Star Trek, Star Wars, and Babylon 5. We knew we wanted a dramatic backdrop for adventure, a setting that could work for any story-telling medium: games, television, movies, comics, you name it. We knew we would need exotic aliens, advanced technology, weird mystical powers, clashing empires, brutal interstellar wars, ancient mysteries and terrible secrets, and a lot of average joes and janes just trying to survive.  

We ended up working freelance together on several games for Sierra about a decade later, including world-building, background fiction and campaign scripts for Homeworld, Homeworld: Cataclysm and Ground Control. 

We both got very comfortable with the military SF aspects of space opera, and designing games around fleet combat and clashes between ground forces. When Martin and the rest of his team left Rockstar Vancouver in 2004 to form their own studio, they brought me on board as the Lead Writer at Kerberos and gave me the opportunity to build a universe from the ground up.

That universe was Sword of the Stars.  

OUR STORY THUS FAR…  

The team worked independently for two years on the first release of Sword of the Stars. It was a hugely ambitious space 4X game, featuring turn-based empire-building and real-time tactical combat between large fleets. 

Players had four playable races to choose from, including humans, Hivers, Tarka and Liir. Each playable species had its own Lore and faction design—biology, culture, language and tech, including a unique FTL Drive system which gave them different ways of moving across the map.  

From the first day of its first release in 2006, the game also featured an AI Rebellion event, which could be triggered any time you pushed your AI Research too far, and some Random Menaces and Grand Menaces—aliens and technology that belonged to no empire, and sometimes represented a threat to all life in the universe.

Fourteen years later, after expanding through dozens of product releases, the Sword of the Stars universe has gone from “Big” to “Epic” in scope. It spans multiple video game genres—two stand-alone space 4X games, a ground combat war game, a FPS horror game in development, and a popular single-player dungeon crawler (“rogue-alike”)…Sword of the Stars: The Pit. I’ve written a military SF novel in the universe and there’s even been a limited edition Premium Lore Book--442 pages of concept art, team interviews and background fiction.

A WHOLE NEW WORLD!  

Moving into the tabletop arena with Sword of the Stars is something we’ve wanted to do since 2012, when the studio declared full independence from our former publishers. Since that time, various tabletop projects have been proposed, including a hex map war game with tank miniatures based on Ground Pounders, and a pen-and-paper role-playing game called Freehold—a game for people who love the classic sci-fi RPG’s like Shadowrun, Savage Worlds and Traveler.  

The Pit: The Board Game is the first Sword of the Stars game for tabletop players, but it won’t be our last. If you’re a long-time fan of Sword of the Stars, we hope you’ll come along for this ride and enjoy the brave new world of SotS miniatures, board games, card games, and source books.  

If you’re new to Sword of the Stars, welcome aboard!  

We do our best to make every new game a great place to start.

DESIGN FRIDAY - 30% FUNDED IN 24 HOURS!
almost 6 years ago – Fri, May 11, 2018 at 03:36:13 PM

Hello everyone! On Design Friday we hear from our Lead Designer, Martin Cirulis, about design features of The Pit Board Game. We also have some cool news and campaign updates today, but we'll add them at the end of this post.

Here's Martin!

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Hello everyone, welcome to The Friday Dev Diary! Every Friday I will be lifting up the hood on our latest game and showing you around some key aspects of the design.  

IN THE BEGINNING...  

Sword of the Stars: The Pit was released in February 2013, and quickly became one of the more popular dungeon crawler or “rogue-alike” games for the PC. I often thought about branching out into board game design with it, as dungeon crawler board games have always been a favorite of mine. But it wasn’t until last year that I finally had the chance to turn my idle thoughts into something concrete, and get the company artists, John Yakimow and Ken Lee, to do the real work of turning my ideas into a prototype.

It was fairly clear from the start how character and monster stats or items cards might work, but nothing could really be done with the project until I solved one tiny problem: this was a game that was all about exploring an insane alien base that plunges hundreds of meters below the surface of an alien world, and I had no idea how on earth I was going to present that base as a board game map!

MAZES & MINUTIA

When I am in the early stages of a design I like to kind of storyboard out gameplay in the form of a very rough sketch of a game board and pieces and then progress them through various stages of gameplay to see if the core mechanics and presentation in my head can survive a bit of simulated play. As a life-long fan of dungeon crawlers, I’d seen many designers approach the problem-- I even have a big set of 3-D tiles for the old MageKnight Dungeons game. My first thoughts on the board game version of The Pit involved players laying out intricate hallway and floor tiles and fighting all along the way.

Unfortunately my initial vision could not pass muster. Every run-through I made on paper quickly devolved into an architecture simulator, with layout rules for the rooms and floors propagating faster than rabbits in Australia. Every time I tried to constrict the problem, I ended up with systems that were simply wasting the players’ time with a series of non-choices. So it was time to do what every designer learns to do when hitting a wall: go back to the heart of the game experience. “Where’s the fun?”

SALVATION THROUGH ABSTRACTION

When I listed out the core experiences that made the original computer version of the pit so popular, it soon became obvious that while exploration was in there, it lagged behind combat, discovery, and survival/resource management. When I looked at my initial design ideas for the board game with a fresh eye, I realized I was creating something where 35% of the player’s game time was going to be taken up with something that just wasn’t that important. Yes, I wanted the stressors of finding out what kind of facilities and monsters were on a floor…but I didn’t want to bog the game down in the minutia of floor plans. So I tossed everything out and came at the problem from a different angle, while keeping in mind the most important parts of The Pit experience.

This approach quickly rewarded me with the right answer for this particular game: abstraction. Rooms and their contents are the key parts of exploration. The game board takes all the complexity of exploring a floor and reduces it to a lay-out of five hidden rooms per floor, randomized and mounted on a hallway system that allows players to maneuver. The system allows surprise monster attacks but does NOT take up any player time in creating elaborate layouts by hand. It also creates a very stable board that still allows for a lot of variety in gameplay experience…while being much less vulnerable to Gamer Cats and Table Poltergeists than a tile-based system would be.

With this new system for laying out Floors in place, prototyping of the game leapt ahead and within a week or two we were playing early versions with a rudimentary board and stacks of printed out black and white cards. With every play-test it was clear we were on the right track. We had retained the tension of exploration, pushing into unexplored hallway sections and revealing the mystery of five room cards per floor, without sacrificing the pacing and stressful decisions that make a board game, especially a co-op board game, so much fun.  

Thanks for reading the first installment of The Pit Dev Diary! Swing by again and join us next Friday for more about the anatomy of the Room Cards, how they work, and how they came to be!

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In other news - we're 30% Funded in 24 Hours! Thanks so much for everyone who has supported our game and shared our campaign. We're doing great so far, so definitely keep those shares and posts coming.

We also have a preview out today! Matthew Small sat down with a prototype of The Pit Board Game and the verdict is in--it could be fantastic!

We'll check back in as we have more news and links to share. Thanks everyone!