Saturday, September 22, 2012

Disaster Looms!

It's the name of the game, not a warning.

My second foray into Kickstarter was purchasing Disaster Looms by a start-up game company from the East Side - local Seattle-area folks.  The game surpassed almost all of it's stretch goals so the amount of bits is nearly overwhelming.  The base game, a Kickstarter exclusive expansion, the first public expansion, a whole separate mini-game, and a few other bits.  Not counting the mini-game there were 21 sheets of cardboard to punch out!

My first impression is something along the lines of "Eclipse-lite."  It has the same explore outward from a central hex mechanism, but the center is Earth.  The economics are simpler and there is no combat (just a little friendly bumping).  The premise is to haul all of the population off of a doomed Earth - and make a buck in the process.  This seems like a very human premise - rising to greatness in the time of crisis, but still looking to take advantage of the situation.

Fortunately the first public expansion takes the game up to 6 players so it won't be relegated to the dustbin of games limited to 4 players.  Watch for this coming to an October gaming session near you.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Very cool! Can't wait to hear what you think of it!

Bootstrap said...

This is the publisher's summary of the comments they have received: To summarize our feedback to date: "The game is really fun to play!" "The instruction manual is confusing." "The art looks amazing!" "The components are not as good as I had hoped."

I would agree with their statements and only add that not all the components are poor - just some of them. The quality level is uneven.