We recently backed a project on Kickstarter and I wanted to ramble about that.
(This is not paid promotion and I have no association with the team making this project. This is just me gushing about something I think is cool.)
I grew up playing Heroscape. This game was my childhood. If you don't know what Heroscape is, here you go:
It was a simple tactical minis tabletop battle game where you make a team of different heroes with their own unique abilities. But what really sold this game was the landscape you could build yourself.
I used to have a table that sat out on our front porch that was filled with Herocape stuff as I constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed my maps.
And I didn't just have the starter set you see above. (Above is actually several starter sets. You don't get quite that many pieces from one box. I'm guessing it's three starter sets since there are six ruins, and Heroscape only came with two.) No. I had the ice set, the volcano set, the castle set, a Marvel set. The second starter set with swampy environment.
Heroscape was an amazing part of my childhood. Then Hasbro let it die.
They tried to revive it in the form of Arena of the Planeswalkers, a knock-off with a flat cardboard battlefield. But it got cancelled after two expansions. They're going to try again, but I have no faith that they'll stick with the Heroscape revival.
Which brings us to SOURCE.
SOURCE is a hex system made by indie-developers who themselves were Heroscape fans and inspired by Heroscape. Rather than connecting at the sides like Heroscape, the SOURCE tiles are held together by edges as you can see here. (I sure hope they don't mind me lifting the images from their kickstarter.)
A disadvantage to this is that you lose some of the modularity in being able to build in any shape you want. The advantage though is that it allows for terrain to easily be added and removed throughout gameplay.
(They're also working on special grip mats for those who just really want to build in any shape they want without being confined to shapes of the edges.)
And in my opinion, the detail looks way better than Heroscape ever did. Just compare the lava tiles above to Heroscape's:
There's no contest.
The SOURCE hexes aren't just the same thing in different colors. They're actual works of art.
And I'm not saying this to put Heroscape down. Like I said, it was my childhood and was fantastic for its time.
The game on the Kickstarter, Timestrike, is very similar to Heroscape. But with so much more stacked onto Heroscape's foundation.
Characters have move, range, attack and defense like Heroscape. You have the six-sided dice where three sides are swords and two are shields. Only now there is a special lucky sword and a lucky shield. These aren't relevant for most characters, but some characters will have abilities where they'll gain some bonus on lucky rolls.
If that's not enough, there's also a Contest mechanic where you can push another player's figure. This is great if someone is on a ledge and you want to cause them fall damage, or if you just want to steal the high ground from them to increase your attack.
You can also mine materials, build roads with the materials you mined, and go fishing for buffs. (Literally. You can stand near water and try to fish. If you succeed, you take a card from the fishing deck.)
There are wild monsters you can try to tame. There are even large figures you can mount and ride. See this guy:
That's a base on his back for you to place a smaller miniature on and ride him around!
The game is centered around not just beating each other, but also fighting a boss called a Sentience with space for three figures on its back.
(Note: the Gorilla Brute is not part of this first set, and will likely come with a future expansion.)
The sentience takes full advantage of the destructible terrain, leveling any space he lands on.
And they're tossing in solo and co-op rules for people who don't want to fight each other and just want to fight the boss alone, or to team up to fight the boss.
Oh! And it comes with STACKABLE WALLS!
That's a small thing, but it's a cool thing. (Okay, this is technically a stretch goal for $200,000 that they haven't put on the official Kickstarter, but $200K feels likely to me.)
The creators also seem genuinely committed to making this a reality and keeping it going for a long time, with talk of several expansions in the pipeline, introducing more playable characters, more rideable Brutes, and more bosses which will each have their own abilities and their own solo/co-op modes.
And possibly boats.
That's a picture of a prototype boat that can fit three figures and will NOT be included in this Kickstarter. But it is planned for a future expansion.
I don't know if the boats will come to fruition. I don't know if they'll look like that when they are released or if they'll look completely different by then since that would be a long way off.
But I appreciate knowing that there are plans to make this a long-term investment. I'm not worried that the creators will give up on SOURCE and Timestrike like Hasbro did Heroscape and Arena of the Planeswalkers.
And it's not just Timestrike. The SOURCE terrain can be purchased on its own and the SOURCE system is intended to be used for a variety of games by different creators. And it's already naturally compatible with Heroscape, Arena of the Planeswalkers, Battletech and other hex-based games.
I am incredibly excited and hopeful for the future of this project!
Here's the Kickstarter for anyone who wants to see more of this.
And here's a video review going over the Timestrike rules and how it plays:
