The Kickstarter I Still Haven't Made Peace With

I’ve reviewed Rising Sun on this site already, gave it four stars, called it gorgeous and brutal and meant every word. What I didn’t get into there is the Kickstarter itself, and honestly I’ve been putting off writing about it because I still haven’t landed on how I feel.

I backed it during the campaign, years ago now, mostly for the minis if I’m being straight with you. The pitch was everything you want a campaign pitch to be, beautiful renders, a designer with a track record, stretch goal after stretch goal unlocking more clans, more monsters, a whole expansion’s worth of content folded into the base pledge if you just waited it out. I remember watching the funding total climb and adding my own pledge to a higher tier partway through because the new stretch goal looked too good to pass on, which is exactly the moment I should have known better and didn’t.

It arrived late, which everyone who backs these things learns to expect and I did expect it, that part didn’t bother me. What bothered me is what happened after it showed up. The box sat in my closet for the better part of a year, still shrinkwrapped in places, because nobody in my group actually knew how to teach it and I kept telling myself I’d learn the rules this weekend, next weekend, eventually. Between the base pledge and the expansions I added along the way I’m something like three hundred dollars into this game, and for the first year of owning it that three hundred dollars bought me exactly zero hours of play. If I’d run my usual dollars per hour math on it during that stretch the number would’ve been undefined, division by zero, the actuary’s nightmare.

When it finally hit the table it was good, genuinely good, everything the campaign promised in terms of how it looks and plays. But here’s the complicated part. The kingmaker problem I wrote about in the review, where one losing player can quietly decide who wins through who they choose to ally with, that’s not a minor footnote to me anymore, it’s baked into how I think about the whole pledge. I paid for stretch goal content I use maybe once a year because the extra clans complicate an already fragile alliance system, and some of what looked essential in the campaign renders turned out to be the kind of thing you unbox once, admire, and never touch again.

So do I regret it? Not entirely, and that’s the honest answer even though it’s an unsatisfying one. The minis are still the best looking thing on my shelf. My wife and Nate both still ask to play it by name, which is more than I can say for most of what I’ve backed. But I look at that three hundred dollar number sometimes and think about what else it could’ve bought, four or five games I’d actually reach for more often. Hindsight’s 20/20, and I don’t think I’ve fully made peace with the trade. I haven’t backed a Kickstarter since, not out of some hard rule, just a kind of caution that wasn’t there before. I’d like to tell you I learned a clean lesson from it. Mostly I just learned that a stretch goal is a hell of a drug and I’m not totally sure I’m immune to it happening again.