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Tuesday, September 04, 2012

RANDOM THOUGHTS #112

Steve Cole answers some questions from a fan.

1. What is Kickstarter?

It's a website where people propose a new product (including a lot of games) and fans can order it by pledging their credit card. If enough money is raised, the credit cards are charged and the product is printed. If not, the credit cards are not charged and the product is cancelled.

2. Why haven't there been expansions to the Star Fleet Battle Force card game long before now?

Because decks of cards cost a lot of money to print, making such projects risky, and most card games printed in this industry lose money.

3. Why don't you do pre-painted starships?

Because the minimum orders from the Chinese factories are 100 times the most we ever sold of any ship.

4. Can you print new index separators (full-page-sized cardstock dividers for each letter of the alphabet, each one listing every rule in that letter)?

Not economically. We've gotten price quotes many times as they're just incredibly expensive to print.

5. How about printing a real index for Star Fleet Battles, one that lists every term and what rules numbers it is in?

That would be a massive project, and to be done right would virtually be a reprint of the rulebook. It wouldn't do you much good to have a list of rule numbers that mention "boarding parties" unless each and every entry indicated the context of that mention, e.g., boarding parties against suicide shuttles. What we do have are a basic index (listing the key rule) and the "rules cross-index" (which lists the rule number for every interaction between two rules). Those two documents accomplish 99% of what your "real index" would accomplish.

6. Can you do a new strategic game that does for Federation & Empire what Federation Commander did for Star Fleet Battles?

We plan to (Klingon Invasion, Federation Invasion) but it's not yet on the schedule. In the meantime, just play F&E and leave out scouts, fighters, drone bombardment, carriers, escorts, and other tedious rules.

7. Can you do 3d terrain for Star Fleet Marines?

In theory it could be done, but probably not in economical quantities and in all seriousness it would probably be less than useful as you'd be balancing stacks of counters on top of little miniature trees.

8. How about a re-release of H1 and H2?

We did that quite a few years ago and sell the new H1 (which includes what was once H1 and H2) on our cart.

9. Does ADB still own the rights to all of the out-of-print stuff?

Yes, although there really isn't that much out of print (if you don't count the earlier versions which were replaced) and most out-of-print stuff is on e23.

10. Why did Steven Petrick update R2 instead of some more important product?

Because we ran out of R2 SSD books and had to convert them to print-on-demand and it seemed logical to update them while we were at it.

11. Why isn't Star Fleet Battles run at World Boardgaming Championships?

We don't have the money to go to every convention, nobody seems to want to take SFB to that one, and the guys there (the one time we did go to a lot of effort to get someone to run it) were hardly receptive to any kind of science fiction game.