Bring on the Inferno ... another Kickstarter delivers
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Hell Dorado – My kickstarter package arrived the other day and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I didn't go crazy with the pledges on this one, instead I just opted for the new book and the limited edition Twilight Knight for the Kingdom Death Crossover. The delay on this one wasn't too horrible considering how some of the Kickstarters I backed have been progressing (C'MON needs to get their shit together ... Relic Knights is now screwed again because of Chinese New Year [WTF a country shuts down for a month ... um ok] not that I'm bitter or anything the game will be fun once it gets released but the wait is killing me).
Given the delay of the first release of the Cipher Book I was expecting this to take longer, it's nice to be pleasantly surprised for once.
At an initial glance the Twilight Knight seems to be a decent sculpt that I look forward to putting together and painting. I'm really rusty on the rules but she seems to have a decent amount of abilities and is listed as being a Muslim which is interesting.
The binding is a hardback book which is nice and of a similar quality to the recent GW codex releases. The text pages do seem to be on the thin side but I'm sure that was a way to keep the retail costs down. It would have been nice if they were thicker, given that it's a hardback with the same guts as a paperback but that's a minor issue in the grand scheme of things.
The art is of a similar quality to the last book although it's much more consistent throughout. Which is nice because you don't get the disjointed feeling that you did with the last book. The art is still significantly tamer than the original French release which is probably good given the game should survive on the quality of the system and scuplts rather than rely on shock value.
I haven't finished reading the fluff and looking at the individual model stats, but so far the story is on par with the previous book, and slightly easier to read since it's written in english and not translated from french. It seems that the new units are there to fill some holes in the previous forces as well as add some more flavorful elements to the game.
My biggest issue with the book is the lazy graphic design work. On most of the unit entries they didn't leave enough space for the story section and stats. So rather than redesign, add pages or cut copy they just shrunk the font to something fairly tiny. This is just plain sloppy. Not a big deal for most people but for me this is a big deal and well worth a paragraph of complaining about it.
It's probably going to be a bit before I can get this on the table as my regular Hell Dorado opponent has some schedule conflicts so we can't ever seem to get a game night that works well for both of us. My current regular group is pretty hardcore into 40K and Magic at the moment so finding time for these fringe games is tricky.
