Hyperspace by Sandy Peterson on Kickstarter

[BobtheSomething]

Sandy Peterson of Cthulhu Wars fame has another game on Kickstarter, a 4x game I gather is similar to Twilight Imperium. 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petersengames/hyperspace/description

However, what interests me about the campaign is that it comes with a lot of miniatures, and they look pretty good.  Would anyone who is interested in the rules and not the miniatures want to split a pledge?

[schild]

I gotta be honest, you should just buy the thing dude. I'm not 100% sure it's playable without the minis, but more than that the minis are like 99% of the cost here so it's a little awkward.

[BobtheSomething]

I gotta be honest, you should just buy the thing dude. I'm not 100% sure it's playable without the minis, but more than that the minis are like 99% of the cost here so it's a little awkward.

That's not how GW explained the costs of Space Hulk or how FFG explained the costs of their games.  The cardboard tiles, printed cards and chits were often described as more expensive per box than the miniatures.  And that's not getting into shipping costs.

In either case, I was not expecting to split it 50/50, but just to alleviate some of the cost in exchange for the bulk of the game.  And I seem to have found a trade partner anyway.

[schild]

I'm glad you found a trade partner because this won't seem argumentative now.

FFG and GW are lying. Well, not lying, but fudging the numbers because they print at scale. At the lower end, the tooling and molds and whatnot are extremely cost-prohibitive without volume. Those are two companies with absolutely insane volume. At some point miniatures cost less than printing, but that number is something most companies will absolutely never hit.

With most KS, including Petersen stuff, i'd imagine a solid 60%+ cost is in miniature design, tooling, etc. In a game where the expansions are just "more minis that do more different things" the absolute bulk of the cost is in minis. Like, not even close.

A great example is Kingdom Death. They're printing pretty crazy numbers, but their plastic mini sets are like 3 printed objects and the mini sprues, and they run about $30-$50. The bigger expansions obviously run more but we're getting into dozens if not hundreds of printed objects with the minis. Yea, some of his stuff has probably gotten pretty cheap, particularly the first few expansions - he's definitely working ONLY in the black on each one sold. But he had to pass a threshold.

If minis were cheaper from the getgo, literally no one would do cardboard chits or wooden blocks or what have you. They'd literally all do minis. People do the best thing they can afford in terms of time and money. But mostly money. Miniatures are almost infinitely superior for almost anything besides modifier chits and big overblown games where you need to glance at a number.

For super small scale, I bet EEE's pewter poured minis made locally cost less than just the tooling for plastic molds.

Edit: I might have gotten some of the terminology here wrong, but I know I'm correct about scale on this shit. Mostly because I've had hundreds of thousands of things printed on various things over the past five years.

[Goldenmean]

What Schild said regarding miniature pricing (though I disagree strongly with him about the superiority of miniatures in general). Petersen games are probably at the extreme end of the miniature price curve also because they tend to make theirs so ridiculously large, and make a lot of different molds. Hyperspace seems to be toning down the size, but going pretty extreme on the different types, considering there's freaking 25 different civs, each with 2 unique minis, on top of a couple dozen generics/monsters/etc.

[Sky]

I'm not sure what Poots is paying for his hips tooling, but for the game stuff it's a clear win.

I know some of the rough numbers Reaper had for early Bones productions. Those clunkers cost around $10k/ea to tool, but then the cost was negligible except for multi-part models, which they assembled at the factory (Poots smartly sidesteps this cost entirely). So for soft/med plastics I'd wager that's a fair guesstimate to start with.

People are nuts for tons of game miniatures. I like some games with them, but it can get out of hand because of my previous statement. It sucks in the miniature crowd like nothing else. Given the choice between a cool detailed model and a fucking meeple, I'll take the mini every time.

Also, schild, EEE's mini are a poor comparison because they are total shit :D But last numbers I knew for getting molds for metal miniatures was more on the 1-1.5k range IF you had to hire a moldmaker. Sculpting cost is roughly the same. But then you can get a dozen or so minis from each spin, with the price of metal being your ongoing cost. So figuring low end 1k for the mold and 12k for a dozen sculpts on a mold. Reaper's in-house casting is pretty dicey, to be honest. I'm not sure who Dameon has casting stuff up for Hasslefree, but it's some of the best/consistent I've seen.