This is a D6 generation PEP, bite-sized content for a busy gamer, sometimes featuring Craig,

sometimes featuring Russ.

Hey, what about me?

Oh yeah, and sometimes featuring Raph, ah, Hollywood, Granger. Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the D6 Generation. This time around, I kind of wanted to go through and talk a little bit about receiving your crowdfunded board game and what that's like. And maybe it's sort of what

people can do to get you excited about those expectations and to give you confidence even before

you open the box of the results, as well as, you know, what it's like to open the game and sort of

see if they actually met your expectations. And the reason I'm choosing to do this today is because

I just got a Kickstarter that I backed

a gee, a little over, I guess a year and a half ago now.

So I just received my pledge for the Collectors Edition of Castles of Mad King Ludwig.

Technically, it's Castles of Mad King Ludwig, the Collectors Edition.

Now, I have the original Castles of Mad King Ludwig board game. I've had it for a very long time. It's not a game I play a lot, but I do really enjoy it. I love the idea of it. I like the methodology, the game, the mechanics of the game, the concept of the game. Plus, I'm a huge castles fan, so just the idea of having this game my collection was always cool. But one of the things about the game that I think prevented it from coming to the table more often for my group was we're really all about the components. Now, the original Castles of Mad King Ludwig had good components, I would argue, pretty solid components. It was a great, you know, looking game on the table,

but it didn't like pop off the table, right? And you're building a castle and it was kind of flat.

So when I saw the Collectors Edition and the Collectors Edition, this Kickstarter funded back in February,

February 18th, I think. I'm looking at the Kickstarter now. February 18th, 2021. So it's been over a year now since it funded. And, you know, I was, when I was looking at this thing and the collector's edition, some of the things that kind of caught my eye were the fact that it was all about just really leveling up the components of the game, making it a little more three-dimensional, making it have a lot more table presence, just making it feel much more like a high-end sort of collectible game. I don't mean collectible as in like, you know, collectible card game. I mean collectible as in a really cool thing to have in your collection because it's just a uniquely well-produced game whose components reflect the quality of the rules. Does that make sense?

Because one of the things that bothers me about games so much is like if you have a great

rule set, but the components are only mediocre, then you really feel like you're missing something,

right? It's a rare gem that has wonderful mechanics as well as wonderful components. You've got a lot

of games out there that have amazing components and the rules are met. Or the components are so overproduced, you don't even understand why they went that way. But looking at the Kickstarter for Castles of Mad Kling Ludwig, looking at how the mechanics of the original game used to play and how much I enjoyed that one, I thought, well, this would be something really cool to add to the collection. And you always know on Kickstarter in particular, you get some of that over-the-top stuff in there. That's kind of a little fun that you can't get later when this thing comes to the mass-produced sort of version of it. So I was excited about this and I looked at the levels and I was trying to decide which level to back. I liked how they really focused on, you know, the Kickstarter was designed for folks who already knew their game, obviously.

And by the way, for those who don't know, this is by Bizarer Games, the guys who make Weirolf and a bunch of other games. So they're a well-known publisher, right? So there was no risk with this Kickstarter. It wasn't like a little company starting out. It's a well-known publisher. So you knew you were going to get the game. And that was pretty much a given.

They were just looking to level up this thing and they wanted to see if people would be willing to, you know, back it.

And, of course, they did. They got great numbers on this thing. So what I liked about it, what attracted me to it was, first of all, I do like long time listeners will know, I do like a lot of box control, right? So they have a whole section here on on partnering with game trays with Z, right, and making sure that all the components store back into the box. And they talk about redoing all the art to make the game pop even more. Because I would say the art was good before, but it could definitely have used a little love. It looks like they're doing a lot of that. Of course, some new expansion, three-dimensional towers for the castle, you know,

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