Galliant Games

Sorry, one more small but important thing to add regarding stealing in Scrapyard Empire. When you’ve “built” a small machine, it becomes safe, and other players may not take it from you. We’ve found that this helps create a sense of urgency with building the machines needed in order to create an invention. Most stealing happens with the “parts” that are face up on the table. These are in abundance so I wouldn’t say that stealing ruins someone else’s game – it just sets them back temporarily if you take a part that they need. It’s a race and these little things help you edge your way to victory.

@Chopper Dan, Scrapyard Empire definitely has a backstabbing element to it with the stealing. That’s part of the game and if you’re not into that type of game then it’s probably not for you. On the other hand, people who do like the “take-this” element and a little bit of randomness by way of the dice will probably enjoy this game quite a bit, at least based on our experience with play testers.

Regarding the dice mechanic, there are ways to mitigate it. I’m not sure if the Undead Viking review put emphasis on how this worked at the time it was recorded (it was an update we sent after submitting our prototype for review) but if not, it’s pretty simple. You can offset any dice roll by scrapping (discarding) extra Parts cards. So if you roll a 3 and need a 5 for a success, then you can scrap 2 cards and that roll becomes successful. If you manage your resources effectively, you’ll be able to do this a couple of times during the game for a positive result. Just don’t overdo it (use wisely).

Also, we are planning to include a game variant that uses the same deck, but takes out the dice element entirely and has a few other changes for gamers who like less chaos. This is definitely not the main version of the game, but it’s one of the variants that we’ve been developing.

Regarding stretch goals, quite a bit of thought went into them, and they were based on what we felt we could afford based on the price quotes we got and our estimates on the amount of funding we would raise. That said, we’ve adjusted the stretch goals to smaller increments based on feedback we got from other backers and our new projections on how much will be raised after collecting some real-world data. You can see the current stretch goals on the project page, and read about them in this update