STORM: Strategy in Motion is another game that caught my eye solely on the basis of shiny graphics. Its Kickstarter page describes it as a ‘modern strategy game, with animated lenticular pieces, where patterns collide, pieces explode, and every move reshapes the board.’ Er, animated pieces that explode—it’s astonishing what sort of thing turns up on Kickstarter, and this one’s got to be worth looking at… Right?
The game’s USP (unique selling point) seems to be the tiles that shimmer; however, if as indicated above, the mechanism is lenticular printing, it seems to me that the animation isn’t going to look much like the image above: lenticular pictures are those ones that switch between a small number of different images as you tilt the picture or move your head. I’d love to be discover I’m wrong about that and the pieces are as smooth as the pictures on the campaign page suggest. I note that a couple of comments on the campaign page are asking for videos of the actual tiles, and the response is that videos are ‘coming soon.’
The game is Canadian publisher Friendly Rabbit Inc.’s 14th campaign, most of which have been successful, so they’ve got a decent track record. In any case, the gimmicky tiles don’t affect how you play the game (though that would have been a cunning mechanism indeed).
Game Play
Weeelll, game play seems rather underdefined too…
As far as I can tell, you draw tiles from a bag and add them to a growing map on the basis of matching their edge colours, and you can place sparkly ‘storm tiles’ on top of others to remove pieces at the edge of the board—this in particular seems a lot like the game Gekitai in which placing a counter pushes its neighbours away; a simple mechanism, but one that involves a lot of strategic thinking.
There are also dark ‘anchor tiles’ which will prevent adjacent tiles from being displaced by storms, and a couple of wildcard-ish tiles also appear in an expansion box.
The first person to play all their tiles is the winner; unless there are a lot of storm tiles or as yet undescribed placement restrictions, that seems rather easy.
I have to say that doesn’t sound all that engrossing, and I’m not sure what defines a tile as ‘mine’ since they all look the same. Oh well, maybe a campaign update will describe things in more detail.
Other Impressions
The campaign rewards are a strange mixture of bits and pieces. Besides the game itself and the expansion, there’s a special pledge level for retailers where they can pay to get access to a different pledge manager just for retailers—I’ve seen that sort of thing before, but this project seems to be charging quite a lot for the privilege. For a few bucks more, you can buy a sleeve for the game box plus expansion—why on earth would you want that? Will purchasers really think it’s important enough that they can store both boxes together to spend money on a sleeve?
Other campaign add-ons are a couple of different Friendly Rabbit games with an expansion for one of them, and a trio of rather odd-looking jigsaw puzzles. Actually, I have to say the puzzles do look intriguing, but hoo boy, are they expensive?!
One of the nice things about the campaign is a well-defined timeline, something missing from many Kickstarter projects, where apart from the end of the funding period, dates come out in dribs and drabs. Shame the rest of this particular project is not so clearly defined.
This does not strike me as a campaign to back, at least at this stage: no rulebook, no video of the actual eye-candy pieces (the main feature of the game) in animated action, no review or playthrough. But I’m perhaps the exception: the project was funded in 20 minutes; true, the original goal seemed rather small, but it’s been sufficiently over-subscribed that it’s clear the campaign 800+ backers are keen on it. Even so, I’ll be waiting to see what happens before I consider diving in.
Finaly, you can find out a tiny bit more about STORM on its Kickstarter page.
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
