Call to Arms: Star Fleet

[Lawrence]

Supposed to release this month. Will you be ready?

[Rorschach]

I am ...intrigued

[FormShaper]

I'm intrigued... to see how Mongoose mismanages, flubs, and ultimately loses this license.

MB

[Genestealer]

Saw this awhile back. I'm sure that Mongoose will screw it up.

[buckeye4life02]

Seems Mongoose has a bad rep lol

[Asandiril]

It is a well-earned and much-deserved rep, Travis. Mongoose blows chunks.

[Lawrence]

Wow Ive been out of touch with the gaming world for longer than I thought then, What did Mongoose do?

[Stu]

Wow Ive been out of touch with the gaming world for longer than I thought then, What did Mongoose do?


Poor Mongoose. I have a real love-hate relationship with these guys.
Overall, they're the little game company that continually bites off more than it can chew. They have a number of cool aborted miniatures projects--Babylon 5, Starship Troopers, the mo-dern warfare one, pretty disappointing stuff. You just get to likin' something . . .
With the rpgs, they built their business with the d20 glut. They were occasionally interesting products--like Judge Dredd--with pretty mediocre execution. Then they got Runequest. This was a big deal to me, and I liked the stuff. But they had a couple issues. A lot of other people didn't like the rules, and there were a lot of shuck and jive revisions. Worse--they decided they'd save money if they bought their own printing press, and that was a big monkey knife fight from beginning. I have a bunch of books I eventually just had to spiral bind, because Mongoose couldn't keep up with the replacements. Printing's more complicated than it looks. They found a Chinese printer and resolved those issues, but they's already upset a lot of people.
About that time, they got Traveller. They did a good job with it. It's nice to have it on the shelves again. I wish they'd publiish some more adventures for it. they put out some interesting add-ons for it, but it still seems inconsistently supported, for something as good as it is.
Then they revised Runequest. MRQ2 is a great game. Really, really, slick. The guys that put it together are great designers, and clearly love the world. But it made you feel bad for investing in the first edition, which now seems like a rough draft. Further--they lost the license. The guys that did the great work on MRQ2 are gone now to work on RQ6. Mongoose is going to keep the MRQ2 rules and release them as Legends soon. it'll be a great game, but it won't have the cache of Runequest, so no one's going to play it.

I don't know. Mongoose gets great, great stuff started, then they drop the ball. I hope they don't do that with Star Fleet, but history says it's just a matter of time. Maybe we should start a pool.

[Rorschach]

This time, MGP is just doing the rules, while ADB does the minis. That's a positive step. And that the rules are the latest iteration of the refined Call To Arms system is encouraging. Enough I'll check out the book. But I remain skeptical until game balance is proven, where the Reliant doesn't have more firepower than a Klingon Battleship, or the Kzinti drones can't be beaten by anything, etc...

[Lawrence]

As far as ive seen there is no Reliant...which sux because that class of ship is my favorite