Dear loners,
Some sad news arrived last night. Familiar Games decided to cancel their campaign for the expansion to their great little game Mageling: Rise of the Ancient Ones . It did look like the campaign never got the right momentum, for whatever reason, although I noticed Zerbique had joined the party as well. Anyway, after two days of campaign only 86 backers had pledged some $2.800,- of a $8.000,- goal, with a final stretch goal at $70.000,-.... Doing the math this does seem to be a measured decision, which I quite regret (but fully understand) as the game really deserves a wider audience in my view. The good news is however that they will be back in January! Hopefully the wonderful folks here at solitairetimes will find some time then to bring this game to the attention of all you loners... If you don't know the game please have a look at a very nice review by Stidjen. Actually based on this review I ordered the game already some time ago directly from the Familiar Games website and I haven't regret this a single moment! If you are looking for a nice puzzly engine builder aimed at optimizing the randomness from cards and dice to the max by looking for the best ordering of card/dice-combo's, this game has it all. Highly recommended!
Btw: you can still have a look at the campaign including the rulebook here. Have fun!!!
I fully agree with your observations and have taken the opportunity to contact Joseph Butler to pass them through and ask for the English rules in pdf or link. I have been in contact with him before, so good hope he will come back to me. I will keep you posted on this.
The weird thing is the rules are available on BGG but only in Greek, so in the end Athena might have to get involved again as well... 😉
I think they did several mistakes indeed, including a) pledge levels that were extremely confusing at first (and with almost identical names); b) an overall graphic design of the page that is rather unappealing; c) looking at the campaign page, I have no clue what this game is, what it is about, what I would do in this game, and the initial picture is just weird and tells little; d) as you said, lack of advertisements, involvement on the BGG forums, etc.
I wanted to cover this game with more depth that what Athena ended up doing in emergency, but the rules were nowhere to be found and when I tried to contact the creator, I did not get a reply. Not that I think ST has any significant influence though... By the way, I think the rules on the KS page are only for the campaign that comes in the expansion, not the core game, right? If you had these, I would be grateful if you can share them.
This game looks really cool. I'm glad to hear you praising it, as it comforts my initial impressions.