[UPDATE: Since publication, this Kickstarter campaign has been cancelled.]

“Miniatures Bloat” is becoming a common phrase with regard to crowd-funded tabletop games these days. Even without the biggest players/culprits (CMON, Monolith, Mythic Games etc.) the market and industry as a whole are top-heavy with boxes crammed with (admittedly beautifully sculpted for the most part) bits of plastic of various sizes and hues.

For many this is a turn-off from the outset, but there remain legions of ardent mini fans, willing to shell out hundreds of dollars on impressive injection-moulded centrepieces for their gaming tables.

Image: Geek Dad

What’s undeniable though, even for ardent miniatures fans, is the sad fact that many of the models in question (particularly those supplied gratis as Stretch Goals during crowd-funded campaigns), hardly ever see the light of day, let alone the tabletop.

Even when they do, once scenarios have been played and replayed, the chances diminish with each trip to the table that they’ll ever make it back again.

But what if there was a way to reuse those minis in an innovative and exciting way? A generic game system, tried and tested, that allowed you to reuse the minis in a collection, from multiple collaborating manufacturers, giving them a new lease of life? A cross-genre system that meant whenever you played it there was a chance that any of your minis might see the table.

Ares vs Cthulhu (from Mythic Battles: Pantheon and Cthulhu Wars respectively) – the kind of awesome absurdity we wanted and seemed to be promised.

Such appeared to be the promise when Monolith announced it’s Beyond The Monolith games system. Not only, they said, would you be able to use your Batman, Conan and Mythic Battles minis in quick and brutal skirmish smash-ups (not to mention mash-ups), but other leading miniatures games developers like CMON and Petersen Games had lent their support to the concept, meaning suddenly there was the prospect of the majority of your miniatures collection being viable in a single, epic games system.

Awesome, right?

Not only would you be able to dust off all those boxes of plastic that hadn’t been cracked open in ages, but you’d get a whole new miniatures game system for presumably minimal outlay, as you’d only need some basic ingredients for the new system to support the mountains of plastic you already owned.

Brilliant!

Batman: Gotham City Chronicles “VS” mode. The core of the Beyond the Monolith system. [Image: SlashFilm]

In fact, given that the suggestion was to use the Vs mechanics of Monolith’s Batman: Gotham City Chronicles title, if you owned that already, you almost had all you needed to start playing. All you would need was a rule book and a smattering of new stat cards, and you’d be ready to rock.

Fantastic! When does the campaign launch? Sign me up!

To add to the level of anticipation, in the run up to the campaign, CMON and Petersen Games confirmed their support of the project. This really did feel like it might be the best thing to happen to miniatures games in years. The GURPS/Smash-Up of miniatures games. A Cthulhu-fighting-Conan-fighting-Batman-fighting-zombies piece of epic, awesome craziness.

The drums rolled, the campaign launched, we all rushed to the Kickstarter page and…

WTF?? What am I even looking at?

Yeah, you said it Monolith. WTF is this?

Beyond The Monolith had seemed so simple in its premise. So elegant. Something streamlined that would draw together all the existing mountains of plastic at our disposal and craft it into something new and possibly better than the sum of its parts.

So what greeted our eyes? Well for a start the campaign page was called:

Beyond the Monolith Core System – Conan Universe: “A Core Game system, its first Universe setting and additional content for our previous Conan Game”

Well that’s not exactly “generic” is it?

Boxes and boxes and boxes of… new miniatures. The very thing Monolith claimed was the raison d’être of Beyond The Monolith. To quote from their press release:

“Stop buying new miniatures and play more with the ones you already have”.

The campaign page was confusing for even Monolith veterans, so god knows what newcomers made of it. It wasn’t helped by the opening image being a scrolling animated gif that disappeared and started rescrolling just when you were about halfway through reading it.

Then you literally had to wade through a baffling list of pledges starting at 89 euros: Leader, Legacy, Evolution, All-In Leader, All-In-Batman-Evolution and then Discount & Sponsorship and Campaign Pledge Bonus information before you even got to the heart of the system: the Core System Box, actually priced at a very reasonable 24 euros.

This is, and should be, literally all you need if you have piles of minis already.

This should have been the heart of the campaign. The very first pledge level. The very first paragraph. The entire focus. As it was, you couldn’t even pledge for just that. Or maybe you could. After all the Donation pledge said you could pick and choose the elements that you want that way.

But why? The Core System Box IS the game!

The more you trekked through the campaign page, the more you were presented with yet more opportunities to invest huge sums in yet more plastic, until you got to the bottom and another opportunity to invest in the original core Conan game system in all its glory.

Oh Monolith, what in the very fuck have you done?

This campaign should have been modest. A 24 euro core set, with crossover stat card add-on packs to support your existing miniatures collections. Got the Conan core set? Add that stat card pack. Got the Mythic Battles: Pantheon core set? Here’s the cards. Got any of the expansion boxes for either system ? Here’s some more cards. Got Zombicide: Black Plague or Cthulhu Wars? Here you go.

Simple. Easy to understand. Just take our money already.

It’s not even like there isn’t an opportunity for a minis cash grab with modest boxed sets of minis from the various games they produce, and admittedly Monolith made a fair go at with their four 45 euro themed box sets from the Conan universe.

But these should be standard add-on fare, whereas they were presented as almost essential core sets to a new system, with a minimum buy-in of two to make it all worth it.

There’s even the “opportunity” to buy crossover kits (at 54 euros a pop) to incorporate the contents of the available Monster boxes into Monolith’s existing Mythic Battles: Pantheon game, even though a load of the monsters contained in them are from that very game system!

Monster boxes. Buy loads of minis you already have to a get a few that you don’t.

All this time I’ve been referring to this campaign in the past tense, perhaps just from reminiscing/reliving the nightmare when facing the campaign page for the first time a week ago. But it’s actually active right now for you to check out for yourselves.

And it’s failing. Miserably. Having set a fairly lofty target of 700K euros, the campaign appears to have stalled at less than half that (at the time of writing). Way less in fact.

And that’s heartbreaking. Because at its core it really is a fantastic concept that promised so much, and was something that I (and I’m sure a legion of miniatures gamers) was eager to get behind and support Monolith in producing.

The opportunity to recycle existing minis in a new and innovative way was what drew most of us in, and if that’s what had been delivered in the campaign, we’d all be queuing up to hand over our cash for something that Monolith could have produced with very little risk and minimal overheads.

As it is, there’s this artificially bloated train wreck heading for failure, and perhaps if/when it does fail, Monolith will respond by consigning it to the scrap heap, which would be a crying shame. All it needs is a return to that original, splendid concept.

So lets hope that this is a genuine crowd-funder and not a pre-order for something that Monolith is already knee-deep manufacturing. If it’s the former, they should probably pull the plug now and redesign the campaign to give miniatures fans the thing they were promised.

But if it’s the latter and Monolith have put all their eggs in this one ill-thought-out basket, I wouldn’t like to speculate on the company’s future, and like so many other things we’ve already mentioned, that would be an avoidable tragedy.

[UPDATE: Monolith has released this statement regarding the cancellation of the campaign.]