The Saga of Middara
Middara: Unintentional Malum is an unique case of a Kickstarter funded board game project. The original campaign was successful but the rocky road, that the project had to go through, was really one of a kind. The game collected almost $350.000 back in 2015, but took it over 3 years to produce it and have it shipped to backers.
Contrary to most KS creators who get into the manufacturing hell, the guys at Succubus Publishing never gave up. They’ve spent most of their time looking for investors and people willing to help. The game finally got sent to backers and was highly praised by numerous reviewers and the board gaming community.
Now, after all this time, Middara: Unintentional Malum is back on Kickstarter. And it comes with 2 new acts, turning the entire series into a trilogy.
Game & Gameplay
Middara is a fully cooperative game that can be played with up to 4 players. People who prefer to adventure solo, have a single player mode available, where you can control more characters at once.
The game is set in an unique world merging elements of fantasy with a modern setting. A heavy inspiration by Japanese RPGs can be spotted everywhere: from the design of characters and monsters to the equipment and some story concepts.
Middara’s Act 1 came in a pretty heavy box including its 480 pages long Adventure Book, tons of minis, terrain tiles and card decks. According to the creators: the core game offers at least 80 hours of gameplay.
As there are no predefined classes, players are able to develop their characters in a huge amount of ways and create heroes that fit their playstyles best. The gameplay is story heavy and involves turn based, wargame inspired combat with a set of constantly evolving dice. Contrary to most games in the genre – failure doesn’t lead to restarting the scenario. Instead: your loss has a certain outcome and alters some future events. You keep progressing.
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What’s New in Middara’s Second Campaign
New stuff begins with 2 whole new acts – each coming in its own huge box. Both are supposed to offer about 40 hours of gameplay and include up to 40 miniatures as well as sets of completely new terrain tiles. Each act expands the story and continues the previous one. They also add more ways to experience the Crawl Mode, that worked as an alternative, more dungeon crawler like way to play the original.
New item cards expand your options when developing your character. Disciplines from old Act 1 got new levels to reach, which makes your heroes more versatile and stronger.
Apart from new acts, there are also “adventure expansions” available as well as some smaller ones called “micro adventures”. You can also get a bunch of additional side quests known as “bounty packs”. Finally: there are plenty of other add-ons: from art books, to new minis, player mats and more dice.
Kickstarter
So far Middara’s second campaign is doing incredibly good. After 1 day it’s already almost at 1.9 million USD and will without doubt reach numbers much, much higher. Shipping of this colossal project is planned in 2 waves with the final one coming by December 2021.
