I have an uneasy rumbling in my board game waters today, readers, and not just because I polished off the last of the sheep cards from Settlers of Catan for lunch. No, it’s because of the seriously good-looking game launched on Kickstarter today called Human Interface – Nakamura Tower. Yes, really. It’s got the lot – painstakingly-sculpted miniatures, sexy cyberpunk theme, and a unique combination of tactical, skirmish and roleplay games according to designers Postindustrial Games. It’s also within a whisker of hitting its £35,000 Kickstarter goal after just a few hours, with backers dropping upwards of £60 to bag a copy. The problem? We still know barely a thing about how the game plays.
HINT, as the designers term it, was first revealed in January, but three months and a string of incredibly pretty pictures later and we’re still pretty hazy on how the thing works. Labouring our way through the reams of marketing speak, we’ve got this. Players lead a team of characters with unique skills and abilities, who can be equipped with weapons, equipment and genetic ad cybernetic improvements. They move around a grid-based floorplan playing cards to perform actions both in cyberspace and in the real action. Also… actually, that’s basically all we have. The Kickstarter page adds, “The rules do not use any dice and the testing mechanics are based on cards that we call CanDo. The description on the card, its value and colour influence the final result of the test. The numerical value also states the location of a hit and additional effects connected to it.”
I don’t want to seem too down on the developers here, as they’ve clearly worked incredibly hard to make the game look as beautiful as it does. But for me, it needs to be more than just pretty to justify dropping £60 on it. Maybe I’m wrong, and we’ll be talking about HINT for decades as the cyberpunk board game which changed everything. I hope so. Here’s some more pictures from the Kickstarter, see if you can work out what the hell is going on.
