The Maelstrom's Edge Kickstarter from Spiral Arm Studios users has begun over the weekend and it's already burst through its target goal and is now looking ahead to stretch goals! Don't forget we also got a look at this game a few weeks ago HERE that has loads of information about the background and more...

What's In The Box?

As you can see above you get two armies within this box amongst a plethora of different tokens and templates to play the game of Maelstrom's Edge with. Both the Epirians...

...and the Karist Enclave are looking great and as well as the basic troops that we've seen before you get some cool drones/creatures with them to give you different options on the battlefield.

As well as the pictured troops and such above you will also get an extra model that is still in production at the moment. The Epirians get themselves a Bot Handler for their Robots while the Karist Enclave have the deadly looking Shadow Walker (pictured below).

The Bot Handler deals with the Robots that you can see above and can call in Drone Strikes onto the table allowing you to take down enemies from afar and cover your advancing troops. The Shadow Walker by comparison does a bit more of the stealthy stuff and will be infiltrating behind enemy lines with those nasty blades.

...and last but not least are all the various tokens for the game which remind me a lot of the kind of tokens and terrain you might have seen in older Games Workshop boxed sets.

What's The Game About?

Maelstrom's Edge  is...

"In the far future, a golden age of exploration and progress has been shattered. Humanity and alien alike are on the very edge of annihilation. A gigantic apocalyptic explosion of dark energy known as the Maelstrom is rapidly expanding out from the heart of the galaxy, destroying everything it touches. As worlds and stars on the Maelstrom's Edge are obliterated, those who have the means flee towards deep space, while those left behind fight for the chance to escape."

...which brings us onto some points they raised on the Kickstarter page. If you're interested in the rules then you can check them out HERE for download.

• A Believable Universe – Increasingly in science fiction there has been a push towards grittier, more believable settings, but few games have embraced this style of fiction. We wanted a universe that was morally complex and populated with flawed characters – the technology may have changed, but mankind still faces the same problems it always has.

• High-stakes – The design of both the Maelstrom’s advance and the relative difficulty of interstellar travel means that it is intentionally impossible for everyone to escape its destructive clutches. Worlds do not have the time or resources to evacuate everyone before they are destroyed. This forces the characters in our universe to confront cold, hard choices about what they do in the face of this implacable enemy – do they run, or try to save as many others as they can? Do they fight for the last remaining ships, or loot the helpless? By forcing humanity into such a difficult position, we want to encourage nuanced, morally grey decisions and characters.

• Morally ambiguous – With the initial design goal to create a miniatures game where players would battle a number of different factions against each other, we wanted each of these factions to have a legitimate reason for conflict. There is no absolute good or evil faction in Maelstrom’s Edge – each organisation has its own understandable motives for the way it acts. We have also made sure to include friction within each organisation, to allow fights both between different factions and between splinter groups within each of them - so that if you and your opponent turn up with armies from the same faction, there's a logical reason why they might be fighting each other!

• Scientifically rigorous – With believability key, we tried to keep the universe as rooted in the laws of physics as possible, whilst ensuring that when we did invent new things such as faster-than-light travel through the cybel network and alien lifeforms like the Angels, we constructed them to be internally consistent and believable. We want to avoid magic, psychics and other deus ex machina events unless backed up by a plausible scientific or technological explanation.

• Unique – we wanted to avoid copying the over-used tropes of science fiction and create a universe that felt different to those that had come before. All our factions are carefully designed to avoid relying on a single source of inspiration from either fictional or historical influences. Maelstrom’s Edge is set in such a distant epoch that much of where humanity came from has been forgotten.

...which all sounds very impressive to us!

Stretch Goals

With the target goal beaten it's time to look at the stretch goals for this campaign and it starts with the Kaddar Nova character which is a leader unit within the Karist Enclave...

...followed by the surprise announcement of some Plastic Terrain in the works which makes some very impressive looking buildings as you'll see below.

"Maelstrom's Edge is a fairly terrain heavy game, with many tactical options focused on units having access to nearby cover. We have developed a large sprue of terrain elements which you can affix to a box, cardboard, foam core or just paint up as scraps to create multiple buildings and scatter terrain for your battlefield. This stretch goal will add one terrain sprue to every The Maelstrom Rises level and above. If you are not a gamer, these are also fantastic for adding instant depth to dioramas and displays for your models."

There seems to be quite a lot to look forward to with this Kickstarter so keep an eye on it!

Good luck to the Maelstrom's Edge team!