GenCon 2013 - Ogre Unboxing

For better than a year now, I've been eagerly awaiting receipt of my copy of one of the largest Kickstarter fund-raisers - OGRE Designer's Edition. Though I had never played the game before, I was as peripherally aware of it as any gamer my age and knew of its "cultural" significance, and the Designer's Edition evoked a certain amount of nostalgia in me, not for the game itself, but for the period in gaming that it represented. Coupled with what looked to be some pretty impressive components, this game became one of the first of the numerous successful Kickstarters on whose bandwagon I would jump.


Those of you aware of just how successful this Kickstarter was, and the logistical and manufacturing obstacles Steve Jackson Games began to encounter in producing the large number of stretch goal add-ons to an already complicated initial product, know that the period since the close of this fund-raiser has seen numerous delays in the release of this game. Though this has since become almost the default expectation for such projects, especially such successful ones, Ogre was early enough that this resulted in no end of hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing by its supporters (though I suppose that's the case even now, when experience should be instructing backers of new Kickstarters to scale back their expectations).

As a treat for the backers that were at the convention, Steve Jackson Games held an impromptu unboxing event of a complete copy of the game the Wednesday night of GenCon.  As I believe these pictures of the event show, the wait was more than worth it, even though I know they don't do nearly enough to convey just how cool this product was in hand.

As you can see here, each game comes in it's own shipping case and this one was wheeled in on a dolly.  That's because each one weighs more than 20 pounds!  Much fun was had as backers were invited to come up to the front of the room to pick up the box and experience just how much game they were getting.

Popping the lid off the game, Phil and the other Steve Jackson guys proceeded to pull out sheet after sheet of counters.  Allegedly there are over 1000 in the game (with a 3D Ogre, as you'll see below, constructed from numerous individual pieces, counting as one counter)!  With the way the sheets were bundled together, "bricks of counters" is probably a more apt description.

The box for the game dwarfing my torso - and I'm not a short man by any stretch of the imagination.

An example of a fully constructed 3d Ogre counter.  There are a bunch of these, representing all of the various Ogre marks, as well as dozens of tanks, hovercraft, command posts, etc.  What's especially great about the design of the game is that the box contains a plastic insert with homes for all of these models to be stored in their fully-constructed form.  So no need to break them down between games and no worry that their spindly pieces will be snapped off.

I'm not sure when our backer copies are supposed to arrive, but I know that I'm very much looking forward to getting mine (even if they said that it took two employees 4 hours to punch out and put together all of the counters for the game!).