The SCP Foundation is getting a board game, with SCP The Boardgame: Confidential Crisis launching on Gamefound on September 13. This is the second time studio DigDeep has brought this concept to crowdfunding - after cancelling a Kickstarter in 2021.
In this cooperative board game, you'll be managing special agents, upgrading your security clearance, uncovering map tiles, and encountering dangerous monsters in order to complete the objectives of your selected story scenario.
SCP is best known from the video game Containment Breach but it's originally a collaborative fiction writing website, where fans submit articles about supernatural entities captured and held by a shadowy Foundation.
As with most related fan works, the SCP board game seems to focus on the very early SCPs, mostly the first 1,000 (there are now more than 8,000 on the SCP Wiki). There's two main reasons why the first series SCPs get all the attention, one being that they include some of the most famous monsters like the 'hard to kill lizard' SCP-682. Later SCP articles also tend to be much more complex - rather than simply being a thing that kills you - which makes them harder to turn into gameable content.
I have to say, as much as I personally have been a big fan of SCP in the past, I'm a little wary of this project. The minis are decent, but otherwise the game's presentation is a pretty mixed bag - even the trailer effects feel quite janky.
It doesn't help that the Kickstarter four years ago saw some controversy, with backers accusing the developers of writing fake positive comments. At the time, the studio apologized for making "foolish mistakes" and doing "something horribly wrong".
DigDeep certainly gives the impression of being a young and scrappy team. This Gamefound campaign was actually delayed by months so it could produce prototypes, after initial commenters complained that copies hadn't been sent out to reviewers. I guess the question is, is it young and scrappy with a good game behind it?
We can't answer that question ourselves, but those prototypes did reach content creators, and now at least one lengthy playthrough can be found online.
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