Street Masters: Champion Edition is Coming to Kickstarter | 10 Years of Steamforged

Round Two… Fight! 

As we recently announced in our 10-year anniversary kick-off video, we’re bringing Street Masters back to Kickstarter for a 14-day showdown, including a whole new expansion! 

Introducing Street Masters: Champion Edition — the definitive version that wraps up all the good stuff from previous campaigns, debuts a brand new expansion titled Lament of the Blood Moon, and provides a way for Tide of the Dragon backers to finally get their hands on what they've been waiting for.

• If you’re here to find out when it launches, the date is February 21, and you can follow the Kickstarter here to get notified when it goes live. 
• If you’re wondering what the heck Street Masters is, why we’re doing a Champion Edition, and want to know more about the new expansion, read on to find out. 
• And if you’re a backer of the Tide of the Dragon campaign run by Blacklist Games who’s looking for answers, we’ve got a detailed update for you at the end of this post, and we want to thank you again for your patience while we worked out all the details.

What is Street Masters?

Street Masters is a 1-4 player cooperative combat board game designed by Adam and Brady Sadler (The Walking Dead: No Sanctuary, Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game, Altar Quest). 

Inspired by beat ‘em up fighting video games (like Double Dragon, Streets of Rage, and Final Fight), Street Masters combines all the bare-knuckles neon beauty of classic side-scrollers with tactical, card-driven combat to deliver serious challenges, engaging fights, and hours of replayability! 

Play in Arcade Mode for intense single-session fights, where you’ll choose your fighter, choose your stage, and jump into the action against unique enemy gangs and formidable final bosses. Or, play through full narrative campaigns over multiple sessions, where your victories, defeats, and decisions will help you uncover the Street Masters lore, levelling up your fighters’ skills along the way. What secrets can you pound out of your enemies? Only one way to find out!

What is Street Masters: Champion Edition?

For the background on Steamforged acquiring Street Masters, check out this post.

Now that Street Masters is part of the Steamforged family, Steamforged product owner and game designer, Sherwin Matthews (Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3 board games, and more) has taken the helm, working closely with the Sadler brothers. 

If you’re wondering what the Champion Edition is and how it relates to the previous Street Masters games, Sherwin is here to explain:

“Street Masters was always designed to be a modular system, and across three crowdfunding campaigns, already has a wealth of expansion content, adding a plethora of new fighters, enemies, bosses, and stages. Obviously amazing, but also as daunting as facing an end-of-level-boss for anyone new coming into the game. To give some context, when we counted up just the unique miniatures — not including the multiples — we were in triple digits.

So, when it came to the new Kickstarter campaign, we wanted to make the back catalogue as accessible and user-friendly as possible. Thus, Street Masters: Champion Edition was born. The contents of the previous crowdfunding campaigns will be available in a series of Collector’s boxes, which contain all of the content from the corresponding campaign.

You can see them below—and if you’re anything like me, you’ll immediately fall in love with the fantastic love-letters our talented graphic designer, Elliott Smith, has created. Those of you who know me from our previous projects will already know how close retro video games are to my heart, and Street Masters most certainly meets that criteria. I can’t begin to tell you how many hours I’ve lost in arcades and on consoles playing side-scrolling beat ‘em ups, including a start-to-finish session of Final Fight at last year’s Christmas party with Elliott. 

Working on Street Masters is a dream come true for both of us!”

So, Street Masters returns in a new Champion Edition, bringing together all of Street Masters and its expansions in easy to collect, store, and play releases that capture all the raw adrenaline and excitement from the fight against the Kingdom and the streets of Ransom City!

Lament of the Blood Moon

But Street Masters: Champion Edition doesn’t just consolidate the existing game into three thrilling titles. This new edition also includes a brand new expansion, Street Masters IV: Lament of the Blood Moon, featuring thirteen brand new minions, three new ally/rivals, and two deadly new bosses, as well as new stages and story decks!

In the aftermath of the Kingdom’s defeat, the world has become a far safer place. No longer united in purpose by shadowy overlords, the world’s gangs have been shattered and retreated into the darkness to lick their wounds. But is all as it seems?

Now the dust has settled, powerful new players emerge into the world stage, and none more enigmatic than the leader of a vast empire carved in blood across Japan, known only to her rivals as the Blood Moon. With each passing day, yet more gangs bend the knee to this new mysterious figure, carrying out her orders with brutal efficiency.

Can you confront and destroy this emerging threat to the known world, before she gains enough power to seize the throne of the shattered Kingdom, and turns her attention from rival gangs to the vulnerable world beyond?

Remember your training. Fight hard, using all your cunning and guile, and you too can stand triumphant, a global gladiator with your hand raised in victory!

Street Masters: Champion Edition launches February 21 on Kickstarter. Click here to get notified!

Update for Tide of the Dragon Backers

“Street Masters: Champion Edition is our love-letter to this much-loved game series and to the genre, and our hope is that it will be an exciting new release for fans new and old. But, putting our more sensible hats on for a moment, it’s also a way for us to reach out to the group of Tide of the Dragon Indiegogo campaign backers who never received their pledges from Blacklist Games, the studio that previously published Street Masters. We see you, and we want to help.” - Sherwin

If you’re a backer of the Indiegogo Tide of the Dragon campaign who’s waiting for your pledge, first off, we want to thank you for your patience. As we explained in our last post, it’s taken some time for us to untangle the status of production and explore shipping solutions. 

As well as letting us expand the Street Masters universe with Lament of the Blood Moon, the upcoming Kickstarter also gives us a way to get your Indiegogo pledge to you, without needing to charge you any additional fees, by shipping it to you alongside a Champion Edition pledge.

How will it work?

If you back the upcoming Street Masters: Champion Edition Kickstarter — whether for the new expansion, backfilling gaps in your collection, or both — then we can ship your Indiegogo pledge along with your Champion Edition pledge at no additional cost. Your shipping fee for Champion Edition is the only shipping charge you’ll need to pay.

What if I don’t back the new Kickstarter? Will I still get my pledge?

The short answer is yes, you’ll still receive your pledge. You do not have to back the new campaign to get your pledge.

In this case, because we can’t subsidise the shipping cost by combining your Indiegogo pledge with a Champion Edition pledge, we will need to collect a contribution towards the shipping cost. We’ll do this when we open the Champion Edition pledge manager, which you’ll get an email invite to. This will also give you a way to update your shipping address if it’s changed since the Indiegogo campaign. 

What if I’m still waiting for replacements for my Aftershock pledge?

We’ve been passed a list by Blacklist Games of outstanding replacement requests from the Aftershock Kickstarter that were due to be fulfilled as part of the Indiegogo campaign. If you’re one of the people on this list, the same will apply as for the Indiegogo backers.

We understand this has been a frustrating situation with a historical lack of communication, and we want to thank you again for your patience while we stepped in and worked this out. 

This is the latest update we have right now. The next step will happen after the Kickstarter when the pledge manager launches, which will be toward the end of April / beginning of May. We’ll share an update on the exact date closer to the time. And if you’d like to come and chat with us in the meantime, you can find us (including Sherwin) in the Steamforged Discord.