Crowdfunding Round-up: Battle Strike Slaughter for Afflicted Monster Demons

• Monster Slaughter from Henri Pym and Ankama might suffer from a bit of confusion given the title as the monsters are not being slaughtered but are the ones doing the slaughtering, with the victims being the teenagers that we've all seen in horror movies since the 1980s and with the players trying to off the teens in a certain order to score the most points. Gruesome stuff that's lightened somewhat by the 3D box bottom that functions like a child's dollhouse — except that all the slaughtering takes place within those walls, so the gruesomeness still abounds! (KS link)

For more details on the game, check out the game overview I recorded at the Cannes game festival in February 2017:

• I meant to check out Li Hsiao En's Dragon Canyon at SPIEL '17 as Sweet Lemon Publishing was working on a new version of this Chinese release from 2016, but as often happens at SPIEL, I didn't. Now it's being crowdfunded, so we can all learn about this skirmish game that requires temporary alliances on the path to long-term dominance of the kingdom. (KS link)

• Another battling game on KS right now is Shadow Strike: Melee from Benjamin, Buel, Muckell, and Pure Fun Games, with the game challenging you to knock out others while being able to see only the cards that they play and not your own. (KS link)

• Yet another battling game is Chris Faulkenberry's Battle for Biternia from Stone Circle Games, which marries the familiar 8-bit look of old video games with the battle arenas present in modern video games. (KS link)

• Demons: The 9th Circle of Hell UNLEASHED from Aaron Antonich of Award Winning Games has not won any awards of which I am aware, and the description — a "card based, role playing, kingdom building, adventure game with dice" that has "Replay Value out the wazoo" — sounds overly optimistic, and the art isn't doing anything for me, but the game has cleared its low $5k bar, so I guess it will be coming to print in the future. How about that? (KS link)

• In the same spiritual realm as Demons, we have Sorcerer, a deck-building game that Peter Scholtz started designing in 2012 before eventually connecting with White Wizard Games, which is stepping out of its small box, Star Realms comfort zone to publish this larger game. The gist of the game is that you battle opponents to capture battlefields, but the hook is that before play you create your character RPG-style by combining three separate decks, which determine the spells you can cast, minions you can summon, and enchanted items you can use. (KS link)

We recorded an overview of Sorcerer at the 2017 GAMA Trade Show, but even before that we recorded a 16-minute overview with Scholtz and White Wizard's Rob Dougherty at SPIEL '16, a video that I have only just now found in our queue and published. (You wouldn't believe how much stuff I have in the hopper that's not published. Time is the enemy...)

• If you don't want to build decks, you can build dice with Kapow! from Bogucki, Hettrick, Van Ostrand, and L4 Studios, with this being a dice-building game along the lines of Rattlebones, except that you're a super-powered individual who wants to thrash another such person. (KS link)

• And if neither decks nor dice are your thing, you can build a bag instead in Chris Peach's Tabula Rasa from Kid Loves Tiger Games, an adventure game in which you customize your own bag of crystals to power actions or allow for specialized abilities as you attempt to reseal barriers to unstoppable evil. (KS link)

• Another adventure game is on its second KS go-round for a reprint, this being Folklore: The Affliction from Nick Blain, Will Donovan, and Greenbrier Games, which originally funded to the tune of $500k in 2015. (KS link)

• A game making a longer trip between printings is Medieval, a Richard H. Berg design from 2003 in which you attempt to control various parts of Europe that's been entirely retooled for its new edition from HGN Games. (KS link)

• At SPIEL '17 I received a quick rundown of Kai Herbertz's Albedo from his own Herbertz Entertainment UG, a sci-fi deck-builder that lets you flip cards around to use the side that works best for you in whatever situation you're currently confronting. (KS link)

• We'll close with something that isn't a game at all, but rather the raw materials of such: the Board Game Creative Kit from Polish publisher Games Factory. Should you feel like designing a game, yet don't want to get crafty or tear apart the games you own to scavenge them for parts, you can instead spring for this kit, then scavenge it. (KS link)

Editor's note: Please don't post links to other Kickstarter projects in the comments section. Write to me via the email address in the header, and I'll consider them for inclusion in a future crowdfunding round-up. Thanks! —WEM