Crowdfunding Round-up: Blocky Mountains, Cave Evil, Abeja Reina, Chex, Gettysburg: The Tide Turns & I Am Zombie

Blocky Mountains is a dexterity game playable with 2-4 players in either a cooperative or competitive manner or as a solo game. The core of the game consists of 3D landscapes that you build with large wooden blocks, after which you try to maneuver a large wooden pawn ("the adventurer") over this course.

In competitive play, you want to be the first to reach the mountain summit on the score track, and to do so you must master several challenges. Each challenge consists of a parcours built out of the wooden blocks according to the challenge card you draw randomly from three piles: A - C, from easy to difficult. After having built the landscape course, you have to push, pull, lift, slide or swing the "adventurer" from the start to the end block. This adventurer has a metal eye on top, and you move it with a wooden pole with a hook at its end. Some challenges require an intermediate string between pole and pawn, while others require both hands to simultaneously move pawn and grizzly bear, the bear being another wooden piece. A third kind of piece to be moved is food, which you "kick" with the adventurer.

When you master the challenge, the next player decides whether to change to the next parcours or try to master the same one again. Depending on the difficulty of the challenge, your piece can move 1-3 steps toward the summit. If you lose track, fall down, or lose your food, you have lost this challenge and must move backward! The game includes other details – e.g., owls and squirrel tokens for managing your skills and special actions – but this is more or less the whole game.

"The living dug out cities for their dead – necropolises deep within the earth. They filled the caverns with bodies and locked them away from the upper air. Eventually the dead forgot the living – if any remain.

But in death, a new life began. The breath of evil from the darkness of complete shadow stirred corrupted flesh. In their middens and pits, the dead awakened, swarming through slime-fluxing tunnels, seeking chthonic power, warring with demons and denizens of the deep. Animated by the black flame, necro-ecologies rose and collapsed in the crypt-universe. Now, cloistered undead lich-wizards have discovered the primordial opening to the shadow source, the doleful horror-hole where the Eternal Evil Emperor watches and waits...

The necromancers have dug their Lairs deep into the ground. They must gather precious resources and body parts to assemble an army of minions, while defending their own lairs from the excavations and intrusions of others. In the end, the only route is into the demon path...

Then depletion of your essence leads to spending another eternity in foul sepulchral darkness awaiting the next Awakening of Death."

In Cave Evil, each player takes the role of an ancient Necromancer. Located deep within an earth, their Necropolises have now merged, each seeking the Darkest Pit, the location of all evil. The dark wizards must build minions with precious resources from their Lairs to send forth and destroy, or dig further tunnels to locate other creatures, resources or to ambush another sorcerer.

The game is won when only one remaining Necromancer stands. A Necromancer can be destroyed by combat, or an enemy minion may venture into their Lair and crush the wizard's shadow power, a Chthonic Crystal – but an even greater darkness may befall the players. As they build and destroy creatures, the Dark Pit absorbs the shadowflame and may awaked the ultimate Cave Evil.

I Am Zombie is a role-playing game of horror and survival set in a twisted version of the modern world, layered with secrets and mysteries. However, this is a world of rationality and science, not fantasy and magic.

You are a Toxic, a victim of an age-old disease: the Scourge. The cycles of your life revolve around picking up and getting rid of Odium, a by-product of that which ravages your body. Odium build-up threatens to transform you into a mindless zombie – a Skag – whilst granting physical prowess. You might be half-dead, but if you control your Odium, you can retain your humanity, at least some of time.

When your Odium is high you start to rot and decay, accumulating syndromes – symptoms of various human diseases: a bad rash, blotchy skin, boils, gangrene, and even necrosis. When Odium is absent, such as after the ritual of Purgis, you will look nearly human and the best possible version of yourself. For a few days you can live like a rock star, but then, inevitably, you decline again.

Running a game is made easy and intuitive with most booking eliminated. But unlike other lean game systems, this game is not just about "storytelling" (although that's a big part of it). I Am Zombie incorporates many gameplay elements and has a great deal of strategic decision making. This is a deliberate attempt to perhaps bring a new style to role-playing: simple but elegant rules that give the player a board game experience without getting bogged down by the old school minutiae of charts, indexes and rule exceptions.