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• Designer Corné van Moorsel used to release one new title each year at SPIEL from his Cwali brand, and that was that, but over the past couple of years van Moorsel has migrated to using Kickstarter to sell games in advance to those who won't make it to the game fair in Essen, Germany (or to sell a title that otherwise might not make it to market, e.g., Factory Funner), and now he's using KS to make an out-of-print title available once again, with a second edition of his SPIEL 2016 Habitats on its way to funding right now. (KS link)
In Habitats, each player lays down tiles to build up their own animal park, ideally giving each animal the environment it prefers to make them happy and receive points in return.
• For a title coming at SPIEL in 2017, we can turn to Wendake from Danilo Sabia, Placentia Games, and Post Scriptum, with players representing the Wyandot People who lived in the Great Lakes region in the U.S. and Canada. The game is set in the mid-18th century, and players must manage all aspects of tribal life by choosing rows of action tiles in a grid, just as the Wyandot did at that time. (KS link)
• Till Engel's self-publisher Adellos is another potential SPIEL 2017 release, with players needing to manage their gold to hire twelve types of units to attack opponents and gain influence. (Startnext link)
• Wibbell++ is a game system that originated with the title Wibbell from designer Behrooz Shahriari and was then expanded upon by others creating their own games from this deck with cards that each depict two letters on them along with one of six border designs. Shahriari is funding a new edition of Wibbell++ through her Stuff By Bez brand, and one of the rewards is for her to create a game with you. (KS link) For a sampling of the games playable with the deck, here's an overview video I recorded with Shahriari at SPIEL 2016:
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• To continue with a section devoted to solitaire-friendly games, Pepper & Carrot: The Potion Contest from Guillermo H. Nuñez amd Loyalist Games challenges 1-4 players — or more if you have additional sets — to use orders to manipulate the 18 ingredients in their 3x6 grid to complete recipes quickly. (KS link)
• Shannon Kelly's Lucidity: Six-Sided Nightmares from Fox Tale Games is a press-your-luck game in which dice drawn represent your entry point into a world of nightmares. You can discard two dice to guide yourself down a dream path, but then you're at the mercy of the whatever awaits on the die faces — ideally the power symbols that you need to collect before you transform into a nightmare. (KS link)
• While this next project isn't a game, I would be remiss not to highlight Geoff Engelstein's GameTek: The Math and Science of Gaming, this being a written collection of more than seventy GameTek podcast segments from the past ten years, with the book totaling more than three hundred pages. You'll just have to imagine Geoff reading them to you. (KS link)
• Year six of Casual Game Insider magazine, which is meant to promote casual gaming in mainstream outlets, is also looking for funding. (KS link)
• Also not a game is designer Kenechukwu Ogbuagu's efforts to fund a second African Boardgame Convention "to introduce people to boardgaming and break the stereotypes about general tabletop gaming in Nigeria and other parts of Africa". A 12-hour game convention that's free to the public is what's at stake in this project. (Indiegogo link)
• Triplock from Adam and Josh J. Carlson and their Chip Theory Games sounds like an escape room game at first, but instead the players represent characters who are trying to manipulate tokens that collectively represent a lock box. The steampunk artwork is out of this world, and I wouldn't be surprised to find someone dressing as these characters at a future Gen Con. (KS link)
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• Similar sabotage efforts are required for Love Formula from Gwin Games and Japanime Games, with players in the role of matchmakers who want to couple up their customers to perfection while ruining the potential dates arranged by their competitors. (KS link)
• Yet more sabotage is the order of the day in Philip Loyer's Short Order Hero from Wyvern Gaming as you're working at a greasy diner with other hash-slingers and are determined to look better than them, whether through actually providing dishes that customers want or befouling the offerings of others. (KS link)
• Damn the Man, Save the Music! by Hannah Shaffer is described as a "tabletop roleplaying game", but I think that's simply because you'll be playing it on a horizontal surface. No matter — this project struck a chord with me, so I'm including it anyway. The short description: "Damn the Man is a single-session game inspired by movies like Empire Records and Clerks, and by a love for bygone '90s music" in which you make "a last-ditch effort to save something you love. Play a ragtag group of underachievers, overachievers, street philosophers, and lovestruck artists united by one cause: to rescue your record store from the oppressive hand of The Man… and to keep the music playing." (KS link)
• In Rival Realms, Alf Seegert and Eagle-Gryphon Games return to the land of Fantastiqa for a head-to-head match of magicians who must summon lands, creatures, artifacts and more in order to complete quests and explore regions of the world. (KS link)
• Kwanchai Moriya has presented us with his spin on how raccoons like to party in Trash Pandas, coming from Michael and Lisa Eskue through their Red Rook Games studio. In the game, you need to tip over trash cans to try to acquire food and other things that raccoons adore, then stash them in a safe place so that no one else finds them. (KS link)
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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
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