• Okay, that was a failure. How about Dark Dealings: Dwarven Delve from Peter Gousis, Michael D. Kelley, and Nevermore Games, with this being an expansion to Dark Dealings, a game in which you're an evil overlord under siege by heroes. The expansion moves the action underground, with you now trying to ward off eviction by dwarves through the use of "goblin- and troll-powered defenses". (KS link)
• War of the Nine Realms from Robbie Munn and Wotan Games is unlikely to be combat free unless someone has grossly miscalculated what to title their game, and indeed this tile-based game pits players against one another in tactical skirmishes, with players using the powers of different realms, each with their own characters and abilities, with each realm also having a choice of heroic (raw power) and epic (tactical advantages) play styles. (KS link)
• Hey, here's a combat-free crowdfunding project! Hang 12 from Tim Roediger and Grail Games is a press-your-luck party game in which during each round you're presented with a question about one of your fellow players. You answer this question with "true/false" or "A/B" depending on the type of question; if you guess correctly, you start a scoring wave of 1 point or increase the value of your current scoring wave, while if you guess incorrectly, your wave crashes and you'll have to start surfing anew. Instead of answering, you can score your current surf, and whoever scores 24 points first wins. (KS link)
• Another party game looking for funding comes from Andrea Meyer of BeWitched Spiele, who has a new expansion for her singing-based game Hossa! titled Hossa! Lobgesang (translated as "Hossa! Canticle"), with this consisting of cards that depict 64 items and categories from the world of religious songs. Meyer notes that in response to requests from choir leaders, she's printing the material on postcard-sized cards and laminating them so that they can be used outside by large groups. (Startnext link)
• Loot & Recruit from Derek, Justin, and Stephanie Lynch and Vile Genius Games is a deck-building design in which players acquire action cards and goblins, then attempt to stack goblins and defend said goblin stacks while knocking down the stacks of others. (KS link)
• Kokoro: Avenue of the Kodama marries the look of Daniel Solis' Kodama: The Tree Spirits with the gameplay of Eilif Svensson and Kristian Amundsen Østby's Avenue, which was released by Aporta Games at SPIEL 2016. This design features the same gameplay as Avenue on the A-side of its game board — with path cards being revealed turn by turn so that players can attempt to connect buildings on the board, with each path needing to be more valuable than the previous one so that you can continue scoring — while the B-side has a variable set-up that gives you new starting configurations. Additional scoring tweaks come through decree cards that have been added to the game. (KS link)
• Brandon Tibbetts' The Manhattan Project from Minion Games has been well-received, and now the design team has moved the action forward two decades with The Manhattan Project 2: Minutes to Midnight, with players representing superpowers that need to develop deployment systems for their nuclear weapons. Scoring takes place four times during the game, with players needing to manage strategic bombers, ballistic submarines, ICBMs, and short-range missiles deployed to third world nations. (KS link)
• Rory O'Connor of The Creativity Hub has been publishing Rory's Story Cubes for more than a decade, with the dice meant to encourage and develop storytelling skills in whoever picks them up (assuming that picking them up is followed by rolling them, then telling a story). Now O'Connor has teamed with John Fiore on Untold: Adventures Await, a larger storytelling game in which you can use any and all Story Cubes to tell a grand story that goes through the highs and lows of classic stories. (KS link)
• In the more traditional dice-based game Project Nos from Peter Newland of Mind the Gap Studios, players draft modification dice and cards, then compete in a real-time drag race — on their table, mind you. (KS link)
• Dutch publisher Quined Games is crowdfunding the SPIEL 2017 release of Angelo de Maio's Halloween, a game that challenges you to be the best demon lord that you can be, with that task requiring you to make use of ghosts in the best ways possible. (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