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• Jon Mietling's Palm Island from Portal Dragon is another entry in the short list of games that you can play without needing a table. Each player has a deck of seventeen cards, and you use those cards to play and upgrade other cards in your hand, transforming your deck over eight rounds. This is essentially a one-player game, but enough cards are included for two player to compete, and additional decks allow even more to play. (KS link)
• Dávid Turczi's Dice Settlers from NSKN Games is another title that BGG got a brief look at while at the Spielwarenmesse 2018 fair. (KS link) A short description of the game is already on the BGG page — "a civilization dice game of pool building, resource gathering and area control" — while a slightly longer description can be acquired from watching this overview:
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• Another game for 1-3 players being funded now is Donning the Purple from Petter Schanke Olsen and Tompet Games, and while you might think (or want) this game to be about impersonating Prince, instead you are a family in ancient Rome that is trying to push itself to the top of the ruling structure, at which point everyone will be gunning 4 U. (KS link)
• James Campbell's Into the Black: Boarding Party from I Will Never Grow Up is "a semi-cooperative space pirate dungeon crawl with a hidden traitor element" that's on its third run through Kickstarter and on the verge of being funded as I write this. (KS link)
• Chibi Commander from Markus Geiger looks like a labor of love, with players working together to defend the Earth against invading aliens — or with one of them just trying to take the Earth for themselves. (KS link)
• Peak Oil: Spillover is a mini-expansion for Peak Oil from Tobias Gohrbandt, Heiko Günther, and 2Tomatoes that adds variant cards to the base game (along with four tokens) to provide more variability to the game, as one might expect of variant cards. (KS link)
• Darwinning! from Timo Multamäki, Tiinaliisa Multamäki, Nikolas Lundström Patrakka, and Dragon Dawn Productions is a 2-6 player trick-taking game in which you try to improve the characteristics of your species as you collect cards. If nothing else, it has a great portmanteau of a name. (KS link) We recorded an overview video while at the Spielwarenmesse 2018 fair should you want to see how it works:
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• Brett Sobol and Seth Van Orden of Nauvoo Games landed a license for Brandon Sanderson's The Reckoners, a trilogy of young adult superhero novels in which the characters fight super-powered "Epics". Now you can do the same in this co-op game for 1-6 players, with multiple Epics being included for you to fight. (KS link)
• Nick Little and Kevin Riley are going bigger with Aeon's End: Legacy from Indie Boards & Cards, a standalone game that integrates with the other Aeon's End titles and allows you to create characters that can be brought into those existing worlds, which is a cool take on how legacy games can be used. (KS link)
• Someone told me recently that you can never go wrong with selling dice at a game convention because fans feel that they can never have too many dice. The same seems to be true for fancy metal gaming coins as those having increasingly proliferated at cons, with Drawlab Entertainment now funding their third season of "Legendary Metal Coins". You've got to spend money to make money... (KS link)
• Let's close with another video overview of a game crowdfunding in process, although this video was recorded in early 2017 for what was then titled "Batman: The Boardgame". The final product will be Batman: Gotham City Chronicles, with this Frédéric Henry and Monolith title being exclusively available through Kickstarter (and perhaps at conventions direct from the publisher) because, as the publisher points out on the project page, "we had to lower our selling price [on Conan] to the distributor so much that we did not make any money on this". (KS link)
The project has racked up more than $2 million in backing, with nearly ten thousand people signed on as I write this, so maybe they've gone the right route with this project. Sell directly, then don't worry about distribution later. Your headaches will vanish once you've shipped out that last box sometime in the middle of 2019, and you can finally close the books on this project. We'll see in time, I suppose. As for the game, well, you can see what Monolith had to present twelve months ago here:
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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