Crowdfunding Round-up: Drum Roll, Emperor's New Clothes, Karesansui, Baldrick's Tomb & Kolossus

In Drum Roll each player takes over the role of a circus owner in the early 1900s. Each player moves around Europe hiring performers and giving shows.

There are five main categories of performers: the Tamers, the Acrobats, the Bizarre, the Magicians, and the Jugglers. Each of them have different demands the player must fulfill in order to give their best performance. The requirements, which vary between performers, are Rehearsal, Equipment, Supplies, Costumes, and Promotion. There are three levels of performances that each performer can end up doing in a show: a poor one, a good one, and an outstanding one. The higher the level of performance, the more requirements each performer will have to fulfill in order to achieve it.

The better the performance, the more each player can get out of it. When performers do outstanding performances, the player must choose between getting the maximum amount of benefit out of them, or getting the Prestige Points they are offering. There are also other ways to improve a circus such as trailers, investments, and personnel that will help your performers do their best.

In Emperor's New Clothes, players take on roles, and each role card indicates the types of resources (and sets of resources) required to score points. Dice are rolled (three rolls per turn) to acquire resources, and cards may be played by the active player and opponents to affect dice rolls, card plays, etc.

After each player has had a chance to roll, the roles are revealed and resources are turned in for points.

[Y]ou're right – it IS a crazy art project, but it is also something that you can actually play, and backers actually WILL get a copy of the game.

There's a bunch of other stuff behind the project, and the obvious "hoax" is only the first layer, the one that weeds out those who aren't interested in thinking more deeply about it. I'm hoping that backers will find the experience richly rewarding by the end.

As Grade Two monastery initiates in Karesansui – the cutthroat game of Zen gardening – it will be your great honor to tend the Masters' rock gardens. Each morning the Grade Ones arrive with rocks they've gathered, then haul away the rocks that you don't need anymore – but there aren't enough Grade One initiates to go around, so there will be competition for the best selection of rocks. The Grade Ones will give their new rocks to whoever gives them the fewest old rocks to haul away.

Keep in mind while creating your garden, however, that certain combinations of rocks must be avoided! Every afternoon, the Feng Shui Masters come by to check your work. You'll receive demerits for any forbidden combinations – but you'll also receive demerits for your laziness if you don't add new stones each day, so you must find a balance.

The Masters' final evaluation will come with no advance warning. The Initiate who has the fewest demerits will advance to Grade Three, while the one with the most demerits will be kicked down to Grade One, joining the others in the daily search for new rocks...

Baldrick's Tomb is a roguelike board game for 2-4 players. The game takes place in a four-story, underground tomb that is constantly being churned from the inside out by the late sorcerer Baldrick. The locations of everything – including treasures, traps, monsters, and even the exits – are completely randomized for every game as a result of Baldrick smashing the crypt to bits. The players are tasked with making their way down to the bottom of this tomb, collecting a precious treasure, then climbing back out.

But this is really only a means to an end. The real reason for a group of treasure hunters to explore a dangerous tomb is so that they can (hopefully) acquire heaps of treasure. Players will use their wit, push their luck, and call upon powerful scrolls to help themselves and hinder others, all in the pursuit of treasure points. The player who makes it out of the tomb with the most points wins.

In the days when the world was still young, a race appeared full of splendor, dignity and beauty. They lived in harmony with their world and the power of their artifacts flowed through everyone and everything. Thus it happened that they isolated the mysterious essence of time itself and put it in twelve mighty crystals to keep it there. In the center of a hovering island, they created the enormous Citadel of Time where they used the pulsing power of the crystals to find out what was, what is and what will be to change the way of the universe.

For milleniums, this sign was anticipated and dreaded. Darkness fell over the island as two of the four suns eclipsed. The colossuses would come to posses the astral body of their creator. The Citadel of Time would fall...

In Kolossus, each player starts at one corner of the world with five warriors, two guardians, and one mighty colossus, with players pairing into alliances. The creatures have different strengths and abilities to move across the map, and using their abilities wisely is the key to success. With the use of mana, players can enhance their creatures' abilities to make them harder to beat or to hit stronger.

The aim of the players is to reach the Citadel of Time and control it as long as possible because the alliance controlling the Citadel receives a time crystal for every turn it does so. To win, an alliance needs to have the most time crystals at the end of the game or to expel all creatures from one side from the island.