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Crowdfunding Round-up: Dwarven Minis, Alien Minis, Monster Minis, Knights Minis & Wooden Wombats

Crowdfunding Round-up: Dwarven Minis, Alien Minis, Monster Minis, Knights Minis & Wooden Wombats
Board Game: The Dwarves
Board Game: The Dwarves: The Saga Expansion
• Three years after debuting on the German market, Michael Palm and Lukas Zach's The Dwarves from Pegasus Spiele — a cooperative game based on Markus Heitz' five-book series of the same name — is finally coming to the English-language game market thanks to the introduction of Kickstarter in Germany. (KS link)

While announcing this project, Pegasus marketing director Michael Kränzle wrote, "For you it is a small thing maybe; for us it is huge as Kickstarter Germany just launched today and made it legally possible for companies over here to be part of their global crowdfunding community." Modern day Oprah: "You get a Kickstarter campaign! And you get a Kickstarter campaign! And you get a Kickstarter campaign! Everybody gets a Kickstarter campaign!!"

In addition to the base game, Pegasus is offering (in both English and German) The Dwarves: The Saga Expansion, which adds new components, adventures, quests and game boards to the base game.

Board Game: Samara
• In addition to the Germans on Kickstarter we have Dutch designer/publisher Corné van Moorsel from Cwali with Samara, a worker placement game of sorts in which time is represented by a time track below the buildings and other things that workers can spend their time on. Once all the workers in the current month have been assigned tasks, you slide the time track to the next month to see who can work now. (KS link)

• Salvation Road from Peter Gousis, Michael D. Kelley and Van Ryder Games is, according to this light-hearted description from the publisher, "a cooperative game for 1-4 players set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by famine, pestilence, war, and death." (KS link) Would that someone create a game set thirty years in the future that features a non-post-apocalyptic world much like this one (except for the neckjacks) in which everyone's just worried about keeping their job and finding the right college for their daughter Becky? (Everyone's named Becky in the future.)

• Of course a glance at the subtitle of Harbour Bridges from Matthew Thredgold and Ludogix — "The Bridges of Auckland & Sydney" — shows the value of post-apocalyptic environments in terms of imbuing a game with drama. Perhaps you've been searching for a connection game set in that part of the world, though, in which case...here you go! (KS link)

• The latest KS campaign from regulars Eagle-Gryphon Games is for Matt Wolfe's Wombat Rescue, which I've played once in prototype form. It's a tricky take on a racing game with you needing to feed your wombats so that they'll poop scent cubes on the board, which you'll need in order to move more freely as apparently wombats feel twitchy and unsafe if they can't smell their own poop. What are you trying to do in the game? Rescue your baby wombats from the dingo before (insert meme here).(KS link)

Board Game: Wombat Rescue


Board Game: B-Sieged: Sons of the Abyss
 
• Cool Mini Or Not is racking up support $90 at a time for B-Sieged: Sons of the Abyss from Víctor Fernández, Gorka Mata and Sergi Solé Pascual, and while some might want to know more about this cooperative fantasy-based castle defense game, I'm mostly curious as to why the game is titled "B-Sieged" instead of "Besieged". You're not protecting the land of B. What am I missing here? Is it just something to mess with people who might search for this game online? (KS link)

• Another miniatures-based, cooperative, tower defense game on KS is Project: ELITE from Konstantinos Kokkinis, Sotirios Tsantilas, Artipia Games and Drawlab Entertainment. What are the odds! One strong difference is that players compete in real time, with rounds being timed at two minutes and players moving and shooting as quickly as they can against the alien invaders based on the dice they roll. (KS link)

• Tom Dalgliesh's The Last Spike from Columbia Games is a revamped version of a design published nearly four decades earlier, and while the game is themed around westward expansion of train networks, in reality the design is more of a stock-market game with players trying to get rich by bringing traffic to the towns in which they're invested. (KS link)

• In its second go on KS, the miniatures strategy game Requiem Vampire Knight from KiniGame has cleared the first hurdle and is now piling on the extras. (KS link)

• No Thank You, Evil! from Monte Cook Games seems like a board game version of Scribblenauts, with players creating a story based on whatever ideas seem to work as they make their way through an adventure. (KS link)

Board Game: Coup: Rebellion G54
• At Spiel 2014, designer Rikki Tahta and his family ran a small booth for La Mame Games and sold — I'm taking a wild guess here — a few hundred copies of Coup: Guatemala 1954, a new version of his bluffing game Coup that allows players to choose five of 25 roles each game instead of using the same five each time. Now a revamped version of this design, Coup: Rebellion G54, is on KS from Indie Boards and Cards and the thing has more than three thousand backers. Better marketing? Better artwork? Better market presence? Better availability for the average Joe? Probably all of the above... (KS link)

• In the microgame Swamped from Benjamin Gerber and Bellwether Games, players collectively control a boat moving through a swamp on a quest for treasure — but each payer also has a secret side goal that might cause them to sabotage the group for individual success. (KS link)

• Shadowstar Corsairs from Ryan Wolfe and the intriguingly named 0 hr art & technology has players doing all sorts of things in space that one might expect to do while playing a game: fighting, collecting resources, upgrading their ships. (KS link)

• Along the same lines is Sky Relics from a first-time publisher, with player customizing their armadas in order to claim some of the floating mountains of Targus. (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

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