Crowdfunding Round-up: Elemental Clash, Escape: Fighting for Freedom, Fairytale Games, Frontline General & Several Other Games Not in Alphabetical Order

Crowdfunding Round-up: Elemental Clash, Escape: Fighting for Freedom, Fairytale Games, Frontline General & Several Other Games Not in Alphabetical Order
Board Game: Elemental Clash: The Master Set
• Austrian designer Andreas Propst first released Elemental Clash in 2009 and a handful of expansion sets have followed in the intervening years. Now he's releasing Elemental Clash: The Master Set, which takes elements (ho ho) from previously released sets and mashes them together into a larger set that supports 2-4 players instead of the two player limit in earlier releases. (KS link) Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

Quote:
In ancient times long gone by, when the veil between the world of the humans and the realm of magic was thinner, almighty wizards battled each other in epic duels to determine who was the master of sorcery and arcane wisdom. Armed with a Spellbook and with the aid of the enchanted Element-Stones, the sorcerers summoned fantastic Creatures and magical Spells. A wizard who had no more pages left in his Spellbook would eventually have lost the magical battle of wits.

The aim of the game is to reduce the cards in your opponent's card-deck (or Spellbook) to zero by using the Spells and Creatures in your Spellbook. Players take turns that always follow the same structure. For each point of damage a Player receives through Creatures or Spells, he puts the top card of his or her deck on his Discard Pile (or Archive). If a player is unable to draw a card, he loses immediately.

Elemental Clash: The Master Set is the ultimate deal well-suited for beginners, while still interesting for the veterans. It contains 80 different cards, over 270 in total, carefully selected by the designer from all previous sets of ''Elemental Clash''.
Board Game: Escape: Fighting for Freedom
Escape: Fighting for Freedom, from Taban Miniatures, is another game in the sci-fi genre with lots of specialized miniatures. As noted on the KS page, the game started out in Ravage magazine in France with cardboard characters, but now it's progressing to a big box game with tons of plastic. (KS link) The game description on the BGG page is a mess and could use a rewrite – Geekgold for the user who steps up to do so – but for now here's the minimalist description on KS:

Quote:
Escape: Fighting for Freedom is a board game with miniatures tokens. Each player leading a group of fighters trying to fulfil their mission objectives before their opponent!

You will thrive in the narrow corridors of "NOE new world" arks. Depending on your faction you will play as the Resistance rising to the surface at the cost of their lives, or will control the ISC drones protecting humanity from the surface horrors that occur on the desolate land of Eden...

Whichever side you choose, the campaign will be tactical, fast and fierce!
Board Game: Fairytale Games: The Battle Royale
• Following up on Martial Arts: The Card Game, which completed KS funding in March 2013, designer Alex Lim is now offering Fairytale Games: The Battle Royale, which starts with a brutal premise, then continues to incite even more brutality, with the bodies piling up left and right due to the whim of a few queens. Here's an overview of the game, with a full rundown of gameplay on the BGG game page:

Quote:
The Dark Queen, the Queen of Hearts, and the Snow Queen – three of the most powerful queens of all realms join forces with the common goal of wiping out the population completely in order to start anew and create a utopia with no poverty, crime, or sickness, all designed with their vision and unquestionable control.

To prevent history from repeating itself, they agree to select a champion to lead the new civilization and firmly guide the people based on knowledge from the past world. This champion must have a strong will, strength, magic, intelligence, persuasive abilities and is proven to be a survivor. Thus the Queens banished all Heroes and Villains into a fierce competition to see who will survive the Fairytale Games. There will be only one.

Fairytale Games: The Battle Royale is a 1-10 player dice-based board game that uses cards as the board (for land exploration). Movement is with a 6-sided die. When you begin the game, you and other players start at the same location and begin revealing locations/terrain as you roll your die. Some locations offer opportunities to start quests to gain survival items or allow you to explore more lands and gain better abilities. All the while Events are happening that might help or hinder you greatly. There are 30+ character cards that you can play as or fight against in this game. Other cards include Action Cards, Event Cards, Location Cards, Quest Cards and Item Cards. A normal game duration is about 30 minutes to 1 hour depending on the number of players.

The goal of the game is to kill off at least ten fairytale characters in the game in addition to your opponent before they can do the same to you. If playing a one-player game, you must kill twenty characters. The other way you can win is if you complete certain Quest challenges as a team to escape the realm or to take the entire place down with you by finding the slim opportunities through certain card scenarios to defeat the three Queens.

Although Action Cards allow you to strategically attack, defend, hinder, or help another player, your character cards themselves have their own special abilities that can be used during certain situations through dice rolling or if they are activated by Quests, Events or other Action Cards.
Board Game: Firenze
Board Game: New Amsterdam
• As noted in a May 2013 BGGN post, Pandasaurus Games is bringing Jeffrey D. Allers' New Amsterdam to the U.S. in a new edition, while also importing copies of Andreas Steding's Firenze, which is published by Pegasus Spiele. Pandasaurus is now running a KS campaign for both titles noting that "both of these games are going to have extremely limited print run sizes and may not be as widely available as our other releases are, and we wanted to make sure that our Kickstarter backers had the chance to secure a copy of these games". (KS link)

• In an update for its Snowdonia KS project, Indie Boards and Cards mentions that Sean Ross' Haggis will return to print following "a very short campaign starting June 12th".

• Fred MacKenzie's Princes of the Dragon Throne makes its third appearance in a crowdfunding round-up due to a rebooted campaign that replaces plastic miniatures with wooden bits, while also offering a pledge level for the game and custom wooden pieces. Cue disappointed comments from those who wanted the game with plastic miniatures, who don't see the price drop from $100 to $80 as a large enough "savings", and who don't want to pay more than the previous base game pledge amount for wooden bits. The campaign goal is now $25k instead of $50k as Game Salute notes that it's lowered its planned print run from 3,000 copies to 1,000 (the larger print run being due to the costs associated with the creation of molds for the plastic figures as you want to amortize those costs and have a lower cost per unit). Maybe this campaign will fly... (KS link)

• Bill Olmesdahl's Warriors of Darkmyre is a "miniatures battle board game" with warriors battling in an arena, then using their winnings to "upgrade to new and more powerful combo attacks, armor, and weapons". (KS link)

Board Game: Conquest of the Empire
• Online gaming site GameTable Online has signed an agreement with Harris Game Designs to develop an online version of Larry Harris' Conquest of the Empire. What does that have to do with Kickstarter? GTO is running a KS campaign to "supercharge" its site with new features while adding Tsuro of the Seas to its online game offerings at the same time. (KS link) Conquest of the Empire is listed as a $16k stretch goal on the KS campaign, which has already met its original goal of $10k.

• Byron Collins from Collins Epic Wargames is running a crowdfunding campaign for Frontline General: Spearpoint 1943 Eastern Front, with this standalone design being a "two-player tactical card wargame action set in WWII on the Eastern Front", while also being compatible and integrable with the 2010 release Frontline General: Spearpoint 1943. (KS link) Collins talks about the Spearpoint series of games and other matters in an interview on Grant Rodiek's Hyperbole Games blog.

Pixel Lincoln's Jason Tagmire has reached his funding goal for a deck of storytelling cards that features (1) a standard 54-card deck with the usual suits and numbers, (2) an image on each card that features a character holding an item, while completing an action in a location, and (3) icons showing a mood, a season, a letter, and a color on each card. The cards are intended to facilitate creativity and storytelling, and the pledge levels include storytelling kits that feature blank comic pages or a film outline to provide additional ways to use these cards. (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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