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• Other items in the category of returning old faces includes The Walking Dead: All Out War, a miniatures game from Mantic Games that pits human survivors against one another as well as against the zombie hordes that reside within Interstate 85. (KS link)
• The combination of miniatures and old faces is also at play in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shadows of the Past from designer Kevin Wilson and publishers IDW Games and Pandasaurus Games. I recall working at K&K Toys in upstate New York in 1990-1991, and one of the hot items that year was TMNT figures (SKU 556555). We would receive shipments from HQ weekly, and whenever we got new boxes of TMNT characters they contained at most one April O'Neil character per 24 figures in the box, which was never enough. Now you don't even get that... (KS link)
• Miniatures are also found in Todd Sanders' Aether Captains, a one-vs-many design of a zeppelin captain defending against sky pirates that was originally a print-and-play design and which MAGE Company and Ninja Division have pumped new air into for a large-scale production. (KS link)
• A different type of miniatures can be found in Fabulous Beasts, a self-published design from George Buckenham and Alex Fleetwood that blends dexterity-based stacking games with digital tools that automatically handle all of the terrain-based modifiers, turn-based scoring modifiers, and evolution-inducing super-tools that come into play when you crossbreed sharks and eagles, as is demonstrated in the overview video that I recorded with them at Spiel 2015. (KS link)
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• An otherworldly experience is also at the heart of Karmaka from Eddy Boxerman and Dave Burke of Hemisphere Games as players start the game as dung beetles and attempt to climb the karmic ladder in order to achieve transcendence first. Yes, a race for enlightenment, which is when you learn that racing is futile! (KS link)
• Mattox Shuler's Control from Keymaster Games is based on a similar idea of people traveling through the ages, with the players being time travelers who have somehow fallen into a rupture in spacetime and are now competing with one another to fuel their way out of the time ditch and abandon everyone else in karmic nowheresville. Okay, this is not a real time-travel game, but I suppose this makes sense. (KS link)
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• Along similar lines is Greater Evil: The Political Bullshit Game from Jacob Bofferding and Shawn Roberts, with gameplay along the lines of Bullshit fancied up with special power cards that function like commercials from super PACs that pretend like they're not under your control but really are. (KS link)
• For another take on powerful factions within the U.S. electorate we have Richard Gurley's Redneck Invasion, in which players control a faction such as hipsters or soccer parents and try to exert influence over the culture of the town that they all supposedly share and call home. (KS link)
• More overt conflict comes into play in Ken Whitehurst's Polyversal, a 6mm science-fiction mass-combat miniatures game from Collins Epic Wargames that's set "in a plausible-future Earth" in which tanks and recon vehicles roam rubble-filled streets and make it difficult for the rest of us to drive to Target. (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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