• At BGG.CON 2013, I recorded a preview video of Baseball Highlights: 2045 with designer Mike Fitzgerald, and he seemed to be practically jumping off his seat with excitement. He's been trying to sell a baseball-themed game forever because he loves the sport, and with this deck-building/team-building approach that abstracts out the details of every pitch and play, he thinks he finally struck the right path. Eagle Games does as well obviously since it plans to publish the game. (KS link) Here's a summary of the gameplay:
One odd/interesting tie-in with this KS campaign: Fitzgerald is also the designer of the Mystery Rummy series of card games — Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper, Mystery Rummy: Murders in the Rue Morgue, Mystery Rummy: Jekyll & Hyde and Mystery Rummy: Al Capone and the Chicago Underworld — and Eagle Games has partnered with MR publisher U.S. Game Systems to (finally!) bring those games back to print, with them being add-on items if you're backing Baseball Highlights: 2045. I presume these MR titles will be available at retail outlets in the future as I've been pestering U.S. Games with questions about this series on-and-off since (checking my email records) 2009, when Jack the Ripper was reprinted on its own without the other three titles. It's been a long time coming...
• Designer/artist/publisher Ryan Laukat of Red Raven Games is back on Kickstarter with The Ancient World, with 2-4 players trying to "grow the largest and most influential city-state by managing citizens, treasury, and military and by defeating titans", titans being jerks who harass local tribes that you hope to win over with your fab city-state. (KS link)
• Stephen Finn has added a small expansion for his Scripts and Scribes: The Dice Game — consisting of a "power" die, a card and two wooden cubes — to his current KS for Let Them Eat Shrimp! Interesting to see how projects evolve based on backer feedback, especially when you have a designer like Finn who's cultivated a lot of support through direct sales with gamers. (KS link)
• Demigods Rising is a skirmish-style board game from first-timers Nikola Andrejic and Milos Pavlovic in which players are demigods controlling armies comprised of some of the twenty heroes available to them. Multiple game modes are available, and as you might expect for a thematic battle game, it includes miniatures of the heroes. (KS link)
• Somewhat game-related is a KS project for Ambient Soundscapes Vol. II from Scott Morton, who claims that this disc is part of a "series of rich ambient music and sound collections, crafted to enhance the tabletop gaming experience". Can anyone vouch for this richness and enhancement? (KS link)
• The designer trio of Mike Langlois, Christian Leonhard and Gary Simpson, along with publisher Emergent Games, blew past their $50k funding goal for Fireteam Zero in a day and have (as of this writing) tripled that amount. (KS link) Guess that's what happens when you're offering a big game with two boxed expansions and a pile of miniatures. What's the game, you ask? Here's the setting: "In 1942, four soldiers vanished from the training program of the newly formed First Ranger Battalion, their names stricken from the roster. Chosen for their unique skills, they would fight in secret against terrifying supernatural enemies and overwhelming odds. This is their story." In more detail:
Aiding them are two NPC Specialists, one with an uncanny ability to sense the location and nature of the supernatural energy in the area and another with an encyclopedic knowledge of the arcane. Use the Specialists wisely or risk failure no matter how many monsters you defeat.
Race against time as the creatures on the board become stronger and more cunning. The longer you take to complete your objectives, the more Monster Twist cards are revealed, each granting a new and terrible aspect to your enemy. In each set of missions you will face a different family of horrifying creatures, each with their own special abilities and twist cards.
Players must not only fight for their lives, but at the same time they must make smart tactical choices with their teammates in order to make the best use of a limited resource, the cards in their hands. Each card not only represents an action that they can take, but also their health. Spending too many cards can leave you vulnerable, while spending too few can result in being overwhelmed. Clever players will rely on each other to succeed.
Coming Soon
• Two months ahead of a May 2014 KS project for Scott Almes' Harbour, Tasty Minstrel Games has released a print-and-play version of the game with black-and-white artwork (PDF) to chum the funding waters and get feedback from testers.
• In a newsletter, TMG's Michael Mindes also mentions that Dan Keltner and David Short's Bomb Squad — a real-time co-operative game with a Hanabi-style information system that's available as a print-and-play game via the BGG game page — is in the works, and given TMG's track record, that game will likely appear on KS at some point.
Taking a Breather
Think this is all of the games being crowdfunded right now? Hoo boy, not a chance! But I'm splitting them into two posts in order to get one out the door faster...
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