![Crowdfunding Round-up: Guns & Steel, Caverns & Pirates, and Cats & Lobotomies](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/Ry8HcpYyJYoN85GV4xxUnw__thumb/img/mYrjF7bgeLmIV1hwrgxSXJZaQrw=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic1890368.jpg)
• Alexander Lauck's mission-driven pirate game The Curse of the Black Dice, due out at Spiel 2015 from Board&Dice, is funding on Polish site Wspieram.to and you can back the game there to preorder it for pick-up in Essen — or just to buy it. (Wspieram.to link)
• The microgame Soccer 17 from Jack Darwid Games includes only seventeen cards, yet supposedly allows players to recreate a football match on their table. What also caught my eye about this KS project is the founder's location in Indonesia, mostly because we have an Indonesian exchange student in the house right now. Kickstarter projects can now be started from almost anywhere, it seems. (KS link)
• I've played Jesse Li's Guns & Steel a couple of times, and it's a clever deck-builder that can also be incredibly brutal to those who fall behind in the growth of their card-based civilization. Now Grail Games is partnering with original publisher Moaideas Game Design on a revamped version of the game to make it accessible to those not attending Spiel 2015 — (update) but only those in Oceania and southeast Asia as the project has sold its limit to buyers in other locations. (KS link)
• Jeremy Commandeur's Booze Barons from Overworld Games challenges 3-9 players to make and sell booze (in the game, mind you) during the Prohibition Era, with players trying to conceal their mob identity so that they don't get ratted out. (KS link)
• A different take on mobssters, one that involves tiny bodies and large heads, comes courtesy of Marc Di Stefano and Nice Games with chibiMob, which consists of six mob modules (Yakuza, Mafia, Triads, Posse, Jewish Mob, and Russian Mob), with the various mobs allowing for play variety and larger player counts. (KS link)
• I don't normally cover digital games in this space, but Tabletopia is not a game, so it gets a pass. Instead Tabletopia is a digital platform that allows people to play games on it, and while that doesn't sound like anything new or revolutionary, the nature of Tabletopia differs from what you find on iOS or Android devices (while also allowing you to play games on those devices as well as on PCs and Macs). Tabletopia is a sandbox system that allows designers and publishers to create digital representations of their game designs so that others can play those games wherever they are in the world. No AI is present, and rules enforcement is non-existent; this is a digital platform that mimics exactly what you'd find in a game box, and more than one hundred games — including Imperial Settlers, Zooloretto, and Tigris & Euphrates — have already been licensed for the system. (KS link)
• BattleCON, a two-player fighting game with tons of characters and iterations and variants from Brad Talton and Level 99 Games, is going digital, with cross-platform play being accessible online as well as on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android devices. (KS link)
• Lobotomy from Titan Forge Games posits that players are phobia-ridden patients in an abandoned mental hospital who must escape as quickly as they can, despite the delusions they keep confronting along the way. (KS link)
• Less from Aleksandr Starovojtov and Inventedfor.com has, as suggested from the title, simple rules, with each player in this abstract strategy game using three action points each turn to move their bits from one corner of the board to the other. (KS link)
• Designer Robert Burke has new dragons, abilities and battlefields to add to Drago Magi from Robert Burke Games and Grey Fox Games in Drago Magi: Expansion 1. (KS link)
• Aza Chen's super cute dexterity game Cat Tower is being released in a new edition from IDW Games and Pandasaurus Games. This is not in any way a strategic game, but I don't think you could mistake it for one. Instead this is a game you break out at a café because you want to play something light and meet new people, which you will since others will inevitably asking what you're playing.
With the project now having reached its funding goal, Pandasaurus is adding copies of Cat Tower Lite and Cat Tower Plus to each shipment. Despite all the positives, Nathan McNair from Pandasaurus told me at Gen Con 2015 that he was bummed that they could not recreate the pop-up cat ears on their box while still having the game produced at a reasonable price point. (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