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Crowdfunding Round-up: Long Shots and Hail Marys

Crowdfunding Round-up: Long Shots and Hail Marys
Board Game: Princes of the Renaissance
• For years people wondered whether Martin Wallace's Princes of the Renaissance would ever be available again. Now Mercury Games is Kickstarting a new edition of the game, and the response has been...muted? Those annual Warfrog titles were hotly anticipated by a certain segment of the gaming community, but perhaps we're living in a different era these days — or maybe it was the same few people asking for the game over and over again... (KS link)

• Another P... R... title for this round-up comes courtesy of The Pirate Republic, a design by Tom Butler through Green Feet Games that sets players in the West Indies during the 1700s, with them trying to commandeer ships, raid towns, and otherwise do piratey things to complete missions and commandeer victory. (KS link)

• All of the other p... r...s in my inbox are press releases, so we'll have to transition instead via genre trope, in this case jumping from pirates to superheroes, with Clover Games' Central City: Heroes being a 1-4 player co-op of building superhero characters, then bashing centrally into the city to complete five missions and take out the archnemesis, ideally without having your secret identities revealed. (KS link)

• From superheroes we'll turn to the fast (and possibly furious) vehicles in Championship Formula Racing Douglas Schulz and Ultra Pro, with this Speed Circuit-inspired design recreating F1 tracks and bringing historical racers behind the wheel once again. (KS link)

• Driving junked and tricked-out vehicles in a post-apocalyptic environment is another common movie trope, but in Matthew Morris' Wasteland Justice from Madbeard Games, you aren't necessarily trying to destroy one another but instead be the first to move your vehicular mayhem across the finish line — and if no one else is mobile enough to do so, then you win automatically. (KS link)

Board Game: Heroes and Tricks
• The hook for the trick-taking Heroes and Tricks from Eduardo Baraf, Jonathan Gilmour, and Baraf's Pencil First Games is that players add cards one at a time to a special box (which also serves as game storage) so that you know only the color and suit of the card most recently played. Clever? Annoying? That's for you to decide! (KS link)

• Another KS trick-taker of sorts comes courtesy of Sunish Chabba, who is dressing up the traditional Indian game of Ganjifa as Guru Ganjifa, while also including rules for a few other games that can be played with the same ten-suited deck. (KS link)

• Staying in Asia (sort of) we have Anthony Burch's World Championship Russian Roulette from Two Rooms and a Boom publisher Tuesday Knight Games, a press-your-luck bluffing game in which you try to be the last one alive (since you can also shoot at others!) or the first team to collect 15 VP. You can even pocket your bullets to increase your odds of survival — as long as you don't get caught. (KS link)

• You also duel in an untraditional way in Kettou from Thomas Song and Table Forged, with an audio track (or a designated reader for the round) calling out the desired target, then players racing to slap the right card to score a hit. Players also use special abilities on their samurai cards while loading combat cards into bushido slots to further damage their opponent. (KS link)

• Duels also take place in the dice-rolling design Garden of Bees from Eoin Costelloe, Ciara Costelloe, Brian O Moore, and Decking Awesome Games, with players amassing an army of bees in order to take out one another and have the garden to themselves. (KS link)

Board Game: Days of Ire: Budapest 1956
• Armies come in a more traditional form in Days of Ire: Budapest 1956 from Katalin Nimmerfroh, Dávid Turczi, and Mihály Vincze and the publishing partners Cloud Island and Mr. B Games. Built around the history of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, this card-driven board game allows players to compete in a one vs. many mode with one player controlling the Soviet invaders, a co-op mode in which you fight against the game itself, and a solo mode. (KS link)

• If you prefer more cartoonish battle, turn to Ryan Boyle's self-published PWNs: A Game of Strategic Mayhem, with players using terrain effects, ability counters, and card effects to knock others out of the game, with you trying to have the most members of your team still active when one team succumbs. (KS link)

• Cartoons are also at the heart of Knuckle Sammich from Daniel Landis, Christopher O'Neill, and Ninth Level Games, which uses the characters from Kobolds Ate My Baby! in a Love Letter-style microgame that first appeared in 2013 in a POD edition. (KS link)

• The prize for most unusual setting for a game this week goes to Newton's Noggin from Bill Morgal and Worthington Publishing, with players using think cards to manipulate ideas in Isaac Newton's head Tetris-style to create the concepts at the heart of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. (KS link)

• I recall asking Ludocom for info on Vignobles in 2012, but no, the game wouldn't be ready for Spiel 2012, so onto the back burner it went — and there it sat for years. Now, though, Fabrice Arcas and Guillaume Peccoz's hand-management game about life as a wine merchant in southwest France is finally nearing completion. Has the design improved with age? Can you detect elements of oak and special actions in the tasting? (Ulule link)

Board Game: Vignobles

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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