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• As I did last time, let's start this round-up with a blast from the past, namely a new version of Wolfgang Sentker and Ralf zur Linde's Finca, which is helpfully described on the KS page by German publisher franjos as "board game with fruits". Truer words were rarely spoken, although the fruits are wooden instead of, well, fruity, so this might actually be only a half-truth depending on how you look at things.
Gameplay in Finca is simple: Collect those wooden fruits so that you can complete contracts visible on the island game board. To collect fruits, move one of your farmers from one blade of an illustrated windmill to another one, with the farmer moving as many spaces as the number of farmers on the blade it's leaving and collecting as many fruits as the number of farmers on the blade it's landing on. Yes, Finca is a mancala game from before the time that Trajan made mancala cool again. The game has a bit more to it than that, but that old-school German interaction is what drives the design, along with the fear of being scooped on contracts and thus the bonus tiles associated with those completed contracts.
Finca has dragged itself across the KS funding line slowly compared to how good the game is, but I think that's due to few people in today's market having played the game. Sure, you might have heard it's good, but no one you know is posting about how cool it looks and you haven't seen it being played in prototype form at conventions and no one is posting overview videos of it, so you figure you'll get to it should you ever have the chance, but you've lived without it this long, so why rush to the bar now to order one? (KS link)
• Edge of Darkness from John D. Clair and Alderac Entertainment Group is one of those aforementioned new-fangled games that people are posting about how cool-looking this deck-building, card-crafting, worker-placing game is (KS link), and BGG is guilty of this as well, having previewed the game during the 2017 Origins Game Fair:
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• A game taking place a bit farther along in history is Hastings 1066 from Lewis Pulsipher and Worthington Publishing, with the Normans and Saxons going after another once again. (KS link)
• If we skip ahead a few hundred years, we come to the inspiration of Rolando Issa's Eternal Kings, which pitches itself as a card-based game that recreates chess as the pieces are now characters with special powers starting in their usual places on the 8x8 game board, with each player having a constructed deck of ability cards to let them juice creature powers during play. (KS link)
• Slightly later in time we come to Japan's Edo period, which is the setting for AJ Lambeth's Kami-sama from Kolossal Games, a game that positions players as Japanese spirits trying to spread their influence across the land to gain favor with villagers while still remaining connected with nature. (KS link)
• The past becomes a path to explore in Rüdiger Dorn's Luxor from Queen Games, which is releasing both the base game on its own and a collector's edition that includes four expansions and a new edition of the Dorn game Robber Knights. In Luxor, you move explorers through the walls of a temple, picking up more explorers as you progress toward the central chamber where the most valuable items lie, but if you rush ahead to pick up more helpers, you'll leave treasures behind for others to scoop up in your wake. (KS link) Here's an overview of the game that BGG recorded at Spielwarenmesse 2018:
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• Page Quest: Season 1 – Mythical Artifacts is a new version of A4 Quest, a solitaire adventure game printed on a single sheet of A4 paper. The original design from Michał Jagodziński, Paweł Niziołek, and Jarosław Wajs was picked up for development by Polish publisher Board&Dice, which is offering Kickstarter-exclusive adventure missions as well as a larger version of A4 Quest that includes components beyond paper. (KS link)
• Robin Gibson's Arcane Bakery Clash is one of two new titles in the Button Shy line of wallet games, with two players competing to bake certain items in the oven to the proper degree that they can be used as weapons against one another in a quest to show who's boss of the bakery. (KS link)
• Designer Mitsuo Yamamoto of Logy Games has created a few dozen abstract strategy games that include hand-painted ceramic components, and for mid-2018 he's creating a new edition of Beehive from 2007.
In the game, each of the two players in this game has tokens numbered 0-9, and on a turn you place one of these tokens onto the hexagonal game board. If the token touches only one other token (such as the initial I token placed anywhere other than the central hex), then you must place a token that is higher than the token already in place while also matching that token's oddness or evenness. If the token touches more than one token, then the value of this new token must equal the ones value of the sum of all tokens that it touches (e.g., a placed token that touches 2, 5 and 7 must be a 4). If you can't play, you lose; if both players get down to one token in hand, whoever has the higher-valued token wins. (KS link)
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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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