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I ran into Vigour at BGG.CON 2013, with him seeming somewhat nervous about the prospect of bringing this large design to print, but he's found plenty of backers for this game of intergalactic hot potato in which to win you need to be holding the potato when the universe ends. For more on the game, here's a video I recorded at that convention:
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• Zombie 15', a real-time escape-from-the-zombies game from designers Guillaume Lémery and Nicolas Schlewitz, has been in development with French publisher IELLO for more than a year, and for its KS project IELLO has taken the approach of forgoing standalone stretch goals and instead adding every stretch goal to every copy of the game, no matter what the language. (KS link)
• Hey, if you have one zombie game, you might as well have two, the second one being Zombies!!! 13: DEFCON Z from KErry Breitenstein and Twilight Creations, Inc. (KS link)
• Space Junk from designers Mike Friesen and Leif Steiestol and publisher Lamp Light Games shoots players into orbit where they must use spare parts orbiting the Earth to create a spaceship and return home. (KS link)
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• Competing zeppelin games are looking for funding, with Eric Vogel's Zeppelin Attack from Evil Hat Productions headed to Kickstarter on January 28, 2014 while 12SP Entertainment's Zeppeldrome from designers Anthony Gallela and Jeff Wilcox is already scanning the skies. (KS link) Zeppelin Attack is a deck-building game in which you use zeppelins to attack...things, while Zeppeldrome is a zeppelin-racing game with cards that provide either movement or special actions, depending on which half of the card you choose to use.
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• Elad Goldsteen from Golden Egg Games is back on Kickstarter, but instead of one of his own designs, he's selling two recently released games from Italian publishers: Florenza: The Card Game and Ark & Noah, both designed by Stefano Groppi and published by Placentia Games. (KS link)
• The new bimonthly science-fiction periodical Ares Magazine will contain a standalone board game each issue, along with fiction and essays. (KS link) The first issue, which it hopes to release in May 2014, will contain War of the Worlds, a two-player game from Bill Banks themed on the H.G. Wells story of the same name.
• Flip! is a rummy-style game with double-sided cards. (KS link)
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• Copies of Hero Brigade from designer Nicholas Yu are just now headed to backers of the KS project, but he's onto his next project: Eternal Dynasty with co-designer Joshua Reubens. (KS link) On the KS page, his shorthand description of the game is a blended version of "Ticket to Ride, History of the World, Weiqi (Go), and the old Romance of the Three Kingdoms video games". Does that help?
• Spurs: A Tale in the Old West is another title that I got an advance peek at during BGG.CON 2013, even recording a game preview video with publisher and co-designer Sean Brown. (KS link) The game's originator, Ole Steiness, has been posting designer diary installments on BGG. For a first-hand look at the game, here's the video I recorded with Brown in November 2013:
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• Josh Raab's Nika from Eagle Games has players using Greek soldiers to shove each other around. (KS link) The game description is not clear at all. Who wants to rewrite it and earn one shiny Geekgold?
• Flippin' Fruit from Andrew Platt uses the much maligned d12 — two of them actually — with players flipping them to get the fruit they need to finish smoothie and fruit salad cards. (KS link) Platt's been writing a lot about the game on BGG game page. Apparently you can write more about a fruit-themed dice game than I ever realized.
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"Pull my arms down, Eric. Pull them. Please pull them. I'm waaaaaaaaaiting..."
This game is completely ridiculous and incredibly fun — assuming you're the type of person who likes using a plastic monkey to shoot rubberized coconuts into plastic cups, preferably those in front of another player so that you can steal them away. That's a type, right? Now Mayday Games is importing copies of Coconuts to the U.S., so if you're as big a goofball as me, I encourage you to embrace your inner monkey and start firing. (KS link)
• Finally, Byron Collins of Collins Epic Wargames ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for Spearpoint 1943: Eastern Front that ended in mid-January 2014 (KS link), but that was his second attempt at funding the game. Why did the second project succeed, drawing in more funds than were needed for the first project despite having a lower goal on the second? Collins attempts to explain everything that went into rebooting the KS project in a looooong BGG blog post, and if you're looking to run a project and have it succeed on the first go-round (without you therefore having to bother with a second one), you might want to look it over.
•••
Oh, man, is that all? Am I really through?
No, of course not. I've covered nothing on crowdfunding sites outside of Kickstarter, and KS itself has tons more on it, games spilling out in all directions. That said, I'm stopping for now so that you and I can soak in the overwhelming force that Kickstarter has become in the past few years. And so that I can go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Until tomorrow...
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