Crowdfunding Round-up: Prettier Flowers, Return of the Aces & Klaus von Essen's Twisted Apparatus

Crowdfunding Round-up: Prettier Flowers, Return of the Aces & Klaus von Essen's Twisted Apparatus
From gallery of angelkurisu
• U.S. publisher Asmadi Games is running a Kickstarter project for a professionally published version of Carl Chudyk's FlowerFall, which debuted in a quicky back-alley version at Origins 2012 in May. (KS link) Here's a quick game description:

Quote:
Flowers falling from the sky! In FlowerFall, players attempt to form large garden patches containing more of their color flower than their opponents. Each continuous patch will score points at the end of the game. Adding cards to the table is not as simple as placing them down, however. You must carefully drop them, letting them flutter through the air. Skill improves your chances, but the whim of the environment may thwart you.

FlowerFall is a quick, portable game you can play anywhere. The location you're at becomes the terrain!
 
• Rick Loomis at Flying Buffalo is trying to reprint Ace of Aces, specifically the Ace of Aces: Handy Rotary Series. (KS link) Says Loomis, "I am attempting to reprint the entire Ace of Aces line, starting with the first one (Handy Rotary Series) and hopefully ending up with the ones that were planned but never got printed due to lack of funding back in the 1980s." A short description of this title:

Quote:
Ace of Aces is an innovative 1-on-1 combat game that simulates a dogfight between WWI aircraft. Each player has a book with pictures of what they see out the cockpit of their airplane. Each player selects a maneuver (bank left, barrel roll, etc.) and tells their opponent a page number to turn to. This new page, when cross indexed with the maneuver made, gives the page number that shows the results of the chosen maneuver. The object of the game is to get your opponent in your sights and shoot them down.

There are advanced rules for fuel consumption as well as a campaign game.
Board Game: Apparatus
• U.S. game and toy publisher Toy Vault has launched a Kickstarter project for Rob Bartel's Apparatus, a long description of which follows:

Quote:
World-renowned genius (and eccentric) inventor Klaus von Essen has completed his latest creation, the "Apparatus". The world wants to know what it does. His peers want to know how it works. His wife wants to know what it did with him.

In Apparatus, players race to recruit Researcher teams to invent the Contraptions that will help fund the recreation of the Apparatus. Of course building the first Apparatus is important, but not as important as exploiting it for financial gain. As the research teams are recruited, each Contraption is endowed with ever-increasing grants, and a player wins only if he collects the most Electros (the currency in the game)!

In the first part of the game, players use grants that provide income every turn to recruit Researchers of various Professions. Some of these Researchers are in high demand and a bidding war between players can break out. As the player's spend their Electros on Researchers, various Contraptions that comprise The Apparatus will gain value in the second part of the game. Once all the Researchers are acquired by the players, the game moves on to the second phase.

In the second phase of the game, players use recruited Researchers to compete to be the first ones to discover the various Contraptions that will help fund the creation of the Apparatus. Each Contraption requires certain types of teams of Researchers. Players compare values of the various teams to determine the winner and second place teams. The winner has a choice of gaining Electros, which is used to determine who wins, or gaining research notes, which determines who builds the Apparatus first. As the Contraptions are decided, the required teams become more and more difficult to build.

The game ends with the building of the Apparatus, which has a large reward for the first place team. Players then count up their Electros, and the player with the most wins the game!
If that's not enough for you, check out the English rulebook (PDF) on the Toy Vault website. (KS link)

(Apologies for the second crowdfunding post this week. I've been on the road for much of the past two weeks and am catching up on news that the cat knocked behind the couch while I was out. —WEM)

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