x
search
menu

Crowdfunding Round-up: Publishing Newspapers, Reliving Spiel, Building a Beehive, Polluting the Earth & More

Crowdfunding Round-up: Publishing Newspapers, Reliving Spiel, Building a Beehive, Polluting the Earth & More
Board Game: ESSEN The Game: SPIEL'13
Board Game: ESSEN
• Two games about the Spiel game fair in Essen, Germany are on Kickstarter right now, and strangely both of them are titled "Essen" instead of "Spiel". Seems like a odd choice given that the appeal of Spiel is not in the city where the fair is located, but the fair itself.

In any case, ESSEN The Game from designers Fabrice Beghin, Frédéric Delporte and Etienne Espreman presents players as attendees at Spiel 2013, with wish lists in hand, tons of competition to buy titles before they sell out, and limited space in the car trunk to hold everything purchased. (KS link) The game uses actual publisher logos (with permission) as well as the covers of games that debuted at Spiel 2013. BGG even has a spot on the game board, although I'm not sure what happens at our stand. If history is a guide, people will use our preprinted maps to find where particular booths are located.

Harry-Pekka Kuusela's ESSEN, on the other hand, puts you in the role of publisher and challenges you to place your stall in the right place, create buzz for your releases, and turn a profit on the games you sell. (KS link)

• I included Galaxy Defenders: Operation Strikeback in an earlier c.f. post, but for more details on that expansion, you can check out Andrea Ligabue's preview on Opinionated Gamers.

Board Game: Penny Press
• Designers Robert Dijkman Dulkes and Matt Golec co-won the Cards Against Humanity Tabletop Deathmatch with Penny Press, and one of the judges of that competition, Chris Cieslik of Asmadi Games, has already launched a c.f. campaign for it. (KS link) In the game, players send their reporters out to cover stories with the goal of assembling stories jigsaw-style to fit them into the available layout on your press.

• MAGE Company is back on Kickstarter with 12 Realms: Ancestors Legacy, which adds four new realms — Kievan Empire, Golden Caliphate, Olympia and Nile Valley — to 12 Realms, which I guess will necessitate a name change to 16 Realms, but so be it. (KS link)

• Button Bashers is another title with the 8-bit look seen in games like Pixel Lincoln, and as the name suggests, the title is modeled after arcade fighting games, with 2-4 players trying to beat down via combos and card play. (KS link)

• Robert Gray's Realm of Strife is a "free-to-play tabletop fantasy RPG" that is possibly available only online. I'm not really sure what's going on with this game, but I'll present it anyway for those who want to explore the world and let others know what this is. (KS link)

Board Game: Kyoto Protocol
• Petri Savola's Kyoto Protocol from Roll D6 Games is a card game about "energy production and pollution", with the players controlling power companies that try to produce energy while not using so many resources that they're fined for pollution. Not creating energy will also lead to fines as angry customers will storm governmental offices that will then punish you. (KS link)

• Space Frontier from Aaron Dona and John Mathison is a big hexy creation in which players gain influence through missions, research, trade, or conquest, and compete to spread their influence across a region of uncharted space. (KS link) I'll confess to not being a space guy, but even so that shortened description does zip for me. The longer description on the BGG page? Still flatlined. I don't see a hook here, a USP to make me look at this any further. Maybe it's just me, though.

• German crowdfunding site Spieleschmiede is running a campaign for a German-language version of Bryan Johnson's fort-building game Island Fortress. (Spieleschmiede link) Similarly, Tzvika Harpaz's Athlas: Duel for Divinity is also aiming to fund a German edition (on top of English and Italian editions that are also being crowdfunded). (Spieleschmiede link)

Board Game: Brave the Elements
• Designer Miles Ratcliffe from Chaos Publishing is trying to bring Brave the Elements to publication, the short description of which goes like this: "Discover a land of wonder in which the ability to control the four elements – Fire, Air, Earth and Water – has become second nature. Conjure powerful disasters and infiltrate your opponents' societies while developing your own and defending it from harm." (KS link)

• Next England Captain might sound like three random words being smashed together, ergo the title of a party game, but in fact this John-Paul Treen design from Too Much Games is a card game that "models the career of a modern footballer", that is, one in which you must maintain solid press appearances, obtain a celebrity wife, and perhaps even kick the ball around a bit. (KS link)

• Fútbol Strategy from Dirk Knemeyer, Daniel M. Levine and Conquistador Games is a more traditional football game, with "football" meaning what it usually means outside the U.S. Players draft six players from a national team of twelve, then compete in single games or tournaments. (KS link)

• Waggle Dance is named for the "dance" that honeybees perform when trying to direct other bees to a source of food, and in this worker bee-placement game from Mike Nudd and Grublin Games Publishing you're trying to collect pollen, build a beehive, and make honey. (KS link) That "worker bee-placement" line is mine, by the way; can't believe they didn't include that in the game description! Love the look of this cover:

Board Game: Waggle Dance


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

Related

New Game Round-up: Gen Con 2014 — Japanese Arcatypes, French Barbarians, U.S. High Command & Alien Invaders

New Game Round-up: Gen Con 2014 — Japanese Arcatypes, French Barbarians, U.S. High Command & Alien Invaders

Jun 10, 2014

• Gen Con has become a far more international convention over the past few years, with many European publishers now previewing or debuting games at that con instead of waiting to show them off...
Crowdfunding Round-up: Chicago Express, Copper Country, Luchador & Twilight Struggle

Crowdfunding Round-up: Chicago Express, Copper Country, Luchador & Twilight Struggle

Jun 10, 2014

Kickstarter — bringing you projects that otherwise would have had no chance at success! You know, like a top 200 game or a digital port of the #1 game on BGG...Origins is almost here!!! I love...
New Game Round-up: Titans Threaten Mankind, Boomers Settle Oklahoma & Cartoons Animate Fluxx

New Game Round-up: Titans Threaten Mankind, Boomers Settle Oklahoma & Cartoons Animate Fluxx

Jun 10, 2014

• In March 2014, U.S. publisher Looney Labs announced that it had signed a licensing deal with Cartoon Network to create themed versions of its existing games, with Regular Show Fluxx being the...
New Game Round-up: Car Wars and Tile Chess Return, Revolution Adds Anarchy & China Awaits Unifying in ZhanGuo

New Game Round-up: Car Wars and Tile Chess Return, Revolution Adds Anarchy & China Awaits Unifying in ZhanGuo

Jun 09, 2014

• Steve Jackson Games continues to advance toward a full reboot of its Car Wars combat game of vehicular mayhem with the announced October 2014 release of the Car Wars base set, which SJG...
Designer Diary: Subdivision, or Designing From The Bits Up

Designer Diary: Subdivision, or Designing From The Bits Up

Jun 09, 2014

The IdeaI was driving home from work and designed the basics of two new games in my head.I had just mentally put away a game that I had been working on actively for the better part of a year,...
ads