• In the category of games bearing famous IPs, we have Resident Evil 2: The Board Game from UK-based Steamforged Games Ltd., which last hit Kickstarter in mid-2016 to fund its take on Dark Souls. I guess Steamforged has its niche carved out. Any bets on what they'll adapt next? (KS link)
• Also lodged in that category is T2029: The Official Terminator 2 Board Game from Ian O'Toole and Australian publisher Rule & Make. As you might expect, players all take part in the Resistance against Skynet in the year 2029 while also needing to protect John Connor in 1995. (KS link) We recorded an overview at Gen Con 50 should you care to learn more:
• Okay, that's three intense co-ops from non-U.S. publishers, so let's zag in the other direction for Sunset Over Water from Eduardo Baraf, Steve Finn, Keith Matejka, and Pencil First Games. Players in this game trek through the wilderness, create landscape paintings, then attempt to sell them. No one fires guns or falls off a cliff and needs a broken leg bound. I'm not sure how such games still exist, but here we are. (KS link)
• You might experience a similarly calm sensation in Spy Club from Randy Hoyt and Jason D. Kingsley, which is being co-published by frequent partners Foxtrot Games and Renegade Game Studios. In this cooperative game, you channel Encyclopedia Brown and Harriet the Spy to solve mysteries in your neighborhood, whether as one-off cases or as a sequence of cases that fit together in a larger story. From the BGG description: "Throughout the campaign, you'll unlock new modules with additional rules and story elements. With 40+ new modules and 150+ cards in the campaign deck, you can reset everything and play multiple campaigns — with a different story and gameplay experience emerging each time." (KS link)
• Deduction is also at the heart of Stephen Godot's Human Punishment: Social Deduction 2.0 from his own Godot Games, with each of the 4-16 players being either human, machine, or outlaw and wanting to hunt down everyone else on the other teams. The graphics seem like a modern take on the neon-heavy look of Blade Runner. (KS link)
• Japanese creators can now use Kickstarter as well, and I think the first such project from Japan is for Yota Suzuki's Space Editor from TACTICAL GAMES. The game takes you back to the dawn of time, then challenges you to create the universe (no small feat!) by taking control of one of the five elements and ensuring that element remains dominant when you and the other gods decide to knock off for the day and call it done. (KS link)
• Potato Pirates is the latest take on a game that will teach kids how to code, with this design coming from Singapore-based technology company Codomo. More generally, this seems like a "take that" style of game that allows for loops and conditional elements to do more and take advantage of opponents in particular circumstances. (KS link)
• Nothing Now Games is back on Kickstarter for a second go at Panic!, a bidding and bluffing system from James Ernest in which players are commodity brokers who must escape a market crash before everyone else in order to stay on top of the financial pack. As seems to be common for an Ernest design, his game system has been used to create three different designs in one box: a bidding game, a drafting game, and a trick-taking game. (KS link)
• Another game getting a relaunch is ELO Darkness from Tommaso Mondadori, Alberto Parisi, and Reggie Games, with this being a two-player customizable MOBA-inspired card game that can also accommodate four players in teams of two. (KS link)
• Marshall Britt and Andrew Toth's Re-Chord from Yanaguana Games places you in a guitar battle that has you trying to complete secret chords to score points while also placing the guitar picks of your hidden color in the best scoring positions. (KS link)
• After releasing multiple versions of its Evolution board game, North Star Games is now bringing the design to PC, Mac, and mobile devices. (KS link)
• Whoa, here's a blast from the past. Outer Limit Games is funding a new version of Rui Alípio Monteiro's Trench, an abstract strategy game for two players inspired by trench warfare tactics from World War I. (KS link)
I interviewed Wise Games, the original publisher of Trench, at the 2013 Spielwarenmesse trade show in Nürnberg, Germany, the first time I had attended that event. It's nice to be able to re-use videos for an explanation of something coming back to market. (P.S.: I still own that shirt.)
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