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Crowdfunding Round-up: Ancient Games with Modern Funding

Crowdfunding Round-up: Ancient Games with Modern Funding
Board Game: Tak
• For star power in a crowdfunded game this week, let's start with Tak, an abstract strategy game that novelist Patrick Rothfuss introduced as an ancient design in the book The Wise Man's Fear and which James Ernest of Cheapass Games has now transformed into an actual "ancient" game — that is, a game that feels like it could have been around forever given that you use three simple types of pieces on a board that measures anywhere from 3x3 to 8x8 with the goal of creating a path that connects opposite edges of the board. I'm reminded of Daniel Solis' Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge from 2011 and suitably impressed that such things can still be created. (KS link)

• I suppose an argument could have been made for placing Steamforged Games' Dark Souls: The Board Game in the top spot given that it is a miniatures game based on the extremely popular Dark Souls videogame series that has collected nearly $2 million in funding within a couple of days, but we don't have a flat front cover image of the game in the database, so no can do. I hope that blow to their crowdfunding efforts won't be too harsh. Also, I keep thinking the name is Dead Souls and am curious to see how they've adapted the Nikolai Gogol novel. That college education is only getting in my way at this point... (KS link)

• Another game that actually is novel-based and blowing up on KS is The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game from Eric B. Vogel and Evil Hat Productions. We met with Vogel at the GAMA Trade Show in March 2016 and recorded this overview of what the game is like, what you might expect from the design in the future, and how many times Vogel read the books to pull out everything that he wanted from them. (KS link)




Board Game: Aether Captains
• Todd Sanders' Aether Captains from MAGE Company is back on KS for another flight, and this time the steampunky sky pirate battle game has more than doubled its slightly lowered goal. When at first you don't succeed, fly, fly again. (KS link)

• If steampunk isn't your thing, you can step up to 20th century dieselpunk in André Schillo's Xibalba from Voodoo Games and raid opponents in a fight for resources in order to raid an ark from an intergalactic civilization. At least I think that's what you're doing — whatever it is, though, you'll have fantastic hair and cleavage when doing it. (KS link)

• Diesel-powered fists are also on display in Battle for Sularia: Blood, Profit, and Glory, an expansion for the BoS base game from Jesse Bergman, John Kimmel, and Punch-It Entertainment that adds new mercenary allies to the game with three new ability keywords that are (despite the promise of the title) not blood, profit, and glory. (KS link)

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• Designer Stefan Risthaus of OSTIA Spiele is back with another minigame along the lines of 2015's Visby. In Tallinn, named after the Estonian capital, each player has the same set of ten cards, with each card having two actions on it. All players simultaneously reveal a card — with their thumb on the half of the card they want to use — then they stack it on the other cards they've played, with scoring occurring both between rounds and at the end of the game. (Spieleschmiede link)

• Exposed from designers Brian Henk and Clayton Skancke and publisher Overworld Games has you trying to steal wallets from passengers aboard a cruise ship while not being revealed as a thief in the process. (KS link)

• Draft card, create inventions, and win bonus points for alliteration in David J. Clarke's Great Scott! from Sinister Fish Games. All approve alliteration! (KS link)

• The cover of Bucks, Bullets and Flowers — a game from Cristian Mungherli and Apokalypse Inc in which you use mobsters to try to rule 1920s Chicago — is glorious, but apparently other people don't think it's $57K worth of glorious. (KS link)


Board Game: Bucks, Bullets & Flowers


 
• At the halfway point in this long c.f. post, we'll hit the ancient world once again with Eliot Hochberg's ILIOS: The Battle of Troy, which was released by Playford Games in 2015 as part of the Ancient Conflict Treasure Chest. In this game, players take turns placing tiles with arrows onto a board that measures anywhere from 4x4 to 10x10. You claim ownership of the tiles being pointed at by your newly placed tile, and if you surround or fence off tiles, you claim the tiles themselves as points. (KS link)

• War of a very different sort takes place in Warfighter: The WWII Tactical Combat Card Game from Dan Verssen and his DVG, with 1-6 players working together to complete World War II squad-level combat missions. (KS link)

• Stepping back even further in time we come to Hold the Line: The American Revolution, a project from Worthington Games and PSC Games that combines two prior Worthington games — Clash for a Continent and Hold the Line, both from Matt Burchfield, Grant Wylie, and Mike Wylie — along with eighteen new scenarios, two hundred miniatures, and a separate expansion for The French & Indian War. (KS link)

From gallery of W Eric Martin
• Stonemaier Games is avoiding the c.f. route for its Token Treasury, a three-set collection of fancy resin and metal tokens that can replace the prosaic wood and cardboard bits in the games on your shelves. Instead the publisher is taking money from people directly on the basis that it's producing a minimum of 1,500 sets no matter what and the contents of those sets won't change no matter how many people back it. Stonemaier is also reproducing the metal coins from Viticulture/Tuscany and Scythe should the metallic bling be more of your thing. (Stonemaier Games link)

• The Cthulhu portion of this crowdfunding post comes to you courtesy of Miskatonic School for Boys, a reverse deduction game from Garrett Herdter and Fun to 11 in which players are fifth dimensional beasts who know what creature everyone else is possessing but not who they're possessing. Maybe they're born with it, maybe it's Miskatonic. (KS link)

• Andy Breckman's Shit Happens — available with or without a G-rated decoy cover — from AdMagic Games plays like a filth-covered Timeline with you trying to place events in your row of miserable events based on how you think an event ranks on the 1-100 Misery Index. How does a lost pet compare to a ketchup bottle being stick in your butt? Now you finally answer this conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for centuries. (KS link)

• Bijhan Valibeigi's Time Wars: Supreme Command bills itself as the world's first "deck stacking" game as players place each discarded or used card on the bottom of someone's deck, thereby trying to set up (or foil) combinations that allow players to set up and collapse the Timeline in a way that's most favorable to them. (KS link)

• Let's end where we began this week, with a minimalist abstract strategy game that seems like it could have been designed at any point in the past thousand years. King's Valley, from Mitsuo Yamamoto and his own Logy Games, presents players with five pieces each on a 5x5 board, with each piece moving as far as it can in any direction, stopping only when it hits another piece or the edges of the playing area. Your goal is to land your king piece in the central square before your opponent does this first. As with Yamamoto's earlier KS project for e-SOLO-e, many designs of board and pieces are available because he apparently creates everything by hand. (KS link)


From gallery of W Eric Martin


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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