To start, each player chooses one of the six available characters. As you move down the trail, you'll draw cards, which might be good or bad for you, bad for opponents, or terrible for everyone at the table. You'll also acquire useful items and specialties — with each character having a different set of things to find — have adventures, and come into conflict with other players. Conflict in Cross Hares takes the form of either shoving each other back and forth around the map or stealing items.
Don't worry if you're far back on the path away from everyone else as with the right events or die rolls, you can race ahead of the others! Once you get to the factory, though, you'll need all of your skills and items to defeat it, so be sure you save some of your strength for that.
• In the "madeleine" category, we have Mega Man: The Board Game from Jasco Games, a title featuring the Capcom video game character, expensive backer levels, and complaints about the game not featuring all of the characters that it "should" to be a proper board game adaptation of said video game. (KS link) No matter — the project racked up more than $200k in support in three days, so perhaps most people are fine with the project as it's being presented. I don't know. I've never played the video game, so I have no clue what I'm missing or not missing. Some days I wonder what I'd be like if I had played video games in my youth and teen years, but I'll have to be satisfied with memories of Paul Smith drawing Kitty Pryde in tight pants.
• Spanish publisher nestorgames runs its own crowdfunding site — the eponymous nestorbooster — for small production runs of certain games, and until January 3, 2014 company owner Néstor Romeral Andrés is trying to fund a new edition of his dice-rolling race-ish Way of the Dragon (nb link) and the first "dice-based" edition of Stephen Tavener's WW1 aerial combat game Crosshairs (nb link). Why fund these two games? Because each title uses custom dice, and in Andrés' words: "In order to get an 'affordable' price, I have to manufacture 20 sets of dice (100 in total) or more."
• Designer Andreas Propst is trying to fund the production of Elemental Clash: Legendary Legacy, the next expansion for his Elemental Clash game series on Indiegogo. (IGG link)
• If you plan to run a crowdfunding campaign of your own, perhaps you'll want to check out Dan Shapiro's "Anatomy of a $631,230 Kickstarter Video", Shapiro being the designer and publisher of KS success Robot Turtles, which brought in the aforementioned amount of money from more than 13,000 backers. His advice summarized:
2) It's worth the money to hire a pro, but...
3) Let reality shine through.