Crowdfunding Round-up: Dollars for Coins, Checks for Mechs & Cool Preorders Or Not?

• Is it time for another Eric M. Lang/Guillotine Games/Cool Mini Or Not blockbuster on Kickstarter? Apparently it is because The Others: 7 Sins blew past its $100k funding goal in minutes, barely leaving people enough time to complain about CMON's misuse of Kickstarter as a sales platform. Ha ha, I'm just kidding; those people are still complaining about it long afterward. (KS link)

• Tim Mierzejewski self-published Awesome Bots, then titled Dash, in a tiny edition in 2009 and now he's trying to fund a larger edition of this card game in which you draft and assemble robots, then sic them on one another. (KS link)

• Skallywaggs from Ben Crenshaw, Chris Pallace and Bent Castle Workshops is another example of this crowdfund-the-second-edition practice, with players in this game assembling a pirate crew from assorted heads, torsos and lower halves, with event cards and specially powered body parts that might enable you to complete your crew first. (KS link)

• Modiphius Entertainment is trying to fund a German edition of Matt Leacock's Thunderbirds. (Spieleschmiede link)

• Jason Glover's Virgin Seas from Grey Gnome Games has players sailing the seas — well, creating the seas from the fleet cards in hand in order to claim islands and score. (KS link)

• In Mech Deck, to be self-published by designer Patrick Fahy, players draft components, build mechs from five parts, then place them on the randomly-generated battlefield and blast one another to pieces. (KS link)

• Brett Brooks and Phil Chalker from Basement City Productions invite you to learn How to Kill a Spider in their quick-playing card game. (KS link)

• Players in Fate of Akalon: Tribes from Robert Nicaise and Foursight Games each control a faction and use the strength of those cards, as well as their special powers, to try to send opposing forces to the graveyard. (KS link)

• Private Die from Bennett, Chaney, Schirmer and Mystic Ape Games has the player detectives trying to crack witnesses to gain clues, but if you push them too far, they'll feed you false info and set back your efforts. (KS link)

• Yes, Dustin Schwartz included Corné van Moorsel's Factory Funner in his c.f. round-up, but I'm a huge fan of van Moorsel's design style, including the almost decade-old Factory Fun. Wow, time does fly. The gist of the game is that you're making goo — different colors of goo, mind you — and you need to install the proper equipment to keep the goo flowing to the proper channels. Factory Funner moves from a square floor to a hexagonal floor, allowing you to create more complicated and funner layouts of equipment and pipes. (KS link)

• In addition to all the games on KS, manufacturers are pitching a wide variety of game supplies and supporting material, such as Artana's "Best Damn Gaming Coins Ever II", which features coins bearing Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Persian and Mongol themes (KS link), and Infinity Plus One's "Epic Coins", which feature fantasy themes with lions, griffons, dragons, and wolves. (Spieleschmiede link)

• Along the same lines, Nate Perry is proposing a system of BitCrates, tiny attractive boxes that hold components on the game table and can be stored inside a larger box. Boxes nest together, in case you didn't know. (KS link)

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