The entire game lasts two "game years", and each year consists of four seasons (a.k.a. turns). At the start of each season, players see the heroes and events to come in the following season, allowing them to prepare. At the end of each season after the first, heroes are allocated to each player according to the players' level of evilness. Heroes range from mighty heroes to sneaky thieves. Each hero has its own power for which the player needs to prepare for. At the end of each year, the heroes travel into the dungeons to fight.
Scoring in the game is based upon what you have built, the monsters you have hired and the heroes you have captured.
At the start of a round, players draft cards and place (program) them in one of three slots. Then in player order, players reveal the first slot and take one of the two available actions. Players can fire their weapons, hide beyond cover, switch weapons, grab money, etc. Players also have the opportunity to "throw" chairs or other items (cards) onto an opponent's player board to do additional damage.
The game ends in two ways: If a player takes four points of damage, he's dead and out of the game, with the last man (or woman!) standing winning it all. Alternatively, if the pot of dinero ever runs out, the richest outlaw wins.
• Designer Brad Talton from Level 99 Games loves variability in his games — not just in the gameplay itself, mind you, though he does love it there, too, but in everything surrounding those games. (KS link) Thus, with the remastered edition of BattleCON: War of Indines on KS, you find new arenas that provide different fighting environments and strikers that you can call in as allies during a battle and alternate costumes for existing fighters that provide new abilities and an armory to further let you customize fighters and more options for 2v1 and 3v1 battle modes and — phew, the possibilities are mind-boggling, and that's before you even get to the base gameplay:
BattleCON forms attacks by combining a character's unique styles with a set of generic bases, which all characters share. Because of this system of combined attacks, every fighter plays differently, yet all share a similar metagame which makes picking up and playing new characters easy. In addition, each character has a unique special power which gives them additional strategic options.
Yardmaster Express plays in ten minutes and consists of just over 20 cards (no tokens, no cargo cards).
• Spells of Doom from Evangelos Foskolos, Stelios Kourtis, and Drawlab Entertainment has you casting, well, you know, in order to try to capture magic crystals and damage opponents. (KS link)
• Stonemaier Games is back on KS, not with a giant game this time but with a "treasure chest" that comes filled with "an assortment of premium-grade realistic resource gaming tokens (gold, wood, ore, stone, clay, and gems)". (KS link)
• Monikers from Alex Hague and Justin Vickers is another take on the Celebrities party/charades game that previously brought us Time's Up!, but Monikers includes both tougher and more generic things to guess like "Drunk Jeff Goldblum", "Bloody Mary", and "A Juggalo". (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