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• Word games are being reclaimed by hobby designers left and right these days, and Wibbell++ is the latest in the revolution. Behrooz Shahriari and company have put together a game system, with multiple games that can be played with the same deck of cards. Wibbell itself is a word game that rewards quick thinking. Be the first to blurt out a word using one letter from every card. But the more rounds you win, the more cards you have to use, making your task tougher; it’s like the vocabularist’s version of a tractor pull. (KS link)
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• Gil Hova’s party game Bad Medicine quickly sold out its initial print run, but it’s being reprinted by Formal Ferret Games and has even metastasized, with the new growth being the Second Opinion expansion. The crux of this pitching party game is downplaying the side effects from your pharmaceutical concoction, but this expansion adds complications, an oddly thematic new mechanism with cards that will add surprise cards to your pitch. Gil has also teased that French and German localizations might be in the works; let’s just hope the EMA doesn’t look under this particular childproof cap. (KS link)
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• Last year, a small publisher no one had heard of called Mindclash Games stormed onto the scene with their heavy euro sim of 19th-century illusionist acts, Trickerion: Legends of Illusion. They’re staying with a euro backbone for their new release Anachrony, by the design team of Amann, Peter, and Turczi, but the plastic minis and coat of sci-fi paint will likely turn the heads of the meat-damage crowd, too. The hybrid style feels like a Schwarzenegger T-800: living tissue over metal endoskeleton. (KS link)
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• Would you rather be Indiana Jones or Rick Grimes? That’s the dilemma presented by the latest Queen Games project, which features big box editions of the popular Escape: The Curse of the Temple and its cousin Escape: Zombie City. A shrewd observer might remark that Temple has already received a big box, which is true; this second edition includes all three main expansions and all but one of the “Queenies”, as well as an updated insert to help keep it all sorted. So I guess it’s sort of the bigger big box? (KS link)
• Almost every ancient culture has a flood myth, but in a couple thousand years when inter-galactic travel is no big deal, those flood myths might be supernova myths. (The great part is that we’ll still be able to call the escape pod an “ark” since, you know, that’s a term sci-fi writers use.) Sol: Last Days of a Star, from brothers Ryan and Sean Spangler and their Elephant Laboratories imprint, is that story. You’re harvesting energy from the dying sun to power your ark, but the harvesting process is no multiplayer solitaire. (KS link)
• Veteran gamers will recognize Town of Salem: The Card Game as another riff on the classic Werewolf formula, but one with an interesting origin story: the card game is a back-formation from a video game of the same name — first browser-based and then released for Steam and mobile — originally created by Josh Brittain and Blake Burns at BlankMediaGames. Folks from villages all over have been doing play-by-email Werewolf sessions for a long time, but these guys beat everyone to the punch on actual video game implementation of that concept, and now the witchery they cooked up is paying off. (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
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