Crowdfunding Round-up: Fantasy, Fascists and Frozen Faces

• NSKN Games has gone back to the crowdfunding well for Simurgh: Call of the Dragonlord, a modular expansion for Pierluca Zizzi's Spiel 2015 release Simurgh that adds new tiles of existing types, new Leadership tiles, a second game board, and more. (KS link, Giochistarter link)

• The second edition of REDIMP GAMES' The Lord of the Ice Garden is also on Giochistarter, with backers receiving Italian rules with a copy of the game. Interesting to see this type of approach to wedge the game into a new market. (Giochistarter link)

• We previewed Daryl Andrews' and JR Honeycutt's Fantasy Fantasy Baseball from CSE Games at Gen Con 2015 (video), and now the game is looking to fill its roster of backers on KS. In FFB, you draft fantasy creatures, then compare stats, cast spells, and otherwise do whatever is needed to score. (KS link)

• Jeffrey Lai's Draconis Invasion is a deck-building game that gives each player secret campaign quests at the start of play, thereby providing some mystery as to who might win once someone takes down their seventh invader or the deck of event cards runs dry. (KS link)

• Who is Secret Hitler? Only the fascists know for sure. That's the basis of Secret Hitler from Max Temkin, Mike Boxleiter and Tommy Maranges, a hidden role game that pits liberals against fascists in 1930s Germany, with the liberals trying to enact five liberal policies or find and assassinate Secret Hitler before the outnumbered fascists can enact six policies of their own or elect Secret Hitler Chancellor. (KS link)

• Laurence Humier's Smart Money Maker is a semi-cooperative card game in which 2-6 players must pay off their debts, taxes and loans in order for someone — the player with the most money on hand — to win; if anyone still has unpaid debts, though, then the game wins. (KS link)

• Dan Chou's Security Council from CHOU! Games gives players the power to nuke the world and possibly survive afterward in order to rule over the bits that remain. (KS link)

• Leonardo: The Game of Art and Death — Plague Edition sounds intriguing, but a closer look at the game, the second Leonardo-based item kickstarted by Dent-de-Lion du Midi, shows more than a few similarities to Monopoly underneath the polished da Vincian finish. One player can become Death, though, and claim money from the owners of the spaces on which it lands, so I suppose that's something. (KS link)

• Treatment: A psychiatry card game from Markus Takanen was demoed at Spiel 2015 at the Sierra Madre Games stand, and now the game and its quirky cute(?) illustrations in which players represent psychiatric diseases are nearly funded. (KS link)

• The party game Why the long face? from Penelope Taylor has you trying to recreate the faces of depicted taxidermied animals. To quote the creator, "Why the long face? is a face charades game where players bring taxidermy to life!" I can imagine someone creating a taxidermy-based game that I'd want to play, but this isn't it. (KS link)

• Deer Lord is a party game along the lines of J'te Gage Que..., a.k.a. Bluff Party, with players trying to do something during the turns of other players (while not getting called out for it) in order to claim credit for that something on their turn in order to score points. Deer Lord does add duel cards to its deck, so that's one new element, I think. (KS link)

• Breaker Blocks from Jacob Vander Ende and his Spriteborne brand is a two-player battle over circuits using laser-cut action and power tiles. (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