Crowdfunding Round-up: Futuristic Baseball, Transported Heroes from the Past & Present Day Mysteries Reborn

Crowdfunding Round-up: Futuristic Baseball, Transported Heroes from the Past & Present Day Mysteries Reborn
Board Game: Baseball Highlights: 2045
Can you believe it's already time for another round-up of game-related crowdfunding projects? Mind you, it's not like such posts are on an official schedule, but rather a "let's clear out my inbox" type of feeling. Whatever the cause, I'll now dump a ton of pie-eyed dreamers in your lap and leave their fate in your hands.

• At BGG.CON 2013, I recorded a preview video of Baseball Highlights: 2045 with designer Mike Fitzgerald, and he seemed to be practically jumping off his seat with excitement. He's been trying to sell a baseball-themed game forever because he loves the sport, and with this deck-building/team-building approach that abstracts out the details of every pitch and play, he thinks he finally struck the right path. Eagle Games does as well obviously since it plans to publish the game. (KS link) Here's a summary of the gameplay:

Quote:
Baseball Highlights: 2045 is like watching TV highlights of early 21st-century baseball games, with the gameplay being full of theme with no outs or innings and without bogging down in a play-by-play baseball simulation. In this quick and interactive game, two players build their teams as they play, combining both strategy (building your team) and tactics (playing the game) without any of the downtime. During each "mini-game", each player alternates playing six cards to simulate a full game's highlights. The mini-game includes defensive and offensive actions, and your single card play may include elements of defensive and/or offensive plays. Do you try to thwart your opponent's pending hits, put up strong offensive action of your own, or use your better players to do both? Players buy new free agents after each mini-game to improve their roster, and the team who wins the most mini-games in the series is the champ!
Designer Tom Lehmann has even written a preview/appreciation of the game on BGG: "Baseball purists may decry Mike's futuristic setting, but I think Mike has done a marvelous job capturing baseball flavor, in both the card powers and his player names, such as Catfish Carlton, Mickey Maris, or Barry Sosa."

One odd/interesting tie-in with this KS campaign: Fitzgerald is also the designer of the Mystery Rummy series of card gamesMystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper, Mystery Rummy: Murders in the Rue Morgue, Mystery Rummy: Jekyll & Hyde and Mystery Rummy: Al Capone and the Chicago Underworld — and Eagle Games has partnered with MR publisher U.S. Game Systems to (finally!) bring those games back to print, with them being add-on items if you're backing Baseball Highlights: 2045. I presume these MR titles will be available at retail outlets in the future as I've been pestering U.S. Games with questions about this series on-and-off since (checking my email records) 2009, when Jack the Ripper was reprinted on its own without the other three titles. It's been a long time coming...

Board Game: Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper
From gallery of W Eric Martin
Board Game: Mystery Rummy: Jekyll & Hyde
Board Game: Mystery Rummy: Al Capone and the Chicago Underworld

Board Game: The Ancient World
• Designer/artist/publisher Ryan Laukat of Red Raven Games is back on Kickstarter with The Ancient World, with 2-4 players trying to "grow the largest and most influential city-state by managing citizens, treasury, and military and by defeating titans", titans being jerks who harass local tribes that you hope to win over with your fab city-state. (KS link)

• Stephen Finn has added a small expansion for his Scripts and Scribes: The Dice Game — consisting of a "power" die, a card and two wooden cubes — to his current KS for Let Them Eat Shrimp! Interesting to see how projects evolve based on backer feedback, especially when you have a designer like Finn who's cultivated a lot of support through direct sales with gamers. (KS link)

Demigods Rising is a skirmish-style board game from first-timers Nikola Andrejic and Milos Pavlovic in which players are demigods controlling armies comprised of some of the twenty heroes available to them. Multiple game modes are available, and as you might expect for a thematic battle game, it includes miniatures of the heroes. (KS link)

• Somewhat game-related is a KS project for Ambient Soundscapes Vol. II from Scott Morton, who claims that this disc is part of a "series of rich ambient music and sound collections, crafted to enhance the tabletop gaming experience". Can anyone vouch for this richness and enhancement? (KS link)

Board Game: Fireteam Zero
Board Game: Fireteam Zero: Europe Cycle
Board Game: Fireteam Zero: Africa Cycle
• The designer trio of Mike Langlois, Christian Leonhard and Gary Simpson, along with publisher Emergent Games, blew past their $50k funding goal for Fireteam Zero in a day and have (as of this writing) tripled that amount. (KS link) Guess that's what happens when you're offering a big game with two boxed expansions and a pile of miniatures. What's the game, you ask? Here's the setting: "In 1942, four soldiers vanished from the training program of the newly formed First Ranger Battalion, their names stricken from the roster. Chosen for their unique skills, they would fight in secret against terrifying supernatural enemies and overwhelming odds. This is their story." In more detail:

Quote:
Fireteam Zero is a cooperative game for up to four players who must cut a path through an endless swarm of deadly monsters in order to discover and defeat the ultimate evil behind them. Each player possesses a set of brutal combat skills that are represented by a deck of cards unique to that character. Play cards to devastate the creatures in your way, help your teammates survive the onslaught, or even reshape the tactical landscape with the proper application of explosive ordinance. The battle is fought across three maps of increasing difficulty, each one bringing more and tougher enemies than the last. Players must search for and complete mission objectives in order to progress and bring them one step closer to the final showdown.

Aiding them are two NPC Specialists, one with an uncanny ability to sense the location and nature of the supernatural energy in the area and another with an encyclopedic knowledge of the arcane. Use the Specialists wisely or risk failure no matter how many monsters you defeat.

Race against time as the creatures on the board become stronger and more cunning. The longer you take to complete your objectives, the more Monster Twist cards are revealed, each granting a new and terrible aspect to your enemy. In each set of missions you will face a different family of horrifying creatures, each with their own special abilities and twist cards.

Players must not only fight for their lives, but at the same time they must make smart tactical choices with their teammates in order to make the best use of a limited resource, the cards in their hands. Each card not only represents an action that they can take, but also their health. Spending too many cards can leave you vulnerable, while spending too few can result in being overwhelmed. Clever players will rely on each other to succeed.
The two expansions for Fireteam ZeroThe Europe Cycle and The Africa Cycle — each add to the game four double-sided tiles, a new monster family, upgrades for your specialists (gear, personal ability decks), and three new adventures, such as "The Battle of Lost Children" and "The Man from Carthage".

Coming Soon

• Two months ahead of a May 2014 KS project for Scott Almes' Harbour, Tasty Minstrel Games has released a print-and-play version of the game with black-and-white artwork (PDF) to chum the funding waters and get feedback from testers.

• In a newsletter, TMG's Michael Mindes also mentions that Dan Keltner and David Short's Bomb Squad — a real-time co-operative game with a Hanabi-style information system that's available as a print-and-play game via the BGG game page — is in the works, and given TMG's track record, that game will likely appear on KS at some point.

Taking a Breather

Think this is all of the games being crowdfunded right now? Hoo boy, not a chance! But I'm splitting them into two posts in order to get one out the door faster...

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

Related

Game Overview: Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension

Game Overview: Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension

Mar 09, 2014

At Gen Con 2013, I spoke with designer Corey Young in the BGG booth and previewed his game Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension, which publisher Cryptozoic Entertainment had in limited supply...

New Game Round-up: From Media to Games with Regular Show, Bravest Warriors & Video Game High School

New Game Round-up: From Media to Games with Regular Show, Bravest Warriors & Video Game High School

Mar 08, 2014

• Cryptozoic Entertainment has the Bravest Warriors Co-operative Dice Game due out in July 2014, as noted in this BGGN post, but apparently it's not the only game company to snag a license for...

New Game Round-up: Magicians Practice Vudù, Robots Rescue Jupiter & Attack Wing Moves from SF to F

New Game Round-up: Magicians Practice Vudù, Robots Rescue Jupiter & Attack Wing Moves from SF to F

Mar 07, 2014

• In early February 2014, I linked on Facebook to a post about WizKids Games making miniatures for Dungeons & Dragons. I don't cover role-playing games, after all, but I thought folks might...

NY Toy Fair 2014 — Game Previews III: Sushi Go!, Pyramix, Dodge Dice, Over/Under & Space Spinners

NY Toy Fair 2014 — Game Previews III: Sushi Go!, Pyramix, Dodge Dice, Over/Under & Space Spinners

Mar 06, 2014

• Hoo boy, I gotta get moving on all these videos that I recorded at NY Toy Fair 2014, not to mention those still languishing from Spielwarenmesse 2014, which opened six weeks ago and is...

Designer Diary: Mad City, or My Longest and Shortest Design Yet

Designer Diary: Mad City, or My Longest and Shortest Design Yet

Mar 06, 2014

I guess it could be true for me to say that Mad City was the game I designed the fastest — and from a certain point of view also the game that took me the longest to design.Around 1999 or 2000,...

ads