Crowdfunding Round-up: Hannibal Flippin' Off Barbarian Fantasy Clans of Mars & More

Crowdfunding Round-up: Hannibal Flippin' Off Barbarian Fantasy Clans of Mars & More
Board Game: Hannibal & Hamilcar
• Polish publisher PHALANX has been working on a new version of Mark Simonitch's classic game Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage for years. Defunct Canadian publisher Valley Games had released a new version in 2007 when the game was a decade old, then it announced but failed to get to print the standalone spinoff title Hamilcar: First Punic War, co-designed with Jaro Andruszkiewicz and John Rodriguez.

Now PHALANX is bringing that second game to life in a package with Hannibal since the games share some components and can each take one side of the game board for themselves. (KS link) BGG shot an overview video of the design, which was then still in progress, with Andruszkiewicz at Spielwarenmesse 2016 if you want to hear what their goals were for this redesign.


Board Game: Clans of Caledonia
• A game matching Hannibal & Hamilcar dollar for dollar on Kickstarter right now is the twenty-years-younger Clans of Caledonia from Juma Al-JouJou and his own Karma Games. This game is set in 19th century Scotland, with players representing one of eight clans — each with a unique ability — that's attempting to produce, trade, and export agricultural goods and whisky. (KS link)

• If you're drinking whisky, you probably want to get Flippin' Off, which the publisher-to-be describes as "a fun and frantic new bottle flipping game that includes a burping and farting bottle". I'm not sure what else needs to be added to that description. (KS link)

• Hard as it might be to imagine, burping and farting are not game mechanisms in Barbarians: The Invasion from Martino Chiacchiera, Mattia Ciaccasassi, Pierluca Zizzi, and Tabula Game. As with Clans of Caledonia above, this game is for 1-4 players, and it "revolves around worker placement on a 3D rotating volcano where you can perform different actions depending on the position of your workers, area control on a map, and the management of an economic engine". I'm not sure why you're doing anything on a volcano other than moving away from it, but that's why I was expelled from my barbarian homeland as a youth. (KS link)

• Another solitaire game looking for funding right now is Fantasy Defense, a new edition of Yoshiyuki Arai's Defense Three Kingdoms from Mandoo Games and Sweet Lemon Publishing in which humans and elves fight orcs to protect the city. This version adds a two-player cooperative mode, along with new art from Yann Tisseron. (KS link)

Board Game: One Deck Dungeon: Forest of Shadows
One Deck Dungeon: Forest of Shadows from Chris Cieslik of Asmadi Games is also a fantasy co-op, with this game being a standalone expansion for the dungeon delve One Deck Dungeon. You can mix and match the heroes and dungeon bits between games for more variety.
(KS link)

• Another standalone expansion is God Hates Charades: Wrath from God Hates Games, which replicates the gameplay of the original God Hates Charades, but with new cards. In the game, you pair an actor or fictional character with a random situation, then attempt to charade this pairing so that others can guess it. Hilarity ensues.
KS link)

• A similarly freeform design is Sedis from Neal Murthy and Nefer Games, with this being a set of sixty hexagonal tiles with a varying number of pips along each edge of the tile. This article in Houstonia Magazine quotes Murthy as saying "There's been nothing even remotely like it in at least 600 years", which makes it seem like Murthy is unfamiliar with any number of other game systems that have been created during that time period. The Kickstarter project includes guidelines for a few games, but the main pitch seems to be that you can create your own designs using these components. (KS link)

Chimera & More is a new version of Ralph Anderson's Chimera from Eagle-Gryphon Games that now includes nearly twice as many cards so that in addition to playing with three players, you can also play with exactly five. As for the gameplay in this rolling-trick-taking game, each round one player faces off against two (or two against three) to try to play all their cards in hand first. (KS link)

• Unlike the title above, the trick-taking game Boast or Nothing from Yeon-Min Jung and A.ger Games allows for play with four players, as well as three and five, but aside from the enticing-sounding set-up — with players being contestants in the final round of the World Championship of Boasting — the gameplay sounds fairly old-fashioned, with the only difference being a token-ranking stack that determines which card wins when someone plays off suit. (KS link)

Board Game: Rayguns and Rocketships
• Scott Rogers' Rayguns and Rocketships from IDW Games looks old-fashioned, but that's because the graphic design is straight out of the pulps of old. In the game, players must manage both the Planeteers who are commanding their spaceship and the spaceship itself while trying to blast others. (KS link)

• Néstor Romeral Andrés first published Gardens of Mars through his own nestorgames in 2011, and now new publisher Big Kid Games is releasing it anew. In the game, players draft dice to enable movement on the planet Mars so that they can plant plants in the red dirt of the surface to terraform the surface and (more importantly) score points based on the plants adjacent to their most recent plot. (KS link)

• Dice also help drive the action in Simon McGregor's Konja from Pleasant Company Games, a game in which two players compete to use special powers from travelers, along with cards and tokens, to manipulate dice to cast spell cards and purchase relics. (KS link)

• Finally, we have a title that breaks the connection game I've indulged in to this point, but a title that had to be included for its sheer eyebrow-raising nature. It's A Squirrel's Life was "created by Randy Hecht who rescued an orphaned squirrel named 'Roxy', who in turn inspired him to invent this all-American game both kids and adults will enjoy for years to come", a game designed "to help children develop their math, negotiation and social skills". Few Kickstarter projects include a poem written from the point of view of a grateful squirrel, but this one does. (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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