Orrrrrrrr the spaceships are on the game board and need you to flick them to move them around instead of you having the ability to move them (and keep them) exactly where you want. At the start of your turn, you receive resources based on where you are, and you use them to buy upgrades, ideally ones that will let you smash others into black holes, as one must inevitably do while in space. (KS link)
• Dexterity also comes into play in Jarom Higley's self-published Rise of the Exiled, with each player having a clear plastic playing card that depicts a weapon. Players simultaneously throw their weapons at characters on the table that belong to others, trying to damage them to remove them from play. (KS link)
• IDW Games racked up $800,000 in early 2016 with a Kickstarter for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shadows of the Past, and now it's partnered with Steve Jackson Games for a different take on the comic/toy/movie/no-really-it's-a-toy brand with Munchkin: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with both a deluxe edition and a deluxe ultimate edition being available. (The deluxe ultimate edition features a cover and art style that pays homage to Rōnin, I mean, the first TMNT comics from Mirage Studios.) (KS link)
• Now let's turn to a far different take on the concept of martial arts in games: As is often the case with Japanese designers, Kentaro Yazawa first released Master of Respect through his own publishing circle, Hoy Games, in 2016. Now the design has been picked up by Hobby Japan for release on a larger scale. (KS link) In the game, players attempt to train students, sometimes taking the actions performed by other masters to advance themselves, which pays those masters respect (i.e. victory points) in the process. For more details, you can watch the game overview that BGG recorded at Spielwarenmesse 2018:
• I don't know much about Konstantin Seleznev's Cult: Choose Your God Wisely, a co-publication of Igrology and Cryptozoic Entertainment, beyond it being a priest placement game in which you try to establish chapels or perform a ritual to summon your favored deity, but dang, does that cover rock the orange/blue contrast or what?! (KS link)
• Two years after his first effort to fund Bad Medicine: Second Opinion, an expansion for his first self-published game Bad Medicine, Gil Hova of Formal Ferret Games is back on Kickstarter funding both the expansion and a second edition of this party game in which you pitch made-up drugs to others and try to explain why the random side effects aren't as bad as you might think. (KS link)
• The short list of games that you can play without needing a table, referenced in my March 4, 2018 round-up, could expand by one with the release of Guardian's Gambit, a two-player combat game in which each player has a hand of six cards — two swordsmen, two shield bearers, and two specials of your choice — and you take turns sending one card out to attack...something in the opponent's hand. What will you find there? (KS link)
• Michael Addison's Space Princess from Nerdy Pup Games is a two-player asymmetric game with one player controlling the Princess and needing to escape the star cruiser while the other player controls the Dark Zealot and wants to keep her trapped. As you might guess from the name, Addison was inspired by Carrie Fisher in the creation of this design, and he's promised to donate $10 for every copy purchased to the International Bipolar Foundation. (Indiegogo link)
• Designer Martin Wallace first implanted Lovecraftian Old Ones in his designs in 2013's A Study of Emerald, a design he revisited in 2015, and now with New Zealand-based SchilMil Games he's bringing them to the Southern Hemisphere in AuZtralia, with 1-4 players fighting for dominance, although in the end they might all bow before beings from another plane of existence. (KS link)
• Scott Caputo's Sorcerer City from Druid City Games is a real-time tile-placement game as in each of the five rounds players have two minutes to assemble a personal city from their stack of tiles, gaining money, magic and influence based on how well they put things together. (KS link)
• Bézier Games released the party-ish deduction game Werewords in 2017, and now it's aiming to release Werewords Deluxe Edition, which includes new roles, a catalog of fifteen thousand words to be guessed, and gameplay that now accommodates as few as two players and as many as twenty. (KS link)
• You'll also find a digital element in David Cicurel's Chronicles of Crime from Lucky Duck Games, a cooperative deduction game with a VR-like experience in that players take turns donning goggles and staring at a digital 3D scene depicted on their smartphone. Describe to everyone else what you're seeing, and they'll look for clues and characters in the decks available to you. Multiple scenarios are in the game, with different game elements fulfilling different roles depending on the scenario. (KS link) We shot an overview of the game at a randomly-grabbed table while at the Spielwarenmesse 2018 fair:
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