In Smash Monster Rampage!, players work together to defeat an attacking monster before the town is destroyed or too many survivors are lost. The "Monster Die" generates random actions for the Monster, making the beast unpredictable and dangerous. It sets buildings ablaze, creates devastating quakes, and destroys everything in its path. Taking turns to move their tank and helicopter units, players get into position to attack the Monster. They can win "Monster Hit" cards by successfully firing at the Monster and fulfilling the conditions on the cards.
If the city is flattened before the Monster is defeated, the Monster wins!
In the elegant and thematic card game Sangoku, players recruit warriors – Dogs, Samurais, Oni and Dragons – to their armies by playing poker hands to each of the Three Realms. The best hand in each realm wins, and a Warrior is summoned from the winning cards – but the weakest cards also summon the most powerful Warriors, with the 2 card in each suit (Fire, Metal, Earth, Water, Wood) summoning a mighty Dragon. With these recruited Warrior tokens, players advance on their opponents to gain ascendancy in the Realms. They can also wager and collect Legend cards, which when combined into sets can be used to powerful effect, including bringing forth uniquely damaging Warriors.
Legends of the American Frontier is an adventure game for 3 to 7 players in which you live the life of a newly-minted citizen in the colonial days of America, starting just after the Revolutionary War in the 1780s and running through the early 1800s.
Over the course of the game, the history of your character will unfold through the adventures you choose to seek Status, Fame, Wealth, and Happiness and the story cues you collect or purchase to define your character's life and deeds. As you craft a tale of adventure, hardship, and discovery, you will be revealing your own Legends of the American Frontier.
The objective of the game is to score the most points through completing Adventures and purchasing Rewards. All Adventures and Rewards are added to the characters Legend, so are not hidden during the course of the game. At the end of the game in the Legend Phase, each player will tell his character's life story to the group based on their Legend developed over the course of play then proceed to the final scoring where -1 VP tokens, Failure tokens and unspent Reward tokens are calculated and added/subtracted to create the final scores.
• That same post includes Travis R. Chance's Infamy, a cyberpunk game in which players work toward secret goals that's coming from Mercury Games before the end of 2013. (KS link) Chance wrote a designer diary about the game for BGGN that detailed his passion for cyberpunk.
• I know several people have asked for relief from zombie-themed games, but they're out of luck this time, as they are most weeks. They're Coming is a two-player zombie survival game from Super Magical Powers Studio in which one player can control the survivors and the other the zombies, or in which both players can have their own survivors and zombies and they sic one on the other and vice versa. (KS link) "They're Coming" also summarizes the non-stop onslaught of game projects on Kickstarter, whether zombie-related, zombie-free or somewhere in-between.
• Willkommen auf Allofall from designers Till Meyer and Nicole Stiehl and publisher Spieltrieb, an English/German game undergoing fundraising on German site Spielschmiede, covers the same thematic ground as Alien Uprising above. Funny what gets into the creative air sometimes. (Spielschmiede link) An overview of this game project:
The aim of the game is simple: Board on your miniature mining vehicle, the "Rollator MK-V", leave the ship, and get to the landing point of your shuttle on the opposite side of the game board before it leaves again. On your way to the shuttle, you'll have to struggle through deserts, jungle and mountains, with your only equipment being some mining tools and a handful of food and water. You'll become acquainted with Allofall's fauna and flora, and you'll encounter friendly (more or less) aliens who either are going about doing their normal every day business or are struggling to survive on this planet themselves (and are therefore a bit resentful). Whether you fight, avoid, or fool them in order to get past them depends on you, your equipment, and their values of strength, frustration and intelligence.