![Crowdfunding Round-up: Spell Deities Smartly to Win Your Day in Court](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/gxhBPr-BazwsWFgkCbUihg__medium/img/1ZgVejGmOUuU65vNs7MvPvwwpYM=/fit-in/500x500/filters:no_upscale():strip_icc()/pic3183185.jpg)
That said, I interviewed Mythic Games at SPIEL 2016 after seeing a bit of the game and artwork at a press event at Gen Con 2016, and I'm impressed at the package they've put together. We got to play at Gen Con for only 15 minutes as their presentation ran long, but the gameplay elements seem smooth before you start complicating it and blowing up the possibilities with all the expansions. (KS link)
• Believe it or not, an even bigger haul is going on with Flying Frog Productions' Shadows of Brimstone: Forbidden Fortress, with this title being a standalone expansion to Jason C. Hill's other Shadows of Brimstone games that's set in feudal Japan. (KS link)
• Beer Empire from Filip Głowacz, Ireneusz Huszcza, and Board&Dice is an evolved version of their 2013 release Piwne Imperium with players trying to create recipes for new brews. (KS link)
• A similarly reworked design is Gil Hova's Wordsy, first released as Prolix in 2010 by Z-Man Games and now being published by Hova's own Formal Ferret Games. I played a few rounds with Hova and others during NY Toy Fair in February 2016, and the game seemed far smoother than I recalled Prolix being, with players being rewarded for using the letters on the table to come up with the largest word possible and not just for coming up with any word quickly — although being fast can be worth points as well as long as you find a better word than most other players. (KS link)
• Level 99 Games, in partnership with Jasco Games, has two new Pixel Tactics games on tap for mid-2017: Mega Man Blue and Proto Man Red, with each standalone game featuring 28 different characters from the Mega Man titles that can be combined with each other or any other Pixel Tactics title. (KS link)
• The summary of Matthew Austin's Guild Masters from Mirror Box Games on its crowdfunding project pretty much says all that you need to know about whether you want to learn more or move along: "Expand your guild hall, hire unique workers, and craft magic items to build a legendary guild of heroes in this strategy board game." (KS link)
• Hunt down alien creatures and capture them while stymieing opponents from doing the same. That's the short version of Liz Gattra's Xenofera. (KS link)
• Einstein: His Amazing Life and Incomparable Science from Dirk Knemeyer of Artana presents players with an amazing concept: You are each taking on the role of Albert Einstein at a different time in his life, and your goal is to complete your theories before all those other Einsteins. Bonus for those who care: This game includes Penrose tiles! (KS link)
• Richard Boreham's MetRum: London is mostly a standard rummy game in which you meld sets and runs, but the cards feature stations from the London underground, with the iconography being based on Harry Beck's London Underground Tube map. (KS link)
• Designer Clayton Grey of Laboratory Games is back on Kickstarter with two new versions of his deck-building dungeon-crawling 100 Swords: The Gold King's Dungeon and The Silver Queen's Dungeon. Each game challenges one or two players to use a small hand of cards in the best way possible, then to do it again and again until you finally beat the boss. For those who want to play with up to four, a Multi-User Dungeon Expansion Pack is also available through this campaign. (KS link)
• Jason Morningstar's Ghost Court from Bully Pulpit Games is a party game that pits ghosts against the living who are suing them. Lots of role-playing going on here with the judge and court officers hearing multiple cases from plaintiffs and defendants. (KS link)
• Is it possible to design a 4X game with only seventeen cards? Well, how about a 4X-style game? That's what Chip Beauvais promises with Universal Rule from publisher of tiny games Button Shy, although the stretch goals threaten to grossly inflate this game to twenty cards. Horrors! (KS link)
• I'm not even sure what to think of the GameSlate, "a PC peripheral [that] uses a multi-touch grid to enable multiple, simultaneous players around an interactive digital game board". The creator is looking for $190k in backing for a product that sells for $1,600 and comes with three games of a mostly unknown nature, and as of this moment (Nov. 3) the project has, um, $0 in support. An item like this probably needs a year or two of support at all of the major conventions (and many of the minor ones) in order to create awareness of its existence and a desire for it to be a reality. (KS link)
• Gavin Birnbaum keeps making interesting, handmade all-wood designs through his own Cubiko Games, and Q.E. — presumably standing for "quantitative easing", although I don't see that term listed anwhere — pits four players against one another in the role of central banks that are bailing out sixteen companies that are "too big to fail", as the saying goes. (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