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Crowdfunding Round-up: Tiny Epic Defenders, Harbour, Ophir, Escape x2, Start Player Express & More

Crowdfunding Round-up: Tiny Epic Defenders, Harbour, Ophir, Escape x2, Start Player Express & More
Board Game: Tiny Epic Defenders
Board Game: Harbour
• Designer Scott Almes is King of Kickstarter this week with two designs from two publishers raking in huge amounts of support. Tiny Epic Defenders is a co-operative microgame for 1-4 players from Gamelyn Games and a sequel of sorts to Almes' Tiny Epic Kingdoms (KS link), while Harbour is a worker placement game from Tasty Minstrel Games that I've heard described as "Le Havre writ small" (KS link).

• Ted Alspach of the Start Player card "game" has made things just that much simpler for those who don't have a lot of time to read one card to determine who will go first in the next actual game to be played, so he's pitching Start Player Express from his Bézier Games as an alternative. (KS link) To play, you roll the four dice, then look at them to see whether you're looking for the person with the fewest pets, largest nose, highest phone number, etc. Alspach has stated that Start Player Express won't be available in stores.

• Martyn F's self-published Oklahoma Boomers, due out at Spiel 2014, is being funded on Spieleschmiede. (Spieleschmiede link) In this two-player game, players try to use their three pawns to carve out homesteads for themselves on the Oklahoma frontier.

• Marco Pranzo's civilization game Historia, another planned Spiel 2014 release, this time from Italian publisher Giochix.it, is doing double-dip funding on both Kickstarter (link) and Spieleschmiede (link).

From gallery of W Eric Martin
• In just one day, Queen Games has already lapped its funding goal a couple of times for Escape: Zombie City, which features the same gameplay as Kristian Amundsen Østby's Escape: The Curse of the Temple — real-time co-operative dice-rolling by all players to explore an area before time runs out — but now with a zombie survival theme in which players need to find supplies so that they can make it out of town in time. (KS link) I previewed Escape: Zombie City after playing the prototype twice at BGG.CON 2013, so head to that write-up on BGGN for details of the gameplay.

• Another escape being funded is Mystery Rummy: Escape from Alcatraz from designers Mike Fitzgerald and Andrew Korson, with publishers Gryphon Games and U.S. Games co-ordinating on this release of title #5 in the Mystery Rummy series and the re-release of the previous four titles. (KS link)

• RE:VERSUS from Uptick Games is another rummy-based game looking for funding on KS, but it's not clear at first glance whether the game offers more than rummy with special action cards. I did not give it a second glance. (KS link)

Board Game: Ophir
• Terra Nova Games is following its tiny debut title Guile with the larger, temple-building, pick-up-and-deliver, set-collection game Ophir from Jason D. Kingsley and Charles C. Wright. (KS link)

• Designer/publisher David Sirlin of Sirlin Games is coming out with a new edition of his fighting card game Yomi, with twenty characters available for head-to-head combat. (KS link)

• Brad Finlayson's Symetra is already available in an edition from The Game Crafter, but he's now trying to fund a proper, large-scale version of this game in which players try to move their energy from potentiality to actuality in order to join "Symetra, an ascended being who travels between Earth and other worlds". (KS link) In brief:

Quote:
Players actualize their potential energy by fusing, combining and charging cards in the matrix, which is the board created by the players' cards. Once cards are charged in the matrix, players can use their unique actions to shape their victory.
Board Game: Antidote
• Dennis Hoyle's Antidote, first available as a print-and-play game, is shooting for publication status through Hoyle's Bellwether Games. (KS link) In this semi-cooperative card game, all the players have been poisoned and they must deduce which items might cure them — but since the quantity of antidote is limited, people might be reluctant to share...

• Isaac Childres' Forge War from Cephalofair Games mirrors the theme of Battle Merchants and Dwarven Miner in that players are blacksmiths creating weapons to sell to adventurers, who will then ideally come back rich and purchase more stuff from you. Curious to see how themes bubble up at particular times. (KS link)

• Pack the Pack, on the other hand, from Meghan McGinley and Games by Play Date, lets you play as those aforementioned adventurers, trying to figure out how to fit as much stuff in your backpack as possible so that you don't leave stuff behind for those other chumps. (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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