Crowdfunding Round-up: Vacationing in Small World Before Walking a Plank of Deadwood and Getting the Shakes

Your family wants to have the best vacation ever! Your goal is to visit various cities and famous attractions all over America to increase your family’s happiness and collect bonus points. The player with the highest score at the end wins.

In Family Vacation players each have four family members and a car. A turn consists of moving your car one space. Each family member has two random interests (such as Golf, History or going to the Beach). When your family visits a space corresponding to an interest they have, your family gets happier. Every time you travel on the road, it's boring and your family loses happiness. While trying to make your family happy, you might also want to visit bonus attractions (such as the Statue of Liberty and the Golden Gate Bridge). Once a space has been visited, it is no longer available to other players. Some spaces require the drawing of a card, which can be good or bad. Maybe your family will stop for a snack, or perhaps someone will have to visit the bathroom – right now!

In addition to your car, each family has one Plane Ticket which allows quick travel between any two airports. Just make sure you plan for the long drive home!

Once your family has had a good vacation and you are satisfied with their level of happiness, you can head home and lock in your score. Players may head home at any time as long as they have visited at least one of their target destinations. Once one player has gone home, a countdown begins; all other players have seven turns to make it home. Players who are home score bonus points while they wait for the last few turns to wind down. In the end, you'll compare notes – that is, scores – and see how your vacation stacks up against everyone else's. Who has bragging rights for this year?

Time to film the latest western being produced at Deadwood Studios, makers of terrible western movies. All the special roles are up for grabs: "Man falling off roof", "Crying woman", "Stagecoach driver", "Dead man", and more. Yes, they're all available, and if you're good enough – that is, if you progress up through the "hack" levels represented by the number on your character's die – you may even get to play that complicated character part "Rear-end of Horse"!

In Deadwood, players wander across the backlot each day, looking for acting jobs. Your actor is a six-sided die, and the number on top represents your status. (These dice are never rolled; they just show your status.) After you take a role in the movie, you can roll a die and try to "act", or you can "rehearse" to improve your odds. As you work, you'll earn money and fame, and you can trade those things at the casting office for higher status, which brings you the ability to take better-paying roles.

At the end of the game, you add up your money, fame, and status points, and the player with the highest score is the best actor at Deadwood Studios!

In Shake Shake Tower – this game's original name – players start the game with eight 3D curved polyomino pieces in a single color, then take turns placing them on a swiveling, seesaw-style platform. Gravity pulls the platform and pieces from side to side as the tower rises, so players might have a tough time adding a piece to the stack – especially since each level must be filled before players can play on top of other bricks. If a player can't legally play, she must skip her turn, so play strategically to block others while leaving yourself room to grow!

If you knock pieces off the tower, you keep them on the side, losing one point for each brick in such a piece. When a player plays her final piece, the game ends. Players then score one point for each brick of theirs visible from a top-down view of the tower. Whoever has the high score wins.

Tremblex, a revised version of Shake Shake Tower, uses the same pieces and nearly the same scoring method, but players are free to place pieces as they wish on the tower – with one small exception that drives play in a different direction. Each piece you place must touch one of your pieces already in play; if all of your pieces have been covered by other players, then you're forced to sit out until someone else knocks pieces off the tower! Once this happens, all players are back in the game. The game ends when a player places her final piece, and players tally their scores, earning one point for each brick showing from a top-down view of the tower, losing one point for each brick in pieces knocked off the tower, and collecting a three point bonus if their piece is highest up in the tower.

Tremblex includes variant rules as well, such as a cooperative mode in which players try to complete the tower with no holes and a two-player game in which opponents place pieces only on their half of the platform, trying to scale higher than the other player in order to win.

In Walk the Plank!, players represent the worst pirates in a captain's crew. The captain has rounded you all up because you're all lazy and stupid and simply not worth the rum and loot you get paid. That said, the captain has decided he's willing to keep two of you in his crew. To prove you're worthy, you will fight amongst yourselves, trying to shove other players' pirates off the end of the plank while keeping yours alive!

In game terms, each round players secretly stack three of their ten action cards, then they take turns revealing and playing those actions one by one no matter what's gone wrong between the planning and the doing. If you plan to have a pirate shove someone off the plank on your third move and all he sees are his own best mates, he will still shove away! Some cards bear a skull on them, and these powerful cards must remain on the table the round after they're played, but otherwise players then pick up their action cards and start a new round. As soon as two or fewer pirates remain on board, the game ends and the owner (or owners) of these pirates win! Watch out, though, as sometimes every pirate will end up in the drink, which means that no one wins other than the sharks circling in the water below...