Crowdfunding Round-up: Vineyards, River Boats, Werewolves & a Kickstarter Decree

In Viticulture, the players find themselves in the roles of people in rustic, pre-modern Tuscany who have inherited meager vineyards. They have a few plots of land, an old crushpad, a tiny cellar, and four workers. They each have a dream of being the first to call their winery a true success.

The players are in the position of determining how they want to allocate their workers throughout the year. Every season is different on a vineyard, so the workers have different tasks they can take care of in the summer and winter. There's competition over those tasks, and often the first worker to get to the job has an advantage over subsequent workers.

Fortunately for the players, people love to visit wineries, and it just so happens that many of those visitors are willing to help out around the vineyard when they visit as long as you assign a worker to take care of them. Their visits (in the form of cards) are brief but can be very helpful.

Using those workers and visitors, players can expand their vineyards by building structures and planting vines (vine cards) and filling wine orders (wine order cards), players work towards the goal of running the most successful winery in Tuscany.

Werewolf takes place in a small village which is hunted by werewolves.

Each player is secretly assigned a role - Werewolf, Villager, or Seer (a special Villager). There is also a Moderator player who controls the flow of the game.

The game alternates between night and day phases. At night, the Werewolves secretly choose a Villager to kill. Also, the Seer (if still alive) asks whether another player is a Werewolf or not. During the day, the Villager who was killed is revealed and is out of the game. The remaining Villagers then vote on the player they suspect is a Werewolf. That player reveals his/her role and is out of the game.

Werewolves win when there are an equal number of Villagers and Werewolves. Villagers win when they have killed all Werewolves. Werewolf is a social game that requires no equipment to play, and can accommodate almost any large group of players.

Until the second half of the 18th century, most people thought that larger barges could not navigate the Ruhr River. However, the convenient route meant that attempts were conducted to transport the coveted coal resource along the river in the beginning industrial revolution. The first coal barges reached Kettwig in spring 1770. A little while later barges reached the Rhine mouth at Ruhrort. The empty barges were drawn upstream by horses afterwards.

However, the Ruhr was not generally navigable in this time. Large dams at mills and low dams for fishing were common. At these spots the coal has to be transferred from one barge to the next. This decreased the quality of the coal considerably – sometimes only "coal dust" reached Ruhrort. Only the building 14 locks between Witten and Ruhrort changed this.

The Ruhr remained an important route for coal until the end of the 19th century. At that time the railway superseded it.

In Ruhrschifffahrt 1769-1890, 2-4 players transport and sell coal along the Ruhr river in Germany as profitable as possible. Progress markers are helping them. The position of each player's Ruhr barge is most important; the player farthest upriver is allowed to conduct his action first in each phase of a game turn.

It's hard to know how many people feel like they're shopping at a store when they're backing projects on Kickstarter, but we want to make sure that it's no one. Today we're introducing a number of changes to reinforce that Kickstarter isn’t a store — it’s a new way for creators and audiences to work together to make things. We’d like to walk you through these changes now...

Today we added a new section to the project page called "Risks and Challenges". All project creators are now required to answer the following question when creating their project:

"What are the risks and challenges this project faces, and what qualifies you to overcome them?"

We added the "Risks and Challenges" section to reinforce that creators' projects are in development. Before backing a project, people can judge both the creator's ability to complete their project as promised and whether they feel the creator is being open and honest about the risks and challenges they face.