Forget Polyominoes! It's Time for Polycube Games Instead!

• Japanese designer Mitsuo Yamamoto has released many abstract strategy designs through his Logy Games brand, with most of the games including handmade ceramic or wood components.

For those who argue that Kickstarter is intended to bring to life games that might not exist otherwise, Yamamoto's creations provide an interesting case study. His most recent five projects have raised $1,400-$4,300 in support from a few dozen backers, so they're not putting up big numbers — yet because the games are handmade, you can't argue that they exist solely thanks to Kickstarter. These games would have existed anyway, but with 40-80 fewer copies being made and sold. Kickstarter is as much a store for Yamamoto as it is for CMON Limited, yet on a far smaller scale, so do the arguments against CMON using Kickstarter hold equally true for Yamamoto, and if not, why?

In any case, in December 2018 Yamamoto ran a KS (link) for Dubai Race, a game for at least two players, with copies due out in Q1 2019. Each copy of the game comes with two colors of components, with each set of components containing 10 hexagonal tiles and 10 "building units" composed of 1-4 cubes; as long as the tiles and building units can be distinguished by color, you can have any number of players participate in the same game.

To start the game, players take turns laying out their tiles in a contiguous shape, then they take turns placing one of their building units on one of their tiles until everything has been placed. They then take turns rebuilding the shared city. Specifically, you take a building that's yours — that is, one that has your color on top — then move that building in one of the six available directions until you can place it on top of a higher building.

If you topple anything, you're out of the game; if you can't move, you must retire, but your pieces remain in play. After all players have toppled something or retired, whoever owns the tallest building wins.

• Aside from this new game, Yamamoto has signed a licensing deal in which his polycube-stacking game ACTOP (short for "Ancient Construct Tower of Philosopher") will be released in the U.S. in 2019 by Winning Moves Games under the name KOZO.

In the game, which can be played co-operatively, competitively, or solitaire, players take turns placing one of the twelve polycubes — which are constructed from 3-6 cubes — on a central tower that has a 3x3 grid. No parts of a polycube maybe placed outside that grid or over the central square. After placing a polycube, a player has to place a tiny "balance" cube on one of the horizontal faces, thereby blocking that space from play.

This promotional image is...unfortunate

• Okay, those previous two games feature polycubes, but surely we can find one more to write about to make this an official "trend" post, yes? With the number of games hitting the market, I never doubted this for a minute.

Adam Spanel's Project L was crowdfunded (KS link) in October 2018 by Czech publisher Boardcubator for release in October 2019. In this game for 1-4 players, you start with a single piece, take various actions to complete one of the mini-puzzles on display, which then gets you your pieces back along with one bonus piece. As the game progresses, you can solve multiple puzzles at once.

The sample pieces shown in the prototypes below don't look like proper polycubes, but rather polycubes sawed in half. Ideally the finished production will include beefier blocks.

3D-printed test version