Repair Pottery, Collect Butterflies, Escape Dreams, and Explore Fliptown

Repair Pottery, Collect Butterflies, Escape Dreams, and Explore Fliptown
Today, I'll highlight a handful of smaller game projects being crowdfunded that might be overshadowed by larger campaigns that create their own gravity:

• Designer Steven Aramini has started his own publishing company with Write Stuff Games, and his first title — the 1-4 player game Fliptown — is looking for funding on Kickstarter through May 20, 2022.

Board Game: Fliptown

Here's an overview of the gameplay:
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Fliptown is a flip-and-write game in which you are trying to earn stars by exploring a wild west town. The game uses a standard poker deck to drive an open world-style of game play, along with dry erase boards or print-and-play sheets that serves as each player's map.

Each turn, flip over three cards, assigning one card to represent your suit, one card to represent your value, and one card to represent your poker card. The suit dictates which of four regions you activate, the value dictates which site within that region you get to circle, and the poker card goes toward a five-card poker hand that is resolved at the end of each round. Each of the four regions — Trail, Badlands, Mine, and Town — offers a different puzzle to master, while each site within a region provides a unique reward such as cash, gold, helpful items like guns, horses and tools, or bonus actions to create powerful combinations.

Board Game: Fliptown

For solo play, you can play to achieve a high score or compete against one of four "cowbot" robot opponents, each with its own motivation.

For multiplayer play, players use "community cards" in the center of play, with players resolving each turn simultaneously. Additionally, bounty cards add competitive goals that players are racing to achieve.

In addition to the standard game, you can play as one of 14 wild west characters. Each character has a unique set of starting resources and a unique special ability.
• You can tick even more boxes in Steve Finn's Butterfly Garden Duel, the second BYOP (bring your own pencil) title from his own Dr. Finn's Games brand following 2022's Mining Colony Duel. Here's the quick take on this game, which is funding on Kickstarter through May 16, 2022:
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In the game you compete with your opponent to spend time in the park collecting a variety of butterflies. You also need to make sure you have the right jars to hold them.

Board Game: Butterfly Garden Duel

Each round, players pledge to commit time to the task, and the player who commits more time has their choice of which park areas to capture butterflies from, and it usually means you can capture more — but the amount of time you spend one day may limit your time on another, so you must carefully choose when to spend the most time.
Butterfly Garden Duel also includes solitaire rules.

• UAE publisher Cation Arts has licensed the use of Andre the Giant, Macho Man Randy Savage, and other professional wrestlers for the 1-4 player card-and-dice game All Time Wrestling from Mohamed Al Qadi and Jad Yammine, which is being funded on Kickstarter through May 26, 2022. Here's an overview of the setting:
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"Clack! Zap! Boom!" A frightening roar echoes through the chambers of the arena. This is the sound of something sinister. This is a beast, grinding and twisting, bending the forces of the universe to the will of its master, a master who is obsessed with finding the definitive answer to the question of "Who is the greatest wrestler of all time?"

Now, his beast, the world's only time machine, brings forward the very best — champions of past, present and future generations. legends who seek to cement their legacy as the best of all time. This is where legends collide. This is where your destiny awaits.

Board Game: All Time Wrestling
The base game is for two players only

In All Time Wrestling, you choose your champion from the legends of past, present and future, each with their own deck of attacks, abilities, signature moves, and finishers! Play your cards to unleash devastating combos, powerbombs and piledrivers, aerial stunts and deadly submissions...but will the dice be in your favor?
• At Gen Con 2021 in September, I had played a prototype version of Patrick Rauland's Broken and Beautiful: A Game About Kintsugi from Left Justified Studio, and this 2-4 player card game in which players draft seven types of pottery and other items is now being funded on Kickstarter through May 20, 2022.

From gallery of W Eric Martin
Prototype at Gen Con 2021

Gameplay is straightforward in Broken and Beautiful. Each round, lay out a number of cards face up equal to twice the number of players, plus one. (The top card of the deck is also face up, and that matters at the end of the round.) In clockwise order from the active player, everyone drafts a card, either keeping it or selling it for the gold shown on the card, then in counterclockwise order everyone drafts a second card, again keeping or selling it.

One card remains on the table, and all unbroken pottery of the type shown on both this card and the card on top of the deck breaks. Players can use gold to repair broken pottery, and you are rewarded for the unique beauty of repaired pieces as they are more valuable than "regular" unbroken pottery that's just like every other piece of the same type. (Broken pottery is worthless, so either you don't want it to break in the first place, or you want to have enough money to fix what does break.

Board Game: Broken and Beautiful: A Game About Kintsugi

• Finally, we come to Dreamers, a two-player game from Ÿøssef Fårhi of Alone Editions. (Kickstarter link)

In each of the games five rounds, each player receives a secret identity card, and if they both happen to be dreamers, then they want to open three gates to exit the dream world and win the round. If one of them happens to be the Master of Nightmares, that player must prevent the other player from leaving the dream world while not being exposed in the process; if the dreamer either leaves or exposes the M. of N., then they win.

Board Game: Dreamers

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