This week's update comes in 2 parts. The first part is the usual round-up for this week; the second part is a very brief round up of last...
This week's update comes in 2 parts. The first part is the usual round-up for this week; the second part is a very brief round up of last week's projects (Bottom of page).
There are 13 new projects hitting crowdfunding platforms in the coming week; a large number of these projects are 2nd printings, expansions and re-launching games.
I am very excited to see 'Aberration' unfold over on Gamefound; the project is by the creator of 'Lords of Waterdeep' and 'Horrified'; 2 of my favourite games.
As always, remember, back with your head, not your heart and most importantly, love your games.
In Deep Rock Galactic: The Board Game, an authorized tabletop game adaption of the popular computer game, players take the roles of up to four dwarf miners in space: the Scout, the Engineer, the Gunner, and the Driller. Players must work together to mine precious minerals deep below the surface of a hostile planet where indigenous insectoid predators — the Glyphids — await, aggressively defending their caves against the intruders. Will your team be able to meet the mineral quota set by the company, or will you all end up as dinner for the Glyphids?
Players move around the board while throwing dice to fight monsters and mine rare minerals in order to escape in time with the required amount of minerals needed to win the current mission.
Have you ever wanted to play a pop-up book? Have you been searching for a game that is filled with magic and mystery? Is your gaming group looking for something quick and fun without pages and pages of rules? Look no further!
The Shivers is a truly one-of-a-kind tabletop experience that features the magic of hand-crafted pop-ups, combined with just the right amount of spooky puzzle-solving mystery and role playing.
Using our patent-pending modular pop-up system, the mystery will unfold as you and your friends explore a magical mansion, as one of the members of the Shivers family. Each episode takes about an hour to play cooperatively, with one person taking the lead as the Storyteller. Once players finish one episode, a quick change of the system reveals the next story which will be completely new and unique: filled with new clues, puzzles, room layouts, and foes to vanquish.
The Shivers is fun and challenging for young kids, teens, and even older experienced game players. While most games have dozens of pages of rules and take many hours to learn and play, Shivers players have just a couple simple rules, and can get up and playing in less than 5 minutes. Similar to an escape room in structure and feel (but on a much smaller scale), players can get immediately immersed in the mystery, discovering the right path forward as they
Travel back in time to the Cretaceous period, build a rail network, and take time-traveling tourists to see their favorite dinosaurs in the wild, where they will rate them on Dinosaur Yelp. After going on safari, tourists can relax at your resort where they can enjoy your latest and greatest attractions, including the dinosaurs you have on display.
This quick-playing mid-weight Euro features an innovative intersectional worker placement system, route building, tableau-building, and resource management. Players will strive to utilize the resources of the Cretaceous jungle in order to build the optimum combination of attractions for abilities and scoring. The player who builds the most successful dino resort by the end of the fourth round wins!
In Hello Kitty: Day at the Park, players take on the role of Hello Kitty, My Melody, Kuromi, and other characters to playfully compete for the most epic day of fun at the local park. They explore the park by laying tiles, ideally gaining items along the way that allow them to complete adventures, which they will document by taking selfies.
The game features a unique system to scale all parts of the game in difficulty for each individual player, even while the game is in progress, so kids can start with the simplest version to begin to explore the game's mechanisms, then learn the more advanced gameplay when they feel ready.
Once all the tiles have been played, the end of the game is triggered, and the player who has gained the most points from their adventures wins!
Be the first to build a wealth of bones, through exploration, trade or piracy. Expand your pack of Muttley Crue and do what dog pirates do best - bury your treasure of bones, mark your 'terriertory' or perhaps challenge your opponents to a dastardly doggy dice duel!
Borrow against your pack's goodwill to achieve success, but don't push your luck too far, or you might end up with a 'muttiny' on your paws!
Play competitively or in co-op and solo games modes against the menacing Measley Moggy Fleet!
You just came back with your friends from one more perfectly ordinary mini golf game. “Who designs these boring, easy and unimaginative courses?” – You yawn… You are through with them! You grab your pencil and you are about to make history while designing the craziest, most difficult obstacle course the world has ever seen. “Guys, guys, look at this! You could never beat that in one, could ya?” – But, to your surprise, your friends are already on it.
Tiny Mini Golf is a quick and easy to learn roll 'n' write game about designing mini golf courses just to watch your friends later sweat trying to beat them. First players draw the terrain and obstacles from custom dice results - deciding which to use. Then each player tries to put the ball into the hole in as few shots as possible. The catch is that the stronger the shot, the bigger the risk of it going horribly wrong.
Diatoms is a puzzly tile-placement and pattern-making game where players create their own microscopic mosaic, based on an obscure Victorian art form.
Hidden in the water all around us are tiny lifeforms known as “diatoms.” These microscopic algae cells come in a variety of exquisite geometric shapes and patterns. Their outer layer is made with silica, giving them a glass-like quality. Here at the Society for the Microscopic Arts, we collect these diatoms and delicately arrange them on slides into beautiful, tiny mosaics. As part of your induction into the Society, you will each create your own entry for today’s Exhibition of Microscopic Mosaics.
In Diatoms, you compete with your fellow players to collect and place diatom shapes into a mosaic form. You take turns placing tiles representing algae colonies. From that placement you earn diatoms of different colours and shapes. You then strategically place these diatoms on your personal board, taking care to consider how your arrangement will be scored at the end of the game. In the base scoring, you'll want to achieve matching colours, shape variety, and symmetry along your mosaic's central lines. Each time you play, you may also have a "guest" judge card that brings a unique scoring criteria to the game.
Diatoms also includes a solo variant where you collect diatom tiles as in the main game while trying to create a mosaic that fulfils specific requirements from mosaic commission prompts.
Enter the world of Erune and roam through its darkest dungeons... Experience epic quests, fight hordes of monsters and thwart the Master of Shadows' evil plans!
Erune is a Dungeon-Crawler for 1 to 5 players.
Thanks to the mix of a board game with a mobile app, you can talk with your game!
The Spirit of Erune is the privileged companion of your adventures. Guardian of the ancestral knowledge of the world of Erune, it resides in each and everything. Impartial, it does not take part in the conflict between the Adventurers and the Master of Shadows.
The Spirit of Erune is the narrator of your adventure It allows you to speak with the characters you meet during your adventures. It punctuates your quests with all kinds of events. Beware! Your choices have consequences that influence your story!
The Spirit of Erune is a source of knowledge It will answer all your questions about the rules of the game and the objects of the world of Erune down to the smallest detail.
The Spirit of Erune is luck It unveils the treasures, the traps and the effects of items among thousands of possibilities!
The Spirit of Erune makes you evolve It reveals your earnings when you level up, your quest objectives and the winner of the game.
The app is free on iOS and Android but requires an Erune Game Box to be used.
Step into a world veiled in darkness, where shadows and aberrations lurk. The sanctuary of your village teeters on the brink of oblivion, and in this perilous hour, you stand as its last defence.
Aberration offers a thrilling cooperative tower defence experience. In this harrowing blend of horror and survival, you will find worker placement, bag building, and asymmetric player powers. Shadow and light intertwine in a fog-of-war mechanic that shrouds the truth and conceals lurking terrors. As the tainted forest succumbs to the influence of The Great Beast, each game unveils a unique and corrupted landscape, engulfing the map as you play. Adding tension and terror to every moment. But beware, for the forest's very essence transforms, as do players and enemies alike, ascending towards newfound power, but at what cost…
Join forces with veteran game designer Peter Lee (Lords of Waterdeep, Horrified, and Tyrants of the Underdark) as he summons you into this dark fantasy realm.
In the face of this unfolding nightmare, can you survive the night?
Defenders of the Wild is a cooperative board game of animals against machines. Play as one of four unique factions and assemble your crew of defenders from a wide range of animal characters to resist the machines across a modular map that changes with each game.
War has come to the Wild. For millennia, animals have weathered shifting alliances and the cycle of the seasons—but they’ve never faced an enemy like this. An army of machines powered by corrupted magic is rampaging across the woodlands, enclosing everything in its path and exploiting the warmth of the world. Across the marshes, plains, mountains, and forests, scrappy crews of defenders rise up to resist the machine occupation. The partisans hail from four factions, each determined to fight back in their own way: the Council with its fortitude and bread, the Order with its wisdom of the flame, the Sect with its ingenious inventions, and the Coven with its spells and subterfuge.
Players assemble their crews by drawing defender cards that each correspond with a faction and a habitat type. Each card details a unique animal character that enables that player to take various actions such as moving, clearing pollution, fighting mechs, building camps, and healing across a modular illustrated hex map. Different combinations of defender cards from different factions allow for varied strategies and approaches to achieving objectives and fighting the machines. A machine deck controls the expansion of the machines and their development across the board. As the machines enclose habitats, they build factories and send out hunter mechs while leaving behind a trail of walls and pollution. If players can successfully build all of their camps and rewild the machines' factories before the last factory is built, all players win the game together.
Can the Defenders band together to heal the land and outsmart a seemingly impossible enemy? Or will the woodlands succumb to an endless industrial winter? It’s up to you and your comrades to decide.
League of Dungeoneers (LoD) is a detailed Dungeon Crawl and party management game. The game is designed to be a solo/coop game but could be played with a game master as well. The main task of the game is to develop your characters both by gaining experience but also by finding gold, equipment, magic and legendary items that can help you in your quest. The game is set in its own fantasy universe, containing many of the races and monsters that you would expect from a classical fantasy setting. You could either run the campaign supplied with the game or run any of the 22 single quests.
All dungeons are procedurally generated, and all monsters and treasures are randomized making the quests different every time you play them. There is however a theme for each quest you embark upon so don’t expect to find a goblin among the undead in a crypt. There are more than 50 different room and corridor tiles, each with details about furniture and 5 different large seized objective rooms. All rooms have different furniture and a chest is likely to contain gold or magic items, where for instance a bookshelf is more likely to contain magical scrolls.
Party morale and sanity are two important factors to monitor in the game. Meeting fearsome monsters and springing deadly traps will take its toll on the mental state of your heroes and too much strain will give your heroes unwanted disorders such as claustrophobia, arachnophobia or stress syndromes. This will make them less effective and maybe even a liability for the rest of the party. To remedy this, you will need to rest in between quests. If you can’t afford to rest due to lack of funds, maybe that stressed out Dwarf will have to stay behind during the next quest, forcing you to solve the task with a skeleton crew.
Characters are designed around several stats such as strength and dexterity but also around skills such as Pick lock or Heal. Depending on their profession the heroes will excel in some of these, while being quite useless in other. Through levelling, you will also unlock talents which will boost certain areas of your character and perks which are powerful boosts that can be used a limited number of times. There are more than 100 talents and perks in the game. As your heroes levels up, the monsters they meet will be tougher as well.
Combat is an essential part of the game and is designed to promote movement and prevent those bogged down battles of attrition. With several types of attacks available, both for monsters and heroes, combat becomes more flexible and less of a chore. Add to this the decision if you should evoke that special perk that could change the outcome of the battle or save it to the next.
Finally, each dungeon has a threat level. This will increase as the Dungeoneers make their way through he dungeon. Making noises such as bashing down a door, or maybe screaming because of your stress syndrome, is a bad idea. This will increase the threat level, which in turn increases the chances of something bad happening. Maybe you will trigger a wandering group of monsters or set of a trap? It can also give the monsters unexpected boosts during combat.
I've have received some question and I thought I would make some clarifications:
Complexity: Medium+ I would say. There is quite a lot of information defining each character which of course makes things more complex. However, the actual gameplay is pretty straight forward once you get the hang of it. A gaming session can easily be paused by just taking a picture of the setup.
What miniatures can I use?: You can use tokens, standees or any other miniatures you have. The tiles are supplied with miniatures about 28mm with a 25mm base in mind but can of course be scaled to any scale you want to.
How many different kinds of monsters are there?: A little more than 80. Some of these are variants, such as Orc, Orc brute and Orc berserker for instance. There are also several special characters that you will face during the quests not included in this list.
Can I use other tiles or a 3D-printed dungeon with this game?: Yes! This is a simple matter of making your own rooms and corridors table. There is even a template for this in the files section.
This game does not focus on stream lining, but rather on creating a detailed dungeon crawler experience. It will require more on the behalf of the player than some of the more modern designs, but for me it's the perfect level of detail.
Forage is the final instalment of the 9 card solitaire game trilogy (following Orchard and its sequel Grove).
Its 18 cards show different types of woodland areas, where you'll find wild blackberries, sweet chestnuts and edible mushrooms. Some areas are split into two types which, together with the custom dice featuring hungry wood mice, offer new opportunities and different strategies to increase your harvest.
The card backs have recipe challenges to provide a win/lose condition (as an alternative to the standard game's ‘beat your own score’) for those who prefer it, adding even more replay ability.
Last week's campaigns 18th September
Sirens, Defrag & 16 Candies. A Tiny Game Series.
Transmissions (Second Printing)
Mini One Deck Game & Score Cards
Vynestra: An Ancient-Themed 5th Edition World & City Setting
Creature Caravan and World of Arzium RPG
Storyburg: An Adventure Story Deckbuilding Game
