This time of year seems to be particularly busy for Kickstarter board games, as publishers try to wrap up funding so they can get their games to backers before the year-end holidays, so I’ve had a number of Kickstarter reviews last month and a few more coming up this month as well. Here are a couple projects to check out!
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer, and visit our Kickstarter curated page for more projects we love.
I actually have played a prototype of Dicey Peaks a while back—it’s another design by the prolific Scott Almes, published by Calliope Games. It’s a bit of a press-your-luck dice game, where you decide each turn whether you’re going to climb or rest. If you rest, you’re hoping to gain oxygen—but too much and your tank overfills, gaining you nothing. If you climb, you spend oxygen, and have to watch out for avalanches. And whether you’re climbing or resting, you have to watch out for the Yeti, which scares all the climbers behind you and lets them move forward.
Tiles are revealed as you land on them, with good and bad results to find. Reach the summit first to win! You can download the rules here for a closer look, and there’s even a free print and play if you want to give it a try before you pledge. Calliope Games has plenty of experience publishing games, so you can count on high-quality components and a nice presentation, too.
If you missed out on Gloomhaven the first time around, now you’ve got another chance to back it. Gloomhaven is a massive legacy-style cooperative game set in a fantasy world. You and your companions will take on various quests, battling monsters and making decisions that will affect your future options and unlock new abilities. I’ll have a more in-depth look at the game coming up, but if you back the project now (even at a buck), you can follow along with an ongoing storyline that designer Isaac Childres is revealing during the course of the campaign, where you can help select the course of action as the campaign progresses.
For those of you that already have Gloomhaven, there are also options in this campaign for upgraded health/XP trackers (highly recommended) and revised rulebooks and scenario books, as well as a printed version of the solo scenarios that Childres has released for the various characters.
Now, I’ll admit that I haven’t played this one, but it’s by the designer of Sheriff of Nottingham, and I just like Russian nesting dolls. The game involves set collection, hidden trading, and negotiation. You’re trying to get sets of matching dolls, as well as different-colored dolls of the same size, and each round you will reveal a little more about what you have. It looks really adorable.
DIG is a press-your-luck card game about digging for gems, and it has a lot of fun pixel art. The more recruits you hire, the more cards you can get each time you dig … but not all of the cards are good! Interestingly, this one is concurrently running on the German crowdfunding site Spieleschmiede, so German backers can back there, and the stretch goals are being unlocked based on total funding between the two. But don’t wait too long on this one! It’s almost over.
Shadowrift: Skittering Darkness
This expansion to the GeekDad-Approved Shadowrift adds two new monster factions and a new set of hero cards. I’m a big fan of this cooperative deck-building game, and the new cards add even more variety to the game. I’ve been playing the Eve of the Sickle Moon expansion lately, and am excited to see what new mechanics designer Jeremy Anderson has come up with this time. This campaign lets you pledge for just the new expansion, both expansions, or pick up the base game if you haven’t already.
In the 1990s, I worked at Waldensoftware, and I remember when The 7th Guest was released: a horror game that came only on CD-ROMs because it featured live-action video clips! Well, now there’s a board game based on it, led by the co-founder of Trilobyte. Read GeekMom Sophie Brown’s take on the project here!
This one looks like a hit for fans of chess and abstract strategy. You can play regular chess, sure, but the customizable color board can mix things up. Or, try Lure, a game you can play on the same board but with different pieces. Or, combine the two games. I like the way it builds on chess and becomes sort of a game system with lots of new options. This one is also ending very soon, so don’t delay too long if you’re interested!
