Kickstarter Tabletop Alert: More Game Upgrades From Meeple Source

Meeple Source makes custom meeples and other wooden bits that add a lot of pizzaz to your tabletop games, and they’re back on Kickstarter with a whole new set of game upgrade kits, from Carcassonne to Colt Express to Camel Up … and some other games that don’t start with C.

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There’s a set of meeples for Charterstone, the upcoming legacy-style game from Stonemaier Games. So far, details about Charterstone are still slim because Stonemaier has been keeping things pretty tightly under wraps, but there are 6 extra-large character meeples available for the game.

A few classic tabletop games can now get a face-lift: Meeple Source gives you more color choices for Carcassonne and custom pieces for the expansions, and the Catan set includes really lovely settlements, cities, and roads, with each color having its own unique look. More recent games include a few titles from Red Raven Games like Above and Below, Empires of the Void II, and Islebound. There are even ink and remover tokens for the upcoming Hardback, which funded on Kickstarter recently.

And, of course, Meeple Source also has plenty of upgrade kits already available from their previous Kickstarter campaigns as well.

Meeple Source recently sent me a set of Scythe upgrade components from the previous Kickstarter campaign to see how they turned out, and they’re really fantastic. The meeples were designed using the silhouettes from the original Scythe workers, but made significantly larger. Each is painted on both sides and shows the workers with their different types of outfits. I like the way these turned out, though all of them except the purple meeples are men. The color matching is pretty good in most cases, with slight color variations in the red and purple from the original meeples.

Despite the larger size, the meeples still fit in the Scythe player board, as you can see above. Each faction now also has an extra-large action pawn, which you use to mark your current action. The pawns have the faction’s symbol on the top, and they make it a lot easier to tell from across the table what actions your opponents have chosen. Plus, it gives a satisfying thunk when you move it.

There are wooden versions of the small cardboard tokens used by the Albion and Togawa factions from the Invaders From Afar expansion, as well as the encounter tokens in the base game. The wooden encounter tokens definitely stand out a little more than the cardboard tokens, which can often get lost on the colorful board, but I do wish they had a red base rather than tan. The faction tokens are nice, but one thing they’re missing is the faction symbol on the backs.

This set of wooden bits is cool, but it’s not cheap: $82 for the whole set (which includes 82 pieces!). On the other hand, if you’re the sort of person who really wants to trick out your copy of Scythe, this will definitely do that. (There are also sets available with just the meeples, just the action pawns, and so on.)

If you want power dials specific to each faction, you can now get the custom dials for Albion and Togawa through Meeple Source as well. These aren’t totally necessary—the Kickstarter edition had 5 dials, one for each faction, but the retail edition only had 2 dials, because you only ever need two of them at a time. Still, if you’re a completionist, now there are a purple and a green dial as well, since the Invaders From Afar expansion didn’t include them. While these aren’t made by Meeple Source, these additional Scythe components (and some of the promo items) are available there.

Finally, if you got the metal coins for the base game and then got the expansion, you know that it added more cardboard coins. I really liked the metal coins in the deluxe version of Scythe. Meeple Source has you covered there, too: $50 coins and $2 coins are now available as well. The $50 coins are purple with the Togawa faction symbol, and the $2 coins are brass and have the Albion warthog on them.

There are various combo packs for the Scythe upgrade components, depending on which things you’re interested in, and of course there are plenty of other games that also have upgrade kits available.

Visit the Kickstarter page for the complete list for the current campaign, or go to the Meeple Source website to browse their extensive library of existing sets!