In the next few months I’ll have several more reviews of games with upcoming crowdfunding campaigns, but for today I’ve got a roundup of some fun-looking tabletop projects. As usual, these are mostly titles that I haven’t played myself yet, but I’m curious about them—caveat emptor!
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.
Votes for Women from Fort Circle Games
This campaign is for a second print run of Votes for Women, a game about women’s suffrage and the road to the Nineteenth Amendment. I’ve heard a lot of great things about it but I’d missed it the first time around, so I’ve decided to back it this time. The campaign is going strong despite the fact that ads for it were banned on Facebook because it got flagged as a political advertisement, and I figured it’s worth giving it one last boost. The campaign ends today, so don’t sit this one out!
Kabuto Sumo: Sakura Slam from Allplay
Kabuto Sumo is a dexterity game inspired by those coin-pusher machines, but each bug “wrestler” has its own unique abilities (and often some strangely shaped pieces to go with it). You push tokens onto the raised platform, hoping to knock your opponent off, but knocking other pieces out also powers up your abilities. Sakura Slam is a standalone sequel that can also be combined with the base game: this time you’ve got a square arena that adds some new limitations and ways to power up!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/itten-games/tokyo-highway-rainbow-city
Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City from Itten
Tokyo Highway is a fantastic dexterity game about building a tangled highway system—now it’s getting a colorful new expansion. Rainbow City adds a bunch of new objects that let you score points in different ways, and you’ll also have new vehicles that have different functions. What’s more, the cars are now made of rubber so that they don’t slide off the roads, and the roads themselves have rubber pads on the ends—so you can concentrate more on the building strategy and worry a little less about things just sliding apart. (Of course, you still have to be careful not to Godzilla smash everything.) With pledge tiers for just the expansion or the full game, this campaign is worth checking out whether you already own the base game (like me) or you’re totally new to the game. I should have a copy of this to try out soon, so watch for a more in-depth review!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1333804104/stellar-drift-a-pull-and-write-board-game
Stellar Drift from Mystic Tiger Games
This pull-and-write game has you trying to repair your drifting starship before the nearby star explodes. You draw cubes from a bag, and then spend those cubes to fill in spaces on your starship, unlocking bonuses and activating technology. I like roll-and-write games and the cubes-from-a-bag seems like a neat twist to the genre.
#DrawnTogether from Bez Shahriari
This competitive coloring game looks hilarious—two players compete to fill in a coloring page, but each is trying to make a different image. Is it a ghost or a tree? A car or a shark? A heart or a skull? To find out who won, you show the image to a neutral third party and ask them which it looks like. It’s a clever idea and I’m curious to give it a shot. For just $3 you can get at least 2 sheets to print out yourself, with more to come if the Kickstarter funds well. (But be quick—this project ends tomorrow!)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jiangshi/zero-day-war
Zero Day War from Wet Ink Games
Wet Ink Games has primarily done RPGs, which aren’t really in my wheelhouse, but I get notifications from them because I had backed Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall. I got a notification about this launch, which is a card game about hackers trying to make off with the most valuable data during a solar storm. I’ll need to look into the gameplay a little more, but I’m curious to see what sort of card game Wet Ink would publish since it seems outside their usual concepts.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atlasgames/enigma-books
Enigma Puzzle Gamebooks from Atlas Games
This campaign features three puzzle books of varying difficulty levels. You make your way through the story by solving puzzles. The headliner is Unhappy Birthday at Castle Slogar, the medium-difficulty book set in the world of the Gloom card game, with artwork by the same illustrator J. Scott Reeves, but there’s also an easier book about exploring dreams, and a hard level book about hunting cryptids. If you love pen-and-paper puzzles, check these out!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crapaudceleste/etherium
Ethereum from Les Éditions du Crapaud Céleste
I’ll admit this is one that I know very little about—I’m not familiar with this publisher and this is their first project, so I might recommend some additional research before backing it, but what caught my eye about this game is the board itself, which is made up of interlocking boxes. I’m pretty intrigued! There’s still two weeks to go on this one, so I’ve got some time to decide.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/publishinggoblin/zoetrope
Zoetrope: Death Didn’t Take from Publishing Goblin
Like I said, I don’t really play much in the way of role-playing games, but I love time travel stories and this one sounds like goofy fun. You basically play as “time travel rent-a-cops,” sent on various missions. I’m curious about how this plays out because it claims not to need any prep before playing (not even for the Story Leader), but I imagine it helps to have some RPG experience ahead of time. Still, if I can find somebody who might run it for me, it may be worth picking up to give it a shot.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loodoninja/clickport-and-speedport
Clickport and Speedport from Loodo Ninja
I’d gotten a pitch from Loodo Ninja but wasn’t able to get this one into my schedule. These games are inspired by ethernet jacks! They use special boards and short cables to plug into them. Clickport is more of a strategy game, and Speedport is a race to match a pattern card. It’s a little gimmicky, but I’m mostly curious whether Clickport makes good use of the gimmick.
Earthborne Rangers Second Printing from Earthborne Games
I’ve been following the updates for the first Earthborne Rangers campaign, which funded back in 2021—that’s one that I had been interested in but only backed for a dollar to follow it, so I’ve gotten to see a lot of the development over the years. It shipped to backers this past fall, and now there’s a Gamefound campaign for a second printing as well as some expansions. It’s not cheap—$80 for the base game or $205 for the whole kit and kaboodle—so I’m still hesitant because I haven’t played it myself, but this gives me another chance to do a little more digging before I decide.
Last Light Second Edition from Grey Fox Games
This one hasn’t launched yet, but you can click to be reminded when it launches next Tuesday. I reviewed Last Light recently and gave it our GeekDad Approved seal—it’s a 4X sci-fi game that has some neat streamlined gameplay, plus a cool rotating board that simulates the planets orbiting around the dwarf star. While I think the “under an hour” promised in the ads is a little overambitious, it does play faster than some of the other games in this genre, which is part of its appeal.
