Well, I’ve had a busy couple of weeks—a family trip to visit some relatives, and then my sister’s family made a trip to visit us—so I’m a little behind in some of my crowdfunding coverage. There are a few projects that I just missed entirely in my travels, but here’s a handful of tabletop projects that I think are worth taking a look at!
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Pandora Celeste from Guntower Games
I got a prototype of Pandora Celeste to try out but unfortunately summer game night schedules have made it tricky to get it to the table in time; I’ve gotten to play some of the tutorial but not the “full” game yet. The game’s setting is inspired by the Alien films, with a crew that finds its ship crawling with nasty critters. You’ll manage your own deck of action cards to run through the ship, fight the nasties, look for tools, and crawl around in the ventilation ducts. The game uses a clever magnetic box that unfolds to become the board, and the box insert makes up part of the map so that the ventilation shafts are actually elevated above the rooms. In addition to asymmetric characters like the pilot and the android, everyone gets secret agendas—and some of you may be working for the company rather than doing what’s best to help the crew survive!
If you like the sci-fi theme and the “potential traitor” system, take a look at the campaign page. This is a hefty game with a lot going on, but my group enjoyed the way the story played out (so far) as well as the somewhat morbid humor included in the narrative.
Word Ravel from Mind the Gap Studios
This little word game is like Scrabble meets The Amazing Labyrinth: you shift the rows and columns of the letter grid to spell a word, and then claim those letters for points. Less common letters are worth more points, and each player has a set of vowel cards represented in the grid as well—and if other players use your vowels, you’ll score points for that, too!
Each turn, you only get up to 3 “shifts,” so it can be pretty tricky to get things into place, but it’s so satisfying when you find a way to slide things around for a good score. If you like word games with a dash of spatial reasoning, Word Ravel may scratch that itch. It’s also fairly inexpensive and compact, so it’ll be easy to take on the go anywhere you’ve got room to lay out the grid.
Burgle Bros. 3: Future Flip from Tim Fowers
If you love heist movies, Burgle Bros. lets you live out your fantasy of breaking into a highly secure facility with roaming guards, tricky locks, and tons of alarms. In the third installment of the series, the crew finds themselves transported to the future, where they’ll don disguises to sneak past guards. One of the new mechanics is that the location tiles are double-sided, with different effects when they get flipped over. Also, there are employees wandering around the building—you’ll need to cozy up to them to get information, or trick them into taking the blame for the alarms you’ve set off. Burgle Bros. 3 keeps the feel of the original but gives our favorite burglars a new bag of tricks–as well as a whole new set of obstacles to overcome.
Fantasy Tavern Brawl from Amuri Studio
A dwarf, an orc, and a halfling walk into a bar… Fantasy Tavern Brawl is a card-flinging, meeple-flicking dexterity game where you’re trying to get as many of your meeples as high up in the tavern as you can. And what a tavern it is! By the end it’ll be a pile of cards and meeples that definitely isn’t up to code. Everyone starts with the same mix of character cards, and you can use different combinations of them to change up the feel of the game. Each character has its own rules about how the card gets added to the tavern—place, drop, throw, flick—and how it will affect the meeples. Some let you add meeples to the card you placed, some let you move meeples around in the tavern, and some let you flick more meeples into the tavern and hope they find good seats. In the end, you score points based on which “floor” each of your meeples ended up on. It’s a wacky game that will definitely take some practice!
The African Boardgames Convention 2024
I love seeing more people get into the world of tabletop games, and one of the ways that happens is through conventions like the African Boardgames Convention. It started in 2016 and has introduced thousands of people in Nigeria to board games, and has inspired many of them to design their own games. Even though I can’t attend AB Con myself, I want to support efforts like this that bring underrepresented voices into the hobby, both as players and as creators. This year, AB Con needs some additional financial support due in part to the rampant inflation in Nigeria, so you can help make it happen! Sponsor a badge for an attendee or a table at the con, and you can get print-and-play versions of a couple of their games.
Boom Patrol from Smirk & Dagger Games
This tank battle game has you programming your movement and then driving little cardboard tanks around a battlefield, smashing into buildings to grab gold and power-ups, and blasting away at opposing tanks to win medals. It reminds me a little of games like Wings of War or X-Wing Miniatures, but more cartoony, plus there’s dice to roll. I love the swiveling turrets on the tanks, too!
