Wow! It's a crazy busy week over on Kickstarter and Gamefound this week.
With 14 interesting projects live now or going live in the next 7 days, it looks to be a tough week for the wallet. My personal backs this week falls to Drags 2 Riches and Septima. Gathering Gloom and Dex Dixon have my interest, I am looking forward to seeing how both campaigns develop. Septima is my 'Pick Of the Week' and I hope it funds well.
If you back any please leave a comment.
Gear up heroes for adventures and monsters in this drafting strategy game. The core of Journey Adventure Quest is stacking cards to build attack, defense, and knowledge while avoiding damage. Heroes search from dawn to dusk for equipment and spells every day, and create sets crafted by different guilds, which is often vital to completing both Adventures and Quests.
JAQ is a fun strategy game that has neat game mechanics that are easy to learn, and complex strategies that change every game. It is one of those "gateway" games that help people transition from classic board games to strategy games, and then continues to engage those that have played it for years. (We have, and we still enjoy it.)
Khârn-Âges is a medieval fantasy skirmish game in which you lead a Spearhead (name given to your team of miniatures). These Spearheads are composed of anthropomorphic animals of 54mm (this is a guideline, many species are larger, including Tembos that sometimes reach 170mm!!!).
The same miniature can correspond to several profile levels, and you can equip it as you wish, so you have the possibility to play it with different characteristics while changing its weapons and equipment, or to have access to many different spells for the magicians.
Khârn-Âges is a scenario game, it's not about "wiping-out" your opponent (even if it's possible sometimes!), but about fulfilling your objectives to win. Playable on 60x60 cm, a whole series of immersive scenarios are usable in the rulebook.
In The Gig, players are members of a jazz group improvising their way through a song, vying for the spotlight, and trying to please the audience while working up mind-blowing solos!
The game takes place over six rounds, a.k.a. "songs". Each song, players count down, then roll and place dice in real time to gain symbols and create patterns. When one player has placed all four of their dice, they shout "Take it to the bridge!" and other players must stop re-rolling and place the remainder of their dice. After placing all of their dice, each player can add the shape that their dice formed to their instrument's unique solo board, each of which offers a different challenge and way of scoring. Players can use symbols gained via the song and their solo boards to quickly change their dice, keep them for endgame scoring, or spend them to buy audience cards, each of which represents a newly-gained fan who will give you another way of scoring points at game's end.
After the set list of six songs has been played, the player with the most points gained from their solo, audience cards, harmonies, and symbol sets and majorities wins.
The Gig includes a solo mode by Dávid Turczi.
Drags 2 Riches is the deckbuilding card game that finally allows you to live your drag truth. Take on the role of a drag queen building up your wardrobe of fierce and fabulous heels, wigs, outfits, make-up and accessories, laying them down in combinations that will stun the competition.
Players work on their looks in secret, deciding whether to reveal them at the end of the round, or keep them hidden and build even more fabulous combos ready to win the most prestigious events. Every round is full of tension and excitement as you never know who will reveal a look, and only one of you queens can win!
So, if you want to slay the competition… be fabulous, be sassy, and most of all, be fierce!
Globetrotting is a game about traveling the world. Players plot three epic trips to take over the next year. It’ll take careful planning to achieve all your travel goals while staying under budget.
Each round, three Destination cards are revealed. Each player simultaneously selects one Destination and adds it to one of their three trips by drawing the travel route on their own globe. The globe stands have a built-in circular ruler to measure the distance (and cost) of each flight. The further you fly, the more expensive the trip.
Players score by accomplishing the objectives on their Bucket List cards. In addition, each player has shared Travel Buddy Goals with each neighboring player. Coordinate plans with your travel buddies to meet up in the same place at the same time to score. And everyone is racing to be the first to complete the Global Objectives. The player who checks off the most travel goals wins!
The Adventures of Dex Dixon the Board Game is a scenario-based strategy game set in a multi-spoked, inter-dimensional, noir, horror world filled with Paranormal Detectives, Monster Crime Bosses and Vampire Torch-Song Singers. Choose your Boss, recruit your Mugs, assemble your gear, and charge your magical powers. Defeat your opponents and obtain your objective by outwitting them with each characters’ unique abilities. No two game sessions will be the same.
A limited area skirmish game with characters that have specific powers and abilities that can be augmented with cards that you draw throughout the game.
Your goal in Bot Factory is to gather projects and parts, then assemble bots, thereby fulfilling demand goals and improving the value of the bot you are making. Sandra, the factory manager from Kanban, is present here, moving to different departments and using the players' spaces. The game uses the same worker-placement mechanism from Kanban in which turn order is established by the workers' positions on the board.
Britain. 796AD. King Offa of Mercia exhales his last breath. A new Bretwalda must be crowned.
Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex and East Angles. The four largest kingdoms of Britain. All vie for supremacy. Take control of one of these kingdoms. Subdue the Viking raiders. Use diplomacy, coercion and, if necessary brute, military strength to overcome your rivals.
Claim the crown. Become the Bretwalda.
Bretwalda is a game for 1-to-4 players that plays in around 2 hours. Each player takes charge of one of the kingdoms of England. Each kingdom has unique leaders and abilities. Victory is achieved through a combination of control of key areas, completing Chronicles, and constructing Abbeys to support the spread of Christianity across the land.
Play is fast-paced. Over 12 seasons players compete by taking collection, development, mobilization and movement actions. With only 2 actions permitted per season, each decision is critical. Each season will see new events, and the armies of Vikings or independent Kingdoms may arrive or be bribed to attack rivals.
Bartering and alliance-building are essential to success, but, with conquest critical to victory, betrayal is never far away.
Only in a few corners of the world is the memory of magic still alive, even though a few centuries ago its healing power permeated everything. Witches, its last remaining practitioners, have always been outcasts and could help human society only in strict secrecy. The leader of their people, the Septima, has always been the wisest, most knowledgeable witch. Now, as her time is coming to an end, witches from all over the world gather at Noctenburg to leave their mark on the hostile town and prove to the Septima that they are her worthy successor.
Septima is a competitive, highly interactive strategy game of witchcraft. As the leader of your coven, you must prove your worth in the town of Noctenburg to become the successor of Septima, the High Witch. Practice your craft and gain wisdom by collecting herbs, brewing potions, healing the townsfolk, mastering charms and rescuing your fellow brothers and sisters from the trials. But beware: magic, even if used for good, invokes suspicion in the townsfolk...
Simultaneous action selection with positive player interaction: Septima’s central mechanism revolves around the simultaneous, secret selection of one of nine Action cards each turn: Move, Collect, Brew, Heal, Recruit, Plea, Chant, Rite and Remember. Each Action gets a powerful bonus if it is chosen by multiple players, but performing them together also raises suspicion in the townsfolk and attracts the attention of the Witch Hunters. Decisions of when to do a shared action (and who to do it with) adds a fresh, semi-cooperative touch to a competitive game, and lots of player interaction.
Rescue witches to build your Coven: Heal, enthrall or convince the townsfolk and amass enough support to sway the periodic Witch Trials in your favor. If the hostile witnesses are outvoted, the convicted witch is absolved and joins the coven that rescued them. You start small but you can grow your coven to up to four witches this way, each with their own personality and special ability to help your cause. Reckless Witches caught by Witch Hunters are also put to trial, so with enough support from the townsfolk, even witches from other, less careful players’ coven can end up in yours.
Accessible, intuitive and familiar: Septima is Mindclash Games’ most accessible title to date, with beautiful, hand-drawn art style by Villő Farkas and with the character art of Barbara Bernát, wooden components and intuitive, theme-inspired mechanisms. It is very quick to teach and set up, and takes less than 2 hours to play, even with four players
Explore, build and battle in this strategy and resource management game with ground-living birds set in an alternate timeline where birds work alongside tribal clans. As the clans have developed close to their feathery mounts, their cultures have been formed by their specific clan birds. Some have mastered the way of faster bird breeding while others have gone down a more warlike path. Now is the time to choose your bird and in so doing, your way of life.
Players must expand their territory to find supplies and new technologies for their tribes. The threat from rival clans is also constant, so you have to adapt your strategies and think ahead of your opponents to survive. Will you conquer the other clans by force or will your memory live on through the peaceful measure of completing cave paintings? The choice is yours!
After centuries of advancement, humanity has created a utopian society in which every need has been met with complete abundance, every need but one: room to build!
In Skyrise, players are the visionary architects who will work together to overcome this by building humanity's most ambitious project: a glorious new city in the sky itself, dedicated to art and beauty, on which each player will compete to leave their personal artistic signature, gaining prestige throughout the ages.
Skyrise is a standalone sequel to 2008's Metropolys and is based on a similar spatial bidding mechanism. Players begin their turns by placing a numbered bid in an available neighborhood. Players pass or raise the bid by placing a higher-numbered bid in an adjacent neighborhood until all opponents pass or there is nowhere available to bid. The high bidder builds their building where their final bid was placed, then begins the next bidding round.
Skyrise honors the spirit of Metropolys, while raising it to new heights. Bidding tokens now have unique numbers, creating interesting new auction dynamics. The beautiful and multilayered modular board multiplies the game's replayability. The strategic depth already offered by public and private goals has been enhanced by a new specialization system that allows players to accelerate their scoring engine as the game progresses, powerful monuments drafted mid-game that provide unique and variable opportunities to enhance or change your strategy, and special power tokens that when earned and played cleverly can create the epic turning points that will elevate the greatest builders to their ultimate victory.
The Umbrella Academy: The Board Game is a co-operative game for 1-5 people in which the players work together as the Heroes from the famous Umbrella Academy.
To win, they must overcome a succession of dangerous hazards and defeat dastardly villains in order to save the world!
Each player has a hand of cards they can use to place Battle Tokens on potentially dangerous hazards and villains, or trigger special abilities unique to their chosen Hero.
The game is split into different phases - Play Phase (players take actions and move around the board), Draw Phase (draw new cards into their hand), Effect Phase (resolve the effects of Hazards and Villains), and Crisis Phase (generate new Hazards).
Life is full of emotion, and the region of the brain primarily associated with processing these emotions is the amygdala.
In the abstract strategy game Amygdala, players vie for control of different regions, each associated with an emotion. They must collect and store emotional resources in their memory bank which they will use to unlock emotions from their mind, then place these emotion tiles on the main game board.
Emotion tiles can be connected in networks of like emotions to score points. The player with the most emotions in each region can score big points at the end of the game, but only if they manage to unlock and place a claim tile belonging to the region they wish to score.
The Charming family is an eclectic family that lives in a manor on top of the hill in the town of Banebridge somewhere in New England circa 1932. They own the local mortuary as well as a mining company. All they want to do is live in peace, take care of their ancestral home, run their businesses, and get along with the townsfolk. The villagers of Banebridge, however, see it differently. Many of them are firm of the opinion that at least some if not all of the “Charming” family are up to nefarious deeds and are, in fact, “monsters” of various sorts. To that end, they are constantly turning up evidence that implicates members of the family in foul play. Some villagers even start stalking individual members. Sometimes (well, a lot of the time really), the family members are forced to take action to deal with especially difficult villagers or incriminating evidence. Actions include Murder, Terrify, Beguile, Deceive, Extort, Bribe, Coerce, and many more. Of course, the family would NEVER take such actions if the villagers weren’t constantly interfering.
Gathering Gloom is a cooperative game for 1-4 monsters in which the players take on the role of a Witch, a Mad Scientist, a Vampire, a Werewolf, a Zombie, or a Ghost and work to resolve a series of crises at their mansion and businesses. Each character has one or more special abilities and some have vulnerabilities. They use their own attributes as well as those of villagers they have beguiled into minions along with resources on their “Misdeed” cards to resolve 14-16 crises in order to win the game. Gloom gathers every turn based on events as well as from Evidence or Peril cards. If the gloom reaches 50 or more before resolving all the crises, the players lose. Also, if the fear that the villagers have about anyone player reaches twelve or more, the family is exposed and the players lose. The village has seven locations to visit along with three family locations on the board. There are many things to do on the map since each location has a unique action the player can take. There are also alternate buildings that can be selected at setup to add variety to play.
On your turn, you roll dice to determine events. Then you can move to any location on the board, where you may activate an on-arrival action; you may use cards to perform other actions; you may resolve crises in family locations. Finally, you check to see if any villagers or stalkers are going to activate. You draw up for your next turn, and you are done
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