Kickstart Your Month! July 2016

Dungeon Time

Dungeon Time

“For goodness sake, you don’t need three shields. You look like a turtle!”

“That is dwarfist!”

Stop. Dungeon Time! That’s right it must be time for dungeon crawl Kickstarter of the month, a very niche prize with a preponderance of entries. Dungeon Time shows us how to offer up something unique with a real time cooperative dungeon crawler. Players will be racing to draw through a deck of item and quest cards before the 5 minute sand timer runs out, playing the items they need in order to complete the quests.

However, if too many items get played they won’t be used up (by the quests) during the end game resolution phase and you’ll discover you’ve messed up in your blind rush through the dungeon. Turns out you killed the dragon’s statue rather than the dragon and now he’s pissed… or something. The whole quest system is a little bit abstracted as this is really just a real time symbol matching game but they are some pretty symbols, and the game features a levelling system introducing ever-harder quests as you play more and more.

You can’t touch this, but you can back it before July 14th.

 

Pod X

Pod-X

Mayday! Mayday! The SS Kickstart Your Month is going down! (We knew we shouldn’t have let the articles name themselves…) Don’t worry though, there’s enough escape pods for all of you! Unfortunately only one of them is working and only the dealer knows which one of them it is. Better watch them closely!

Pod-X is the latest micro game in the Button Shy Wallet series, featuring a very neat game of deduction, bluffing and luck. Each card features a condition for finding the escape pod, like having the highest value port (as apposed to starboard) card in hand at the end of the round, and a location with corresponding value that may be on the port side of the ship, or it might not. Players will steadily play cards from their hands, trying to deduce what the dealer is doing and possibly beating them to the escape pod. I like a good deduction game and this comes from a proven designer (Daniel Solis) and features some cool graphic design, so definitely check it out!

Pod-X is blasting off July 16th.

 

YokohamaYokohama Deluxe

From a tiny fishing village to the most important port in the country, the history of Yokohama is in some ways the history of post-seclusion Japan. Yokohama Deluxe puts you squarely in the heart of the great period of expansion as the doors were opened to foreign traders and businesses. You are the president of a trading company trying to gain contracts with foreign ministers and import goods which requires you to run around the city collecting resources, money, points, technology and other bits and bobs and maybe building some trade houses.

The city is represented by a modular layout of different cards, ensuring a different arrangement each time you play, which will have important implications for how you move around. You’ll be placing out assistants every turn to give you a network to move through but they are also spent to trigger the abilities on the different areas, and the more you have in an area the more powerful that action will be. Already you can start to get a feel for the depth of decisions that arise from this central mechanism, and there are a lot of other elements to consider in what is a reasonably (but not too) meaty euro game, from established designer Hisashi Hayashi (Trains, Rolling Japan). An important project to check out for euro-fans!

Yokohama shuts up shop on July 16th.

 

Game Of Blame BoxGame of Blame

“WHAT IN THE NAME OF MERCY IS THIS!?” screamed the Queen incredulously. “I know the elves can be moronically anal and the dwarves smell but that’s no reason to leave a hugely beneficial trading partnership! Who’s fault is this!?”

Ooo unexpectedly topical! Game of Blame is a very entertaining little card game about making sure you don’t take responsibility for all those little jobs a senior member of the queen’s court should technically be doing. Like maintaining the city walls as the general or actually having money as the treasurer. Annoying inconveniences to the real duty of being a pompous ass and throwing your fellow lords under the bus. Don’t call the Queen a bus by the way, she doesn’t like that.

Normally I’d go into how the game is played but since I had a review copy of this, and have written a hilarious review of Game of Blame already (or something), I recommend you have a read of that if my merely stating you should check this game out is not enough for you.

Pass the Game of Blame before July 20th.

 

Honourable Mentions

Massive Darkness, Summit, Exoplanets, Nerdy Inventions, Far East War 1592, Hero Realms, Lairs, Rocky Road a la ModeWhelps to Wyrms, Sluff Off & Harald, Millennium Blades, Cosmic Balance

 

Completed Projects

Days Of IreDays of Ire: Budapest 1956

Protests across soviet occupied Eastern Europe have exploded into violence in Budapest. An armed uprising. An attempt to liberate their country from the shackles of communism, but Hungary is not going to be allowed to leave. The soviet army moves in to restore order. Their order.

Days of Ire can either see one player controlling the soviet forces, with the others leading the revolution, or it can be played fully cooperatively. The soviets aim to win the media war before the situation gets out of control, and they will back that up by whatever means necessary on the streets. The revolutionaries need to swing control of those headlines to their side, while maintaining control of the city. All of this works through a card driven system reminiscent of Twilight Struggle, but designed to be accessible to all. With that compelling set up, Days of Ire takes us into a conflict mostly forgotten in the West, and for that reason alone it deserves your attention.

The Days of Ire end on July 1st.

Lab WarsLab Wars

No longer need the exciting discoveries be available only to scientists. You too can discover the passive-aggressive, back-stabbing world of science and everyone’s desperate pursuit of “impact” in Lab Wars! Each player will control a competing biology lab, aiming to gather enough science to publish in the prodigious journal of Nurture, to produce an encyclopaedia article or maybe, even earn yourself a noble prize! Your H-index will be quivering at the thought (that’s very much a science in-joke, sorry).

The key fun bit, aside from the usual satisfaction that comes from the city building style mechanics this game uses to simulate your growing lab, is the mind games that come from trying to figure out what your opponent’s are planning on playing each turn. You see, each round players chose one of their 5 lab roles to activate, but each of these also has a take that ability that triggers if one of the other players uses that target role. For example, the PhD Student will get a bonus when another player plays the Post Doc (someone has to train the kids after all). It’s the inevitable mind games that ensue from these mechanisms that get me really interested!

The Lab Wars may finally be resolved on July 7th.

PlanetariumPlanetarium

Some games have you build cities, some businesses. Planetarium has you building entire planets! That’s even more exciting than a science museum planetarium. Journey across the universe to the birth of a new solar system… a beautiful new baby star is gurgling through its fresh stock of hydrogen while orbiting its head like a play mobile (rotaty things babys have?) are 4 barely formed planets. This is a turbulent time for the solar system though as various lumps of ice and rock that didn’t quite get big enough crash into these planets as meteors, changing their very faces and generating resources for the player that bumps them together. Resources that can be used… to score Victory Points! Oh yes.

The game features a very cool orbital board, by which I mean all the pieces when a player moves them must move along the network of lines and in a certain direction… because they’re orbiting. Am I too easily pleased by science stuff? Maybe. The resources you collect by doing this allow you to play beautifully illustrated evolution cards that score you points, especially the big final evolution cards that require you to try and get the right planets into the right orbits in time for the game’s end. Fundamentally Planetarium is a little bit of an abstract game, but I can really feel that theme and I urge you to check it out in case you do too.

The Planetarium closes its doors on July 7th.

FugitiveFugitive

You’ve dodged the guards, cracked the safe and escaped to the roof in the excellent crime caper Burgle Bros, but now you’ve got to get away with it! In Fugitive, the thematic sequel to Burgle Bros, one player is desperately trying to reach the airport and get away with the loot to whatever cardboard paradise board game burglars escape to. The other player is the Marshal hunting them through the city, trying to uncover their hideouts and catch them first.

The fugitive will lay down cards numbered 1-40, to represent their hideout, but must be at most 3 above the previous hideout, unless they discard cards to increase their value. The marshal player will guess numbers, and if that value is down within the line, the fugitive must reveal it. Even if the marshal gets close, if they have not revealed the full sequence of events they can’t arrest the fugitive. From this simple set up arises an incredible deductive challenge for the marshal, and a tense race for the fugitive! Designer Tim Fowers already has a fantastic catalogue of games to his name so it’d be criminal for you to skip this game!

Catch the Fugitive before July 9th.

HOPEHOPE

At the other end of the cosmic scale, HOPE brings us not only the end of the universe itself, but also the most self-serving acronym since T.I.M.E. Stories. Team HOPE (Human Organisation to Preserve Existence) is on a mission to prevent the universe from regressing, an unpleasant experience for everyone. To do this they will have to explore a crazily-dimensioned space time across an incredible hex tiled board that relies on a cunning optical illusion. Which means I can’t describe it and HOPE earns itself a bonus picture:

Hope BoardNow picture in your mind the purple areas as ‘floors’ and the red and blue areas as walls. Now you see how the yellow rocket can move: only along the floors. But other players will be moving along the other colours, seeing them as the floors. Your aim is to reach the many planets dotted around these regions. You are also looking for opportunities to upgrade your character and gain more technology, and while the fate of the universe is at stake… one player is going to be recognised as the best saviour adding a layer of semi-cooperativeness to the game. A very cool looking puzzle game.

HOPE you check this out before July 10th.

 

Any projects caught your eye? Let me know in the comments!

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