Kickstart Your Week! War, Supernovas and the US Presidential Election

 

 

This War Of Mine: The Board Game

 

A bleary grey dawn breaks over the city, its thin light weaving through cracks in boarded up windows. Staccato rat-a-tat-tat. Crying hunger pains. Cracks dimly seen in the plaster of a once beautiful room. A tremendous crash! House shaking. Dust. Dust everywhere. A close one. A new crack in the plaster. Slowly the world returns to peace, the dust settles. Another day in This War of Mine begins.

In war, not everyone is a soldier. Based on the critically acclaimed video game of recent years, This War of Mine pitches you and your friends into a hellish cooperative experience: trying to survive in a war-torn city where getting hold of even the simplest necessities of life becomes a battle for not only your physical survival, but the survival of your very humanity.

This is a game of resource management; it is a game where the luck of the dice could be crucial (as well it might be in a setting where any moment a misaimed shell might come through your roof) but most importantly it is a game about stories, sometimes the most horrific, scarring of stories (though you can tailor your game to suit the grittiness of experience you want). The game features a tome of adventures, like Above and Below or Tales of the Arabian Nights, each giving you a choice, inevitably testing your morals, with outcomes that might, undoubtedly, be bad for you or the group. But even more interestingly the game will track the choices you make, creating consequences later in the game.

So many board game adaptations of video game or film licenses raise questions. It’s too easy to play off of peoples love of a story in a different medium. But here we have not only an interesting set of mechanics, we have a well respected designer, Michał Oracz (Neuroshima Hex, Theseus: The Dark Orbit) at the helm. Add to this a game that is finally taking steps to explore a hugely compelling (and terrifying) topic, and you have a Kickstarter you cannot afford to miss!

 

This War of Mine ends on May 31^st.

 

 

Sol: Last Days of a Star

 

A sun is dying. Approaching collapse, it threatens to destroy its solar system and the civilisations that had lived in peaceful harmony until now. Faced with the threat of extinction, those races have built great interstellar arks but these need to be powered. The energy source? The dying star itself. Rebuilding the harvesting infrastructure will be a significant task, but worse, will only destabilise the star faster! Only one race will have time to power their ship and escape the impending supernova.

Sol: Last Days of a Star features jaw dropping visuals, visions of fire upon the black emptiness of space, but more importantly features fascinating gameplay. Each piece of infrastructure that you build can be used by anyone, but doing so rewards the builder. Where structures are built, and where in relation to other structures, becomes a major spatial puzzle. Your base ships at the edge of the circular board, move each turn, taking you away from your infrastructure and forcing you to use your opponents’ while forcing you to time your actions carefully.

This spatial and temporal puzzle, the combining of cooperative and competitive elements, and a great variability that comes from the different forms of instability that occur each game makes this an absolutely… stellar game you need to check out. Now, Sol will be travelling from another star system so shipping costs are exorbitantly high. See if you can arrange for a joint shipping deal as they discuss at the bottom of the Kickstarter page.

 

Sol enters its Last Days on June 2^nd.

 

 

Campaign Trail

 

It’s time to get back to the Campaign Trail! This was my top Kickstarter pick a few months ago, but sadly didn’t quite make its funding goal. It’s back with a slick new look (and a very interesting blog post accompanying it) and has now already cleared its goal. Naturally, Campaign Trail is a game of presidential electioning, and it earns a top pick thanks to its crazily usable cards…

You play cards to add registered voters into your pool, which can be added to the map by campaigning in the regions where your candidate is, or by advertising in certain regions, according to the map printed on the card. Of course advertising costs money so you can also play cards to fundraise, and discarding other cards will allow you to move your candidate between regions. The insanely difficult decisions begin when I tell you that each card has a choice of 4 of those 6 actions on it, and you can only do one of them when you play that card! But it gets worse! Or, rather, better! Because after each deck of cards runs out, you have a debate! Which is resolved by using another set of symbols on the card! So you have this extra layer of decision-making, whether you want to save cards for their value in the debates.

And then there’s the score track. What? Has Matt gone mad? Who cares about a score track? Well this one is damn clever: each state has a tile that fits into a grooved track. If you have the most voters in that state, you just take the tile and slot it into your groove. Instantly you can see who is in the lead, without doing any maths! The game sounds very clever, full of brain bendingly difficult choices, and with a great eye for components. Definitely check this one out!

 

Campaigning is over June 2^nd!

 

Other Great Games

 

Saltlands – Could this be the Mad Max board game people have been waiting for? A semi-cooperative race through the wasteland remnants of a dried up ocean, searching for clues to a possible salvation, Saltlands has certainly intrigued many backers already with its stunning graphical style and wind-driven movement mechanic. Escape the raiders together, or leave the others to their fate, any number of players can win together, but only if you want that to be the outcome! Ends May 30^th.

 

Plague Inc: The Board Game – Another computer game tie-in, Plague Inc. has players controlling different horrible diseases, each looking to destroy as much of humanity as possible! You’ll start off in a single location, and steadily spread, evolving your disease to better spread or kill the pitiful humans in your area. Ends May 31^st.

 

 

Outlive – Another post-apocalyptic game, here you lead a band of survivors around the ruins of a once great city, collecting the resources you need to survive. Typically you’ll need to coordinate the actions of your various scavengers to get what you need, and your opponents will only make things harder by raiding your weaker groups. Ends June 1^st.

 

 

Ave Roma – A very interesting worker placement game that only narrowly missed out on a top pick this week. Each player has a pool of numbered workers, whose value limits the spaces where they can be placed. Then, at the end of the round, you draft those groups of workers back, leading to changing distribution of values with each round and forcing you to consider your actions multiple turns ahead. Ends June 2^nd.

 

Vanuatu – A new edition of Vanuatu, taking you back to the paradise island of the same name and challenging you to make a living by fishing, finding treasues, trading the island’s resources and prospering off the tourist trade. The artwork and components have been significantly upgraded, creating a beautiful looking game. Ends June 2^nd.

 

 

March of the Ants: Minions of the Meadow – An expansion to the ant based 4X game (not a theme you see terribly often), March of the Ants. This adds ‘Major Workers’ whose abilities evolve with your colony, aphids that can be farmed for extra resources, tactical abilities, parasitic evolutions to benefit from your opponent’s units, and predators! Quite the ecosystem. Ends June 2^nd.

 

 

Virus – Escape a lab full of monsters! Features a unique (and pretty cool!) combat system in which you grab a handful of your resource cubes and drop them on to your player boards, hoping to overlap the squares printed on it. Those that do cause damage to your (many) enemies. Exploring the lab is also driven by player choices, and combining the right colours of tiles in each section will help you escape sooner but watch out… there may be a traitor in your midst. Ends June 3^rd.

 

---

Image credit goes to Board Game Geek users Jakuwis, prismofeverything, ondfly123, Kruppagergely, Ndemic, W Eric Martin, vortex7777, Quined Games, and timeisner1.