Top Kickstarters September 2016

It’s time to say farewell to August and make ourselves ready for the end of summer, the onset of autumn, and the long descent towards winter. Oh woe is me. Thank goodness we have all these lovely Kickstarters to make ourselves feel better, hey?

As always, I’ll be updating this list as the month goes on.

 

Unfair

Why can’t we go to the theme park today!? It’s so Unfair! Or it was, until Unfair came out and let you build your own theme park any day of the week! Sadly you can’t ride your own rollercoaster but such are the limitations we work under. What you do get to do is build the most ridiculously large rides, represented by towering piles of upgrades that stretch your ride tableau across the tabletop. Whoever earns the most points from having the most impressive rides and completing objectives wins. You know, as usual.

The cool element comes from setting up combos of cards, something made even more exciting by the variety, coming from the different themed decks of cards that are combined at the start of each game. The different combinations of these modules will offer up a great degree of replay value, from the cards you can build, the workers you can hire and the events you must face. Unfair puts together some simple rules with some great art and striking graphical design for a great looking project.

Unfair has its grand opening on September 15^th.

 

Word Domination

Mwahahaha! Are you ready to auscultate my exceptional, incogitable stratagem for Word Domination!? It is certain to befuddle you. Prepare for vanquishment! In fact, you might not be creating quite such ostentatious words as these in this new and surprisingly strategic word game. Word Domination requires you to create words from a grid of letters, including a new one you add each turn. You drop a marker on to each letter you use in you word. Then things get clever.

You see, you get to steal each letter that you can place two of your cubes on to. Further, when you put a cube on a letter with your opponent’s cube, you knock them off it, preventing them from taking that letter next turn. So you see, you’re trying to create words using particular letters, doing better when you can match more letters. Tying together what makes word games special into a challenging game is a genuine slice of genius! Do check this one out!

Word Domination concludes on September 21^st.

 

Complete Projects

 

Island Hopper

“Ok so we just need you to deliver these bookshelves to Gryphon island over there. Here’s the plane you’ll be flying”

“Great! She looks like a beau – why are all the windows painted black?!”

“Oh don’t worry about that, we’ll be sending you directions over the radio”

“!”

Island Hopper is a bizarre yet hilarious mix of euro and dexterity game mechanics and features a blindfolded pilot and a mixture of enthusiastic/belligerent directions shouted by people who don’t all want you to go to the same place. That is, the other players. This is a literal pick up and deliver game, where each player has a certain set of contracts they want to see fulfilled by having goods delivered to certain islands. There’ll be a bidding phase to become captain and a bribing phase to entice the captain to certain islands, then the blindfold goes on and the captain must try and drop the goods tokens on to islands. Hopefully using a parachute. Each of the other player is allowed to shout out directions to try and guide their wobbling hand to the “right” destination. It’s such a crazily silly idea that it might just work! Especially with Scott Almes at the helm.

Island Hopper takes off on September 6^th.

Fields of Green

I see Fields of Green…
Red lifestock cards too!
I see them drafted
Between me and you
And I think to myself….

How’s this different to Among the Stars?

Yes, Fields of Green is a new imagining of Artipia Games’ fantastic drafting game, Among the Stars, set now upon 20^th Century Earth with a happy modern farming theme. But it is most certainly more than just a new theme! Just as running a farm should be, you must carefully manage your resources over the years to build up and expand your farm. You can use the abilities of cards again and again so long as you have enough resources to do so, and you even chose the types of cards to build your hand from at the start of each draft! Fields of Green is much more about building an engine than Among the Stars points grabbing tactical play. It certainly sounds different enough to me to be well worth checking out!

Fields of Green go to fallow on September 7^th.

Merchants of Araby

I do enjoy a good bit of negotiation and in Merchants of Araby everything is up for discussion! You are, of course, after the most money possible by ensuring your goods are traded around the world. To do this though, requires you to get your camels in the grand caravans winding their way across the desert landscape, but each player controls access to their caravans. You must convince them, with promises of just about anything, to let you join in.

You have money and you have cards, featuring a wondrous array of characters, even mystical djinn! These cards can be discarded to provide the goods you’ll need to send your camels off to trade with, or can be bought to create a tableau and the corresponding powers associated with them. This is another beautiful game from Daily Magic Games (the Valeria series) and well worth checking out if you love convincing your friends to give you stuff on the cheap. By the way, do watch out for bandits…

Join the Merchants of Araby caravan before September 13^th.

Mint Works

Did you just shake your Mint Works at me? After the heavily spiced dishes of Araby, how about a minty refresher in the round, green shape of Mint Works, the tiniest and possibly tastiest of this weeks games (don’t eat the mints…) Coming in nothing more than a mint tin, Mint Works is a worker placement game… about mints! With mints… as workers! It’s really going full circle.

In this 20 minute game, you are racing to generate enough mints to build plan cards, which offer up victory points and often a special extra ability. Maybe you’ll unlock a special action space, just for you. Perhaps it’s something that will boost your minty economy each round. This is not a meaty game with acres of depth, it’s just a light breezy micro-game to suck on between games or carry round with you in your bag.

Mint Works freshens up on September 13^th.

Herbaceous

Something else aromatic now in the ridiculously pretty form of Herbaceous. In herbaceous you’ll be planting and collecting herbs, each represented by a wonderfully illustrated card, and trying to have the most valuable collection of herb pots at the end of the game. Each of your four pots is looking for a different type of card set, one wants as many cards of the same form as possible, another wants lots of pairs of herbs, but you can only use each pot once, so timing your potting is devilishly important!

Most rounds players will be planting out herbs, one to the public garden and one to their private spaces. Unfortunately for you, you will draw one card, decide where to put it, then draw the next one and place it in the other. A painfully tense decision, especially as anyone can take any herbs from the communal garden when potting. And that, basically, is it! A very simple game to understand, but even though the decisions are binary (pot, don’t pot, communal or private), that doesn’t make them any less intense! A delightful game for the end of summer!

Herbaceous gets potted out on September 13^th.

 

What Kickstarters are you most excited about this month?