Top Kickstarters November 2016

After failing to find any free time at the end of last month, we’re back on the Kickstarter band wagon to take a look at what’s available right now on the world’s favourite crowd funding site. Some of these are finishing very soon too so be sure to go check them out before you miss out!

 

The Edge: Dawnfall

I’m usually a little wary of recommending big miniatures games since their fulfilment so often turns into a drawn out nightmare without offering too much on the gameplay side. But since The Edge: Dawnfall comes from Neuroshima Hex designer Michał Oracz, I have a great deal more faith than normal. This is a very assymetric miniatures combat game, with a resource system, card driven abilities and, yes, glorious looking sculpt-renderings.

The card play is the interesting element here. Each unit has an associated deck of cards that you can draw from, offering up powerful actions that must be paid for with the crystal resources you can obtain by controlling parts of the map. Those units can also be superpowered with those crystals. It supports player vs player, with a degree of deck building and force selection, or a full co-op mode with scenario driven play and a big hearty campaign. It all sounds good and it all looks good but there aren’t that many details on the page so approach with caution.

The Edge dawn falls on November 14^th.

Spires

An in-SPIRE-ing trick taking game that is sure to TOWER over its rivals in the genre. But not too high. The King wouldn’t like that. The aim is to collect tower cards into your tableau, as many as possible, but if you have 4 or more of the same suit come the end of the game, you will be losing points as your tower rises above those of the royal palace… awkward!

There are up to 3 markets placed in the centre and each player will secretly choose a market to visit each round. If you’re the only visitor, fine! You take the tower card available there. But if more than one player goes for the same spot, you’ll compete playing a tower card from your hand to attempt to win both the market card and the card of the other player. Clearly winning is great! Until you have 3 of one colour and then you need to be very careful as tactically losing contests might be a very effective way to win the game! Also the scoring for the solo mode has some of the funniest resolution notes I think I’ve seen. Check it out!

Spires climb high until November 15^th.

 

Finished Projects

Medici: The Card Game

Mysterious goings on in the board game hobby! Game after game is being snatched away in the dead of night to be compressed down into card only formats and it appears Medici, a classic auction game from Reiner Knizia, is the latest in a long line of games to be a victim… except these new versions tend to be pretty good, actually.

Medici the card game follows the same premise of its bigger brother: score points for the value of your cargo load each round, and also for the total number of each goods type stored in their warehouse. Unlike full-blown Medici, there is less auctioning things, and more pushing your luck as you draw up to three cards from the deck and must take the last one you draw, but can take others. But there’s only so much room in your boat! This edition is again comprehensively illustrated by Vincent Dutrait so I’m drooling all over it (not on your copy, don’t worry).

Medici the Card Game sets sail November 3^rd.

Rise Up

Something a bit more meaningful here, perhaps. Rise Up is not a game about baking, but a co-op about pushing for social change against a system that is set against it. Certainly something of a topical game. The challenge is to play cards to sway popular opinion across various areas so that you have control a majority by the end of the game, as the system will be attempting to reinforce its version of events at the same time. Additionally, your players must ensure they don’t run out of followers because of their actions.

This is an intriguing one and it cleverly lets you chose at the start of the game what your movement is fighting for, rather than prescribing any particular ideology of it’s own. So you can be #BlackLivesMatter, or you can go for something completely fantastical (equal rights for orcs?) either way you are exposed to the activities of popular movements through your play. The one criticism that leaps out to me is that because the game can represent any social movement, everything that happens represent something fairly generic, which does lose some of its power.

The up rising begins on November 3^rd.

Lazer Ryderz!

Oh my! We are going full 80’s now with the psychedelic artwork of Lazer Ryderz! Which is perfect, because this is basically Tron’s light cycle game! Each player gets a biker and moves across the tabletop (no board!) by way of laying track sections (that look a lot like X-Wing’s movement rulers), so each player moves and turns in discrete sections. The aim is to grab a certain number of the gems placed out at the start of the game before your opponents do. But, of course, if you hit a previously laid stretch of track, you explode!

Lazer Ryderz is certainly a simple game to grasp, and can be cracked out anywhere that you have a decent sized table. I worry it’s a little too simple, and once players have sealed off a certain region of the board there’s not much more gameplay left, but this isn’t aiming to be the next decision heavy euro game. This is just a fun appeal to posterity: I mean the game comes in a set of videotape style boxes! Definitely worth a look!

Lazer Ryderz hits the wall on November 4^th.

Chariot Race

US/Canada only.

The smell of horses, the roar of the crowd, the cries of your friends as you drop another set of caltrops behind you and in their path. This is Chariot Race, the latest game from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock. Two loops of the track are all that stand between you and glory, well, that and your gaggle of vicious, spear throwing co-racers that is. This is a far from friendly competition!

Chariot Race felt like a cross between Formula D and King of Tokyo: it’s a yahtzee style dice game, where going too fast into the corners is going to punish you. I got to play this at Essen and it is a lean, slick design that works very well. You need to manage your speed and damage, your position in the lanes and everyone else too. Because this is extremely interactive in the meanest sense, which really took me by surprise! Leaders can drop caltrops behind to damage trailing charioteers; those players can fling spears at the leaders, or crash into them on purpose. It’s quick and brutal so make sure you’re ready for that!

Chariot Race crosses the finishing line on November 5^th.

C.O.G.

C.O.G. aka the “Cabinet Of Gadgetry” is a steampunk organisation dedicated to constructing acronyms that spell “cog”. C.O.G. is also a very clever steampunk themed word and worker placement game where you are attempting to construct the parts needed for the “Great Apparatus”…! Which is what I’m going to call the London Underground from now on. The clever bit here is that you will be pulling together parts and assembling them into pieces that interlock in clever ways, just like a top hat wielding engineer might. But those parts are letters, the pieces are words, and they interlock in a scrabble/crossword style grid of your own construction. I’m really appreciating the metaphor they’re going for here!

The worker placement element is different to what you might expect too. There are 4 locations on the main board and you have to visit them all once per round, but the sooner you visit a location the more choice you’ll have. The locations give you letters, that you’ll then be using to spell words on your player board, cabinet cards that give special powers, dice for moving round a central track of bonuses, and turn order next round. The other piece of good news is that you don’t need to be wracking your brains for words to spell, instead everyone has a list of the parts (words) the Cabinet of Gadgetry are looking for so it’s a question of getting and arranging words in the best way!

C.O.G. departs on November 9^th.

I’ll be updating this article as the month goes on and I have a bit more time to check out the other Kickstarters that are running right now. Which ones have got you excited?