Lots of kickstarter games on my radar right now. Only backing one right now, very highly considering backing another, and the others I'll be watching out for in retail.
Artifacts, Inc. is a new game by Ryan Laukat. He's my favourite game artist and he has a good track record with kickstarter games, both for reliability and for quality of game. I think he's most famous for the Eight Minute Empire series of games. I'm highly looking forward to The Ancient World, which should be arriving in a month or two. For those who cares about such things, Laukat runs a small independent publishing company with his wife, Red Raven Games, so he legitimately needs kickstarter to help fund his work.
Artifacts, Inc. looks to be a light-ish dice placement game. You send your intrepid adventurers out on expeditions to find artifacts, and you sell them to museums to grow your own assets and increase your reputation. The theme appeals to me, and the art brings the theme through very well.
This is the game I am backing. For those in the US, the kickstarter price looks very competitive with what can be expected in retail. It's a bit higher for me in Canada, but I'm willing to put in the extra money here to support the designer (and maybe get an exclusive box cover...). Check this one out!
Steampunk Rally is a racing game where you draft cards to build and power a steampunk contraption. It had a relatively high goal but it has easily blown past it and cracked open a treasure trove of stretch goals. With the addition of 40 metal cogs for free, it looks to be great value. The
rahdo runs through video makes it look like a nice little game, though perhaps a little light on player interaction.
This is the game I am probably going to back. The value does look really good, and the designers are from Alberta, where I live. My main hesitation is that it
is fairly expensive, and I know very little about the creators. The campaign looks good though, so maybe this will be the first project I back from an actual first time creator. (I backed Progress a while ago, which was a first-time KS, but the creators behind that had completed another project on IndieGoGo.)
Roots is a party game which reminds me a little of Apples to Apples. You use prefix and suffix cards to form word trees and attempt to build words that fit given categories or subjects. I think the idea is neat. My main concern is that the game has public submissions, unlike Apples to Apples or Dixit. That means that if one player is close to winning, players may be disinclined to award them even if they had the best entry.
Snake Oil is another party game with public entries, this one from the actual publishers of Apples to Apples. The KS is for a second stand-alone expansion, though you can get the other two games as well for one mega pack. In this game, one player takes on the role of customer and is given a character. the other players combine words in their hand to make products, which they will then pitch to the customer. As far as party games go, this sounds like it can spark a lot of creativity and laughter.
Stockpile is ending soon and I'm not sure if it's going to make it. It's close though! This is a game about insider trading on the stock market. The theme is not interesting to me, but the central mechanism of the game sounds really neat.
Each player receives some insider information about how the market is going to change at the end of the round. With this knowledge in hand, players will create stockpiles with face-up and face-down cards and then bid on those stockpiles, trying to get the best stocks with the right timing.
Desert Island is essentially a revamped version of the classic game, Lifeboat. The designer has taken years of play and feedback to improve that game, and Desert Island is the result. The theme is fun and the character-driven gameplay looks delightful.
New Bedford is a worker placement game by Dice Hate Me Games, most famous (I think) for Compounded and Viva Java. I'm hearing a lot of positive comparisons to Le Havre, which is a game I've wanted to try for a while now. That said, I'm not really looking for another Worker Placement at this point.
Finally, I've also got an eye on
Spell Saga, though I actually haven't looked too closely at it. It is one-player story telling game. From what I can tell, it's sort of like a choose-your-own-adventure book in board game form, probably with some gaming tropes like stats and inventory. It looks rather charming and I like the idea. That said, I'm almost certainly not going to back it. $20 shipping to Canada is too much for me. Moreover, if I'm going to do solo gaming, I might as well play a video game or computer game, eh?
