Lots of interesting games are up right now! I am almost certainly going to back one, my friend is already backing another, and the others just look pretty neat.
Coup: Rebellion G54
This is the one I'm probably going to back. If you don't know about Coup, you've been living under a rock. It's an enormously popular bluffing game that is simple to learn and plays very quickly. I actually hadn't played it until very recently, and found it mediocre, but I expect that it really shines when you play it again and again.
Before I'd even played it once, I was already very interested in
Coup: Guatemala 1954, the successor to Coup. The gameplay is almost identical, but the key difference is that there are 25 different roles from which you only choose 5 per game. This kind of variety instantly grabs me in any game.
The KS campaign is for Rebellion G54, which is the same as Guatemala but with the same sci-fi theme as the most(?) well-known version of Coup published by Indie Boards and Cards.
Millenium Blades
I posted about this in the
random thread, and this is the game that a friend is backing. It is by the guys who produced BattleCON.
Millenium Blades is a CCG simulator. In the game, you are players of a [fictional] CCG which is also called Millenium Blades. Over the course of the game you will buy booster packs and singles, grow your collection, trade cards, build your deck and make friends with the other hobbyists (this is an actual mechanism in the game). You'll also face off against each other in tournaments. You'll earn points for all these things; you might not be the most competitive player of the CCG but you could still win just by having an awesome collection.
The fictional CCG itself will evolve in different ways in each game because there are a bunch of expansions that may be released which won't be the same in each game. Also, many of these expansions have hilarious themes.
All in all, it sounds like a really fun time, especially if you have nostalgia for any CCG as a hobby.
Speaking of CCGs...
Gruff
This is
not a CCG, but it
is a 2 player tactical card game in the vein of Magic or Hearthstone. That puts it outside my wheelhouse, but it still looks neat enough to grab my attention and tempt me.
The game has several things going for it. First is the theme. The game is set in some sort of dark fantasy world where you play as shepherds travelling between worlds. In order to protect yourself, you make use of horrendously twisted and mutated goat monsters. It sounds hilarious and the art is just the right level of cartoony fun to make it work.
Second is the setup. You choose a unique Shepherd and 3 unique Goats. Each Goat has 15 ability cards from which you choose 8. You shuffle them all together to form a deck of just 24 cards. And then you go. It gives you some of that deck construction feel but in a quicker, more concentrated form.
Third is the cost. At $25, it's rather affordable.
Anyway, I am probably not going to back it. I am more interested in the Coup project and I still have a few finished campaigns that have yet to deliver. I also rarely play 2p games and I'm actually not sure if I'd even enjoy this style of game. But still, the project looks really neat.
Evolution
This campaign is primarily for a new expansion to Evolution,
Flight. It also includes some rebalanced cards for the original game (which was on kickstarter not too long ago, actually). My understanding is that v1.0 was tested and balanced, but it turned out that inexperienced players tended to be less aggressive than expected. The changes serve to tighten up the ecosystem so that there is less food available overall, forcing more direct competition and probably a few extinctions.
The game interests me mainly because animals are awesome and this game lets you make customized animals. I am probably not going to back it because, if I did, I would feel too tempted to get both the base game and the expansion together, which is too big an investment at this time.
Finally, I wanted to mention...
The Titan Series
This is not a specific game, but rather a series. The publisher has rounded up a bunch of well known designers (the titular "titans") who have committed to producing a gateway game each. There is very little information available though, and it's a long-term investment if you buy in. An interesting project, though one that doesn't tempt me much at all.
What do you guys think? Did you back or receive a game recently? Anything interesting on your radar?
Edit: fixing an image link