I noticed this Kickstarter project the other day which I think looks amazing.  The project is creating laser-cut wood pieces with which you can make dungeons or villages for table top play.

Some of the pieces attach to the base plate(s) and the rest of the items slot together so it’s completely modular and can be taken apart too.  Floors and roofs can be removed too so you can use the inside of the buildings.  Whilst primarily for role-playing and table top games, I think they’d be great as the board for a board game too.

You can read more about the project, pledge levels and watch videos here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/direbadger/direbadger-lasercut-roleplay-town-and-dungeon-terr/

The time lapse video of the project creator making one of the sets is interesting to watch.  Check out the headstones in the graveyard – you can have one inscribed with your name if you want.

James.

City of Zombies is a co-operative, dice-allocating game where players are trying to stop wave after wave of zombies from attacking the city.

This is a Kickstarter project that is live at the moment.  The game was designed by Matt Tidbury to help his daughter with her arithmetic and, since then, Matt has had a great deal of excellent and positive feedback from the many schools where he has tested it with kids, as well as adult education centres and even a prison too.

Whilst the game is intended to help kids with their number skills, it offers a fun game challenge too.  Players take turns rolling 3 dice and they can then allocate them to zombies which each have a target number on them in order to destroy them.  The tricky part is that to kill a zombie, a player must use the values of the dice to match the target number on each zombie AND no dice can be left unused.  So, if you roll a 2, 4 and 5, you could add these all together to make 11 and kill one zombie with value 11, or multiply the 2 and 4 to make 8 and kill one zombie with value 8 and another zombie with value 5, etc.  Remember, every dice must be used in some way or no zombies can be removed by that player.  After each player has had a turn, the zombies advance towards the city and more zombies arrive at the top of the board.

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Some months ago, I posted about the wine-making game Viticulture which was being Kickstarted (and I will be reviewing that soon).  The same designers at StoneMayer Games are Kickstarting their new game at the moment called Euphoria.

Euphoria is set in a dystopian future and is a game of worker placement.  Workers are dice whose values are set by rolling them when you gain them or retrieve them from the board.  High value dice can be handy because some locations give a benefit based on the sum of the workers there; however, the numbers represent the worker’s knowledge of the world around them and too much knowledge on your workers who aren’t currently placed means they become too aware of their reality and run away.

On their turn, players can either place workers (one at a time, or more if the workers have matching values) or they can remove workers, but never both.  Placing workers allows players to use various actions which usually earn resources or allow a player to spend resources to gain things like workers, etc.

However, there are a few different types of area where workers can be placed.  For example, in some areas, workers don’t get returned to their owner until another worker is placed on the same area (which makes me think there may be opportunities to return a worker to another player specifically to try and cause them to run away if that player has several high-value, unplaced workers already).  Another example is that some areas can have any number of workers present on them and the benefit gained from placing a worker there is based on the total sum of the workers’ values.  These sound like nice additions to the usual worker placement mechanic. Read the rest of this entry »

Kickstarter.com is growing in popularity as a way to finance board game production and I’m always interested to check out any new games on there.  In fact, it was through Kickstarter that I ordered my copy of Triumvirate back in April 2010.

A game on Kickstarter that has caught my attention is Lyssan as it looks like an interesting Medieval-themed game that mixes Diplomacy on the board (as there’re no dice for movement and attacks) but with card play to sway the conflicts.  Helping your opponents can be a useful tool so you can plot against them such as getting inside their castle and then turning their followers against them.

Check it out on Kickstarter – the video is a very good introduction and the designer (who seems like a very pleasant guy) describes the game.  Lyssan has reached its $20k funding but you can still pledge and, as with most Kickstarter projects, any money over the goal is always well-appreciated so larger production runs can be made.

I look forwards to seeing more about this game and hope it can deliver its mix of intrigue and confrontation.

James.