Let’s start with a thing from Patreon, a website that does an absolutely horrible job for finding worthy projects to support: look in the Games category and you only get seven things that are featured. Search for the word “games” — heck, search for anything — and you only get twenty-three results, and those include creators that use the word in their Patreon username, backer posts, and project name. If you’re creating a gaming-related project and don’t use the word “game” in your project name, you will never be found. This is something that Patreon creators should know, so I’m going to bold this bit: If you’re running a gaming-related Patreon, the only way you’re going to get more patrons is to do a lot of the promotion yourself…so contact me at thomas@purplepawn.com if you know of something there that others should know about.

Like the Fate RPG? Mark Diaz Truman assembles and edits a mostly-monthly ‘zine containing three articles about the Fate Core game system  (and Fate Accelerated Edition) written by various game industry veterans, plus a quickstart adventure. Pledge levels start at $1.99 per issue, which gets you access to a PDF, epub, or mobi version of the issue. I’m the guy that does layout on the project — which is how I knew about it — but even if I wasn’t involved at all, I’d be recommending The Fate Codex. (Gen Con attendees: The Fate Codex Anthology, collecting the first year of the ‘zine, is on sale at booth 734!)

game tshirtsI know there’s more cool stuff on Patreon, but, alas. On to Kickstarter.

Hey, could these shirts be referring to your favorite boardgame? Why, I think they just might be! While it’s a bit odd to sell t-shirts through Kickstarter — oh hey, meeple ties! Anyway, $20 a shirt, seven bucks more for all of the stretch goals, including a coaster set, stickers, and tote bag. The Twilight Struggle-inspired design is pretty cool.

I’m really digging the retro 70’s art style on Roadkill Rivals, a lighthearted quick-playing card game about running over animals. It looks to have a lot of Take That! actions, including “lose a turn” cards, which might suck in a game that’s longer than the 15 or so minute play time this game has. Twenty bucks gets you a copy.

roadkill

I’m a big fan of the boardgame cafe concept. Over in Lancashire, UK, Dice & Donuts is trying to raise additional funds to improve their soon-to-be-opend boardgame cafe. While other funding is already in place, D&D is looking for backers to help them afford an additional draft beer line, extra beverage fridges, expand into their own coffee roaster, obtain a set of kits to make board games accessible to blind players, and add more games to the cafe. Special backer levels (all gone, unfortunately) include colored-piece deeds: always like to play red? At that level, D&D will award you and exclusive rights deed that ensures you get to play red in every game you play at the cafe. Clever.