Sign up for the Gnome Stew blog’s email list for a chance to win DriveThruRPG gift certificates and two RPG ebooks.

Select PDFs from Kenzer & Co. are on sale for 15-30% off.

For the next week everything at Noble Knight Games is at least 10% off. (Well maybe a little less than a week. I think they sent me the email yesterday.)

Scallywags from Gamewright will be debuting at Origins Game Fair in a beginner-level tournament. Prizes will include copies of the game before it’s available in stores.

Avalon Games’ e-book products will be half-off on May 21st.

Everything for sale on Chaosium’s website is 30% off through the 28th.

On Amazon, LEGO Ramses Return is available for only $3.11 and Qwirkle for $17.94.

Father Geek is giving away Dark Horse from Knight Works.

Thanks, Mail Carrier is giving away Classic Battleship Movie Edition and a KRE-O Battleship Combat Chopper set from Hasbro.

My Four Monkeys is giving away Distraction from ThinkFun.

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Crowdfunding has become a major trend in the tabletop games industry. It’s allowed both startup and established game-makers to produce products that otherwise they could not have. And it’s given consumers a forum for voicing their opinions and voting with their dollars before resources are committed to manufacturing.

Discovering what projects are out there, however, has become an increasingly difficult process as the numbers have increased. Many of you, I know, looked forward to our weekly Kickstarter roundup, and some expressed disappointment when it recently lapsed. To be honest, maintaining it takes a lot of work. But we love the games!

So now we’re proud to announce the relaunch of our comprehensive list of all Kickstarter and Indiegogo game projects. We’re going to keep it on its own page (see up top where it says “Kickstarter“), to make it easier to access at any time. Check it out. I think you’ll like all the added features. You can now search the table, as well as sort by project name, dollars raised, percent funded, or closing date. You can even export the data or download a spreadsheet with more information.

If you like it, tell your friends.

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Purple Pawn has been on the forefront of covering Kickstarter game projects for some time. With the explosion in both the number and scope of projects, however, that coverage must evolve. We hope to bring back shortly our comprehensive list of projects. In the meantime, though, we’re going to test a weekly roundup of Kickstarter game news that highlights interesting projects, major achievements, sneak peeks, and related stuff from around the web. Please let us know what you think of this approach.

Finished and Finishing

Zombicide successfully funded on Sunday with just over $780,000—39 times its goal! Ogre Designer’s Edition is at $715,000 with about a day-and-a-half left.

Interesting Projects

Ace of Spies is a spy-themed card game set in the 1920s. It’s the first project of new game publisher Albino Dragon, a venture of sometimes contributor to Purple Pawn, Richard Bliss (also currently an advertiser). Watch their intro video. It’s my favorite so far.

Another project with a connection to this site is Off Your Rocker from Stratus Games. It’s a party game, which honestly is not usually my thing. However, we’re currently running a giveaway of Off Your Rocker for Stratus, and as part of that have been playing a version of the game over on our Play page. It’s been a lot of fun!

Polynesian Adventure is the project of a recent business school graduate and Hawaii resident. It’s supposed to teach Polynesian culture but is just roll-and-move—or more precisely, draw-card-and-move, like Candy Land. [Reminds me of a story I did 4 years ago.] It’s passed the 50 percent mark but only has 7 days left to go.

Gen Con or Bust is fiction author Patrick Stutzman’s attempt to finance a trip to Gen Con. He’s been before but can’t afford it this year. He’s asking for $2,250.

Lots of people talk about the difficulties of dealing with sexism, classism, racism, violence, and historical realism in fantasy games. The Farewell to Fear project is trying to address that with a sophisticated “progressive post-fantasy roleplaying game”. Not simply changing the skin color of NPCs, Farewell to Fear presents a medieval-style setting undergoing social revolution.

Think punk rock meets fantasy. Bad Religion meets Tolkien, boot to face.

With the Global GameSpace project, creator Curtis Lacy is hoping to develop a cross-platform, virtual-tabletop application for playing board games over the internet. He plans to give away the software when it’s finished but needs $40,000 to make it happen.

Interesting projects show up on Indiegogo too. One of them is Sharks With Lasers, a game in which the players’ secret agent trainees must dodge sharks, and their lasers, on the way to an island.

Stuff From Around the Web

Lisa Stevens, CEO of Paizo, talked about crowdfunding on a Gamerati Google+ Hangout and teased about a possible Kickstarter project launching soon. Could the Pathfinder Online Technology Demo from Goblin Works be what she was referring to?

On BoardGameGeek, one user is maintaining a GeekList of the top 10 most funded board game projects on Kickstarter.

Pinnacle Entertainment Group announced that it will announce next week (really) a Kickstarter project for a new Savage Worlds RPG setting.

On Troll in the Corner, Nick reminds donors to be cautious with crowdfunding, noting that there’s no guarantee of quality for supported projects.

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[source: Daniel Solis]

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You may recall a post back in December about the card game Eleminis. I recently had a chance to play the game with my kids, and it’s a light, fun, simple game that can be played in as little as 5 minutes.

Each turn a player draws a card, and can either play it in one of 5 spaces in front of them or on another player’s spaces. The goal of the game is to get 1 of each element (water, air, fire, plant, and rock) down in front of them. There’s also a star, which is wild, and trash, which keeps a player from winning until they get rid of it. Along with these character cards, there’s aslo action cards that let you swap cards with other players, move cards around between players, skip players, or reverse the turn order.

A pretty cool element (heh) to the game is that each element trumps 2 others, so it can be played over that element to replace it. This comes in handy when another player is close to getting their winning hand.

Overall the game is very simple, yet enjoyable with kids. It’s easy to pack up, pickup, and play on the go. It’s for 2-8 players, and even though it says ages 7+ I had no trouble teaching my 5 year old the rules in no time at all.

Eleminis was provided free for review by Game Salute.

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Calling it the Community Wizard, Fantasy Flight Games has launched a new online tool that allows gamers to record their collection, connect with other gamers, find retailers, and register for events. Officially still in the beta testing phase, the tool is currently accessible by all registered users on FFG’s website. Unfortunately, Community Wizard is limited to FFG games. Nevertheless, I’m impressed with how easy it is to use, how focused it is on getting players in to more games, and how much support it offers to retailers and games clubs.

When searching for opportunities, Community Wizard users can specify the games that they’re interested in playing, as well as choose between finding other players, retailer-hosted events, conventions, or game clubs. Players can also propose events to take place at these locations, while the organizations themselves can use Community Wizard to schedule and publicize events, and even take reservations.

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Earlier this week at the Mensa Mind Games in Herndon, Virginia, 300 judges played for 48 hours to choose these 5 games from among 68 as the 2012 Mensa Select winners:

IOTA—A card game, in which to play and score cards, each of the three attributes for all cards in a line must either be all the same or all different.

Snake Oil—A party game of making up crazy products and convincing people to buy them.

Mine Shift—Navigate your jewel through the maze mine, or rearrange the mine.

Coerceo—In which the players attempt to surround each other’s pieces to capture them and also the board shrinks as the game is played.

Tetris Link—Drop Tetris pieces in to the tower slot. Linking pieces with the same color earns points but leaving gaps earns a penalty.

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There’s a lot going on in Kickstarter at the moment. Amongst a host of new entries, Zpocalypse have just breached D-Day Dice’s old record in becoming the highest earning boardgame kickstarter campaign EVER. The figure: $210,237 (or, enough money to create a one-dollar bill stack 7 stories high)

If you scroll down to the bottom of their Kickstarter page, you see a familiar looking badge that a lot of kickstarter campaigns are sporting nowadays, The Springboard Seal of Quality:

“It is your assurance that a new game project is worth your time and attention. All titles approved for Springboard campaigns are vetted by the game professionals at Game Salute.”

Well how is it approved by Springboard? And who are these “professionals” that claim to know more about boardgames than me?! Well, the answer was supplied by a very nice chap called Dan Yarrington…

1. Hello Dan, thanks for talking to us, let’s start with the most important question. Tell me exactly what Game Salute is and what Game Salute does.

At its core, Game Salute is a company dedicated to improving the industry overall, for gamers, for stores, and for design studios. Read the rest of this entry »

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Mafia Dollar is a card game designed by Heiko Weyen for 2 – 6 players. The game sees the players taking control of different groups of mobsters each trying to get as much cash as possible before the End of Prohibition.

Players equip gangsters and hit the streets trying to earn loot, steal from other players, whacking other gangsters, and trying not to get caught by the police.

Mafia Dollar will be released in a bilingual (German and English) version in July 2012 for the price of 10.99€.

At first I was kind of turned off by the art style of the box and example cards shown on the site, but they really started to grow on me. Looks like it’ll be a fairly light card game in the 30-45 minute play time range.

You can check out more about the game here.

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This week there are 57 active projects in the Weekly Roundup. Last week projects funded and 2 failed. The week funded close to $60,000. Not a bad week but definitely a slow down compared to some of the crazy weeks so far this year.

This next week appears to be heading for a steep decline as 7 projects are currently struggling to reach their funding goal and 6 projects already over their goal. Mostly RPG games are reaching their funding goals. This coming week will see Gunship wrap a very successful campaign.

My podcast, Funding the Dream, this coming week will have interviews with Max Temkin, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity which was a top game last year and now has been topping the charts on Amazon.

We also speak with Fred Hicks who discusses the Worst-Case Success Kickstarter project. Brian Fargo, CEO of InXile joins us to talk about us $1 million plus project and his initiative called Kicking it Forward. You can read more at www.kickingitforward.org.

Enjoy this weeks list.

All projects new to the list for this week are in bold.

Read the rest of this entry »

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