The rest of the staff is at Toy Fair New York this frigid weekend and this coming week we’ll be flooded with news from that event. So until then, let’s look at some crowdfunding stuff!

The Cyanide & Happiness folks have created NSFW party game based on their random comics generator. In a world of Apples to Apples derivitaves (and Cards Against Humanity knockoffs), Joking Hazard adds a new twist to the formula. To create a three panel strip, a random panel is drawn from the deck and the judge arranges that with a panel card from their hand. The other players sumbit a final panel for the comic strip. A $25 pledge gets you the base game while ten bucks more gets you an extra fifty-card expansion.

It’s more metal coins! Drawlab is back with their second Legendary Metal Coins campaign with a surprisingly low buy in. About $19 gets you either a set of 24 coins or one of each coin in the lines they’re producing. You’ve got Roman, Egyptian, Spartan, and Viking-themed coins, as well as Cyberpunk coins (which I would think would be a bag full of 0s and 1s) and Cthulhu coins because they use currency in Ry’leh? Honestly, I’d just use them in games as tokens that members of a crazy cult would use to identify each other. There’s also a Units set with coins marked as 1, 3, 5, in an art deco typeface for your non-thematic boardgames. (Plus you can get some of the last campaign’s coins in some pledge levels.)

You really want to play a professional wrestling role-playing game, don’t you? Well, yay, because with Nathan D. Paoletta’s World Wide Wrestling: International Incident campaign on Kickstarter, you can get the base game and this new expansion for just $15! Those of you who play RPGs may have noticed the game as the word “World” in there, and yes, it’s using the Apocalypse World RPG engine to drive all the action in the ring and backstage. LET’S GET READY TO [NOT USE A REGISTERED TRAAAAAAAAADEMAAAAAARK]!

Cool playing card decks grab my attention, and this one — while pretty in its own way — is something that really should be funded. Therapy Decks for Speech and Language by Megan Berg (Slp Insights) are a standard deck of playing cards, but that have large graphics and text to help in speech therapy sessions. Decks include R-blends (words with double or triple constanants that include the letter R), idioms, front/back minimal pairs (words with similar beginning and ending sounds like key and tea), categories, and Initial B (words starting with B). Unlike most decks that are crowdfunded, these aren’t just pretty things, they’re functional and done with a purpose. Deck packages start at $16.

More cards, but not really: Josh Krause from Original Magic Art is offering classic artwork cards as tokens for various TCGs and CCGs. Taken mainly from masterpieces in the public domain, the card-sized tokens are naturally beautiful with basic sets beginning at $18, full 54-card themed sets at $25, and playmats at $25. While I don’t play many games that require playmats, I’m tempted to get the one based on The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

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The “core part of the team” of Conquistador’s The Best Damn Gaming Coins Ever! campaign are back with a new metal-coins-for-games accessory they’re calling “The Best Damn Gaming Coins Ever! Two”. Included in this campaign are seven new coin sets, plus the original campaign’s thirteen sets: Chinese, Mongol, Perisan, Indian, Anglo-Saxon, and more. Already funded, if they hit the $30k mark, they will have paper (cardstock) bills with “famous women of history”. Also on the campaign page, a suggested pairing of sets and board games: Fresco with the Renaissance coin set? Don’t mind if I do! Five bucks gets you a handful of coins, twenty-five gets you an entire set of 78 coins, and fifty dollars for the deluxe collection of 117 coins.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned Will Hindmarch’s Patreon. Nathan D. Paoletta, Will’s co-host of the Design Games Podcast, also has a Patreon for people that wish to support his ongoing game design process. Nathan has developed indie roleplaying games like Annalise, carry, World Wide Wrestling, and more. “It’s part design journal, part Patron-participation, and part early bird access to all of my published work.” Suggested patronage levels begin at $1 per month.

I can’t count the number of times I found out about a crowdfunding campaign too late. Thankfully, IndieGoGo has an interesting feature called InDemand: campaign creators can opt to have a successful campaign extend past the campaign’s end. If you’re like me and miss a campaign’s funding period, you can still jump in on a successful campaign after that campaign has ended. Here’s two playing card decks that have ended but are still offering perks to backers.

How many male scientists can you name? How many female scientists — besides Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace — can you name? Any? Women in Science is a card game featuring 44 female scientists. Doubling as a standard playing card deck, the game itself features scientists, engineers, and astronauts with mini-biographies. It’s a simple rummy-like game with players creating labs (“melds”). $20 gets you a copy of the game.

EduStack Playing Cards for Math and Astronomy sounds like a very dry title for an extremely dull educational project disguising itself as a game, but no — these playing cards are really nice. There’s a deck about some math concepts for $10, but what really caught my eye was the Star Stack, a deck about constellations for $12. Bump that up to $42, and you get a lovely book with stories about the constellations (and scientific facts), a poster star map of the northern and southern hemisphere, and a sticker featuring the design on the card backs. Shipping to non-India locations is $8.

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