Kickstarter is looking for a Games Content Strategist to work at its office in Brooklyn, evaluating games projects, writing about them, and promoting them through various online outlets.. The company is also looking for a Games Intern for a 3 month research project. There’ll be a lot of detail work online and either previous academic study of games or 3-4 years of professional experience with games is required.

Recruiter Aardvark Swift is searching for a Marketing Manager to work at The Pokemon Company in London. The successful applicant will familiar with media for 4-14 year olds across Europe.

Steamforged Games (Guild Ball, Dark Souls) is looking to fill two positions: Commercial Brand Coordinator and Retail Support Manager, both in Tukwila, Washington. The former will focus on marketing, the latter on retailer account management.

Esdevium Games, part of the Asmodee Group in the U.K., has openings for a Finance Manager, an HR Officer, and a Sales and Customer Service Account Handler. The last of those is about sales to the hobby channel.

University Games, located in the Mission area of San Francisco, needs someone to fill the dual role of Receptionist and Office Manager.

The Stars Group is working to develop a state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence that could learn to play a variety of games. Toward that end, the company is recruiting for a Poker AI Research Engineer and a Graduate Poker AI Research Engineer.

Cubicle 7 needs an Office Assistant in Swindon, U.K. to help with customer service, order handling, and administrative tasks.

Tabletop Tycoon (Game Salute, Myriad Games, Ship Naked) is staffing up in Londonderry, New Hampshire. The company has job openings for an Account Manager, an Assistant Account Manager, full and part-time Fulfillment Staff, and a General Manager. The Account Manager and Assistant Account Manager will be responsible for sales and logistics for Ship Naked. Fulfillment Staff will handle packing and shipping. The General Manager, who will run everything, is expected on-site 7:00 AM-7:00 PM.

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Goodman Games is doing for the post-apocalyptic genre what it did for fantasy with the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Mutant Crawl Classics, inspired by Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha, is stand-alone but still fully compatible with DCC. Characters can be human, mutant, manimal, or plantient and in a typical adventure venture the wastelands to collect lost super-science.

For a system that’ll allow gamers to make their own mutants, Weapons Grade Funk is working toward a line of customizable anthropomorphic miniatures. The current round of fundraising will support sculpting of all the various body parts. These will then be incorporated in to an online application with which users can mix-and-match for 3D printing.

Game of Blame combines be-the-first-to-dump-your-cards game-play with a kind-of hot-potato mechanic for a light card game of courtly intrigue. As the queen’s advisers, the players know that personal success isn’t really about fixing the kingdom’s problems but instead about making sure someone else takes the blame for the things that go wrong.

Beautiful and with a unique theme, Planetarium from Game Salute has players forming the planets of a new solar system by colliding matter on board orbits, and then further evolving those planets through the play of various cards.

Back on earth, players operate ice cream trucks in Rocky Road a la Mode, Green Couch Games’ tribute to the summer season. Cards in the game serve either as music to attract customers or as frozen treats to relieve the heat. With the right customers, players can also lay claim to summer hot spots, such as the pool, park, or ball field.

For the more sinister players, there’s Mr. B’s Madness at Midnight, a cultists-side Cthulhu game. This one combines worker placement and action-dice mechanics as players fulfill sinister plots and work to control key locations in Arkham. The first to 13 victory points is the winner, that is as long as they manage to keep the investigators at bay.

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Game Salute launched a thematic dice Kickstarter campaign inspired by their Alien Frontiers game in March of 2013, eventually cancelling the entire project on April 18, 2016. The rocket-shaped dice campaign was funded in 3.5 hours. The campaign originally was designed to produce six-sided dice with pips in the player colors for Alien Frontiers, eventually expanded into 12 colors of dice covering the typical range of RPG polyhedrals, Fudge (Fate) compatible dice, and numbered six-sided dice.

Citing production difficulties with China-based Panda Game Manufacturing, the original manufacturer, and the cost of recreating molds with a new supplier, the company has cancelled the entire campaign promising a full refund for any products not yet delivered in the campaign. “After the multiple rounds of samples and revisions we had already attempted,” Game Salute writes, “we determined that we could not achieve the quality we would consider acceptable for mass production and delivery with a new supplier.” In June of 2015, the manufacturer cites “the intricate numbering that needs to be done on the RPG dice“, specifically the twenty-sided die as causing production difficulties.

Of the Rocket Dice that shipped, apparently the six-sided dice were shipped out but with significant changes. Dice are normally finished via tumbler polishing, but after 23 iterations, that method wouldn’t give good results. ABS plastic (the plastic that is used to create LEGO pieces) solved production issues, but required hot stamping. “Larger pips did not work with the hot stamping, so the smaller [pip size] was the final fix to all previous problems,” Game Salute wrote in March of 2015. However with the change in pip size, some backers were upset with the resulting dice. Game Salute offered a refund at that point to dissatisfied customers.

Backers of the now-cancelled campaign should request a refund at the “Contact Me” link on Game Salute’s bio page on Kickstarter.

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I’m kind of surprised we haven’t seen a Fast & Furious game until now. Coming in the the Fall from Game Salute, Fast & Furious: Full Throttle is a game of hand management. Played primarily with cards, you’ll be discarding to change gears, playing sets to speed ahead, and decreasing your hand size when you get speed penalties.

With a play time of only 30 minutes, and an age range of 10+, it looks like it’s going to be lighter, family fare. That’s by no means a knock against it! From what I’m seeing, it looks like it’ll be a pretty good time! When it hits shelves this fall it’ll have a MSRP of $40.

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Shipping now by Game Salute is BoardGameGeek: The Card Game. [So it’s a game about games?] In BoardGameGeek (the card game) each card represents a unique game on BoardGameGeek (the website). [Is there a BoardGameGeek card in BoardGameGeek?] Players line up their cards vertically in matching colors to represent playing games of a certain category, or horizontally in sets of colors to represent collecting games across categories. [Actually then, it’s a game in which you play at playing games.]

In fact this isn’t the first BoardGameGeek game. Is it wrong to hope to it’s the last? My spinning head would definitely appreciate it.

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ModCubes are dice-like accessories with exchangeable faces. They’ll ship with symbols for use as marker tokens in Star Wars X-Wing, Warhammer 40,000, and Corvus Belli.

Coup Rebellion G54 has the same basic play as Indie Boards & Cards’ original bluffing game, Coup. This one, however, comes with 25 new characters.

From the designer of Escape and publisher, Evolving Games, is Automania, a Euro-style strategy game about building cars. Workers are placed to build out a player’s factories. Then cars of various types are assembled and shipped out, with income earned based on the popularity of their features.

Steampunkish space battles are the subject of Clockwork Armada. Plus miniature ships, one faction of which has wings!

Planet Mercenary is a Schlock Mercenary roleplaying game, which is probably all I need to say about that.

And then there’s Fast & Furious: Full Throttle, a board game based on the movie series. Obviously, it’s a racing game. Movement is governed by the play of gear cards. Before each game, though, players select sets of upgrades, each of which allows a car a specific type of special move once during a race.

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Dead Men Tell No Tales, Minion Games’ 14th Kickstarter project, is a pirate-themed cooperative game in which players explore an on-fire, undead guarded, sinking ship. But why, you ask? Well, for treasure of course! The game has an interesting fatigue mechanic, and also allows players to share with others their unused actions.

Applying the 13th Age roleplaying system to the classic setting of Glorantha is the goal of 13th Age in Glorantha. With new classes, monsters, and icon relationships, designers Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet look to focus on what they call “myth-crawling”.

While not the first to crowdfund metal coins for games, Coins for Anything is offering an array of alternate designs at a reasonable price. The are Egyptian, Greek, dragon, fire, magic, Viking, Roman, and pirate sets.

From designer Philip duBarry and publisher Game Salute, Skyway Robbery is a steampunk-styled adventure game where the players are criminals traveling the world on an airship, each stop presenting a new opportunity for theft. After recruiting gangs and collecting the tools needed to grab loot, the winner is the player to have accumulated the most criminal renown.

Ignore the lumberjack pig art if you can, Hogger Logger is a game about trying to guess whether one’s face-down cards are higher or lower than the face-up one. Seems simple enough until you realize that other players can change the cards in play at any time simply by replacing them with cards from their hands or by playing action cards for more chaotic manipulations.

1750: Britain vs. France is a historically based card and dice game that includes political, diplomatic, and economic elements in addition to combat.

Play as a child’s toys fighting off nightmares in the card game, Nightlight. The game is cooperative, includes multiple scenarios, and features an interesting mix of cute and dark art.

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Game Salute

Game Salute is always a great place to visit at a convention. The wide variety of games they publish/manage means there’s something for everyone. Their latest game is Ruse, a murder mystery game set in a steampunk Victorian era. The cool part is that you actually get a standalone card game, standalone dice game, and a 100 page novella in the box. I didn’t get a chance to see it in action, but I hope to very soon.

CritSuccess

Dice Rings. Lots of Dice Rings. CritSuccess had a booth with Dice Rings in all sorts of varieties, from classic polyhedral dice counterparts to life counters and rings with multiple die faces. They spin super smoothly, and just look way damn cool. I got sized for a ring at the show, and am eagerly awaiting its arrival at my doorstep.

Drinking Quest

Touted as the original drinking RPG, Drinking Quest is supposed to play like a stripped down version of D&D, but with lots of real-life drinking. There’s currently 3 different version of Drinking Quest: Drinking Quest 1, Drinking Quest 2, and Drinking Quest 3. Each is stand-alone, and contains 4 quests. There were beers at the booth, but I don’t think they were handing any out! This one’s on the way to me, also, so look for a review in the near future.

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One of the first games I saw, and got to play, at Toy Fair was Serpent Stones by Robert Harrington. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, Robert is selling the game through Game Salute, which you can preorder for $40. The game is easy to learn, smooth the play, and has a good amount of strategy.

Using warrior cards, Nahualli cards, and Teotl cards you battle, capture, and give yourself a tactical advantage to play and capture your opponent’s temple stone. An expansion will also be available that adds barriers that block off areas of the board, and includes 3 more types of special action cards.

I also got a chance to meet the designer of Zpocolypse, Jeff Gracia, at the Game Salute booth. A really cool feature of the game comes in the rulebook. Every page of the rulebook has a QR code that can be scanned by a smartphone to access video clips of play examples of the rules on that page.

Another Kickstarter success story, Zpocolypse can be preordered for $60.

For more info on the game, see our previous post about it from October of last year.

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