In role-playing games there’s something about a contemporary or near-future setting that has grabbed me over the past few years. “It’s our world, but different.” Now, there’s an Urban Fantasy setting for the Savage Worlds game system up on IndieGoGo with an interesting twist: the Greek Gods and Titans do battle in a game that seems part Jason Bourne, part Shadowrun. Olympus Inc. is a licensed Savage Worlds product with reward tiers beginning at $15. Pop on over to their IndieGoGo page and download a sample chapter.

More roleplaying goodness! With just a few days to go, Infinitas DM looks like everything I wanted a roleplaying game app to be. It’s a tabletop game platform somewhat similar to Roll20, plus intergrated campaign management. Right now, Atom Switch Inc. is coming down to the wire: just over $4000 left to make their modest funding goal. A pledge of $5 (five bucks?) gets you the finished app, hopefully at the end of the year. (Honestly, I think they underpriced their pledge tiers.)

Ghostbusters: The Board Game II? What? Didn’t the Ghostbusters board game just get released? Anyway, if you liked that and have $125 to blow on a Ghostbusters board game based on the not-so-great movie Ghostbusters II, um. Go ahead, ’cause apparently nearly 3000 people liked Ghostbusters II enough to pony up the cash, so yeah, it’s funded already.

Speaking of the 80’s, It’s The Goonies Adventure Card Game! In this game by Albino Dragon, you’re just a bunch’a rag-tag kids trying to find the treasure of legendary pirate One-Eyed Willy while evading the Fratelli criminal — you know what, it’s The Goonies. Just get it already. It’s funded nearly five times over which is even more amazing than the time you ate your weight in Godfather’s pizza, right?

This week in Popular Card Game Coattail Riding/Parody/Marketplace Confusion, our Cards Against Humanity winner is Cards Against Technology, where a Canadian (!) ran out of Cards Against Humanity cards so he made his own. “Imagine playing Cards Against Humanity, but with unlimited possibilities to choose from making the game almost different every time, and funnier, and less boring as time passes depending on who you play with.” Typos and Arial instead of Helvetica on these cards. Plenty of ® and ™ symbols in the text so these guys don’t get sued. Only $273 of $1500 CAD pledged.  Runner-up: Deck a Celebrity, where the judge pulls out a topic card (“AIDS!” she cries out.) and players have eight quotes from celebrities to best match the topic. (“If he invited you out, he’s got to pay.” -Beyonce was the winning card. Tee-hee.) It’s more Apples to Apples than CAH. They’ve pulled in $2,462 in pledges, but they wanted $15k. Nice KS intro video and better card design, though.

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Want to help a good cause, and get a cool game in the process? Shenanigans: The Musical is up on Kickstarter, and helping fund the project also helps The People’s Orchestra, an organization that makes orchestra accessible to everyone, as both audience and performers, regardless of their wealth or status.

For a pledge of £10 (around $14) you’ll get a copy of the game and all it’s expansions if the project is funded.

So what’s the game all about?

The orchestra is in crisis. Someone can’t play their instrument and needs to be booted out. Of course this artiste doesn’t want to be caught. Also, a lot of the musicians have their own agenda they’d like to achieve. Supporting 4-10 players, the game is similar to Mafia/Werewolf, except after the descision to kick a member out of the orchestra is made, the game is over. I love this simple rules graphic from the Kicktstarter:

We had a lot of fun with this one, and the fact that it doesn’t take as long as similar party games of its styles makes it simple to setup and play again multiple times in a rather short time, cycling players if needed. This makes it great for hectic family gatherings where there’s a lot of kids, and adults, that may need looking after.

Shenanigans is simple, humorous, and excellent with large groups. It’s a refreshing take on Mafia/Werewolf style party games, and is much quicker and fluid.

A prototype copy of Shenanigans: The Musical was provided free for preview purposes.

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Despite it being April Fools Day, we found some real, actual crowdfunding campaigns that look like jokes, but aren’t.

Ryan Macklin, writer and RPG game designer, developed Katanas & Trenchcoats, Episode 1: Welcome to Darkest Vancouver, just over two years ago as a goofy blog post parodying “the 90’s dream of Highlander and World of Darkness games”. Announcing on April Fools Day that year, he promised the game would go to Kickstarter. The following year on that day, he launched the actual Katana & Trenchcoats website at SoManyKatanas.com with proceeds going to the Seattle Children’s Hospital (over $1,500). And this year, after seeing the response to the first version of the game, he put out a call for writers for a revised version. Today, on April Fools Day, the promised Kickstarter went live.

“Here’s my thing about April Fools Day stuff,” Ryan wrote last year after launching the first version of the game. “I loathe pranks. I love shared, good-spirited laughter. Katanas & Trenchcoats is us laughing together, cheering together, having fun together.”

A $15 pledge gets you an electronic copy of the new edition while twice that adds on a physical book. Go check it out. It’s totally a real thing.

Moving on, let’s see what Dice Hate Me Games is doing this year.

Last April Fools Day, they launched a 72-hour Kickstarter campaign for Deck Building: The Deck Buildng Game and Unpub: the Unpublished Card Game with a funding goal of $4,115. (Why that amount? The campaign launched on 4/1/15.) After merging with Greater Than Games, the company launched a contest called _________: The _________ Game Contest, a contest that centered around using a game mechanic whose name is in the title. Out of a staggering 158 entries, two winners were chosen: a game about magicians stealing each other’s tricks called Trick-Taking: the Trick-Taking Game, and a game about managers in the Office of Time Management sending workers through time to manage the flow of time itself called Time Management: the Time Management Game. Those two games, along with Traitor Mechanic: the Traitor Mechanic Game, are now on Kickstarter.

This year, they want $4116.

A $9 pledge gets you either Trick-Taking or Time Management games, $19 gets you Traitor Mechanic, and $37 gets you all three. This is a real thing, too.

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Quadrupedly-funded only five days into the Kickstarter: It’s the Conan RPG a/k/a Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of. Journey to the savage pulp adventure action of the Hyborian Age with this all-new roleplaying game. There’s a bewildering matrix of reward levels and what you can get with the stretch goals, but it looks like at about $58 you can get everything that’s unlocked as PDFs or the same pledge amount gets you only the core book (physical and PDF) plus an art book (as PDF) and map (physical) or maybe $44 plus shipping for just the core book or maybe $87 for both things but not the art book or… Anyway, delve into the madness of Conan’s reward tiers and see for yourself.

Pinnacle Entertainment Group is bringing the Weird War I setting to the Savage Worlds game system. This is a very short funding drive for the game: only ten days left. In this fourth installment of the Weird War series (WW2, Rome, and Vietnam), it’s crazy horror plus war action in the trenches of Europe. Get the player’s guide and the digital stretch goals as low as $15; GMs will want to pony up $35 for the player’s guide, plus GM handbook, GM screen inserts, a full adventure, and all the digital stretch goals.

Over on Patreon, Guillaume Tavernier is creating amazing location-based map artwork for fantasy roleplaying games. The city of Tahala is inspired by oriental and Indian architecture. Each month, Guillaume will be producing a new building or area, complete with setting and story hooks with the end goal of creating the entire city, building by building. He’s suggesting a $5 patronage pledge per illustration PDF.

Oh, hey, Argo is back! Flatlined Games brings Argo back to Kickstarter with a more-reasonably attained goal (which it already met!). It’s a Bruno Faidutti and Serge Laget-designed game of astronauts waking up from suspended animation to find the ship is overrun with aliens and they’ve got to get to the escape pods. And just like in the movie Alien, there’s simply not enough space in the escape pods for everybody. Ah, cutbacks! 30 Euros for a copy of the game, which is around $33. Canadian, American, and European-friendly shipping options.

Van Ryder Games has Saloon Tycoon, a 3d tile laying game set in the wild west. As you play the game, you’ll be building a saloon by placing cubes and stacking floors, higher and higher, or expanding out along the road. It physically looks a bit like the setup in Rampage (a/k/a Terror in Meeple City), but here the game is all about creating the best saloon, not about knocking down the buildings with armed bands of outlaws (or irradiated giant lizards). It looks pretty darn cool and you can get a copy by pledging $40.

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Escape rooms, one of the hottest new trends in entertainment, are a kind-of live adventure game. Participants are locked in a room or similar location and given usually about an hour to solve puzzles and follow a series of clues that finds the key and lets them out. Most are built around a theme or story and designed for groups of 4-6 friends.

But though escape rooms are popping up in many urban locations, they’re not accessible to many people, can sometimes be difficult to schedule, and can cost a hundred dollars or more for a 1 hour session. Enter several companies offering escape rooms to go.

Developed by Identity Games and licensed for North American distribution by Spin Master, Escape Room The Game is a $40 package due in the summer that can run 2-5 participants through four different rooms. The clues, puzzles, and mysteries for each room are contained in three envelopes. When participants believe they have solved an envelope, they choose one of the included keys and plug it in to the game’s electronic timer, called a “chrono decoder”. If they’re correct, they can move on to the next envelope. If not, the chrono decoder imposes a time penalty. Though the base game is not yet at retail, Identity is already at work on expansion packs, which should make use of the same chrono decoder.

Another at-home option, ThinkFun’s Escape the Room: Mystery at the Stargazer’s Manor, addresses the problem of hiding answers with a “solution wheel” rather than something electronic. The game begins with the reading of a scene card and proceeds along a story line. Every puzzle solved on the way leads to a symbol and those symbols have to line up in a certain way on the wheel in order to trigger the next stage of the mystery. Due in March, Mystery at the Stargazer’s Manor is just a single room activity but is timed at 90 minutes and priced at only $22.

There’s also the Escape Room In A Box: The Werewolf Experiment Kickstarter project. At $45, this one is also only a single room game. However, it is a more handcrafted experience with jars, locks, and other more substantial elements. Also, certain replacement parts will be available, so that the kit can be used to host other teams.

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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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With an edition already released in Japan, Zombie Tower 3D has now hit Kickstarter for an updated, English release.

Zombie Tower 3D is a cooperative game with a twist. Each player can only see their own play space in the 3D game board. How is it cooperative, then? There’s certain spaces in the walls where you can pass items through. The problem? Zombie hoards quickly build up, and getting an item passed through the wall isn’t always easy! You can always search the rooms for more useful items, but sometimes rooms will collapse or fires will break out. There’s also survivors to worry about…or use as zombie bait to make a quick escape.

I have to admit I thought the game would be all about the gimmick, and not much else. That didn’t turn out to be the case at all. The Emergence mechanic of how Zombies populate the board, item trading through walls, using survivors as bait only to have them turn into zombies…all these things make for an entertaining game with an awesome cardboard tower.

The game plays 3-4 players, with a different setup of the tower for each. The Kickstarter page has some of the updates that differ from the version I have, but most of them are graphical. $42 will get you the game if it’s funded, which is a pretty good deal in an age of $80+ games being Kickstarted lately. I have a good feeling we’ll see this one succeed, and that’s great. It’s a surprisingly fun game.

A copy of the original Japanese release of Zombie Tower 3D was provided free for review by Cosaic, LLC.

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Well now, there’s a lot of stuff on Kickstarter this past week. Let’s have a little looksee, shall we?

John Wick’s 7th Sea Kickstarter campaign launched this morning and it funded within minutes. The Restoration Era roleplaying game returns to the land of Théah, a world that looks an awful lot like our Europe of 1668, but different. It’s The Princess Bride, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Three Musketeers wrapped up into a roleplaying game of derring-do. $20 gets you the PDF of the main game, but $40 gets you PDFs of all stretch goal books plus the first edition books. (Full disclosure: I’m doing layout on the quickstart adventure for the campaign.)

The storyline of the Sentinels of the Multiverse game comes to an end in OblivAeon, and Greater Than Games has returned to Kickstarter with a huge game-ending campaign! You can get a copy of the last expansion for just $39 plus shipping, or you can add on $15 to get all the variant hero cards (with all new artwork ) you didn’t get from earlier Kickstarters, pre-orders, or convention appearances. Or up your pledge again to get shiny foil versions of every hero card! Or even more to get the collectors case to store every single expansion in one mighty mega-box!

IDW Games has launched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shadows of the Past board game and if they send a review copy to us, we’re probably going to fight each other to see who gets to play it first. It’s a story-driven adventure for players to fight their way through some of the comic book’s keystone moments. Stretch goals include hero packs based on April O’Neil, Casey Jones, and splinter; TMNT sculpts based on the original look of the turtles; and mousers! All this for $90 (or $150 for the earlier versions of the turtles).

Jeff Siadek of Gorilla Games has a Kickstarter campaign for Battlestations: Second Edition. This update to the classic game that’s a little bit of a roleplaying game and a little bit of a board game has your crew on a modular space ship taking on one of hundreds of missions — official and fan-made. Zoom out to the star map where your ship encounters other ships, zoom in to what’s going on board your ship — or the enemy ship. It’s a crazy fun ride. Think Star Trek meets Space Hulk. Get the game in PDF format for $20, get a physical game with miniatures and all sorts of goodness for $90.

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Not the least of my favorite things about Tinkerbot Games’ Ghostel is its ghost-shaped player pawns. The 3D pieces planned for a stretch goal are wonderful but even the 2D ghost meeples are super cute!

The game too gives me plenty to crow over, providing a nice balance of chance and tactical decision-making, as well as a wonderful representation of its light spooky theme.

Each night round, the players as ghosts roll and distribute Terror Dice in an attempt to frighten away guests staying at their hotel. In every guest room a ghost visits, its player place’s one of their dice. At the end of the night, any guest who’s courage value is exceeded by the dice in their room runs away, and the players who contributed to that spook collect points.

During the day rounds, guests who made it through the night recover some of their composure—dice previously placed in their room remain there but are reduced by one pip—and new guests arrive to fill up the empty rooms.

The ghosts, of course, are not active during the day but their players then have an opportunity to spend previously earned points on Scare Tactic, Terror Bonus, and Spookie Favor cards. Though earning up the most points is the way to win the game, spending them judiciously can provide significant advantage. Scare Tactics allow players to trigger guests’ phobias (such as snakes, spiders, and clowns), doubling the value of a die as they place it. Terror Bonuses give players extra dice to roll. And Spookie Favors are special one-time tricks, like walking through walls (which allows a player to move their ghost piece anywhere on the board) or the chills (which gives a guest every phobia at once).

In the end, Ghostel is super-easy to play, though also just a bit challenging turn-to-turn. The kind of game I love, where you can blame the dice if you lose but still have lots of opportunities to make the most of them during play. To help fund Ghostel on Kickstarter, as I hope you will, a copy will cost you £29 (approximately $41).

A complimentary prototype copy of Ghostel was provided by Tinkerbot Games for review.

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A campaign for a new version of Apocalypse World (my favorite RPG game system) went up on Kickstarter yesterday and it’s nearly funded two times over. It’s such a good system that several other games have been created using the same game engine. The skeleton of the setting is there — something happened to the world more than a generation ago, but not that far away in recent memory — presented in a way that drives the action. You decide what the apocalypse is: Mad Max-ian atomic wasteland? Nature run rampant? Global warming with drowned coastlines? $28+shipping gets you a physical copy.

Apocalypse World’s creator, Vincent Baker, also runs a Patreon where you can support him designing games (and, in his words, “watch them die”.) A three dollar monthly donation grants you access to contribute in discussion at his patrons-only message board, including a monthly private discussion. Interested in AW? There’s some early playtest notes in there.

Perhaps your apocalypse is more zombie-flavored? The Walking Dead: All Out War, is a miniatures battle game based on the comic book. But it’s not suvivors versus zombies, it’s survivors versus other groups with the walkers reacting to every move. Already unlocked at the $125 level: 11 survivors, 12 walkers, with more to come. Already funded, you have the entire month of February to pick this one up from Mantic Games.

Speaking of miniatures, Oathsworn Miniatures just has a few days left in their Heroines in Sensible Shoes campaign. These are fantasy miniatures of female adventurers wearing… sensible armor and clothing. Chainmail bikinis, boob armor that directs swords to the sternum, exposed legs, revealing cleavage, or jutting buttocks? Not here. Just women adventurers dressed how they would logically dress when suiting up to raid a dragon’s hoard. About $7 for a miniature, $19 for three.

Let’s talk dice. Trayser Metal Works creates cast metal gaming dice in their garage and they’re looking to upgrade their metal shop to handle higher production volumes. They feature nine impressive dice shapes and styles in four different metals. Take a look at this amazing album on imgur to see how they do it! Individual dice are available as rewards for about every $14 pledged to the project.

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