Already way above its funding goal, Thornwatch: Eyrewood Adventures, bridges the gap between narrative RPGs and board games. The game was originally envisioned by Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins and is co-designed with Lone Shark’s Mike Selinker, Chad Brown, and Rodney Thompson. In the game players take on the roles of the Protectors of the Eyrewood, the Thornwatch, playing through a sort of choose-your-own adventure run by the a player designated as the Judge.

The game looks breathtaking, and you can even get a quick taste of it with a free print-and-play.

A pledge of $78 gets you a copy of the game, with all sorts of amazing things available at higher tiers. The stretch goals, most of which have already been met, provide you with additional characters, stories, and even a comic.

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Simple but highly appropriate for its straightforward educational purpose, Chemical Spill is a card game meant for high school students. Players draft a hand of element cards then assemble them in to molecules, along the way learning about covalent bonds, Lewis dot structures, and electron sub-shell configurations.

Based on Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Victory Point Games’ Nemo’s War is a solitaire adventure board game where the player, as Captain Nemo, pilots the Nautilus about the oceans’ depths. Exploration, scientific discovery, war, and anti-imperialism are the priorities from which the player may choose, and against which actions such as refitting the submarine, inciting local uprisings, and attacking surface ships are judged for victory points.

Empires: Galactic Rebellion from Eagle-Gryphon Games treats players to an epic-scale game set in conflict among the stars. A follow-up to Glen Drover’s Age of Empires, Galactic Rebellion incorporates development on economic, political, military, and technological fronts, as well as worker placement, in to gameplay. As a new feature, those workers are differentiated between rebels, scientists, troopers, smugglers, and diplomats, each of which is represented by a different miniature figure.

Calling it a “skill-building game”, Lone Shark’s The Ninth World is an adventure card game based on the Numenera RPG. Each player’s hand of cards represents their current set of skills. As better skills are developed, new cards replace old ones. Players then use the cards in bidding against each other to explore, collect relics, complete quests, and further improve their skills.

In CitiesUP, building is just the first step. Every structure, whether residential, commercial, or industrial, must be supplied with water and electricity. In return for that support, players are able to collect taxes for victory points. Field cards represent special events, including some natural disasters. And building out the city is market with vertical wooden cubes, so you get the image of a growing downtown as game progresses.

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The Cthulhu-head dice tower looks amazing but I won’t be held responsible for what happens should you actually bring it to the table or, worse yet, feed it dice.

Lone Shark’s The Apocrypha Adventure Card Game has a modern horror theme but is built off the system that Mike Selinker developed for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. Also differentiating it from its predecessor is character development. Rather than with check-boxes, players add cards to their character decks as they reveal their character’s repressed memories.

Requiem Vampire Knight is a game for which I published a detailed preview when it originally sought funding on Indiegogo 2 years ago. Now on Kickstarter, the game I’m told plays pretty much the same, though with a thoroughly-edited rule book and an upgrade to plastic miniatures. As a I said then, the game does have some interesting mechanics but it’s the dark theme and artwork that’s particularly striking.

On a lighter, cuter note there’s JunKing, a card game about scavenger imps who hoard garbage. Pulling the “Crown” from the junkpile (a.k.a., the draw pile) ends the game and is a major point boost, but holding the “Perfectly Good Sandwich” (“Someone threw this away?”) is a strong consolation prize.

BattleBards is a background-audio system for tabletop games. Audio tracks and a soundboard from the same company already exist for PC and MAC. This project is for creating a web-based soundboard, producing additional audio, and recording a series of voice-overs covering standard fantasy adventure encounters (such as the barmaid in the tavern that the PCs always visit).

From the creators of Driking Quest comes Haiku Warrior, a card-based roleplaying game told via haiku. “Fight monsters, find souls, eat fruit.” I think maybe they played with their first product a little too much.

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