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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The last of the Sentinels of the Multiverse expansions, OblivAeon, will launch on Kickstarter on February 9th. The final installment of the popular superhero card game will include addons and lots of stretch goals., like the limited edition hero promo cards, previously only available as convention and Kickstarter exclusives. “We have been pretty public about the fact that the story we’re telling has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” said Christopher Badell. “And we’re finally nearing that end.”

Greater Than Games had announced that they were moving away from Kickstarter to a pre-order system for expansions for their games, only using the crowdfunding platform to launch new titles. With the announcement for OblivAeon, Badell says they are heading back to Kickstarter to help organize the launch of that product. Citing technical difficulties and issues with some international orders during last year’s self-hosted preorder for Villains of the Multiverse, he said past experiences with Kickstarter campaigns help to avoid those issues. “We wanted to include a number of products [with OblivAeon’s launch] that have been long-promised and long-anticipated, and we didn’t want them to get lost in the shuffle with a preorder,” he said.

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Just launched is Sword Coast Legends, a Dungeons & Dragons video RPG available for PS4 consoles and PC or Mac via Steam. Based on D&D’s 5th Edition rules and set in the Forgotten Realms, Sword Coast Legends features a Dungeon Master Mode, which allows a user to not only create new adventures but also to adjust them in real time in response to player actions.

The Exodus: Proxima Centauri Companion app (iOS) will calculate costs for working through the technology tree, plot fleet movement, and roll dice. Not yet but soon, it’ll provide a victory point calculation tool as well.

Another new companion app available on iOS devices substitutes for the Crossroads deck in Plaid Hat Games’ Dead of Winter. The app, though, forces the players to decide on which actions to take without the benefit of advance knowledge of the results.

A recent update to Sentinels of the Multiverse for iOS adds support for online cross-platform multiplayer games. There’s also now a free learn-to-play edition of the game (with limited content, of course) available for both iOS and Android.

Monopoly and Yahtzee join Catch Phrase as Hasbro games playable via Chromecast.

Family Fun Board Games’ The Postal Game is now available to download for PC or Mac, as an online browser game, for iOS, and for Android.

The City expansion for Talisman: Digital Edition adds a new region, six characters, 82 city cards, and three alternative ending cards.

Another classic, Titan, previously available for iOS, is now also available for Android.

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After briefly mentioning it in a Gen Con 2015 plans post, Greater Than Games officially announced a roleplaying game based on their popular Sentinels of the Multiverse setting. Cam Banks, Dave Chalker, and Philippe-Antoine Ménard of Critical Hits Studio will be designing the Sentinel Comics superhero roleplaying game. The last superhero game they developed, the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game, was well-received by the gaming community. Sentinel Comics RPG will be using a completely new system developed for the game.

Demos for the Sentinel Comics RPG will be held at Gen Con 2015. A Kickstarter campaign for the game will begin in “early 2016”. Greater Than Games expects the core rulebook to sell for $40-50 with a “starter box” for $20 and an unknown number of supplements.

The demos at Gen Con are currently sold out, but Christopher Badell stated that opening up more demo opportunities at the convention is really “a matter of having people to run demos and time to run them. If we do [add more demos], we’ll post about them on the front page [of the GTG website], but that won’t be until a bit closer to Gen Con.”

Dave Chalker explains the design process. What will be shown at Gen Con will showcase the system’s fundamentals, he writes, along with making “the characters from the core Sentinels set playable, along with some villains, environments, and plots.” After Gen Con, the designers will develop the basics showcased at the convention into a full game. “We have started on all of that with our current ruleset, but it’s not quite fully developed enough to go indepth with yet. We want to get the rules into wider hands first to make the system it can be before we build other systems on top of it.”

Dave Chalker also writes that “The Sentinels Comics RPG takes cues from a variety of influences, including Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Fate, Apocalypse World, FUDGE, 13th Age, and years of collecting comic books. It will be its own unique system for superhero action, comic book stories, villainous plots, and cybernetic velociraptors.”

This article was edited to add additional comments from Dave Chalker and Christopher Badell.

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Greater Than Games slipped in an announcement for a Sentinels of the Multiverse roleplaying game in a large post about the company’s Gen Con plans. The company, primarily known for the Sentinels property, will have demos of the roleplaying game “a few times” during Gen Con 2015. The Sentinels game is described as an “upcoming RPG”. Players attending a scheduled two-hour demo of the RPG also receive a $2 coupon good at the GTG booth (2143).

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Greater than Games was showing off a video game version of Sentinels of the Multiverse at PAX East. The game faithfully reproduces its tabletop counterpart and even has most of the expansions available as in-game purchases.

It looks great, and is a lot of fun. It’s a great way to take the game with you on a tablet or phone and play solo. The game is also out on Steam. Having had a change to play I’m mostly satisfied with it. The interface is a little clunky until you get used to it, and the pacing could be a bit faster. Hopefully these are things that will be fixed as time goes on. It won’t stop me from playing the game, though, and I’m sure I’ll be enjoying this one for some time to come.

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Greater Than Games will begin a pre-order of three “major” items for games set in its Sentinels of the Multiverse setting Monday, January 19th. A supervillain-centric expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse, titled Villains of the Multiverse, provides ten villains and two new environments for $29.95. Battle for Broken City ($39.95) is a standalone game for the Sentinel Tactics game line and can be combined with The Flame of Freedom core game and Uprising expansion. For Profit is a $19.95 expansion for both Sentinel Tactics’ Battle for Broken City and The Flame of Freedom. The pre-order period ends on March 12, 2015.

In a recently-cancelled Kickstarter campaign for a new game in the Sentinels setting, GTG’s Christopher Badell stated that after the Shattered Timelines expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse, they “would not run any more Kickstarters for Sentinels of the Multiverse products – that game is well established enough to support its own expansions. Since then, we have decided to go a step further and not run Kickstarter campaigns for expansions for any existing products.” For funding the production of expansions, the company has gone to a pre-order system, with orders placed via their website. In the fall of 2014, the company received nearly 4500 pre-orders for SotM’s Wrath of the Cosmos expansion.

Next week’s pre-order will be the company’s first for multiple products. Greater Than Games also mentions that there will be additional items to be pre-ordered, such as oversized villain cards, and pre-order promotional materials. Expected delivery is end of year, 2015.

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Greater Than Games cancelled their Story War: Sentinel Conflict card game’s Kickstarter campaign on January 5th, citing lack of interest. “We consider this Kickstarter campaign to have successfully done its job. It let us know whether we should make these products or not,” reads the most recent update to the project. “We are glad to have learned that now and not after printing several thousand copies of the game.”

Story War was to be a new party game set in the Sentinels of the Multiverse setting. The Kickstarter would have also funded Cosmic Contest, a 50-page comic book, and (at a $75k stretch goal) a revised version of Freedom Four Annual #1, the first actual comic book from the Sentinels of the Multiverse setting.

“We were more surprised by a general lack of interest in the comic book,” Christopher Badell of GTG states. Requests for actual comic books are received by the company quite often, but with the lack of backer support for comic book reward levels, the company was surprised to find that while “people may be interested in reading comic books from Sentinel Comics, few are interested in purchasing them. And that is good to know. We are still interested in making comic books, and Adam and I will continue to work on them, but they will remain side projects at most…”

The cancellation occurred three days prior to the close of the campaign with $28,097 pledged of a $40,000 goal and 688 backers. In fall of 2014, the Wrath of the Cosmos expansion to Sentinels of the Multiverse received 4481 pre-orders.

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