An early adopter of crowdfunding, Tasty Minstrel Games is now looking to raise general operating and marketing funds through equity crowdfunding portal MicroVentures. The company says it has three games in development, 15 in production, and has sold over 400,000 units since 2010. It appears that any return on a crowdfunding investment could only come about through the sale of shares back to the company or if the company as a whole was sold at some point in the future. But equity crowdfunding is significantly more complex that your typical game project. Read those documents carefully.

Calliope Games has been doing a great job with its focus on easier-going strategy games. Next in that line is to be Dicey Peaks, currently funded and aiming for stretch-goals in its final hours on Kickstarter. I got a brief preview of Dicey Peaks at Toy Fair. It’s a push-your-luck dice game of mountain-climbing. To win, players must make their way to the summit while managing their oxygen and avoiding yeti attacks.

With Commands & Colors: Tricorne from Compass Games, designer Richard Borg takes his C&C card-driven system to the American Revolution. The game will include more than 300 wood blocks, printed dice, a mounted map-board, and separate decks of combat cards to represent the differentiated strategies of the British and Colonials.

On the verge of funding is another block war game, Combat Infantry. Columbia Games’s version of squad-level combat in World War II, this one emphasizes fog-of-war with blocks that are single-sided and rotate to record current strength. The box will include six historical scenarios from the invasion of Normandy, as well as four additional generic scenarios.

Tesla vs. Edison: Duel is an abbreviated, two-player card game that covers the same history of early electric utilities as Artana’s full Tesla vs. Edison board game. Most importantly, the company finally included Samuel Insull, my favorite personality of the period.

Kenzer and Company is on Kickstarter for the first time with Aces & Eights: Reloaded, a revised edition of its wild-west roleplaying game. Kenzer promises a second edition “chock-full of new rules, tweaks, art and other enhancements,” while maintaining the game’s unique shot-clock, a targeting overlay for fun old-west style shoot-outs.

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Everything games eventually gets a Cthulhu version, right? Well, Cthulhu Realms is Tasty Minstrel Games’ Lovecraftian entry in to the deck building genre and it’s diabolically fun.

Cthulhu Realms is one of the easier-playing variety of deck-building games—like Ascension, DC Comics, or Star Realms—with only five cards available at a time and no restrictions on the order cards are purchased and played. Actually, Cthulhu Realms is an almost exact copy of Star Realms (licensed from White Wizard Games) but with cultists instead of space ships, locations instead of stations, sanity instead of authority, and conjuring power instead of trade. In terms of game-play, the only new features are that card types can also grant a kind-of ally bonus and that certain locations, while they’re out, represent a nexus, meaning they also protect other locations as well as the player’s sanity.

Easy-going game play is one of the things I like about Cthulhu Realms but another is how it goes light on the the sanity-stealing theme with art that’s more cartoonish than frightening. There is, for example, The King in Yellow card illustrated like a Dr. Seuss book and the image of a Mi-Go returning, briefcase in-hand, from a hard day at the office.

If there’s one thing about the game that I found a little off-putting, it’s the complete reliance on icons to indicate what each card does. Eliminating the instructional text found in most card games does help feature the wonderful art but I found it takes a fair amount of practice playing before interpreting those icons becomes automatic.

Tasty Minstrel’s Cthulhu Realms card game plays with 2-4 in about 30 minutes. MSRP is $20.

There’s also a new mobile app version of Cthulhu Realms recently released for Android. For an idea of how that plays, take a look at fellow contributor Robert’s review on his blog, A Pawn’s Perspective, or watch as he live streams it tonight at 8:30 Eastern.

A complimentary copy of Cthulhu Realms was provided for review by Tasty Minstrel Games. Purple Pawn contributor Thomas Deeny is credited with graphic design for the game.

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Number 1 in this week’s Highlights isn’t a game. I’m not even sure the campaign is thinking about games rather than just toys. But it’s a cause worthy of our support. And that cause is #ToyLikeMe, an effort to have better representation of people with disabilities in children’s toys. The #ToyLikeMe campaign has already brought Playmobil around to the idea of producing figures with disabilities. And just today, Lego revealed a minifigure in a wheelchair. To help keep the campaign growing, though, its organizers are asking for £16,000 to develop a professional website and associated resources. Drop a little in the hat, will you?

Crowdfunding campaign number 2 this week is for a card game version of Manhattan Project, Minion Games’ title about developing and building nuclear weapons. I love the original and Manhattan Project: Chain Reaction looks to be a great translation. Of course all elements of the game—workers, resources, buildings, etc.—are now represented by cards. A more interesting difference, however, lies in the fact that at the end of each turn, a player has to discard every factory, every university, everything that’s not a resource or a bomb. This means that the industrial engines that players chain together will now constantly need to be refreshed.

Thief’s Market from Tasty Minstrel Games is about dividing and spending loot. The loot is represented by dice, which the players take turns either selecting from the center or grabbing from one of their fellow thieves. Then when the dice are all split up, they can be spent on finery, useful items, or henchmen, each of which confers some later benefit. At the end, the thief with the most notoriety wins. That is campaign number 3.

Number 4 is Fabulous Beasts. This one, at first, looks like a typical stacking game. Three-dimensional animal figures are placed on top of each other until something gives and everything falls. But that’s not actually the whole deal. Fabulous Beasts also integrates a sensor platform, such that as the animals are stacked a unique virtual world and story unfolds in a linked tablet app.

Finally, at number 5 is Olympus Inc, an urban fantasy setting book for the Savage Worlds roleplaying game. Olympus Inc is the story of a magical war between Titans and Olympians taking place in, but hidden from, modern society. With Olympians developing their power through corporate intrigue and the magical war hidden from the perception of ordinary people, Olympus Inc has a distinct cyberpunk element as well.

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Donald X. Vaccarino announced that Queen Games’ upcoming Kingdom Builder expansion’s Kickstarter campaign has been cancelled. Last week, the game designer made a public statement on BoardGameGeek.com’s message forums about lack of payment and the expiration of the contract. “The contract expires if they haven’t published the expansion by June 30 2015,” he writes. “[G]iven that they haven’t paid me yet for 2014, I’m not feeling inclined to give them more time.”

This morning, Mr. Vaccarino reports that Queen Games has been working with him to determine “just how much exactly they owe me for 2014, in a completely friendly fashion, and has paid most of it.” He attributes the post and the crossposting to the Kickstarter comments to have motivated the company to pay him.

Queen Games has published a statement about the campaign’s cancellation in a backers-only update. Queen says they will not have the rights to publish the expansion after the 30th of June and that the contract will not be extended by the designer. “Before the campaign started, everything was lined up for publishing the German edition by that time,” the update reads. “But for unfortunate circumstances we could no longer hold that date.”

The designers for Tortuga, Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim, also have stated they have not been paid by Queen Games for 2014. In a post on reddit’s boardgames subreddit, Jay Cormier says that the company only pays once per year, with ninety days after the end of the calendar to make payment. “It’s now June 19th,” he writes, “and we still haven’t been paid. We’ve sent them numerous emails – with hardly any responses.” The designers, who also developed a boardgame based on the Orphan Black television show as well as Belfort by Tasty Minstrel Games, state they are glad that Donald X. Vaccarino went public with his frustration and hope that spurs Queen Games to settle their account as well.

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Tasty Minstrel Games will soon be releasing a Steampunk-themed modular board game where players must build devices using components they find along their journey.

As a Victorian-era inventor in Steam Works, you will use special starting components and abilities to assemble modular component tiles into unique devices for other players to use. The more you build on a device, the more options you can add.

Devices run on clockwork, steam or electrical power based on Tesla’s inventions. Working devices will increase player’s prestige points, as well as help gain resources and more components.

The game is based on worker placement mechanics. Players set their characters to work to gather resources and components to build machines and gadgets.

Steam Works supports two to five players, ages 10 and up. It takes approximately 90 minutes to play through one game. It will be available sometime this year at your local board game store.

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Do you play Fantasy Flight Games’ X-Wing or Armada? The creators behind the Magnetic War Mats campaign on Kickstarter do, and they’re printing 36″ square and 36″ x 72″ magnetic rubber game mats to keep ships steadier on the playing field. The products that would be funded in this campaign can be ordered with or without printing; mats without printing can be placed under other company’s printed mats (such as Wings of Glory/War) to help prevent your ships from slipping during play. All of the currently-proposed prints are space scenes. Each set comes with either 20 or 40 neodymium magnets to attach to ships “completely flush with the bottom of [the X-Wing type] game base”. Mats begin at $20 unprinted, $40 for printed (with carrying travel case).

Tasty Minstrel Games is halfway through a campaign for two Eminent Domain-based products. Battlecruisers is a standalone game in the ED setting; Exotica is the second expansion to Eminent Domain. Already funded (over $70k as of this writing), TMG has added several stretch goals to the project. The base game was one of the first boardgame Kickstarter campaigns, launched in 2010, and is one of TMG’s flagpole games. Eminent Domain: Battlecruisers & Exotica‘s Kickstarter campaign ends on July 1st.

Meanwhile on IndieGoGo, there’s a papercraft car racing game called Papecarz. With a throwback 60’s design and plenty of Good Girl Art, Papecarz comes with track, stands, and six cars, all pre-cut and pre-creased. All you need is glue to assemble. Funding levels include a $29 for the game tier (with modern-day NASCAR-like cars), $10 more for six additional “vintage” race cars, and slightly higher tiers for custom car designs. This IndieGoGo campaign will only be funded if it hits the $5000 mark on July 14th.

Over on Patreon, Kaitlynn Peavler is creating stock illustrations. Her goal is to have weekly releases available to use by all patrons, with diverse characters “of many different ethnicities, genders, body types, and ages.” A $1 pledge gets you access to the images while a $10 pledge (limited slots) will let you suggest illustrations.

Lowell Francis is covering the history of roleplaying games, looking at a genre of games (like superhero, post-apocalyptic, and others) in a certain time period, describing how they fit into the culture of the time, and then listing games (with reviews, where possible) from that period. As an example, “History of Superhero RPGs (Part Four: 1993-1996)” beings with a personal look at the era and a review of the state of the comics industry at the time, followed by twelve different entries for the four-year period. Suggested pledge levels start at fifty cents.

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From Worthington Games and designer Lew Pulsipher, Sea Kings is a game about Vikings that involves players in exploration, trade, and diplomacy in addition to raiding and pillaging. It’s also supposed to play in just 30-45 minutes with 2-6 players.

Yashima: Legend of the Kami Masters is a card-driven tactical battle game with a fantastical martial arts theme. Each game, players create custom battle decks by combining a character deck with a spirit deck.

Feng Shui, the cinematic martial-arts action roleplaying game, is making a comeback. And while Atlas Games’ project for Feng Shui 2 is already funded more than 10 times over, jumping on the bandwagon will help with additional stretch goals.

Another action-oriented RPG but one that’s supposed to let me play out The Rockford Files is Spirit of 77. Monkeyfun Studios is building this 1970s homage on the Apocalypse World engine.

The first of what Storyception Games hopes will be a series all sharing a single epic-scale setting, Galactic Arena is a science-fiction game of gladiatorial combat. Other products planned by the company include a card game, roleplaying game, and dice game—all part of the Apocalypse Universe.

Bomb Squad is a real-time cooperative game that uses cards but doesn’t allow players to see their own hands. Just after launching the project for it, Tasty Minstrel Games discovered and licensed a similarly-themed game, Bomb Squad Academy. The company will include this second game for free with the first, if a significant stretch goal is reached.

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Using Pelgrane Press’ Gumshoe system for a time-travel roleplaying game, TimeWatch is supposed to be rules-light, provide fast cinematic action, and facilitate improvisational GMing. Lead designer Kevin Kulp also promises that the game will “embrace using paradox and time-travel to your advantage when solving mysteries and battling foes; leave yourself a note from the future, or have your future self clock in to lend a hand when you need it the most.” At the ambitious stretch goal of $1 billion, he also promises to fund an actual time machine.

With Village in a Box, The Game Crafter is “experimenting” at Kickstarter. The company says it’s about building an economy of scale. For an $89 pledge, backers can get eight different games, each one of which has sold or will sell for around $20 on The Game Crafter’s website. However, I’m not convinced. There are nine pledge levels that bundle different combinations of the eight games, and add-on options further increase the number of permutations. When divided among the eight games, the project’s goal of only $1,500 doesn’t strike me as enough to guarantee scale for any one. Thus, I see it as more of a marketing device. Nevertheless, if you’re interested in any of the games and willing to pay up front, The Game Crafter is offering a pretty good discount and as a POD company should be able to deliver in a reasonable time frame.

Mora Games, who also plans to use The Game Crafter for Flip, may have a bigger problem. The game looks quite similar, as well as similarly named, to Flip Out from Gamewright.

Shoshana Kessock is raising funds to support the Living Games Conference at New York University. The conference is about LARPs and Shoshana, who’s running the conference as her graduate student thesis, would like to record its events for future scholarly reference.

Also in the LARP category is Sabertron. The project from Level Up aims to produce foam swords with built-in electronics that can record hits and differentiate them parried strikes.

Fat Dragon Games’ Ravenfell project is for the production of print-and-assemble 28 mm miniature terrain files. Fat Dragon promises a whole village’s worth of buildings that can be folded flat and reassembled, customized with add-on elements, and mixed-and-matched level by level. The thing is, I can’t find any indication of how many model plans the company considers a village’s worth. And while the project has hit a number of stretch goals, only the higher priced donors qualify for the extra rewards attached to them.

Query is a party game based on the auto-complete function of internet search engines. Each round players try to guess which phrase are a true search engine result and which are alternatives submitted by fellow players.

In Livestock Uprising, Dog Might Games looks to be producing a resource-driven war game, gimmicked up with farm animals as factions. For $250, backers can get “From Seed to Harvest”, a 70 page book of “articles, workshops, design tips, drawings, and artwork” about the game, and a hand-made, hardwood game box.

On Indiegogo, Noel and Tye are asking for funds to help them make a Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine costume. [Waiting for the C&D…]

On Ulule, Narrativiste Edition is seeking funds for a French translation of Evil Hat’s Spirit of the Century RPG.

Tasty Minstrel Games’ latest pay-what-you-want project is a western-themed, tile-laying game. This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the 2-4 of Us is worth $3 for the name alone.

Tasty Minstrel Games’ Scoville project stands out for doing a fantastic job of teaching the basics of the game in a 3 minute video. Actual play looks pretty good too. The game is about farming hot peppers, which are represented by wood cubes of various colors. The board represents a shared field for planting peppers, which when harvested peppers can be sold in the market (for various benefits) or used in the making of chili recipes (for victory points). Cross-breeding specialty peppers draws on the color wheel as a mechanism in the game.

Another project that does a good job of introducing game play in its short video is Nika from Eagle Games. Though applied to an ancient Greece theme, Nika is an abstract title where the goal is to move one’s pieces to the other side of the board. The twist—let’s say in comparison to a traditional game like Chess—is that while the pieces are all the same, their relative strength depends on how groups are configured and aligned together—in game terms, the size and shape of a phalanx.

I don’t think that Queen Games is really depending on Kickstarter success to print Tortuga, a game about pirates stealing treasure from each other that’ll come with a bunch of custom dice. But then again, I don’t think that it’s backers really care.

Modiphius Entertainment proposes to bring back the Mutant Chronicles roleplaying game in a 3rd edition with new rules. And it looks like the company is already well underway with an extensive playtesting program and has detailed plans for a full line of supplements. By the way, I have no idea what “dieselpunk sci-fi” means.

Silver Fox is producing a line of Call of Cthulhu 32 mm miniatures.

UPDATED 1/4/2014

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Michael Mindes is running a Pay-What-You-Want Kickstarter campaign for his micro-game, Coin Age. The game consists solely of a credit-card sized board, and coins.

In the game two players face off each against each other, trying to gain control of the map. One player is heads, the other is tails. You gain actions by shaking coins, slapping them against the table, and counting how many faces match your side.

The best part is that the game is completely free to print-and-play. So get out there, give it a shot, and help fund the project if you enjoy it.

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