Kickstarter
Miniature space ship games are usually popular on Kickstarter. Everyone likes to channel their inner Han Solo sometimes. The newest game of that breed is Ryan Wolfe’s Shadowstar Corsairs, and it might actually be set slightly above Han’s pay grade. Player’s are captains of their own ship, but they are not mere smugglers. Trade is a part of the game, but in Shadowstar Corsairs you will also manage resource production, play at politics, reconstruct alien technology and, when all that fails, blow up your rivals in space. At the center of the game are different ships players pick from, each suited for different strategies and further customizable with crew and weapons.
eggertspiele / Pegasus Spiele
As is tradition for (Kenner)Spiel des Jahres winners, an expansion for last year’s Kennerspiel Istanbul is in the making. Mokka und Bakschisch (Mocca and Baksheesh, if anyone needed the translation) adds coffee as a new commodity players can trade at the bazaar. The baksheesh part of the title comes up in the Tavern where players can pay the guests for favors. There will be four new places to visit and more interaction between the players. If nothing changes, Mokka und Backschisch will be released in May.
Rokoko, another eggerspiele game, was also nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres last year, and it’s also due an expansion according to the Pegasus Spiele website. We don’t know anything about the contents yet, and the final title will likely not be Rokoko Expansion either, but it is coming and we’re looking forward to it.
Modiphius Entertainment
Modiphius Entertainment have launched the Kickstarter campaign for the Thunderbirds cooperative board game that we talked about a while ago. The game by Matt Leacock is based on the 1960s British marionette science fiction series about International Rescue, an organization using its futuristic technology to save lives. In the game, you’ll fly around the world averting disasters part of the villainous The Hood’s scheme. In an interesting experiment, you can watch the rules for Thunderbird being written. There’s a link on the Kickstarter page that will take you to a Google Docs document Matt Leacock is actively working on.
Libellud / Asmodee
This September, Libellud and Asmodee will release English and French editions of Mysterium, a cooperative game for two to seven players that has first been published in Polish by Portal Games in 2013. The players have to work together to solve a mysterious murder that happened in the house they assemble in. Well, all but one of them assemble there, the last one is already there: he’s the victim’s ghost giving hints about his demise to the other players through mysterious signs, also known as art cards. It sounds like a deduction game crossed with Dixit. And speaking of Dixit, there is going to be another expansion called Dixit: Memories with 110 new cards for that game.
Mücke Spiele
Like good whiskey, some games need a certain time to age before they are ready to be enjoyed. Lignum is one of those games, it made its first appearance when it reached the finals of the the 2009/2010 Spielmaterial.de design competition. It wasn’t published back then, but has now appeared Spieleschmiede. In Lignum, players manage their own lumber yards in a lot of detail, deciding where to cut trees, how to transport it to their yards, if they dry it before processing or not and when to sell it. With this many screws to turn, you can probably tell Lignum is a game for gamers where you can try different optimizations to your strategy every time you play.
Stonemaier Games
Between Two Cities, the previously announced drafting game by Stonemaier Games, has launched on Kickstarter. Each player sits literally between two cities, each shared with one of his neighbors. Each city scores the same for both its owners, but a player’s total score is the lower score of his two cities. This being a drafting game, you have to play one tile in each city and then pass the rest to the next player, so ideally you pass tiles that are useless for your neighbors’ other cities, forcing them to improve the city shared with you while doing badly in the other one. Not easy, but certainly fun.