Minion Games
You can now get a quick and easy way to your own nuclear arsenal on Kickstarter. Wait, that sounds wrong and will probably get the wrong sort of attention. Let me try that again. You can now kickstart Minion Games’s The Manhattan Project: Chain Reaction, a card game with the same setting as their Manhattan Project: the race to build your nation’s nuclear arsenal. Chain Reaction is much faster and lighter than Manhattan Project, you have a hand of cards that you chain together to produce resources and ultimately bombs. Most cards have an input they need to function, all cards have some sort of output that is used as an input for another card. Cards can also be used as laborers, a special type of input, but then you can’t use their other features. Build the best chains and create the most bombs to win.
Space Cowboys
A new game by Martin Wallace, Via Nebula, is going to be published by Space Cowboys. Players compete to achieve constructions, building projects in their cities that require resources. Some resources are just lying around the board at the start, production sites creating more can be created by the players. But there is one difficulty: the fog. The fog is pretty much everywhere, and you have to create ways through it in order to get anywhere. Once a way is cleared all players can use it. The same goes for production sites. In the early game, players might well cooperate to get started more quickly, but when resources run low competition will be all the more fierce. Via Nebula sounds like a really cool concept, and going by the cover photo it might become the best looking Wallace game ever made.
Fantasy Flight Games
It seems Fantasy Flight want to try something new with the previews for Star Wars: Rebellion and release a bunch of them in a burst. They started with the victory conditions last Friday and will release one a day this week. So how do you win? Star Wars: Rebellion is an asymmetrical game. The Imperial player has to find and destroy the Rebels’ secret base, hidden in one of the game’s 32 systems. The Rebels have to survive and gain support to incite a full on rebellion against the Empire. They complete objectives for support points, the marker for which moves towards the game turn markers. When those two meet, the Rebels win. The next preview introduces us to each side’s four leaders, the characters that drive the story. Everything in Star Wars: Rebellion will depend on how you use them, nothing happens without a leader around. One thing they can do is go on missions and use everything from diplomacy to sabotage to turn the game in their favor. They can also oppose enemy leaders in their missions, or they can activate a system and move troops there. Literally nothing gets down when the boss isn’t there.
Grail Games
Grail Games are kickstarting a new edition of a Reiner Knizia classic, the auction game Medici. As rich merchants, players spend three days (rounds) competing against each other in auctions for goods to load on their ships. When the ships are full or the market is empty, they receive money for the goods they acquired. Some money is based on the value of the card, but you’re also rewarded for owning more of a commodity than the other players. When the game ends, the player with the most money wins. Medici sounds really simple, but the auction and majority mechanics make a much richer game than you might think. One big downside of this Kickstarter, however, is that it only delivers to a select few countries. If you live anywhere else… well, lets hope you have some friends with a valid shipping address.
Z-Man Games
Matt Leacock is designing far outside his usual hunting grounds. Instead of another tense and awesome cooperative game his new project Knit Wit is a party word game – and very likely still awesome, probably also tense. While details on how to play are not available, the description says you’ll make loops around categories and then find answers that match as many categories as possible. What is intriguing is a look at the game components, you’ll play Knit Wit with actual yarn, cloth pins and buttons. Can’t wait to find out more.
Hemisphere Games
As game themes go, Karmaka may have the most interesting one I saw recently. The first Kickstarter project by Hemisphere Games is a card game about reincarnation. From life to life – round to round – you want to collect enough karma points to move up on the reincarnation ladder. Being a dung beetle just isn’t any fun. But you don’t want to just use all your best cards for that. You also want to stash some for your next life, those cards will be in your next opening hand. Cards can also be played as actions, either helping you along or messing up your opponents’ plans. But this is a game about karma and those things will come back to bite you: your opponents may pick up cards you play this way for their own next life. That creates some interesting decisions for you, and the game also looks ridiculously good.
The Champa Kingdom, a first millennium culture on the coast of today’s Viet Nam, was a cultural offspring of Hindu India. You can tell by the architecture, in my opinion. Not much is left of Champa today except the My Son Sanctuary heritage site. This beautiful photo of the site was taken Mikhail Dubov and shared with a CC-BY license. Thank you for sharing, Mikhail!