Rapid Fire Dice Chucking & Tiny Tabletop RPGs? August 15th, 2024 Crowdfunding Roundup
Does your inbox fill up every Tuesday with Kickstarter emails? Well, mine does - so I decided to start writing my thoughts on new tabletop gaming Kickstarters every week. Keep in mind, most of these thoughts are based on initial impressions and looking at the Kickstarter video.
There’s a lot of “buzz” surrounding these campaigns, so you’d better “rapid fire” click your mouse, as you’ve only got “One Shot” to grab them before you’re “locked out”!
The Rapid Fire Dicebox - from Tempest Terrain
I swear that the music they use in this video is the same background music they use in the Warhammer+ Battle Reports. Either way, this was an instant back for me - it’s a dicebox that you can throw all your D6s into and it will sort them out into groups of 5. When playing games like Warhammer that require massive amounts of dice rolling, being able to quickly count out how many dice you need is a great thing to have. Personally, when I’ve been playing Warhammer recently I had been grouping my dice into stacks of 5 for this reason. Now, I won’t have to have a lot of space taken up by the different groups, I can just grab 5 dice and then throw them back on top when I’m done. You can back for a physical product at higher tiers, but the dicebox is designed to be 3d printed and you can get just the files for about $13. It folds up to look like a cargo crate, so it can even dual as a piece of terrain on your battlefield.
Locked Out: A semi-competitive social deduction card game
It’s always nice when I can find a smaller game to help support that isn’t clearly someone’s first time on Kickstarter. But bold move Cotton putting an 8-minute long board game review video as your Kickstarter video. Also very weird, because you are acting like you are reviewing any old board game when it’s a game you are publishing. Locked Out was the winner of a “Lunchtime Game Challenge”, and now is on Kickstarter looking for funding. For $15 you will get this social deduction game where you are on a ship you stole and trying to get control of it before you are caught. If everyone works together, the person with the most points will win the game. If you run out of time/resources, then the player with the lowest score wins the game. The dual-natured ending in a social deduction game is definitely a very intriguing concept. If you’ve got a group of coworkers you play games with at lunch, then you’ll probably want to check this game out.
OSN: Book Club Anthology, vol 1
If you haven’t heard of James D’Amato and the One Shot Podcast Network at this point, I’d be really impressed. James has done a lot for the RPG community over the years, and has even appeared on our shows (I got killed by aliens in one)! Now, he’s offering a collection of 12 micro-RPGs in PDF form for $20. With names like You Must Sneak Human Remains into Disney World, Goblins with a Gourd, and Aliens Don’t Do Group Projects, I’m sure there will be plenty of entertainment for your RPG group. If you still aren’t sold, he is offering You Must Sneak Human Remains into Disney World for free to everyone. Check it out, and if you like what you see, take a look at the Kickstarter page for the complete listing of RPGs in the Anthology and a brief description of each game.
Canadians in Space!
Canada Stands! If you don’t understand that reference, you might want to just move on to the next campaign. At a massive $95 for all the models, you can get STLs to sub in everyone’s favorite neighbors to the North for your totally-not-trying-to-be-imperial-guard army. I love this concept, especially since the guard players I know like to get very customized with their individual models to be in different units. My only gripe is that aside from the couple of guys holding Canadian flags, I’m not really seeing much of a “Canada” vibe with the models. They are cool looking models, but if you took the generic ones and showed them to me with no description, I doubt I’d get that they are supposed to be Canadian. Still, printing them off is still way cheaper than putting together an official guard army.
HYVE: A Colorful Beehive Simulator
I’m a sucker for cool looking roll-and-write games, especially when the boards look very pretty. Hyve is a $5 print and play game where you assign colors to different dice numbers. This means as you play the game you’ll fill up the board coloring in squares instead of writing numbers everywhere. For visual learners, this might be more appealing and make things easier to learn. There appears to be a lot of depth to this game - you need to assign your “bees” (dice) to different actions so that you can progress your hive and expand to other hives. If other roll-and-write games are too simple for you, then you may want to look over this game and see if it fits your style.
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