Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’d like to return to the subject of crowdfunding!

[Image courtesy of The Startup Garage.]

I’ve covered various campaigns for board games, card games, and puzzle projects across the Kickstarter and Indiegogo crowdfunding platforms over the years, and today I’d like to share a few more that could use your attention.

The first is the strategy game Sovrano.

Sovrano is a tactical game in the spirit of chess where you compete with your opponent to score points by capturing one or both of the towers in the center row of the board and/or by escorting your emperor to the throne at the center of the board. With only 11 game pieces apiece, this multi-tiered game is simple to learn but contains enough depth and nuance to keep players interested.

Although supporting Sovrano is a bit more expensive than the average game’s Kickstarter levels, it’s worth noting that each game is hand-made by the father-and-son team behind the game, and the craftsmanship looks gorgeous.

A bit more complex and cutthroat than Sovrano, Summit is a strategy game that’ll test your speed, cunning, and karma. It’s kind of like The Oregon Trail, but with other wagons racing you.

Summit combines path building (by laying triangular tiles on the mountain map), mechanics to help or hinder opponents (inspiring alliances and encouraging betrayals in equal measure), resource management, and an element of luck to create an intriguing racing game where players compete to climb AND descend a mountain before their opponents do.

On the simpler side of things, we have Hoard, a test-your-luck card game all about hedging your bet to sneak as much treasure as possible away from a sleeping dragon before it awakes.

With elements of Memory (remembering which treasure cards are hidden where), chain-solving (doing your best to combine where to move on the board with the cards in your hand and the treasures you’ve already nabbed) and risk management (do you try to wake the dragon now to secure your treasure, or do you hedge your bet and try to grab more before someone else wakes it?), Hoard is a quick-playing family-friendly experience that could be a great gateway game for more involved games later.

Our final game today, Knuckle Sammich, is far, far goofier than the other three, but it’s a project near and dear to my heart, because it’s a spinoff of one of my favorite quick-and-silly role-playing games, Kobolds Ate My Baby.

Now, for the uninitiated, a bit of backstory: kobolds are among the first creatures you usually encounter in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, because they’re easy for even the greenest of heroes to defeat. They’re basically cannon fodder. So it’s great fun to have a game centered around playing one of these easily crushed minions, stealing food for your king and being generally mischievous.

And now they’re launching a card game all about eating sandwiches before they run out…or before you become lunch yourself! It’s guaranteed to be glorious chaos.

These are four intriguing and very entertaining projects, all loaded with potential, and I hope you consider contributing to one or more of them. As someone who has become a regular donor to various Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, I am proud to have funded some marvelous new ideas and watched them take shape over the months that followed.

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