Welcome to Kickstart Monday! This is our weekly series featuring 2 or more crowdfunding projects that have caught our eye. We scour over platforms like Kickstarter and Gamefound to find projects that interest us. This week’s picks are:

Read on to find out what makes them special…

Manhattan Project: Energy Empire

Our first game this week is Manhattan Project: Energy Empire from Frost Bite Games on Kickstarter.

Manhattan Project: Energy Empire is a 1 to 5 player worker placement game and comes from the minds of designers Luke Laurie and Tom Jolly and is a game I personally enjoy quite a bit. Originally released in 2016 this new version brings a complete graphical redesign with a new art style as well as some new expansion content.

Fans of the original version will still find familiar mechanics and gameplay in this new update. Players play as a nation  yodeling out their industrial, commercial and government sectors while managing the energy needed to power their progress and dealing with the different kinds of pollution produced by a growing nation. 

With many actions you’ll be building structures and technologies like factories, oil refineries, educational institutes, government agencies and commercial businesses to build out a personal tableau. Structures provide points and engine building opportunities with special abilities and new action spaces for you to take with your workers. Improving your energy production is another big part of the game. You are able to gain different energy dice like coal, oil, hydroelectric and nuclear.

On turns when you cannot place workers, you roll your energy dice to produce energy which can be used alongside your workers to augment your actions and allow you to take actions other players have already chosen. Most energy types produce pollution though and your air, land and water can fill with pollution costing you end game points. The player who manages their nation, pollution and energy the most effectively will be the winner! 

The new version of Energy Empire will include the “Cold War” expansion as well as a new “UNEnvoys” expansion which replaces the existing UN track and gives each player special envoy tokens which you can send to the UN on a variety of boards to influence the game in different ways and earn benefits for your nation.

Manhattan Project: Energy Empire is available now on Kickstarter for $50 with the Energy Empire Pledge. If you are feeling energized about this one make sure you back the campaign before it ends on March 25, 2025.

Formaggio

Next up this week we are looking at Formaggio from Road to Infamy on Kickstarter. 

Formaggio is a stand alone expansion to the 1 to 4 player cheese making game Fromage. Fromage is a “simultaneous worker-placement” game where players as a French cheesemaker, gather resources and make, age and sell delicious cheeses.

Players can arrange an impressive cheese display at their local fromagerie, show off their best cheeses at festivals, build structures to improve their creamery, serve cheese pairings at popular bistros and deliver their cheese to various cities across France. In this standalone expansion Formaggio, the game explores Italy and brings in new board mechanics, mini-games and activities, and of course wonderful Italian cheeses.

In Fromaggio you will find yourself pairing wines and cheeses at the Vigneto, Selling cheese to restaurants on the canal, distributing cheese across Italy and even depositing your cheese in the Banca, an Italian cheese bank which is indeed a real thing in Italy. These new modules can even be mixed and matched with the board modules from the Fromage for further replayability. 

This campaign also includes a reprint of the base game if you missed out on its original printing as well as some special limited edition options so let’s take a look at those pledge levels now:

  • Formaggio (Standard Edition) – $39 – One copy of the retail version of Formaggio.
  • Formaggio (Limited Edition) – $59 – Includes upgraded wooden tokens, and an improved lazy susan with a neoprene mat.
  • Fromage and Formaggio (Limited Editions) $128 – The limited editions of both Fromage and Formaggio

If Formaggio is something you’re getting hungry to get your hands on make sure to get your pledge in before April 8, 2025 when the Kickstarter campaign ends.

Did we miss your favorite project?

Thank you for checking out this week’s Kickstart Monday! If you find these interesting or want some attention on a Kickstarter or other crowdfunded projects that you would like to read more about please share your thoughts with us via social media or email.

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