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. Read on for this week’s picks:

Mutagen

For our first game this week we are taking a look at Mutagen from Dranda Games on Kickstarter.

Mutagen is a 1-4 player worker placement game in a Biopunk setting with customizable workers. A mysterious element known as the “Great Shard” has altered the course of the industrial era allowing people to gain biogenetic modifications and enhance themselves in strange and wonderful ways. These people known as The Mutagen are now competing to control the Great Shard as its lone protector “The Keeper” is nearing the end of his life and seeks a successor to take his place. 

Each player has assembled a team of 4 workers: a Spy, a Thug, an Engineer, and a Robot to help them claim the title of Keeper of the Shard. Players will send members of their team out to take actions and each worker type will gain a different benefit from the location they visit. On top of this you will be drafting mutations each round to augment your workers which will grant additional bonuses when they take actions. 

During the game you’ll be collecting different elements (Crystal, Gas, Liquid, and Ore) to power your personal airship to gain points each round, deliver elements to the Sacred Tree location to collect sets of Tree Cards for end game scoring, or to move up the 4 element tracks where your position is scored each round.

You also are able to hire crew member cards that will earn you points for your position on specific element tracks. At the end of four rounds you’ll total the points you earned for completed crew cards and tree cards as well as the points you earned during the game and one industrious player will become the new Keeper of the Great Shard.

Let’s take a look at the different pledge levels available for this campaign:

  • Worker Pledge – $46 – Mutagen Retail Edition
  • Mutagen Pledge – $59 – Mutagen Deluxe Edition which includes  20 mutation attachments and expansions from David Turczi and Jonny Pac.
  • Keeper Pledge – $103 – Everything in the Deluxe Edition plus a playmat and deluxe shard fragments

You’ll have until November 13, 2024, to make your pledge for Mutagen, so be sure to check out the campaign page before then.

The Maniac

Our second game this week is The Maniac and comes to us from Escape Studios Games on Gamefound.

The Maniac is a hidden movement horror board game for 1 to 6 players. Players start the game as one of six teenagers spending the night at the remote Black Pine Lodge. But something is wrong with this place, an evil presence pervades the lodge. As the players explore one of them will discover the cursed mask that is the source of the evil and find themselves transformed into the psychotic Maniac. 

Hopefully you will have found some useful items as you searched the lodge because once the Maniac is loose you’ll need to turn to run, hide, fight and ultimately escape the lodge if you want to survive. The Maniac features a dual hidden movement system where The Maniacs movements are hidden from the players and tracked on a hidden map but the players are able to plan their actions in secret as well keeping The Maniac guessing.

Players will need to Sneak to prevent making noise and revealing their location but they may need to walk or run to cover more ground. If a player ends up in the same location as the Maniac they will have to engage in a fight which could result in a player death or even a new player taking the role of the Maniac! The survivors will have to move carefully, hide when necessary and gather useful items if they hope to succeed.

The survivors will win if they manage to resist until dawn, find an escape route or annihilate The Maniac. The Maniac on the other hand will need to kill each of the original survivors or at least six survivors if new survivors are introduced during the game such as the Sheriff. Either way the finale is sure to be tense whichever path the survivors try to take.

Let’s break down the available pledge levels for The Maniac: 

  • The Maniac Standard Edition – $64 – The Maniac standard core game
  • The Maniac Collector Edition – $96 – Includes 3d multi-level game board with 3d tiles and a tower, additional 3d decorative tokens and ladder miniatures
  • The Maniac All In Collector Edition – $156 – Includes the collector edition and 2 Director’s Cut expansions. *Note: the Director’s expansions contain adult themes.

If you can’t wait to test your mettle as a survivor or maybe step into the shoes of a maniacal killer make your pledge for The Maniac on Gamefound before the campaign ends on November 7, 2024.

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 our social media or email.

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