Welcome to Kickstart Monday!!!! This is our weekly series featuring 2 or more crowdfunding projects in the tabletop gaming industry. I scour over platforms like Kickstarter, Gamefound, and Indigogo to find projects that interest me. People would ask me what I think is worth backing since I was providing these recommendations already. So why not share my thoughts with a weekly blog about projects that interest me?
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In this week’s Kickstart Monday it wouldn’t do to not mention Elizabeth Hargrave’s latest game, The Fox Experiment. If you don’t know who Elizabeth Hargrave is, she is the designer behind the hit game Wingspan. In addition, we are going to take a look at the Cyberpunk game Nanolith. Cyberpunk is often a genre that doesn’t see too many releases in the board game world and this one has a lot of cool factors to it.
The Fox Experiment from publisher Pandasaurus Games and designer Elizabeth Hargrave is a game about breeding domesticated foxes to have desirable traits. The game itself is based on a real experiment that attempted to determine how dogs were domesticated. While the original experiment may not have been the most humane to the animals, Pandasaurus ensures us that they do not support the kind of animal treatment that went into the historical experiments.
In the game itself, you will select the parents that have traits you want to pass on to the next generation. Then you will roll trait dice to create fox pups. Your goal is to create pups that match the studies that you have selected. This will all be done over a series of phases. After five rounds of gameplay final scores will be tallied and the player with the highest points wins. Overall this game is a combination of roll and write mechanics along with more traditional board game mechanisms to create a unique game experience.
If this game sounds interesting or you love games about breeding animals then you should definitely check out this project.
Nanolith, the Cyberpunk RPG Board Game, from publisher Woodpecker Games is a combination of board game and RPG game experience. Promising an immersive experience, players can experience the world of Neo-Eden. At the start of the game, this fantasy world is on the brink of collapse. Through the campaign element of the game, you will explore how the world got this way and overcome various challenges, enemies, and boss encounters.
The game itself promises players roughly 50-60 hours of playtime to complete a campaign. During each game, there will always be four player-controlled characters. These characters will be allowed to gain new equipment and level up between save points to allow those characters to scale with the growing challenges. Game sessions aren’t necessarily missions, but rather the game uses the idea of save points. The game is designed from a narrative design of going from the beginning to the end of the game, but the designers do not expect players to be able to complete that in one session, so when players reach a save point, they can pack up the game, note where they are and then set up the game the next time where the save point left off.
If you like the idea of RPG narrative board games with immersive game experiences then you should definitely check out this project.
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.
