I just wanted to share a few current board game Kickstarters with everyone, as aside from the amazing looking Dark Souls: The Board Game currently up, there are quite a few really awesome ones currently running their campaigns.
Sol: Last Days of a Star
This game looks like a work of art and has a tight rule-set while being deep and extremely thematic. I'm a sucker for sci-fi themed board games and I love the concept centering around a group of highly advanced civilizations attempting to escape their sun's imminent super nova, yet still requiring its energy to power their interstellar arks which only furthers to speed up their sun's destruction the more it's harvested.
Overview:
Sol: Last Days of a Star is a game of solar destruction and salvation for 2-5 players. Each player controls one of the worlds surrounding a star facing annihilation. For centuries these worlds have been living in utopia, fed by the seemingly boundless energy drawn from their star through a lattice of solar harvesting infrastructure. Suddenly this infrastructure is destroyed and their worlds are cast into darkness, their inhabitants facing imminent extinction.
Amidst the clamor, each world has built an Ark housing some small fraction of their population. Each Ark is now waiting at the edge of the solar system for the energy required to attain escape velocity before the final devastation hits. Unfortunately, the only possible source of such a great deal of energy is the dying star itself.
In the game, each player will be launching sundivers to rebuild just enough of the lost solar infrastructure needed to harvest and transmit energy back to their waiting Arks. In a final twist of irony, the process of extracting this energy will further compound the solar instability and hasten their Sun's ultimate demise.
Outlive
This seems like Fallout: The Board Game if there ever was one, all the way down to the "Fallout Shelter" player boards, with a pinch of The Last of Us style art direction. The mechanics seem really solid and I love the building construction/resource management elements that come with running your shelter, and the Heroes Pledge looks like an incredible bundle, complete with an incredible number of miniatures along with themed storage boxes to organize and store them all.
Overview:
Outlive is a 1 (with unlocked stretch goals) to 4 player resource management game where players will compete for survival in a world reclaimed by nature. Its unique workers displacement mechanic will make you feel the struggle of your people as you if you were there. Gather your Tribe, build your strategy and always be ready to move before other Tribes or, failing that, turn their own actions against them. Resources are scarce and if you hesitate your people will go hungry
After 3 Years of development and hundreds of play tests, Outlive is a game where:
- The presence of different events, leaders and rooms that are assigned to you at the beginning of the game, on top of the items you may find and the abilities you may unlock in your shelter ensure a lot of replayability!
- All the time spent playtesting and balancing has produced a board game that provides a great challenge at the 2, 3 or 4 player level.
- The unique, innovative and interactive movement system ensures that each move must be weighed against the availability of resources as well as presence both your own and other players scavenging parties.
- The simple yet effective turn system means that gameplay remains fluid and you wont have much time to reflect on your next move before play passes to you again.
- A setting and theme that fits perfectly with the mechanics of the game.
Anachrony
I don't even know where to begin with this game. It's so dense with amazingly cool mechanics (Mech exosuits; time travel; a cataclysmic asteroid impact halfway through the game that triggers the climax, to name a few) that it's hard to sum up what seems so cool about this game, but I personally have not seen anything quite like it.
Overview:
Anachrony is a competitive, epic Euro-style strategy game with worker placement at its core, set in a grim future where Earth has been rebuilt along four different ideological Paths. The game is played through a series of Eras, with a time traveling twist - players can use Time Rifts to reach back to earlier Eras as the game progresses.
Players assume the roles of iconic leaders of the four ideological Paths, striving for the supremacy and prosperity of their people, and do everything they can to prepare for a game-changing event: after the fourth Era, an asteroid impact shakes Earth, threatening to destroy the World Capital, New Earths last independent city. When the time comes, the Paths can take their part in evacuating the collapsing Capital. In the end, one of the Paths will be the new home to the reformed World Council, and lead humanity to a brighter future.
Innovative worker placement with Exosuits
While your Workers can operate safely within your Path's perimeter, venturing out to a desolate, post-apocalyptic Earth is a dangerous undertaking. In Anachrony, you can use four different types of Workers, and certain Actions can only be used if they are protected by powered-up Exosuits. Workers and Exosuits are managed as separate systems, and both are required for success.
Resource Management through Time
Anachrony's smart time traveling mechanism allows players to request resources from their very own future at the beginning of each Era. These resources can greatly boost their progress, but as time passes, they will have to complete the loop by sending that resource back to their own past - the earlier turn. Failing to do so is a dangerous endeavor that may result in temporal Anomalies tearing up the present!