Cyclades: Legendary Edition has already secured over half a million in crowdfunding for a new edition of the popular Greek God territory battler.

Mine so far is wingspan, my dads been bugging me to download Root.

After a few delays we finally managed to get the 2023 registration opened for the tabletop game convention that I help put on.

If you are in the York PA area in November, please consider joining us. It'll be a good time. https://www.saveagainstfear.com

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What we‘re looking for:

• Easy to learn, hard to master
• small footprint
• It has to be great with both 2 or more players (up to 5)
• exciting (push your luck or take that or similar mechanisms, maybe bluffing? A coop small engine builder tycoon game heavier than Bohnanza maybe?)

What we already have and like, but are bad with 2p

• The Crew: Awesome, but sucks at 2p
• For Sale
• High Society

What we didn‘t enjoy:

• Sushi Go Party
• Cascadia (also too big)
• King if Toyko (awesome but a bit too big, we‘d prefer a game without dice)
• Love Letter
• Coup

I very much enjoyed the original Bang! and it's additions. I want something that feels like the shooting dice equivalent to Bangs! Poker. How good is the dice version and are there other games that are better but share the direction?

I was putting my collection back together after redecorating over the weekend and noticed a distinct lack of worker placement games in my collection!

We've played (and enjoyed!) Architects of the West Kingdom and Tiny Epic Dinosaurs in the past, but both belong to a friends collection and don't want to overlap with them.

What worker placement games do you own and enjoy?

I am wondering if anyone has suggestions that will fit my needs.

At work me and some work pals play a quick game or two of rummikub. This has been the reigning king of lunch for a while for a few reasons: it's quick, easy to learn if someone wants to join in, suits varying amounts of players, there's no scoring or need to write anything down, random enough that most people get a win every now and then, VERY quick set up, just grab tiles and go.

I like it but also like variety and am wondering if anyone has some suggestions that match some or all of these criteria. Just a quick replayable game that we can enjoy on our break and anyone can join in easily. I tried Azul but even that was a bit too much for most even though it's the slightest bump up in terms of setup and scoring.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Edit: So many excellent suggestions to try, thanks everyone!

I enjoy trading card games a lot, and was wondering if there was such a board game that could capture that feeling at higher player counts (without spending money on booster packs)

Think Radlands, but for 3-4 players

Tigris & Euphrates, the classic board game about building ancient civilisations, is set to make its return this October.

Medium Euro games are by far my favorite boardgame genre. Picking a winner was extremely hard for me, I've been postponing this review forever now...

Today's game is... this is so hard... I guess it's Concordia

TL;DR

Score: 9/10

Positives:

• Other players actions can benefit you

• Very strategic

• Networking is fun

• Plays in 1.5 hours, which is a sweet spot for me

• Rulebook is like 3 pages

Negatives:

• Artwork and components are VERY dated

• Scoring can be confusing at first

• Game-end can be triggered by any player, and then everyone else plays an extra turn. Unfortunately this can mean that not everyone played the same number of turns, which is a pet peeve of mine.

The Review

Concordia has the most original theme you have ever heard. You're a striving merchant in the Mediterranean! You'll want to expand your influence around the map, collect goods and please the gods!

Image credit to Klara & Marcel Petermeier on bgg, source here

In Concordia your turn is quite simple: you either play a card from your hard or retrieve all the played cards back to your hand. You start the game with 7 cards, all with different intesting actions. You can move your colonists in the map and build some houses, acquire new colonists, trade goods or acquire new cards.

Without getting too much detail, you'll want to expand your buildings into the map because they'll generate resources for you. Each building is associated with a map region and a specific good type that you can later collect. The region of the building is important because at any time a player can "activate" a region, and everyone in the region receives the goods from their buildings. I always love when other players' actions can benefit you. Do I want to be alone and collect all the goods for myself or do I want to move to the same region as other players and collect their free region activations?

Acquiring new cards is also an interesting action. New cards are added to your hand and contain a new action for you to perform. The cards are displayed in a row and the last cards are more expensive. When a card is purchased, the row moves forward and a new card is available in the most expensive spot. You want to grab that nice card now at a premium cost or gamble that no one is going to take it? The new cards net new an interesting actions but, equaly importantly, they contain scoring oportunities. Each card is associated with a god, which is used for end-game scoring. Cards can be interesting for their action but also for their scoring opportunities and it's important to balance it out.

I think this game is amazing. It's really tense, especially in the beginning where everyone is starting to move out of rome and create their own buildings. Love the player interaction on this one. You can collect goods from other players action, you can play their someone else's last played card. It feels me with a lot of positive vibes. Playing around not only your game but what you think your opponents are going to do feels really great. I love games where you build a large network, it always feels very rewarding.

If I had to say something negative about the game that would be the artwork and components... They feel really dated, dull and dry. It's hard to convince people to play Concordia for the first time, they look at the cover and feel like playing something else. A "new version" came out recently-ish with a new generic boring cover but the game is the same. This game deserves a deluxified version, something pretty and engaging. Scoring was also a bit confusing to me in the first game. Each god scores differently, each card has an associated god. It's easy to be caught up in the fun of expanding your empire but then completely missing the scoring conditions for a couple of gods.

I tried the expansion, not really a fan of having a wild resource. I heard some of the new maps make it for a more interesting 2 player experienced but I never played it. Unfortunately someone else in my group owns the game, not me. I'm waiting for that deluxe version!

I know this game looks boring, I know the theme is the least appealing theme on the planet but trust me... It's an amazing game with simple rules and a short-ish play time. The rulebook is like 3 pages long, you can learn it super fast. When was the last time you played an medium euro game with a 3-page rulebook? Personally, I'm a huge fan of games with a large depth but a low rules overhead. If you're like me, this game is for you! You need to try this!

Context Information

Number of plays: 7

Suggested player count: 4 players is best, 3 is okay, 5 players is nice if everyone knows how to play and no one suffers from Analysis Paralysis

Win-rate: 28.57%

Average playtime: 1.5 hours

Honorable Mentions

Consider these games as winners, which they could very well have been!

• Viticulture: Essential Edition with expansion Viticulture: Tuscany Essential Edition - I almost chose this one as the winner but the game is only fantastic with the expansion. In my personal opinion, this game NEEDS the expansion. I wouldn't play without it.

• Lost Ruins of Arnak - My SO loves this game so we've played it a ton. It's really good, plays nicely at 2 players. It's very min-max oriented, which can lead to some analysis paralysis. I really like discovering and killing the monsters and ultimately I wish the game was more about that. The expansions add variable powers to each character, which is something I really enjoy.

• Everdell - Artwork is amazing, which is what lead me to buy the game. The game is fun, haven't tried any of the expansions (I own Spirecrest). The big tree is pretty but honestly pretty non-functional.

• Sol: Last Days of a Star - This game is different than anything you've ever played. It's so quirky, so different, so unique. Definitely check it out if you're looking for something new. You need at least 4 players to play it, don't bother to play with with any less players.

• Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition - This Terraforming Mars meets Race for the Galaxy. It still feels like Terraforming Mars but it was streamlined a lot. Do I like it better than the original? Well... That's hard to answer. I miss putting forest and oceans on the map, I really do. However, Terraforming Mars often feels like it drags for too long, often took over 3 hours. Ares Expedition is fast, it plays under an hour. You lose some things but at the end of the day it's still very good. The "card play" feels the same and it's definitely something I would recommend. The new expansion adds milestones & awards, which is fine.

Howdy. I have a boardgame called "Seventh Street" that I've developed. It's kind of a complicated project but the best way to describe it is that it's a real-estate trading game with elements of deduction and deception. (If it helps, think of it as Monopoly with incomplete information and without the death spiral and player elimination)

Point is, I think it could work as a product. I just don't know how to turn it from a bunch of PDFs that you print on cardstock into a product, nor do I really know what I need to do to refine it, and what to look for in playtesting.

Does anyone have experience kickstarting a board game and have any advice?

Anybody play this?

Some friends introduced it to me, I liked the idea of having to play the cards in the sequence received.

I've just had this idea. Why don't we create a bot that scans comments and replies to them with boardgamegeek links for every game found in the comment?

To simplify the implementation I would be favourable to introduce some sort of syntax to make unambiguous whether or not some words are a game name or not.

What do you think about this idea?

I regularly play UNO atm and would love to hear your strategies when playing this game. Do you try to remember what cards were played e.g. the +2 an d+4? Do you switch colors if someone is about to finish? Do you also keep the color-picker until the end?

While I like the concept of the game, I find the amount of key words and rules to juggle cumbersome and my GF was unable to get a handle on what to do.

What's your experience with sticking with the game? Any tipps that helped you internalize the gameplay?

PS I've already tried in solo but it's even more fiddly that way.

Any tips, warnings or cool new discoveries, please share!

I haven't been able to post review in the last fiew days, life got in the way. Hopefully this week goes better!

Today's game is Lovecraft Letter.

TL;DR

Score: 9/10

Positives:

• Very easy to teach

• Very fast

• Light-hearted

• Very nice components

Negatives:

• Some folks really dislike "accusing", they won't like this game

The Review

Lovecraft Letter combines the classic Love Letter game with an H.P. Lovecraft theme. This isn't just one of those simple Batman re-themes, if feels more like an expansion to Love Letter.

Image credit to Petra on bgg, source here

The goal of the game is to be the last surviving person. In your turn you will draw a card and play one of the 2 cards in your hand. Each card has a number and an associated action that you can perform. For instance, the card number 1 lets you attempt to guess someone else's card and if you succeed they are out of the game. The number 8 card cannot be played and if you are ever forced to discard it you lose the game. Though the game has player elimination, the rounds are very quick and it won't take long before you play again. If there were no cards left to be drawn, the person with the highest numbered card wins.

In the base Love Letter game, this was the entire game and boy did we enjoy playing it. It felt really great to play after a longer and heavier game. It's just such a chill and light-hearted fun game. You don't have to think too much, we mostly didn't even care too much about odds or anything. Folks just like to accuse me of being a Princess and that was fun. Sometimes we ended playing Love Letter for the entire evening. It was great but eventually we burned out a bit.

That's when Lovecraft Letter was released. The game is essentially the same but it adds a push your luck mechanic. Now there is an additional 8 alternative, green cards (1 for each number). Playing or discarding one of these alternative cards will leave you insane. The green cards will now have VERY strong abilities at your disposal, however you will need to do a sanity check before each of your turns. For each green card you have played/discarded you have to flip a card from the deck... if it's a green or 8 card you just lose. It was such a simple and subtle twist in the game but it REALLY refreshed the game for us. If I have a green card in hand do I want to risk using its amazing power? It will certainly pay off.... If you survive long enough to use it!

The components are great for the price. The game comes with a really neat box, a nice organizer, sleeves and poker chips. You're set. If, for some reason, you don't like the push your luck component added in Lovecraft Letter, you can still play base Love Letter just by removing the green cards.

I have really great memories playing this game for so many evenings with my friends. I still don't get how such a simple game hooked us so hard, but it really did. You can teach this game to anyone, it's so easy and plays in like 5 minutes. Can't recommend it enough!

Context Information

Number of plays: Certainly 100+

Suggested player count: 4+

Average playtime: A single game is like 5 minutes and if you win 2 games as insane or 3 games as sane you are the ultimate winner. Sometimes it takes a while to find the winner, depending on the number of players, but each individual game is super fast.

Honorable mentions:

• Fantasy Realms - Trying to build combos is super fun

• Arboretum - I tend not to like "mean" games, but I don't think one is as mean as people make it out to be. I love building my Arboretum!

So the major aspect affecting pricing in the last 4 years are paper costs, COVID, and possibly tariffs with China (the latter I have heard the least of from vendors).

Here is a rundown of pricing changes I have seen over the years:

Special notes: Isle of Cats never increased in price, always at $50, and even more notable because you get a lot of weight and bits for $50, where I would have seen any other company likely charge $60 for it. Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion is also at a staggering $50 SRP the whole time!! (How much money did Target give Isaac?)

Asmodee: two major price hikes, one in 2019 and another around 2021-2022. Dice Forge went from $39.99 to a whopping $54.99. Most of their other games went up from $40 to $45 and their $50 to $60. Production hasn't changed but sales wise I feel like those games have dipped a little on sales, especially with more affordable $40 games like Cascadia, Decorum, etc.

StoneMeier: Wingspan being around $50-$55 on its first print run now at $65. Scythe went from $80-90.

Pokemon: You think the Pokemon Company would have jacked up their costs during the Logan Paul inflation scam, but only Jan 2023 did Pokemon increase their SRPs.

HABA Games, Renegade, Arcane Tinmen, Red Raven Games, Rio Grande, etc: Most of these companies increased products by around $5, this seems to be the norm. These mainly occured around early 2021

Play monster Games: I got an email saying US Freight costs increased 300% for them, however they sell cheaper products like Five Crowns so I haven't noticed how their SRPs increased, maybe a dollar or two.

Games Workshop: so many price changes it was hard to keep track, as I imagine you have to add whatever was happening with the EU might have also affected costs among everything else in the US, or just GW being GW as usual.

Grandpa Beck Games: the usual $1-$2 price hikes for small card games, but I just want to point them out because it was the only email that felt like an actual human being typed it all up instead of using some template like everyone else.

**Wizards of the Coast. There were a tiny bit later in increasing prices around 2022, but I imagine they make so much profit margin selling a piece of cardboard it likely didn't matter. New D&D books however will start increasing in price next month.

What is this?

This is a weekly crowdfunding roundup of new projects launched last week and projects that end the coming week.

This is a continuation of the same lists that were originally started over at the /r/boardgames subreddit.

Google Docs

As an alternative format, the lists are now also available as a Google Docs found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BC9nQ7xVUs3rwVpSl_K9V5unJeMIqrtBPmch1lYo7tQ/edit?usp=sharing

Updates

Expect new lists every Sunday between 00:00 and 23:59 CEST on the following platforms:

Mastodon: @danielpervan@mastodon.social

Discord: https://discord.gg/T9MCxgHj

Threadiverse: You're reading it

Reddit: /r/boardgames

Selection criteria

The criteria for the lists are as follows:##What is this?
This is a weekly crowdfunding roundup of new projects launched last week and projects that end the coming week.

Expect new lists every Sunday between 00:00 and 23:59 CEST

The criteria for the lists are as follows:

Ending soon

• Sorted by number of backers

• Kickstarter projects ending in the next 7 days, that have at least 100 backers (or marked as "Project we love" by Kickstarter), will have reached more than estimated 95% of their goal by their deadline and passed the filters:

  • No DnD books

  • No zines

  • No 3D printing

  • No dice sets

  • No magazines

  • No shirts

  • No playmats

  • No furniture

  • No events

• Gamefound projects ending in the next 7 days, that will have reached more than estimated 95% of their goal by their deadline and passed the above filters.

• (beta) Backerkit Crowdfunding projects ending in the next 7 days, that will have reached more than estimated 95% of their goal by their deadline and have a matching BGG page.

Newly launched

• Sorted by number of backers

• Kickstarter projects launched in the last 7 days, that have had at least average 15 backers per day, have at least 100 backers or is marked as "Project we love" by Kickstarter and passed the filters (see above).

• Gamefound projects launched in the last 7 days and passed the filters (see above).

• (beta) Backerkit Crowdfunding projects launched in the last 7 days and have a matching BGG page.

Notable filtered projects

• Filtered projects from above lists that have more than 1000 backers.

Tags

🎉: Staff pick/featured

💰: Funded

🔥: More than average 200 backers/day

🌱: Creator's first project

🌳: Creator's >5th project

🔄: Money back guarantee (Read more)

##FAQ

I live in Bolivia/Canada/Ecuador/USA, why are you posting on a Saturday?!

Because I'm writing this from Europe in the future where it's already Sunday. Timezones be crazy.

Why are there a bunch of non-board games in the board game list?

Because the Tabletop games category on Kickstarter includes anything remotely related to board games and sometimes things slip through my filters.

Why is this future award winning board game and literal saviour of humanity missing from your list?

Sometimes my filters get a bit overzealous and discard actually valid projects. If you feel something is missing for this reason, leave a comment and I'll add it (maybe).

Can I donate all my money to you?

No

Can you help me promote my game?

Please no. I make lists. Nothing more.

Your list is full of errors and now I keep rolling natural 1s!

Indeed, this fine piece of code runs purely on thoughts and prayers, so anything can happen. Leave a comment and I'll see what I can do.

Ending soon (20)

New this week (21)

Notable filtered projects (7)

I do a lot of Roleplaying and need some games for in-between and "gambling" for the others I play with. I don't want my players to learn a long and massive game. Something that feels a bit medieval and uses dice of 55/32 card decks would be perfect. Like Gwent or Zombie dice. Maybe where you can cheat?

I always see pictures of people's collections with boxes stored vertically on their edge. Looks nice, but when I do this the pieces inside tend to get jumbled around.

What's the general consensus on the best way to arrange boxes on the shelf?