Five great games launched on Kickstarter
Crowdfunding has played an important role in gaming over the last eight years.
After a couple weeks off, I’m back here with you today. During my absence, I spent playing one of the more involved dexterity games: painting the interior a house. It even came with some strategic decisions to make, like choosing a color and planning room painting order, among others. Is it my favorite game? Probably not, but there’s something rewarding about it.
I’ve also had some good opportunities recently to play some other games, too, which I’ll be talking about in the coming weeks. I finally played a round of the team-based word game Decrypto, which felt like the merging of Codenames and and Taboo in a way that I never knew I needed. I played more American Bookshop, this time at four- and five-player counts — it’s remarkable just how different a simple game feels when you play with more players. I’ve even played another Exit game and a Deckscape game, both of which will feature in short order.
But today, in lieu of all that, I thought I’d talk about some of my favorite games I backed on Kickstarter and what made them successes for me.
Hardback (2017)
I love a word game (as evidenced above,) and I love a deck-building game. Hardback was the perfect game for me, especially because I already enjoyed Paperback, the game to which this is a successor. One of these days I’ll write more about the differences between these two, but the short story is that the game is a bit more permissive with words, includes suits for the cards in your deck (think Star Realms), and is a real evolution.
Tiny Epic Galaxies (2015)
When I first started playing lots of board games, I quickly discovered that many games came in boxes that were oversized for the content. The industry has come a long way in that regard, although some publishers are still offenders. Gamelyn Games, publisher of Scott Almes’ Tiny Epic Galaxies emerged as the perfect counterpoint: It’s a strategic game with interesting decisions, and the box is nice and small — maybe just a little bigger than two boxes of theater candy stacked?
Gamelyn has gone on to release a dozen or so titles in the Tiny Epic series, with Kickstarter being at the center of their business. I think Galaxies is still my favorite.
Wavelength (2019)
One of the best party games of the last decade being crowdfunded is not what I would have expected. Party games are everywhere, and that trend only seems to be strengthening — but they’re so often cheap productions with themes designed to make you either embarrassed or nostalgic (usually for a big media property. It’s a fun world out there.) Wavelength is anything but. It’s a clever game, easy to teach, and it has a large wheel players get to turn. It’s easily my favorite party game in a long time.
The excellent production qualities really lift Wavelength, but the concept itself is solid: Two teams face off, each trying to be better at reading their teammates’ minds than the other team. Each round has one member — a clue-giver — of the team turning the wheel, which has points ranging from two to four printed, then covering it. They’ll draw a card with two topics on either end of a spectrum — “hot and cold”, for example, or “overrated letter of the alphabet" and “underrated letter of the alphabet,” for another. (And that one’s in the game! It’s not all clear-cut.) The clue-giver then give a clue that exists somewhere along that spectrum, and if the team moves the dial to the right place before revealing the numbers, they’ll get points. It seems a little weird, but it’s very straightforward once you’re playing, and it’s one of the more delightful party games I’ve played.
Cascadia (2021)
Leading the charge of games released first on Kickstarter that reach critical acclaim is Cascadia, published by Flatout Games and designed by Randy Flynn. It’s a smart, tactical game, but it’s approachable, too. That combination has rocketed it up to the top of the abstract strategy charts on BoardGameGeek (surpassing even Azul), and it’s in the top 50 of games overall there. Now, that doesn’t make this a great game on its own, but it’s usually a nice indicator.
Root (2018)
Root is a great example of a game that used Kickstarter to find its audience, and it made possible the publishing of a game that would’ve been difficult to publish through more traditional routes. It’s an asymmetric war game with cute, fuzzy animals. That makes it seem both approachable and difficult simultaneously, which would’ve made for a difficult sell on retail shelves. It’s now a tremendously successful game, and the method of release played a big role.
Thanks, as always, for reading this little newsletter. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll be writing about next week, so if you’ve got anything you’d love to hear about, do shout.