Kickstarter Roundup - Meeples & Monsters, Gloom, Stellaris, and Monuments
Players need to defeat the Dark Council to save the city of Rowan by recruiting, upgrading, and battling their way to victory. Meeples & Monsters is designed by Ole Steiness who is best known for designing games such as Champions of Midgard, and Police Precinct. The game uses deck, pool, and bag building, and worker placement mechanisms, caters for 1-4 players, aged 13+, and can be played in 45-60 minutes. Players need to recruit the cityfolk so that they become powerful allies in the upcoming fight. They will also upgrade the town to score rewards and increase the worker placement options available during the game. Finally, they'll fight the enemies who surrounded the town to eliminate them. The Kickstarter campaign, run by AEG, will end on Friday, March 19th, 2021, has already hit 10x its funding goal, and has an estimated delivery date of March 2022. You can catch Mark Streed's preview on The Dice Tower.
Monuments is a civilization board game where the goal is to build the civilization’s Monument as quickly as possible while managing the empire and its people. It’s designed by Martin Looij and caters for 1-4 players, aged 10+, and playing in roughly 1-2 hours.
Each player has the same set of 10 action cards which can be upgraded over the course of the game for better actions. On a player’s turn they may play an action card from their hand, perform its action, then discard it, or they can retrieve all their discarded hands back into their hand instead. The game ends after the round in which a player finishes their monument but only the player with the most Victory Points is the winner at that point.
The Kickstarter campaign features 3 versions of the game including the Standard Retail Edition, the Deluxe Edition, and finally the Super Deluxe Edition which all differ in stretch goals and resource components. The project is just shy of its goal with over 240 backers, runs until Friday, April 2nd, 2021, and is expected to ship in December of 2021.
The Gloomier campaign includes Gloomier: A Night at Hemlock Hall (a competitive, standalone card game for 2-5 players), a Gloom Grief Case which is a deluxe storage box that holds every Gloom game ever produced, and The Gloom Chronicles which is a campaign-style mini-expansion. The Gloomier: A Night at Hemlock Hall game has players make their characters suffer the greatest tragedies before they “pass on” and earn the player negative points for all the grief inflicted. The game features transparent plastic cards to keep track of the character’s score as the grief is stacked on them. The winner is the player with the most negative score which lets them decide the final narrative to the story. The new stand-alone game includes 6 new Stories, 14 new Guests which can be used in other versions of Gloom, and features new, specially designed story prompts. The Kickstarter campaign, run by Atlas Games, is already funded 5x beyond its goal, will run until Thursday, April 8th, 2021, and is expected to deliver in October of 2021.
Stellaris Infinite Legacy is based on the popular PC game, Stellaris, which is primarily a 4x game set in space. The board game version allows for 2-4 players (up to 6 with the Empires expansion) who can play a myriad of species with the ability to customize their portrait, flag, and planet cards in their empire screen. Players expand their civilization over multiple games and gain access to new mechanisms as their technology and culture is developed. There’s a large and variable Tech Tree, multiple story paths, and the game features simultaneous planning of actions behind player screens. The box uses plastic trays to organize components which makes storage, setup, and gameplay easier. The Kickstarter campaign, run by Academy Games, has two funding levels (one with only the core game and the other with expansions) and has already blown its funding goal out of the water and continues to rake in funding with over 12,125 backers. The project will run until Monday, April 5th, 2021, and is expected to deliver in April of 2022.
