Let’s continue to sample the games that publishers plan to release in 6-18 months once the crowd funds their projects and kicks the manufacturing into motion:
• Julián Pombo has worked with Vital Lacerda, creating a solo mode for Lisboa and co-designing Mercado de Lisboa, and now he has a giant, Lacerda-style game all his own in Pampero, which APE Games is funding on Kickstarter for release in 2023.
In the hand-management, card-driven, action-selection game Pampero, you represent an investor who is attempting to construct wind farms on behalf of the Uruguayan government, with your success being measured in personal wealth. APE Games’ Kevin Brusky has posted an overview of the game on BGG, and Candice Harris plans to write a detailed overview.
• Publisher Game Brewer bills Delta from designer Franz Couderc as a “steampunk adventure” in which you employ a team of characters to create inventions in a workshop, gather knowledge about mechanimals, and use crystals to power Perpetual Steam Engines (PSEs) as you travel across the land. (KS link)
• Italian publisher Horrible Guild plans to launch a c.f. project for The Queen’s Dilemma from Hjalmar Hach and Lorenzo Silva on October 25, 2022. This sequel game to 2019’s The King’s Dilemma is another interactive narrative legacy game in which players negotiate with one another and vote to resolve crises in their land.
• Castles of Mad King Ludwig: Renovations from Ted Alspach and Bézier Games expands Castles of Mad King Ludwig — either the regular edition or the colossal one — with rooms of two types that can be placed on top of existing rooms. (KS link)
• BGG recorded an overview of Robert and Max Jamelli‘s Lords of Baseball at the 2018 Origins Game Fair (video link), and publisher L4 Studios is finally moving this design to print…assuming it funds, of course. (KS link)
• In July 2022, I wrote about Scout Blum‘s Rising Waters, a co-operative game about surviving the 1927 flooding of the Mississippi Delta, and that project is now looking for funding. (KS link)
• A more familiar type of co-operative escape game is JUST RUN, a design from Warren Shaver in which you’re trying not to fall victim to the zombie apocalypse. (KS link)
• In Christophe Raimbault‘s Redwood from Sit Down!, you attempt to take photographs of scenic views and wild animals, and to represent these efforts, you first attach a curved plastic path to your figure on the game board, then move to the end of that path, then place a
“cone of vision” template next to your figure to determine what you capture with your camera.
I sampled Redwood at Gen Con 2022, and it’s tricky to imagine where you’re going to move and what you’ll see from that location. I’m sure practice helps, as with dance and other sports that require you to be in the right place at the right time. (KS link)
• And I’ll close with a game-adjacent item: Stéphane Villain’s 3D building system of attachable plastic triangles called “CARAPACES”, which I first covered in February 2020. The company, DOuG Solutions, funded a campaign on Ulule in Sept. 2020, and now it’s running a Kickstarter project to release a more American audience.
DOuG Solutions also creates 3D rolling ball mazes, and its latest one (being funded on Ulule) is “Conan and the Lost City of Tanasul”, which can’t be sold in the U.S. since the company doesn’t have the rights to Conan in that location. Next up, “Conan and the Lost Licensing Rights”…
