Casual Games on Kickstarter: Vikings, Mushrooms, and Breakfast (Yum!)

Tiny Epic Vikings (Gamelyn Games) – The game is played over three rounds. Players begin each round with a drafting phase, where they each build a hand of Viking cards. On your turn, you play a Viking, performing different actions based on the card. Actions include sailing, exploring islands, building, harvesting, and fighting. Each Viking also has a specific rune type, which allows you to perform extra abilities on other Viking cards if you already have the correct runes on the table when you play them. Play a card face-down to initiate combat. Once everyone who chooses to participate in the fight has played a card (also face-down) all the cards are revealed and the Viking with the highest fight value wins. However, defeated Vikings increase the rage level of the specific gods they are associated with, which factors into scoring at the end of the game.

Mushroom Cats (Paper Puffin) – At the start of each round you are dealt a hand of cards. All players select one card, revealing them at the same time, then any action cards are resolved, and the cards in your hand are passed to the next player. Everyone keeps selecting a card and passing their hands until all cards are played. Collect mushrooms, each one being worth one point unless you manage to collect a set of three different mushrooms, in which case they are worth six points. There are also cat cards to be played with special abilities, poisonous mushrooms you wish to avoid, and antidotes to combat the poison! The game features some truly beautiful artwork (you’ll especially like it if you are a fan of adorable cats!).

Grab Your Breakfast (Ameba) – Tiles are stacked and laid out on the table in a grid, with two tiles in each stack. Each tile shows a piece of breakfast food. The hand cards are shuffled and two are dealt to each player. These also show breakfast foods. On your turn, you may collect a tile card from the grid if it is not blocked and if it matches one of the two cards in your hand. Some tiles have a star symbol, meaning they match all cards in your hand. Players start by only being able to collect tiles from the far left and far right columns. Tiles inside the grid become unblocked by having the tiles between them and these far edges being claimed. If only one of your hand cards matches any of the available tiles, you may choose to discard one and draw a new card. If both of them do not match, you may choose to discard one or both of them. At the end of the game you score points for sets of tiles collected and lose points for uncompleted sets.

Cultist Chaos (Wizard of Barge) – Each player starts with a hand of thirteen cards. Everyone will simultaneously choose one card to play, revealing their cards at the same time. You then pass your hand of cards to another player, taking a new hand from someone else. Cards can include items that are worth a set number of points, skulls which award points to the player who collects the most, spell cards that you can use against your opponents, zone cards whose value is based on the cards you collect, and sacrifice cards which you use for deity cards that are worth a large number of points. Once all the cards in all the hands have been played, the player with the most points wins the game.

Hunters of the Lost Creatures (Wonderbow Games) – Each round, players choose a hunter for one of the four hunting areas. All players then reveal which hunters they chose. If you are the only one who chose that hunting area, you get to collect the animal card that is currently there. Players score points for the creatures they collect, as well as bonus points for collecting creatures from each of the four areas and for collecting creature combos within a specific area type. There are also some attack cards you can play, such as thieves to steal creatures from another player or trolls, which you can add to another player’s park which are worth negative points.

Battlecrest (Button Shy Games) – Battlecrest is a tactical skirmish game that is played with just eighteen cards. The goal is to defeat your opponent's hero. The game is played in a six-by-six grid, with six map cards placed in locations within that grid. On your turn you may perform two actions, choosing from the following: move (move your hero around the grid), activate (use one of your action cards to perform its ability which then exhausts it), prime (exhaust an action card without using its ability in order to build up bonus powers), and refocus (this un-exhausts your action cards and flips them over to their opposite sides where they have different abilities).

Vault (Wayne Koenig) – Vault is a solo print-and-play roll-and-write game. There are eighteen levels of increasing difficulty included in the game. You choose your level and start to play. The sheet shows a series of rows and columns. You play the game over twelve rounds. Each round you roll all five dice and use any combination of those dice to mark off corresponding numbers in the boxes in the rows and columns. Once all dice have been used, you check the row associated with the current round, and if all numbers in that row have been checked off, you circle the gemstones in that row or column, otherwise those gemstones are lost. At the end of twelve rounds, you count how many gemstones you have collected and use that number to determine your score.