Kickstarter

Every year the board game industry grows and incorporates more and more dedicated players. The last few years have been termed the "board game renaissance," and in a lot of ways, it truly is the best era in gaming thus far. By the time industry magazine ICv2 reports of the most recent figures (typically 10-20% annual growth since around 2008), a plethora of new board game publishers have already sprung up. With the growth of Kickstarter, starting a publishing company has become a lot more accessible for those that don't have the financial resources to afford printing thousands of copies of a game on their own.

Running a Kickstarter campaign is a lot of work. There are a plethora of hoops that a creator must jump through in order to be successful.

In the mood for a picnic or TV dinner? Be careful! Don’t forget you can’t eat grains! But maybe cheating on your diet might just be worth it in the end.

Win the guilds to your side, secure the favor of the King, and maneuver and manipulate your way to victory. Strategic and logical, Blackstone Castle is a game of grid manipulation in which all the information is open and available to players.

Cooperation, social deduction, real time, abstract, and micro games all make their way to Kickstarter this month. There’s a little something of everything both in mechanics and theme, with games ranging from fairy tales to stories of survival on the high seas.

Dungeon crawling is slow! Why not race through the dungeon instead? It's a dungeon full of traps, monsters, and loot.

Inspired by side scrolling one-on-one fighting games, PopCats Fighter will have you choose your cat and go toe to toe in a cat-themed game of vicious clawing and agile pouncing.

Which would you choose to defeat the cow king: a perky trident of prodding? Or a never-ending boomerang of poking?

The most nefarious supervillain has been captured by those pestilential heroes, and it’s your job to mount a rescue. Fight your way through guards and heroes in order to save your supervillain friend.

There’s a lot of science fiction this month on Kickstarter, with a jetpack-themed app game getting a board game adaptation, a cooperative game set on a malfunctioning space ship, and a competitive game in which players build a 3D space station as they also build up their revenue.