It's a fun little game where you play as a tourist in Japan. You score points by completing scenery sets, collecting food and souvenirs, things of that nature.

I particularly like how it doesn't pit people against each other but still leaves room for intricacies and competitiveness anyways. The culture showcase and overall design is really nice as well.

Everything was going right for Wonderbow co-founder Laia Gonzalez. Her small publishing company’s latest project, a board game called Kelp, had wildly exceeded expectations and was closing in on its final crowdfunding total of more than $1.5 million. Delivery was scheduled for October 2024, so there was plenty of time to begin finalizing the game’s components and coordinating with a manufacturer for production. Hoping for a little extra dose of dopamine, Gonzalez did a quick Google search to see if anyone in the vast and turbulent sea of tabletop influencers was particularly hyped about her company’s game. But instead of a new video of someone sitting in front of an overstuffed Ikea shelving unit, she was surprised to find Kelp already up for sale on Amazon. She, Wonderbow, and game designer Carl Robinson had become the latest victims of board game counterfeiters.

The “Board Game Road” is an impressive example of how game publishers from Europe are working together to create a forest in Ghana.

Games are not only entertaining, they can also change the world for the better in the long term.

Since 2023, over 10 different game publishers have been working together to create a huge forest in Ghana along the Board Game Road.

In 2024, 16 game publishers are already involved in the Board Game Road project – more than 5,000 trees have already been planted.

Courtesy of u/shelfclutter

Tags:

• * - Added Late
• #bg - Board Game
• #cg - Card Game
• #e - Expansion
• #wg - War Game (or similar)
• #rpg - RPG
• #rw - Roll & Write (or similar)
• #pg - Party Game
• #dg - Dexterity Game
• #d - Dice
• #c - Component
• #o - Other

Courtesy of u/Perkelton

What is this?

This is a weekly roundup of board game crowdfunding projects, featuring new launches from the past week and campaigns ending in the coming week. The information is sourced from Kickstarter, Gamefound, and Backerkit.

The list is curated through a combination of automated data collection and manual review, so occasional errors or omissions may occur. If you notice a missing project, feel free to mention it in the comments. Only projects meeting the selection criteria outlined below are included.

Other channels

You can also find this list on the following platforms:

• Google Docs
• Mastodon
• Bluesky

Selection Criteria

Projects must meet the following conditions to be included:

1. Timing: The project was either launched in the last week or will end in the coming week.
2. Relevance: The project is directly related to board games.
   • Excludes: Accessories not strongly related to board games, furniture, RPGs (e.g., D&D, Pathfinder), video games, STLs, painting tools, events, podcasts, and magazines.
   • Exception: Projects offering promos or similar content for board games are eligible.
3. Backers: The project is expected to reach at least 100 backers by the end of the campaign.
4. Funding Status:
   • The project is expected to reach at least 90% of its funding goal.
   • The project has already achieved at least 20% of its funding goal.

In addition to the main lists, I include a separate section for noteworthy projects that don’t strictly qualify as board games. These projects are included based on a single criterion:

1. Backers: The project currently has more than 1,000 backers.

Crowdfunding is not a store

Crowdfunding is not a guarantee. Projects may face delays, incur additional shipping costs, or fail to deliver entirely. Creators are not obligated to fulfill their promises. While many excellent games are funded this way, the risks are real—only back projects with money you can afford to lose.

Be wary of creators who use FoMO (Fear of Missing Out) tactics to drive pledges. Don’t let the pressure get to you. If you miss a campaign, there will always be others. There's no shortage of excellent board games to enjoy.

Tags

Each project is tagged with one or more of the following categories:

• 🌱 Creator's First Project
• 🌳 Creator with more than 5 projects
• 🌟 Featured Project (e.g. Kickstarter "Staff Pick")
• 💰 Fully funded
• 🔥 More than 200 daily backers
• 🤝 Offers refunds (e.g. Stable Pledge)

Ending Soon (8)

New Projects (19)

Noteworthy filtered projects (14)

Let’s be honest. Most of us in the hobby buy games that we play once or twice or in rare cases, three or four times. In fact, the term “shelf of shame” is a thing, describing games that people have bought but not yet played. The thing is, these games sit there unplayed for months on end and may never see the welcome sight of a table, let alone a board game table. So in this article, I want to look at this a bit further and investigate why we don’t play the same games more than a handful of times.

OC of @danielpervan, I take no credit except for reposting.

What is this?

Other channels

Selection Criteria

Crowdfunding is not a store

Tags

Each project is tagged with one or more of the following categories:

• 🌱 Creator's First Project
• 🌳 Creator with more than 5 projects
• 🌟 Featured Project (e.g. Kickstarter "Staff Pick")
• 💰 Fully funded
• 🔥 More than 200 daily backers
• 🤝 Offers refunds (e.g. Stable Pledge)

Ending Soon (8)

New Projects (17)

Noteworthy filtered projects (9)

For something that's satire, I have to say the numbers are surprisingly low. Though maybe that says more about my tastes than anything else 🤔.

I'd just kick them ALL out of game night.

Source: Existential Comics

A little old, but newly relevant

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/147299/pocket-imperium

The game is a very simple and all about territory control. A common complaint is exactly that it's too simple. Does anyone know about custom rules or things that can give more variety to the game, without necessarily making it too complex?

Images credit /u/WombatsPoopQuadrate

Reminder that you should know your crowd, and it's easier to make gamers into friends than friends into gamers :)

Images credit u/boxofrabbits

Clockwise from top left: Azul, Fire Tower, Across the Desert, Everdell

BOSTON — After five brutal hours of incessant, imaginative bitching, the well-documented hater of “fruity-ass board games,” Sam Daniels, secured victory with an unexpected capture of a seventh stronghold in the waning moments of an all-night Game of Thrones board game session, according to sources pretty goddamned familiar with the situation.

“Oh shit, I won? Bend the knee, motherfuckers!” exclaimed Daniels, who mere moments before had claimed seppuku with the game’s cardboard Valyrian Steel Blade would be preferable to even one more second of “Getting constantly pounded like one of Littlefinger’s prostitutes in this rigged board game.”

Although Daniels reportedly arrived at his best friend Jeff Sanchez’ house in high spirits, it didn’t take long for his mood to sour.

“He attacked my capital on the second turn and, of course, he wasn’t able to take it, so he accused me of cheating and demanded to see the rule book,” said Sanchez, who had all of his pieces knocked onto the floor by Daniels’ fits of rage on three separate occasions. “I mean who the hell attacks Lannisport with just two footmen?”

As Daniels went around the table thrusting his crotch against the losing players’ character cards, exasperated sources speculated that Daniels may have directly benefited from his frequent, borderline-misogynistic outbursts.

“I found myself weighing trying to win by attacking Sam’s defenseless fleet or to just harvest more power tokens and avoid being referred to as that ‘backstabbing Greyjoy harlot’ for the next two hours,” said Katie Williams who reportedly asked off work so she could have a chill evening for once.

“He kept screaming about how biased the game was against House Tyrell and that everybody was conspiring against him, and all I could think was how if this were the Applebee’s I work at, I could have had him thrown out by now,” she told reporters while Daniels pranced around the room yelling to anyone within earshot about his gifted abilities at the very boardgames he had been disparaging all night.

“‘I’m in last place, stop trying to fuck me!’ he screamed all game. Until he wasn’t.”

As of press time, Daniels seemed fairly open to giving the game he’d earlier likened to “drowning in Direwolf shit,” another chance. “Next weekend? Same time, same place?” Daniels asked his silent, frustrated companions.

“It definitely took a little getting used to, but in the end I think we had a lot of fun, right guys?” he added.

Credit to u/jbauer777 and his gaming group for their extreme dedication.

I've had a few memorable moments at the table this year (like a Pandemic Legacy moment where an epidemic caused a city that had been empty of cubes a moment ago to chain-outbreak half a continent), but I think my best memories are of making new friends and introducing beginners to the hobby while chilling with the gang.

Recently, my gaming group and I have gone crazy about Dune Imperium Uprising. We've been doing 10+ games of it a week for the last few weeks. Anybody else ever had a similar story to share? Did you get tired of the game eventually, or even sick of it?